I leaped to my feet naked as a straw. They were between me and the door, but they seemed so clumsy. "Watch it! He's alarmed. Don't let him escape!" "Try and stop me!" I screamed, tensing my muscles for a leap over the pair of intruders. Suddenly the air about my sweating body seemed to thicken to the viscosity of molasses. I could breathe it all right, but quick motion was denied me. My grand leap died before my right foot left the floor. I retreated to my chair in slow-motion panic, sinking slowly through the clabbered atmosphere, to a sitting position on my torn clothing. "Yes, a very clumsy, unesthetic life-form. In fact the bisymmetry fairly nauseates me. Granted that the two arms are practical, doubtless one or the other does 90% of all work. So why have them of equal importance? See here, I'll demonstrate...." "Wait!" the other cautioned. "This is a sentient creature. You can't operate without...." "Of course not!" Something buzzed in my spine, and I blanked out. For the space of one breath, it seemed. "There, that's better." "I guess I must agree with you." A faint tingle in my left arm caused me to stare at it. Unbelievingly! Its length was the same, but its diameter was reduced to two-thirds, and there were two fingers missing on the hand. The opposable thumb remained, but it now had more the appearance of a claw than a human hand. I tried to scream, but the sound was a glutinous bubble of air that never reached my lips. "How about the pedal appendages?" "Well--" there was some hesitation. "Considering the method of locomotion, bisymmetry seems more justified there. However, why bilateral? Why not quadrilateral?" "Because the organs of sight face only one way." "I can fix that, too." My spine buzzed, and when I looked down again a flood of peculiar changes had taken place. My ankles terminated in the middle of my feet, and my heels had disappeared. In their place were toes. "You see, with the double-hinged knee-joint, he can travel forward or backward now without pivoting...." Then I became aware that I could _look_ forward and backward at the same time. "That thing in the middle is certainly superfluous." "Yes." Buzz! It was gone. "A tentacle fastened, say, to the right hip-bone could be very useful." Buzz! My right hip tingled. From it protruded a whip-like appendage some eight feet long, brown and leathery, tapering to the diameter of a pencil and terminating in a pink flesh-pad richly supplied with sensory buds. I could feel every hair in the nap of the carpet on which it rested--feel, taste, smell and hear! Four sense organs in one! "Now we are making progress!" came the exclamation. Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! The instant-seeming anesthetic moments came upon me in quick succession, and each left me bereft of some standard, human equipment or in the possession of some extra-normal addition to my anatomy--with no more sensation than the slight tingle I have mentioned.