"An e? We are all e beings."
"So you mentioned earlier. But what is an e being?"
"Ah, you are too deep for us. Highly original philosopher, yes. But please get off the spaceway. There is a food flood due."
And they edged me firmly down, and down, to a vast doughnut with a hole in the center.
I ate a piece out of habit. It was insipid and tasteless. But then, a doughnut several thousand miles across must have some drawbacks.
"The pasture is better inside," they vibrated.
So I sank down into the enormous piece of pastry and came out of a couple of inner layers to see a big ball of mush. There was no mistaking it. A vast, tangled, interconnecting mass of tiny points of light. Mush was a good name for it. But here and there on its surface were great rivers of liquor and mounds of food in delectable variety.
I stuffed myself for days, browsing here and there across the surface of the globe of mush.
In fact, I was chewing quietly on an apparently endless streaming ribbon of—well—trout, steak, caviar, you-name-your-favorite food; that's what it was to me. And I happened to bite too deeply. There was a core of this mush stuff inside and, when I bit it, the whole food supply stopped. The stream of entrancing food just disappeared.
And there I was, hovering on a plain of bare mush.