And Hank came to the door, hair rumpled, a smear of grease running diagonally from his right temple to the tip of his nose, collar open, sleeves rolled high—
"Was you callin' me, Jim?" he asked.
"Who, me?" I retorted elaborately. "Oh, no! I was just addressing an envelope—hey, what the hell makes around here? Anyhow? Everybody and his brother has been asking me where I hid the corpus delicti. What are you making—"
Then I looked over his shoulder and saw it.
It was the wildest, weirdest looking thing you ever set eyes on in your life. I can't describe it exactly. They say English is the most elastic of all languages, but even it lacks the words to describe some things. Like this one.
But I'll take a running start and see what happens. It was a machine. It was made of metal and glass and gadgets and doolollies and sugar and spice and everything nice; that's what little girls are made of! It was shaped something like the tonneau of a 1931 model Packard, and somewhat more like a big, old-fashioned bathtub with a hood. It was roughly oval, but only roughly so, because you couldn't exactly decide what shape it was. It wriggled!
So help me, that's just what it did! Coils of wire wound around and around the tonneau part, in which there were two wide upholstered seats and an incomprehensible dashboard, bedecked with twelve or twenty dials; these coils twisted out to fore and aft of the egg-shaped structure—and vanished!
It had other features. But that's all I saw during that first, startled glance. And that was enough. I loosed a squawk of despair and held on to Hank for dear life.
"W—what is it?" I yelped. "Great whispering winds, what do you call that—that monstrosity?"