bed. No matter how much of my employer's product I have sampled,
never has Lottie let me sleep it off on the kitchen floor. Her 110
pounds is a match for my 200 in more ways than one, and she takes good
care of her man.

Then I realized that this was not a stag beer-bust. There was
something about a pot of soap-jelly.

It was still there. A long slug of the half-transparent stuff had
strung down off the edge of the table and still hung there like a
nasty-looking icicle.

The knob on the back of my head throbbed so much that at first I
couldn't figure what was wrong with the air. Then my aching dry throat
told me what the matter was. The air was dry like the summer we spent
at a dude ranch in Arizona. It made my nostrils crimp, and my tongue
felt like a mouthful of wrinkled pepperoni.

When I got to my feet and looked at the top of the kitchen table, I
almost panicked again. But this time the pause worked and I got better
results.

Alive or dead, the gunk was the most powerful desiccant I'd ever heard
of. It had drunk up the water in the carrot pot, sucked the surface
moisture from my finger and then spent the past few hours feeding on
the humidity in the air.

It was thirsty. Like alcohol has affinity for water, this stuff was
the same way, only more so. In fact, it even reached out toward
anything that had water in it--like me.

That's why it had oozed over the pan the way it did.

* * * * *

What's so frightening about that, I asked myself. Plants grow toward
water.

[Illustration]

But plants are alive!

That's what Lottie had said--before she screamed.

"So you're thirsty?" I asked it out loud. "Okay, we'll give you a
_real_ drink!"

I got a bucket from the service porch and took the pancake turner to
scrape the gooey nightmare into it. I even caught the drip off the
edge, and it seemed quietly grateful to sink back to the parent glob
in the pail, which by now amounted to about a quart.

I set the pail in the laundry tray and turned on the faucet hard. In
about a second and a half, I almost sprained my wrist turning it off.
Not only did the jelly drink up the water without dissolving, but it
started creeping up the stream in a column about three inches in
diameter, with the water pouring down its middle.

When I got the water shut off, the unholy jelly-spout slopped back
disappointedly.

And now the bucket was over half full of the stuff.

I dropped in an ice