If it wasn’t so ridiculous,he thought, I’d swear I was the victim of some massive conspiracy to keep me here.

Well, he had to decide on something, however unsatisfactory, fairly quickly. At the rates charged by the Grand, they’d be on the street in two more weeks. In a way he envied the girl—that wouldn’t bother her a bit, and he knew it. While she was mortal and he was not, the inseparable gulf between them that even empathic linkage couldn’t get around, he felt the cold and hunger and was subject to many of the infirmities that she was somehow shielded against. He had no intention of being frozen stiff in some cliffside hideaway until somebody found him and thawed him out in years to come.

It was while coming out from yet another fruitless encounter with a shipping agent that he met the colonel.

“Of all the sights I have seen in this beautiful but accursed world, that has to be the most amazing,” said a voice behind him, a voice that sounded both eerie and menacing, the kind of voice that would give the same impression if it just said “Good morning.” It was Sydney Greenstreet, but on steroids and in a mild echo chamber.

Brazil and the girl both stopped dead at the sound and turned. Brazil felt her sudden reaction to the speaker and understood it. She never reacted to the outward appearance of anybody; he wasn’t even sure she considered it relevant. But the inside, the important part of an individual, that she got immediately and with unerring accuracy. Not that he needed the loan of her talent for this case. The voice kind of oozed with a silky sliminess that would put anyone on guard. The fact that the figure who spoke matched the impression only reinforced the sense of menace.

“I beg your pardon,” Brazil responded politely. “Were you speaking to me?”

The creature they faced was less a form than a mass; it seemed almost made of liquid, an unsettling, pulsating thing that had no clearly defined shape, its “skin,” or outer membrane, a glistening obsidianlike shiny brown that reflected and distorted all the light that struck it. He couldn’t imagine how it spoke aloud at all.