"You okay?" Irv asked.

She answered his question with a question: "Have you a thermometer?"

The men looked at one another.

"A thermometer?" said Loopy. "What do you want a thermometer for?"

She frowned. Inside, the Visitor was racing to master her vocabulary. Language was always a tricky business. For all their similarities, intelligent beings were maddeningly idiosyncratic when it came to language - even if they lived on the same planet.

"Thermostat," Elsie said. "Do you have a thermostat?"

"No, honey," said Loopy. "We don't carry thermostats with us, especially for funny little foreign sports cars. But I've got something even better than a thermostat, and I'd be happy to show it to you. Let's get you into the truck."

She reached up and he took her hand and lifted her effortlessly.

Joe Joe whistled softly. She had a spectacular body.

"Here, let me wipe off the blood," he said. He pulled out a dirty handkerchief and softly brushed the side of her head.

"Thank you," she said. "I feel like." She paused, searching for the right words. "Like Blanche Dubois. You know, the kindness of strangers."

"I don't get it," Joe Joe said, turning to Loopy and Irv for help.

"Search me," Loopy said. "She talks funny. Must be because of the bump on the head."

He opened the passenger side door of the truck and gestured for her to get in. An alarm bell went off in what remained of Elsie's consciousness, but the Visitor ignored it. These Two-Legs were no threat, at least not to the Visitor. As for Elsie - well, what happened to her body was not the Visitor's concern. Hosts were easy to find.



Elsie was wedged between Irv, who drove, and Loopy, who put his big arm around her shoulders and talked about how good looking she was and how lucky it was for all concerned that they happened by when she needed a lift. Then he straightened out his body as best he could in the cramped cab of the truck and zipped open the fly of his jeans. He pulled out a very large penis, one that, had Elsie been conscious and in control of her own body, would have impressed her as worthy of an exclamation of amazement and admiration. But the Visitor merely noted that, as it had already suspected, this species reproduced sexually and this male's exposure was part of some mating ritual. The use of language would be especially tricky here. It always was when it involved sexual reproduction among intelligent life forms.

"Honey, Big Tom here needs some strokin'," Loopy said softly. "Needs some lickin' and suckin' too."

The Visitor ran through Elsie's sexual memories and acquired behaviors and decided that cooperation with this male was appropriate.

"A blow job?" asked Elsie. "Sure, I can do that."

And she did, with consummate skill and a concentration that Loopy and Irv had never seen before in such circumstances. It was as if she were conducting some sort of study in which she herself, along with Loopy, was the subject.

But Loopy's puzzlement soon dissolved in a shudder and a fountain of cum. She swallowed it, licked her lips and said, without a hint of a smile, "Well, that was certainly fun."

"Ya think so?" asked Irv. "Well, how about you do me while Loopy drives?"

"No, don't stop yet," said Loopy. "Let's find a side road and see if we can get somewhere secluded, then we can all have lots of fun."

Irv eagerly searched the highway ahead of them, looking for a place to turn off. Without noticing it, he was driving more and more slowly.

Too slowly for a car that had come up behind them. Joe Joe knocked on the back window to get Irv's attention just as the siren on the car behind them made a short blast. It was a sheriff's deputy.

Irv pulled over on the shoulder and cursed under his breath. Loopy said, "Okay, stay cool. We're just helping this young lady get to a garage where they can send out a tow truck for her car."

The deputy, a trim, freckled man of 45, exchanged a few words with Joe Joe and Carlos before reaching the driver's side window.

"Where you boys headed?" he asked. Then he saw Elsie and added, "I mean you boys and the lady."

"We picked her up back down the road a ways," said Irv. "Her sports car overheated. We're bringing her to a garage to get a thermostat."

"Yeah, I saw her car. You agree with all this?" the deputy asked, looking at Elsie.

"Yes," she said. "My small, vintage sports car broke down and these men offered to hump me."

The deputy did a double take. Loopy gulped hard.

Elsie frowned and said, "I mean 'help me.' They offered to help me."

"This some kind of joke?" the deputy asked.

"No, sir," said Irv. "She just talks that way. We only met her a few minutes ago, don't even know her name. But I don't think she grew up speaking English."

"Okay," the deputy said. "Miss, you sure you're okay? You're in that truck voluntarily?"

"Oh, yes," said Elsie. "I have volunteered for this adventure. I am quite curious to see how it will turn out."

The deputy shook his head. "Goddamndest thing I've ever heard out of a good-looking woman in a wet tank top. I hope you boys have a lot of fun and give her an adventure worth remembering."

"If we don't, we'll die trying," said Irv.

Loopy breathed a big sigh of relief as the deputy walked back to his car. Then he planted a big wet kiss on the top of Elsie's head.

"Honey, I don't understand you," he said. "But you're just what the doctor ordered."



A few minutes later, they spotted a blacktop road that angled off the highway to the right. It crossed a culvert, then ran a hundred yards or so through low, swampy land covered with tall grass. The blacktop turned into clamshell gravel, and the road made a slight curve along a stand of pine trees. Finally, it came to a stop beside a fishing camp on a bayou. The camp was just an unpainted cabin with a side porch and a wooden dock. It looked abandoned.

"What'dya think?" Irv asked.

"Looks okay," Loopy said. "Let's check it out."