And they aren't really Greek things. They're pictures of some off-world things that look kind of Greek. They're not even pictures of people. They're pictures of some kind of seaweed that looks like Earth people. I hope that clears up that mystery."

"Oliver, I have plans for us," Brenda Frances said firmly, "and the plans seem very hard to put across to you in words. I have always believed that a half-hour's intimacy is worth more than forever's talk. Come along now.

We're alone except for old sea-slob there."

"I'd better ask my mother first," Oliver said. "It seems that there is some question about this intimacy bit, a question that they all believed would never arise in my case. I'd better ask her."

"Your mother is visiting her sister at Peach Beach," Brenda Frances said. "Your father is fishing at Cat Island. George and Hector and August are all off on sales trips. Mary and Catherine and Helen are all making political appearances somewhere. This is the first time they've all been out of town at once. I came to you so you wouldn't be lonesome.""I'm never lonesome with Shell. You think the intimacy thing will be all right, then?"

"I sure do doubt it, but it's worth a try," Brenda Frances said. "For me, you're the likeliest jackpot in town. Where else would I find such a soft head with so much money attached?"

"We read a seduction scene in a book once," Oliver said. "It was kind of funny and kind of fun."

"Who's we?"

"Shell and myself."

"After we're married, we're sure going to change that 'we' stuff,"

Brenda Frances said. "But how does Shell read?"

"With his eyes like everyone else. And the annotating crabs correlate the reading for him. He says that seduction scenes are more fun where he comes from. All the seductors gather at the first high tide after the big moon is full. The fellows are on one side of the tidal basin -- and then their leader whistles and they put their milt in the tidewater. And the she seashells (Earth usage -- they don't call themselves that there), who are on the other side of the tidal basin, put their roe into the water. Then the she seashell leader whistles an answer and that is the seduction. It's better when both moons are still in the sky. At the Sea of Moyle they have two moons."

"Come along, Oliver," Brenda Frances said, "and you can whistle if you want to, but that seawash talk has got to stop." She took big-headed, short-legged Oliver under her arm and went with him to the chamber she had selected as the seduction room. And Shell followed along.

"How does it walk without any legs?" Brenda Frances asked.

"He doesn't walk. He just moves. I'm getting so that I can move that way too."

"It's not going to get into bed with us, Oliver?"

"Yes, but he says he'll just watch the first time. You don't send him at all."

"Oh, all right. But I tell you, there's going to be some changes around here after we're married."

She turned out the lights when she was ready. But they hadn't been in the dark for five seconds when Brenda Frances began to complain.

"Why is the bed so slimy all at once?"

"Shell likes it that way. It reminds him more of the ocean."

"Ouch! Great crawling crawdads -- something is biting me! Are they bugs?"

"No, no -- they're the little crabs," Oliver told her. "But Shell says that they only bite people they don't like."

"Wow, let me sweep them out of this bed."

"You can't. They're almost too little to see and they hang on. Besides, they have to be here."

"Why?"

"They're annotating crabs. They take notes."

Brenda Frances left the bed and the house in a baffled fury. "Best jackpot in town, hell!" she said. "There are other towns. Somewhere there's another half-brained patsy in a monied family -- one that won't bring the whole damned ocean to bed with him."

It was later learned the Brenda Frances left town in the same fury.

"That was an even less satisfying seduction scene than in that book,"

Shell and his crabby minions conveyed. "We do these things so much better on the Sea of Moyle."

So Oliver preserved his virtue. After all, he was meant for other things.

An off-world person of another great and rich family in the communications field came to call on Mr. Murex at his home.

"We weren't expecting your arrival in quite such manner," Mr. Murex said. He had no idea of how the other had arrived -- he simply was there.

"Oh, I didn't want to wait for a vehicle. They're too slow. I conveyedmyself," the visitor said. They met as tycoon to tycoon. Mr. Murex was very anxious that he and his family should make a good impression on their distinguished visitor. He even thought about concealing Oliver, but that would have been a mistake.

"This is a fine specimen," the visiting person said. "Fine. He could almost be from back home."

"He is my son Oliver," said Mr. Murex, quite pleased.

"And his friend there," the visitor continued, "I swear that he is from back home."

"There's a misunderstanding," Mr. Murex said. "The other one there is a seashell."

"What is a seashell?" the visitor asked. "Are Earth seas hatched out of shells? How odd. But you are mistaken, person Murex. That is a specimen from back home. Do you have the papers on him?"

"I don't know of any papers. What would such papers indicate?"

"Oh, that you have given fair exchange for the specimen. We wouldn't want an interworld conflict over such a small matter, would we?"

"If you will let me know what this 'fair exchange' is," Mr. Murex tried to comply.

"Oh, I'll let you know at the time of my leaving," the visiting tycoon said. "We'll settle on something." This person was very much up on communications. He engaged Mr. Murex and George, Mary, Hector, Catherine, August, Helen, yes, and Oliver, all in simultaneous conversations on the same subject. And he made simultaneous deals so rapid-fire as to astound all of them. He controlled even more patents than did the Murex family, some of them overlapping. The two tycoons were making nonconflict territory agreements and the visitor was out-shuffling the whole Murex clan by a little bit in these complex arrangements.

"Oh, just let me clean them off there!" Mrs. Murex said once where she saw a splatter of small blotches and dust motes on the table that served both for conference and dinner table -- the splatter of little things was mostly about the visitor.

"No, no, leave them," that person said. "I enjoy their conversation.

Really, they could almost be Notarii from my own world." Things began then to go well in these transactions even for the Murex family, just when they had seemed to be going poorly.

The visitor was handsome in an off-worldly way. He was toothless, but his boney upper and lower beak cut through everything, through prime steak that seemed too tough to the Murex clan, through the bones, through the plates. "Glazed, baked, clay, we use it too. It spices a meal," the visitor sad of the plates as he munched them. "And you have designs and colors on the pieces. We do that sometimes with cookies."

"They are priceless chinaware," Mrs. Mu rex said in a voice that was almost a complaint.

"Yes, priceless, delicious, exquisite," the visitor said. "Now shall we finalize the contracts and agreements?"

Several waiting stenographers came n with their machines. Brenda Frances was not among them -- she had left the Murex firm and left town. The stenographers began to take down the contracts and agreements on their dactyl-tactiles.

"And I'll just save time and translation by giving the whole business in my own language to this stenographer from my own world," the visiting tycoon said.

"Ah, that isn't a stenographer there, however much it may remind you of the stenographers where you come from," Mr. Murex tried to set a matter straight again. "That is what we call a seashell."

But the visiting tycoon spoke in his own language to Shell. And Shell whistled. Then whole blotches and clouds of the almost invisible annotating crabs rushed into Shell, ready to work. The visiting tycoon spoke rapidly in off-worldly language, his beak almost touching Shell."Ah, the Geography Cone shell -- that's what the thing is -- is said to be absolutely deadly," Mr. Murex tried to warn the visitor.

"They only kill people they don't like," the visitor said and he went on with his business.

The annotating crabs did the paper work well. Completed contracts and agreements began to roll out of the mantle cavity of Shell. And all the business was finished in one happy glow.

"That is it," the visiting tycoon said with complete satisfaction after all the papers were mutually signed. With his beak he bit a very small ritual wedge from the cheek of his hostess, Mr. Murex. That was a parting custom where he came from.

"And now 'fair exchange' for the specimen from back home," he said. "I always find these exchanges satisfying and fruitful."

He had a sack. And he put the short-legged, big-headed Oliver into that sack.

"Oh, that's not fair exchange," Mr. Murex protested, "I know he looks a little unusual, but that is my son Oliver."

"He's fair enough exchange," the visitor said. He didn't wait for a vehicle. They were too slow. He conveyed himself. And he and Oliver were gone.

So all that the Murex family had to remind them of their vanished son and brother was that big seashell, the Geography Cone. Was it really from the world of the visitor? Who knows the true geography of the Geography Cone?

Oliver sat on the shore of the Sea of Moyle in the far, far north. This was not in the cold, far north. It was on a warm and sunny beach in the off-world far north. And Oliver sat there as if he belonged.

There hadn't been any sudden space-change in Oliver. There had been only the slow change through all the years of his life and that was never a great alteration -- a great difference hadn't been needed in him.

Oliver was bright and shining, the brightest thing on that sunny morning beach. He had his big head and his little body. He had two shiny black eyes peering out of his mantle cavity. Oliver was very much a sea shell now, a special and prized shell. (They didn't use that term there, though. Seashell?

Was the Sea of Moyle hatched out of a shell?) Six sharp-eyed children of the dominant local species were going in close skirmish right over that sunny sand and a smaller seventh child trailed them with absent mind and absent eyes. The big moon had already gone down; the little moon still hung low in the sky like a silver coin. And the sun was an overpowering gold.

The sharp-eyed children were looking for bright shore specimens and they were finding them, too. And right ahead of them was that almost legendary prize, a rare Oliver Cone.

In Outraged Stone

The look of indignation on the face of that artifact was matched only by the total outrage of her whole figure. Oh, she was a mad one! She was the comic masterpiece of the Oganta Collection. If stone could speak she would be shrilling. She was a newly catalogued item among the grotesque alien stonery called the Paravata Oneirougma.

You'd almost believe that she was alive!" was the laughing comment of many who watched her there in the display. "Oh, it's that she was alive once, and now she is furious at finding herself frozen in stone."

But that was the whole missed point of her outrage. She wasn't alive; and she never had been.

It was the cultural discovery time of the Oganta of Paravata. The Oganta had become things both in and interesting. Earth people had taken a seasonable delight in their rough culture, in their hominess, in their froggishness. Many Earth people from the scientific simmer were now visiting them and studying them. In particular were those of the psychologic phratry involved in this. A quick trip to Paravata would yield such theses as enhance reputations and makenames. There the mysterious human undermind and underbody was atop and open to explore. There was no way that one could miss if he had the energy for the encounter. The energy for it, though; that was the thing that separated the bulls from the steers and the homed heifers from the freemartins.

"Paravata has half again Earth's gravity, so it calls out our strength.

It has an atmosphere that keeps one on an oxygen binge, so it gives that strength something to draw on," so had Garamask, that most vigorous Earthman, said of the planet.

Many Earth people wilted on Paravata. They couldn't stand the weight (there was something wrong about the weight) and the weirdness; they hadn't the strength for it. But others (and not always the ones you would guess) found a new strength and excitement there. It was bigger than life and rougher. It was vulgar and misshapen. It was a grinning challenge and it would smash anyone who wasn't up to it.

But if you could make it there you could make it big. The loins bulged with new energy for these fortunates, and the adrenaline ran in rivers. It was a common and shouting and delirious world for those who could match it, and it was not only the body juices that were called into fresh spate. The mind juices sang their new tunes also, and the ideas came in tumbling torrents.

They were pretty shaggy, some of those idea, but there was nothing tired about them. Mind and body appetites grew steeply, almost exploded. There was an absolute horniness that came onto such visitors as had the capacity to take it. And a froggishness. What is the mystique about frogs?

The horned frog of Earth is a miserable sleepy little antediluvian and has nothing to do with these vigorous whorls. Let us take the name away from it and give it to another. Somewhere, on some world, there is a real horned frog, rampant with green comedy, outrageous in its assumptions, able to get away with worse than murder. The Oganta of Paravata were really such horned frogs, except that they hadn't actual visible horns, except that they were frogs only in a manner of speakign.

Five young Earth psychologists (they all had the capacity and ruggedness for Paravata) were dining in one of those gape-walled inns on a ridge above the small town of Mountain Foot, on one of the stunning Paravata plateaus.

Dining wasn't the proper word for it: they were gorging. They were gorging with Oganta friends (an Oganta had to be your friend or one of you would be dead quickly). And they didn't sit at table for their stupendous eating. This would be unthinkable to the Oganta, and it was immediately unthinkable to the Earth people. For such action, they stood, they strode, they rollicked; they Tromped about on the big tables from giant bowl to giant bowl, and they grabbed and ate commonly from these common caldrons. They dipped and slurped, they toothed great joints of flesh-meat, they went muzzle-deep into musky mixtures. They were as mannerless as the Oganta themselves. They were already full of the coarse Oganta spirit and had even taken on something of the Oganta appearance.

On Paravata, one never reclined when he could stand (the Oganta even took their carnal pleasure leaping and hopping); one never sauntered where he could stride, nor walked when he could run. Aimless it all might be, but there was a burning energy and action in the very aimiessness.

They wrestled, they rolled. they walked upon one another and sat upon one another. "Och, I could hardly eat another bellyful," Margaret Mondo groaned happily as she rolled on one of the big tables among the bowls. Then a huge male Oganta landed in the middle of her belly with both feet and bounced.

Ah, he'd have gone three hundred pounds on Earth, and things were half again as heavy on Paravata. "Och, now I can eat again. How I can eat!" Margaret chortled. We knew that Margaret, the earthiest of them all, wouldn't really give out so quickly.

The dining customs on Paravata are extreme. If you can't take them, don't go there.

It was just at frost-bite and there was a light snow sifting. The five youngish Earth-folk were dressed near as barely as the Oganta. It would bemany degrees colder than this before the walls of this mountain inn would be raised. The open air is always to be praised. On Paravata there were no heating fires ever, except the internal ones: and these burned hot.

"It's much more earthy than Earth," George Oneiron was saying. He was almost shouting. "It's everything, it's all through everything. The butterflies here arc absolutely rampant, they're rutting, they're ravening. We know that 'psyche' originally meant butterfly as well as soul. The psyche, the soul-mind-person, is our field of study, and here it is grossly material, fleshed and blooded. Even the Marsala Plasma of this place (there's no counterpart to it on Earth, there couldn't be), though it floats and drifts and jostles in the air. has a heaviness and materiality about it that startles one. Don't turn you're your back on one of those floating blobs or it'll crash down on you like nine tons of rock. We'll solve the mystery of these plasma balls, or we will not solve any other mystery here."

The Oganta themselves had this sometimes weightlessness and this sometimes great weight. It was a part of the jokes they played. And the Earth people discovered that now they had it too, sometimes, mostly when they were in contact with the oafish Oganta. You are light or heavy when you think light or heavy.

The floating globs, the air balls, had more mysteries than their weight.

There was their sound, the most raucous dissonance ever, when one caught it only out of the corner of the ear. But turn full ear on one, and it was all innocence and quiet. Incredible scenes flashed and lounged inside the balls when taken at a careless glance, but they murked over when looked at straight.

The globs made lascivious gestures, but what was lascivious about them? They were only charged air drifting in uncharged air (if there was any uncharged air on Paravata), The lasciviousness must be in the eye of the beholder. But what were the globs anyhow? "Oh, they're persons, some of our own persons, persons that we're not using right now," one of the Oganta tried to explain it.

George Oneiron, still avid to solve the mystery, was trying to take one of these plasma balloons into his hands. It was a yellowish, greenish, translucent, transparent glob of crystal gas (crystal gas? yes, crystal gas) the size of his own head. It challenged him. It was as if it shook its horns at him. He had it, it escaped him, he had it again, he grunted and grappled with it, he seized it out of the shimmering air and he didn't seize it easily.

"It'll go heavy on you," one of the Oganta grinned. "It'll cut you to shreds. Its weight is polaroid, just as ours is, just as yours begins to be.

If it's in alignment it hasn't any weight; if it isn't it's crushing. You match it or it breaks you down. You shape with it or one of you breaks to pieces."

George Oneiron was quite strong, and the thing, after all, was was only a floating glob of gas. "I have you now!" he cried when he had it. "Why do you follow and cling to the Oganta while you evade ourselves? I have you, and you'll spill your secrets to me."

"Poor George is reduced to talking to globs of air," Helen Damalis jibed, but Helen was no great one at understanding deep things.

Actually, it was a giant wrestle, and it was close there for a moment.

But it was the plasma ball, and not George, that broke to pieces. The Marsala Plasma shattered in George's hands, broke jaggedly into a hundred edged pieces, and clattered and crashed heavily on the stony ground. And George was cut badly on the hands and forearms and chest by the jagged slivers of it.