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time, `Marihuana!'
Alice, holding up a small metallic scissors and a black comb, said, `Evidently we're going to get
our hair back. Otherwise, there'd be no need for these. I'm so glad! But do ... They really expect
me to use this?' She held out a tube of bright red lipstick.
`Or me?' Frigate said, also looking at a similar tube.
`They're eminently practical,' Monat said, turning over a packet of what was obviously toilet
paper. Then he pulled out sphere of green soap.
Burton's steak was very tender, although he would have preferred it rare. On the other hand,
Frigate complained because it was not cooked enough.
`Evidently, these grails do not contain menus tailored for the individual owner,' Frigate said.
`Which may be why we men also get lipstick and the women got pipes. It's a mass production.
`Two miracles in one day,' Burton said. `That is, if they are such. I prefer a rational
explanation and intend to get it. I don't think anyone can, as yet, tell me how we were
resurrected. But perhaps you twentieth-centurians have a reasonable theory for the seemingly
magical appearance of these articles in a previously empty container?'
'If you compare the exterior and interior of the grail,' Monat said, 'you will observe an
approximate five-centimeter difference in depth. The false bottom must conceal a molar circuitry,
which is able to convert energy to matter. The energy obviously comes during the discharge from
the rocks. In addition to the converter, the grail must hold molar templates? .. molds? .. which
form the matter into various combinations of and compounds.'
`I'm safe in my speculations, for we had a similar converter on my active planet. But nothing as
miniature as this, I assure you.'
`Same on Earth,' Frigate said. `They were making iron out of pure energy before A.D. 2002, but it
was a very cumbersome and expensive process with an almost microscopic yield.'
`Good,' Burton said. `All this has cost us nothing. So far...
He fell silent for a while, thinking of the dream he had when awakening.
`Pay up,' God had said. `You owe for the flesh.'
'What had that meant? On Earth, at Trieste, in 1890, he had been dying, in his wife's arms and
asking for . . . what? Chloroform? Something. He could not remember. Then, oblivion. And he had
awakened in that nightmare place and had seen things that were not on Earth nor, as far as he
knew, on this planet. But that experience had been no dream.
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They finished eating and replaced the containers in the racks within the grails. Since there was
no water nearby, they would have to wait until morning to wash the containers. Frigate and Kazz,
however, had made several buckets out of sections of the giant bamboo. The American volunteered to
walk back to the river, if some of them would go with him, and fill the sections with water.
Burton wondered why the fellow volunteered. Then, looking at Alice, he knew why. Frigate must be
hoping to find some congenial female companionship. Evidently he took it for granted that Alice
Hargreaves preferred Burton. And the other women, Tucci, Malini, Capone, and Fiorri, had made
their choices of, respectively, Galleazzi, Brontich, Rocco, and Giunta. Babich had wandered off,
possibly for the same reason that Frigate had for wishing to leave.
Monat and Kazz went with Frigate. The sky was suddenly crowded-with gigantic sparks and great
luminous gas clouds. The glitter of jam-packed stars, some so large they seemed to be broken-off
pieces of Earth's moon, and the shine of the clouds, awed them and made them feel pitifully
microscopic and ill-made.
Burton lay on his back on a pile of tree leaves and puffed on a cigar. It was excellent, and in
the London of his day would have cost at least a shilling. He did not feel so minute and unworthy
now. The stars were inanimate matter, and he was alive. No star could ever know the delicious
taste of an expensive cigar. Nor could it know the ecstasy of holding a warm well-curved woman
next to it.
On the other side of the fire, half or wholly lost in the grasses and the shadows, were the
Triestans. The liquor had uninhibited them, though part of their sense of freedom may have come
from joy at being alive and young again. They giggled and laughed and rolled back and forth in the
grass and made loud noises while kissing. And then, couple by couple, they retreated into the
darkness. Or at least, made no more loud noises.
The little girl had fallen asleep by Alice. The firelight flickered over Alice's handsome
aristocratic face and bald head and on the magnificent body and long legs. Burton suddenly knew
that all of him bad been resurrected. He definitely was not the old man who, during the last
sixteen years of his life, had paid so heavily for the many fevers and sicknesses that had
squeezed him dry in the tropics. Now he was young again, healthy, and possessed by the old
clamoring demon.
Yet he had given his promise to protect her. He could make no move, say no word which she could
interpret as seductive.
Well, she was not the only woman in the world. As a matter of fact, he had the whole world of
women, if not at his disposal, at least available to be asked. That is, he did if everybody who
had died on Earth was on this planet. She would be only one among many billions (possibly thirty-
six billion, if Frigate's estimate was correct). But there was, of course, no such evidence that
this was the case.
The hell of it was that Alice might as well be the only one in the world, at this moment, anyway.
He could not get up and walk off into the darkness looking for another woman, because that would
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