"Now I'll have to walk all the way back, I suppose," the voice added. The skeleton got out of the mush jeep, walked through me and lifted the hood. "Battery flat," the voice said disgustedly. "Not a drop of juice in it." I began to feel guilty. There was a slight blue haze round the skeleton's head. When I examined it more closely, it looked less like a skeleton of bare bones and more like a physician's chart of the human nervous system, traced out in thin lines of mush ... little close-packed lines of energy, fixed in relation to each other but flexible as a whole. It occurred to me I was looking at a human being, in terms of energy. And I had just drunk his jeep's ignition! So thought was a form of energy, after all. For some of the things he was thinking about the mechanic responsible for maintaining the jeep were strictly subliminal and Freudian. If he spoke, I doubted if I would hear him. His voice would just be a very faint wave of mush traveling indistinctly out. "And the next time that spark-spark foreman sends me out on an emergency power-line repair," continued the skeleton, "he can spark-spark well give me a vehicle that _works_!" The skeleton's name was Joe, I think. And I watched Joe sway over to the ribbon of mush I had bitten through. "Fused," Joe muttered in his head. "Now, what on Earth did that?" And it struck me for the first time where I was. Back on Earth! As an e being! A being based, it seemed, on energy and not on matter. Converted accidentally by the marvels of modern science and the supreme technological achievement of traveling at the speed of light. I spat disgustedly at the thought. "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.