tuck my finger in it. Right in the middle of it.

A ripple flashed out from the center like when you drop a pebble in a
pool, and the ripple hit the brim and converged back to my finger.
When it hit, the surface climbed up my finger about an eighth of an
inch. Another ripple, another eighth of an inch, and about now I felt
something like a gentle sucking sensation. Also, another feeling I can
only tell you was "unclammy."

I jerked away fast and shook my finger hard over the pan, but it
wasn't necessary. None of the stuff had stayed with me. In fact, my
finger was dry--powdery dry!

Then I got the feeling that someone was staring over my shoulder.
There was. It was Lottie, and she had a look of horror on her face
that didn't help my nerves a bit.

"Get rid of it, Charlie!" she cried. "Get rid of it! Please throw it
out!"

"Now, now, honey," I said. "It ain't alive."

"It is!" she insisted.

Lottie chatters quite a bit and pretty well speaks her mind. But she
doesn't go around making assertions. When she does come out
flat-footed with a serious statement, it is always from the bottom of
her 22-carat womanly intuition, and she is practically always right.

"How could it be alive?" I argued. I often argue when I know I'm
wrong. This time I argued because I wanted to wipe that awful look off
my wife's face. "Come on in the living room and relax," I said.

* * * * *

And then sweet-natured, honey-haired little Lottie did a violent
thing. Still staring over my shoulder at the pie tin, she screamed
wide-open and ran out of the house. A second later, I heard her start
the car out the driveway at 30 miles an hour in reverse. She burned
rubber out in front and was gone.

I hadn't moved an inch. Because when she screamed, I looked back at
the jelly to see why, and the stuff had oozed over the edge and was
flowing slowly toward me.

I know a little about Korzybski and how he wanted everybody to make
what he called a cortico-thalamic pause whenever they get scared as
hell. So I was making this cortico-thalamic pause, which is really
counting to ten before you do anything, while Lottie was leaving the
house. When I got through with my pause, I jumped backward over my
kitchen chair so hard that I must have knocked my head on the tile
sink-board.

When I came to, it was after midnight. The kitchen light was still on.
Lottie was still gone. I knew it. If she was here, she'd have had me
in