The Visitor floated in the wind, a tangle of microscopic filaments enveloped in a force field. Invisible. Alien. Searching for a life form more complex than the airborne pollens, spores and insects it had so far encountered on this blue and watery planet. Even these forms weren't much in evidence at the moment, since a cloudburst a few minutes earlier had cleared the air.

But luck was approaching in the form of a red-tail hawk, heading into the wind that carried the Visitor. When the hawk was a few feet below it, the Visitor detected it and struck. The capture was so quick the hawk felt nothing but an unfamiliar disturbance in the air. Then its wings went limp, and it began tumbling out of the sky.

Inside its body, the Visitor examined its nervous system with swift efficiency. All of the hawk's brain functions were scanned. Its autonomic systems were restarted. Memories and skills the hawk had acquired over the three years since it had hatched became accessible in seconds to the new being that controlled its body. Two hundred feet from the hard surface of the highway it had been flying over, the hawk reopened its wings, caught the uprushing air and turned its vertical fall into a sharp curve that brought its course parallel to the ground.

The Visitor was pleased. The hawk was not an especially intelligent life form, but it was superbly built for navigating the thick, moist atmosphere of this planet. The Visitor had passed through thousands of hosts on hundreds of planets, but none had been quite so quick and responsive in a gaseous environment. An excellent choice, it thought to itself, as it regained altitude and used the hawk's highly efficient long-distance vision to scan the landscape below.



It didn't take the Visitor long to recognize that the shiny metallic creatures that sped along the ribbons of smooth, hard material were mechanical vehicles, and that the clumsy, two-legged animals that occasionally entered or emerged from them were the masters - much as the Visitor was master of the hawk. Clearly, if it were to get the full flavor of this planet, and live up to its obligations to the Supreme Dispatcher, the Visitor would have to invade and occupy at least a few of these Two-Legs. The experience, however, could hardly be any more exhilarating than flight aboard this magnificent winged creature.

Through the hawk's eyes, the Visitor spotted a vehicle on the edge of the hard-surfaced ribbon. It was smaller than the others the Visitor had seen, and a white gas poured from it. Its Two-Leg was moving back and forth in obvious agitation, not at all like a master.

This was too good an opportunity to pass up. The Visitor guided the hawk into a steep dive.



Elsie was as steaming hot as the engine of her restored 1962 MGB. The goddamn car had been nothing but trouble since she bought it. From a friend. Some fucking friend. And some fucking British engineering. No wonder they lost a fucking empire.

She looked both ways on the highway. A car approached from the east but turned onto a side road a hundred yards before reaching her. To the west she could see something coming. A pickup truck? Yes, an orange pickup.

The hawk hit her full force on the side of her head. She hadn't seen it coming, and the impact stunned her. She felt a sharp pain in her left temple, then everything went blank and she slumped to the rain-slicked ground beside her overheated car.



Irv saw the whole thing. He was behind the wheel of the pickup, and he jabbed his sleeping buddy, hit the brakes, and yelled, "Get a load of this!"

As the truck skidded to a stop, Loopy awakened to see a dark-haired young woman lying on the roadside, directly in front of them, next to a steaming sports car. A large bird was running awkwardly away from her, trying to get airborne. Finally it did, and the clumsiness disappeared as it rose on powerful strokes.

Irv cut the engine and jumped out. Loopy joined him, bending over the young woman. Two more men, Joe Joe and Carlos, leaped from the truck bed, cursing.

"Man, first we get drenched, then you fucking nearly kill us," Joe Joe yelled at Irv. Then he fell silent as he saw the woman on the ground.

"Jesus," he said, "what a nice pair of tits."

Now all four of them stood over the fallen woman. She did, indeed, have very nice breasts, which filled her wet tank top. Nice legs, too, tanned and slender. The tan contrasted nicely with her pale blue shorts.

"What happened to her?" Joe Joe asked.

"She was running around next to her car," said Irv. "Then this hawk or buzzard or something dive-bombed her. Just came out of the blue and ran into her head. Look, you can see the cut there. It's bleeding."

Loopy knelt on one knee and put his big, meaty hand on her left breast. "Nice," he said, "nice and soft." He gave it a squeeze.

"What are we going to do with her?" Joe Joe asked.

"Well, I guess if we were gentlemen, we'd rescue her," said Loopy. "But we're not gentlemen, so I guess we'll take her someplace quiet and secluded and fuck her brains out."

"Or something rougher," said Carlos with a crooked grin.

"What could be rougher than having your brains fucked out?" Loopy asked in exasperation. He was getting sick of having Carlos around.

"We've got company," Irv said, with a nod at the woman.

Her eyes were open and she looked up at them with a puzzled expression. They were big brown eyes. For the first time, they noticed that her face was very pretty.

She sat up, rubbed her head, then looked at the blood on her fingertips. She tasted it, tentatively.