"Yeah? Well, I did. I smashed a couple against the sand. Would you like to come back in about ten thousand years to see if I planted some pyramid monsters? You'd most likely be able to tell by that time!" Jarvis paused and drew a deep breath. "Lord! That queer creature! Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless--just a mechanism, and yet--immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it'll just stop. It won't be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food again, there it'll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past. A queer beast--yet I met a stranger one!" "If you did, it must have been in your dreams!" growled Harrison. "You're right!" said Jarvis soberly. "In a way, you're right. The dream-beast! That's the best name for it--and it's the most fiendish, terrifying creation one could imagine! More dangerous than a lion, more insidious than a snake!" "Tell me!" begged Leroy. "I must go see!" "Not _this_ devil!" He paused again. "Well," he resumed, "Tweel and I left the pyramid creature and plowed along through Xanthus. I was tired and a little disheartened by Putz's failure to pick me up, and Tweel's trilling got on my nerves, as did his flying nosedives. So I just strode along without a word, hour after hour across that monotonous desert. "Toward mid-afternoon we came in sight of a low dark line on the horizon. I knew what it was. It was a canal; I'd crossed it in the rocket and it meant that we were just one-third of the way across Xanthus. Pleasant thought, wasn't it? And still, I was keeping up to schedule. "We approached the canal slowly; I remembered that this one was bordered by a wide fringe of vegetation and that Mud-heap City was on it. "I was tired, as I said. I kept thinking of a good hot meal, and then from that I jumped to reflections of how nice and home-like even Borneo would seem after this crazy planet, and from that, to thoughts of little old New York, and then to thinking about a girl I know there--Fancy Long. Know her?" "Vision entertainer," said Harrison. "I've tuned her in. Nice blonde--dances and sings on the _Yerba Mate_ hour." "That's her," said Jarvis ungrammatically. "I know her pretty well--just friends, get me?--though she came down to see us off in the _Ares_. Well, I was thinking about her, feeling pretty lonesome, and all the time we were approaching that line of rubbery plants. "And then--I said, 'What 'n Hell!' and stared. And there she was--Fancy Long, standing plain as day under one of those crack-brained trees, and smiling and waving just the way I remembered her when we left!" "Now you're nuts, too!" observed the captain.