breath, "if this turns out to be the only batch of the finest cleaner in the whole world. And us with only a cupful."

A minute later, I was glad she hadn't heard me. When I dropped a little glob of the stuff into the carrot pan and stirred it around a bit, instead of dissolving and diluting in the extra water, the mixture seemed to stay the same density after swallowing up the water.

"Give me a pie tin," I demanded.

Lottie sighed, but she got a shallow pan out of the pantry and handed it to me. Then I poured the jelly out of the carrot pan and I made my first important discovery.

The stuff was not good for cleaning out scorched carrots.

The pot was bone-dry. So were the carrots. They had a desiccated look and were stuck worse than ever to the bottom. I brushed them with my finger and the top layers powdered to dust. Then I noticed that not a droplet or smidgin of the jelly remained in the pot. When I had poured it out, it had gone out all at the same time, as if it was trying to hang together.

The carbonized carrots at the very bottom were hard and dry, too. A scrape job if I ever saw one.

he pie tin was now full almost to the rim. The globby stuff sort of rolled around, trying to find a flat condition, which it finally did. The motion was not as startling as the sudden quiet that settled over the surface after a last ripple.

The stuff looked like it was waiting.

The temptation was worse than a park bench labeled "wet paint," so I stuck my finger in it. Right in the middle of it.

A ripple flashed out from the center like when you drop a pebble in a pool, and the ripple hit the brim and converged back to my finger. When it hit, the surface climbed up my finger about an eighth of an inch. Another ripple, another eighth of an inch, and about now I felt something like a gentle sucking sensation. Also, another feeling I can only tell you was "unclammy."

I jerked away fast and shook my finger hard over the pan, but it wasn't necessary. None of the stuff had stayed with me. In fact, my finger was dry—powdery dry!

Then I got the feeling that someone was staring over my shoulder. There was. It was Lottie, and she had a look of horror on her face that didn't help my nerves a bit.

"Get rid of it, Charlie!" she cried. "Get rid of it! Please throw it out!"

"Now, now, honey," I said. "It ain't alive."

"It is!" she insisted.

Lottie chatters quite a bit and pretty well speaks her mind. But she doesn't go around making assertions. When she does come out flat-footed with a serious statement, it is always from the bottom of her 22-carat womanly intuition, and she is practically always right.

"How could it be alive?" I argued. I often argue when I know I'm wrong. This time I argued because I wanted to wipe that awful look off my wife's face. "Come on in the living room and relax," I said.

nd then sweet-natured, honey-haired little Lottie did a violent thing. Still staring over my shoulder at the pie tin, she screamed wide-open and ran out of the house. A second later, I heard her start the car out the driveway at 30 miles an hour in reverse. She burned rubber out in front and was gone.

I hadn't moved an inch. Because when she screamed, I looked back at the jelly to see why, and the stuff had oozed over the edge and was flowing slowly toward me.

I know a little about Korzybski and how he wanted everybody to make what he called a cortico-thalamic pause whenever they get scared as hell. So I was making this cortico-thalamic pause, which is really counting to ten before you do anything, while Lottie was leaving the house. When I got through with my pause, I