dying out. If we can hold them off for
a long enough period, we'll be safe forever. The most important thing,
Chief, is to be sure we know it if they land any more 'humble
servants' on the earth."

The Chief nodded approval. "How can we make sure we'll know it?"

"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 co