"It's hard to make absolutely sure, but why not send me out on a roving mission to set up an international organization to detect such a creature? What we want is information about anyone, anywhere, who is unusually strong or unusually attractive to women, or eats six or eight meals a day, or who has the other queer powers they have. I could get all the information coming in from all over the world, process it here, and only bother you when we found something suspicious." The Chief was enthusiastic. "You've thought yourself up a job, Nat. Take three weeks vacation to get yourself rested up, and then get started." * * * * * I walked down the long marble corridors away from the Chief's office, and went down in the elevator and out into the street. As I walked along in the crowds I felt the warmth of bodies as they passed me. I suddenly realized the novocaine was beginning to wear off. I didn't get out any too soon. My chin ached and throbbed. That hot searing flame had come so close ... from now on my nightmares would be of that moment when the Chief was holding the lighter to my cigarette. But one thing sang through my being; the battle was won. In a month my world travels for the F.B.I. would start. Like a phoenix, I, the new Nat Brown, had risen re-born from the ashes of the Nat Brown vaporized by the explosion. What could his thoughts have been, lying tied up on the living room floor waiting for twenty tons of TNT to go off? Waiting, while I held the mirror in front of me and slowly made my face into an exact replica of his. He must have known then that I would get his job, and get his wife, Helene, and finally get his world. He realized then that His Excellency would send down hundreds more like me and that I would be the screen between them and the F.B.I., that I would instruct them and encourage them and give them aid and safety for their missions. As I neared the Cathedral I looked west on Massachusetts Avenue. The sun had just set and the Evening Star was hanging like a lantern in the sky--my homeland, the radiant planet which men on earth call Venus. Venus, they have told me, means love. What a superb and cosmic joke that is! I looked at the beautiful orb on the horizon and was filled with the triumphant excitement of being the earth-man, Nat Brown, of going home to my wife, Helene, one of the thousands who would breed thousands who would breed thousands. * * * * *