Trouble was, it was still dark. No lights. All I could see by the faint
light of a half moon filtering in the kitchen window was a dim figure
standing by the table.
Fact was, I found later, a sudden power surge on the main line outside
the house blew a transformer and blacked out the whole blinking suburb.
I snapped out my lighter and flicked it on. Well now, indeed! There,
half shy, half not so shy and wearing the same negligible costume as in
her final number at the Roma, was Venus, constructed just exactly the
way she should have been.
"The way I built me," she said, and giggled, "to your very explicit
order. So now what are you going to--"
I wouldn't say that I am notably more impetuous than the next man.
That was just an impetuous situation. I let the lighter go and grabbed
her. "Ah," I remember her saying softly, "now we can truly begin to
communicate."
I can say with every reasonable assurance that we did so most
effectively. Alien she was, but she was also a lovely girl, my own
dream girl. Or girls. What man of any imagination at all is a totally
monogamous dreamer? Anyway, she was unarguably lovely, loving, uniquely
adaptable, generally sweet. And if, once her frequently unfathomable
mind was made up, she had the determination of seven dedicated
devils--well, she was female and probably no worse than some billion
local girls. My little atom-powered space girl had a lot more built-in
compensating factors.
But that's as it developed. That night, naturally, was largely devoted
to communication. Luckily, having been fired, I didn't need to worry
about getting up to go to work.
* * * * *
Along about eleven or so the next morning she bounced out of bed,
bright, beautiful and lively. I dragged on down to the kitchen with her
to see if we could put together a breakfast from whatever staples she
hadn't found it necessary to incorporate into new construction. By the
kitchen table I stumbled over the most ravaged, deadest looking corpse
I ever hope to see. It was, of course, the unlamented body of the
original witch, lying just where it had dropped the evening before.
"Look, hon, what about this?"
She shrugged quite charmingly, in spite of the tentlike dimensions of
Aunt Belle's nightgown. "What about it?"
"Well, why didn't you use the--uh--material there, instead of all the
groceries?"