"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.