"What's what?"
"This--this, whatever we're doing?" Somehow they had become oddly
entwined, and his tactile sensations were blossoming like a nova.
Her head slipped past his face, and her sharp teeth nibbled at his ear.
"You _are_ a strange one, honey. It's kissing. It's love-making. And
incidentally, you're doing all right now. Kiss me again, honey. All
those volts! Make me feel it. Make me--"
He piled his hastily contrived, but entirely functional, orbicular
organs upon hers so hard that their teeth clashed. The nova inside him
burgeoned and whirled as though feeding on some hidden hydrogen-helium
infusion. Minutes flashed into eternity. Then an hour, and the crazy
crescendo of emotion was still mounting between them.
Then at the first streak of dawn, his bony arms crushed her to him in
a clasp that sent the universe exploding in one solid bath of pure,
nutrient energy.
His pores opened, and he drank--for one micro-second, two
micro-seconds, three, four, five--and suddenly he found himself
reeling into the stratosphere, up, up, out of the cloying air into the
comfortable, naked void, trailing neutrons, extravagantly, strewing
protons, hiccoughing electrons. At last he stabilized his mass-energy
ratio, drew in his peripheral photons and shimmered to a trembling
focus.
* * * * *
Instantly he was surrounded with Vegans, chittering with curiosity,
dipping and oscillating their silvery disks in the raw, unfiltered
light of the yellow sun.
"Did you learn anything?"
"A little."
"Did you--metamorphose as a native?" they asked expectantly.
"I did," he admitted reluctantly.
"Well, tell us about it. All about it!"
"I was accused of murder, tried in a court of law, convicted, sentenced
to death and executed."
"Irrelevant," a Vegan snapped. "Tell us about the two categories. Did
you find out about that?"
"Yes."
"Is there a significant difference?"
"They call it sex," the Sirian temporized.
"Come, come, delete the alien terminology."
"There are men--and there are women," he said, striving to gather his
thoughts and his dignity about him. It was no use. The patina of his
vastly expanded corona was a dead, pink giveaway. "Just one minute
ago," he confessed, "I was a man, juxtaposed with a woman, exploring
the differences between the categories."
"Were the differences important? Significant?"
"To the humans, _very_!" He tried to sound detached.
The Vegans wouldn't be put aside. "Naturally they'd be important to the
primitives, but how about to you? Subjectively?"
"A few minor anatomical differences, that's all. Added up to very
little." His words were belied by tiny streaks of badly polarized
photons.
The Vegans radiated ripples of disappointment, losing what little
patience they possessed. One blurted out angrily, "Very well, if you
can't explain sex, what about the nuclear reactions? You should be an
expert on that subject. You appeared to ascend from the very island
where they just fused a lithium-hydride bomb."
"Bomb?" the Sirian said dazedly. "What bomb?"
The Vegans circled him and vibrated with cynical laughter. "So this
mysterious sex had no impact upon you?"
The void was filled with their noxious, ill-mannered jeers, but the
Sirian was still too disorganized to feel very embarrassed.
"What happened to the female--the _woman_ you said you were with--what
happened to her?" asked a Vegan.
The Sirian involuntarily phased his photons into a mental image of
the voluptuous, golden-haired native girl, but without the primitive
earth-body with which to react endocrinologically, the vision failed to
renew the corpuscular palpitations which were already damping out.
"The woman?" he repeated wistfully turning toward his home star and
venting a cosmic sigh. "You might say she met with a Sirius accident."