"Summer lightning?" Joe bent his mush head back and looked up. He
exposed a rather interesting tidbit in the region of his throat plexus
and his cardiac nerves were, I regret to say, for an instant very
appetizing. But I controlled myself.
After all, in a technological society as free with energy as ours ...
as yours ... there were bound to be ample food and drink flowing about.
I swear I had come to that ethical conclusion. It wasn't my fault that
I was unfamiliar with my own reactions as an e being. I didn't know I
was so fast. I ate Joe by mistake. I just drained off the energy of his
system before I knew it. Truly.
* * * * *
Well, naturally I was sorry about it. In fact, I was just standing
there, looking at the huddled pile of mush, when the other repair crew
arrived. From their scrambled thoughts of death and radio and Main
Office, I gathered they were sending for a doctor. Sure enough, he
arrived in an autojet with delicious after-burners.
So then they had to send for a team of towing tractors. I just
couldn't help thinking about the ignition systems of their vehicles;
and to think is to eat, with an e. Or rather, if you have the speed
of light--as an e being has--it takes some time before you learn to
control your reactions quickly enough.
"Well, I don't know what's going on around here," said a voice which I
located as the doctor thinking to himself. "But I remember Professor
Bigglesby's advice. When you don't know, nod thoughtfully."
I could see his mush head and its blue haze wobbling solemnly at the
other mush-men. I beg your pardon--at the other humans.
"Nervous collapse," the doctor continued in his head. "Something to
do with electricity, I suppose. Powerline failure. Broken cable. Dead
repair man. Don't know much about electricity. Who does? Hello, hello,
what's this?"
I saw him bend his nervous skeleton over Joe's body and straighten up
with a string of little silver beads sticking to his hand.
"Makes a noise. Quite musical. Adheres to skin. Light. What is it?"
"There's some more of that stuff in the jeep engine," one of the repair
crew noticed.
"And on the doc's jets...."
"And in our truck...."
I watched and gathered I was leaving some form of conversion product
around the place. I didn't like that thought. If an e being eats energy
as food and drink, what does an e being's conversion product make? The
answer might be important ... considering I had just eaten someone.
I decided to follow along. The doctor was wiping the silver beads off
his hands into something shaped like a glass jar and screwing on a lid.
I thought I had better be around when it was examined.
So I rolled after the towing tractors and carefully refrained from even
thinking of their refreshing little spark-plugs and tasty exhaust.
* * * * *
I followed the doctor until we reached a place where the mush grew up
in blocks on either side, square and close-meshed, with streams, rivers
and trickling lines of energy tumbling through their structures. I
gathered we had reached a city of some sort.
The doctor-skeleton got out of the tractor and went into one of the
tall blocks of mush through a hole. I followed, nibbling a light bulb
or two as we passed down the long corridor inside. The doctor, still
carrying the jar shape, stopped once or twice and looked back, then he
shot in through a doorway on the left.
"Dr. McPherson," thought a thin skeleton by the window.
"I don't want to say it," said the doctor's mush head, "but this jar of
muck seems to have put the corridor lights out."
He held out the jar and I saw a faint wave of mush spreading from his
mouth toward the thin skeleton. When the mush wave reached him, the
thin man jerked in plain disbelief.
"If I heard that straight, either Doc McPherson is drunk or he's got
something very interesting. I wonder which."
The thin man wandered casually over to the jar the doctor was holding
and took it.
"Not drunk," he considered, holding the jar up in the air. "But...."
And then his thoughts ran riot in a stream of edibles. He was thinking
of electronics, protons, ions, electrons, gamma, delta and alpha
particles, and I couldn't resist it. I'm sorry. I just had to eat him,
his thoughts were so delicious.
Doctor McPherson stared down at the thin body on the floor and walked
out of the room. He left the jar where it had rolled on the floor of
mush.
I was quite happy. It must have been a laboratory of some sort. There
were refreshing sources all over the room.
I was still tasting and testing here and there when the doctor returned
with another pair of mush-men--humans, I mean--and they had a long
conversation in their heads about the late scientist and the contents
of the jar. Finally, they picked up the jar with a long rod of static
energy--some metal, I suppose. They took it away.
Unfortunately, this time it seems I had eaten a physicist working for
the government. More and more mush shapes of humans clustered round
Doctor McPherson, and one came hurrying up from another laboratory.
"Raw ozone," he thought as he came. "This fellow needs watching.
Couldn't get ozone like that except in space. And now he happens to be
around when we lose our top physicist. And that's the second accident
of the day. Yes, _sir_, this McPherson needs watching! You can never
tell where sabotage will break out."
He grasped the doctor's arm and said something in a faint wave of mush
that I could not see clearly enough to understand.
"Me? Ridiculous! I was just...." thought McPherson. But he shrugged and
turned away.
Well, I couldn't leave him in a mess like that, so I followed Doctor
McPherson home.