starts calling wild games again when it comes his deal, I'll walk out. I don't like 'em." I looked at the drink Joe was mixing. "More gin."

Joe crimped half a lime into the glass. "He won't call any crazy stuff tonight. I told him that if he did, we wouldn't invite him back. He nearly ruined the whole session, didn't he?"

I nodded and took the drink. Joe mixes them right—just the way I like them. They make me feel good inside. "How about a little blackjack while we're waiting?"

"Sure. They're late, anyway."

I got first ace, and dealt. We traded a few chips back and forth—nothing exciting—and on the ninth deal Joe got blackjack.

He shuffled, buried a trey, and gave me an ace-down, duck-up.

"Hit me," I said contentedly.

Joe gave me another ace.

"Mama! ... hit me again."

A four.

"Son," I told him, "you're in for a royal beating. Again."

A deuce.

Joe winced.

I turned up my hole ace and said, "Give me a sixth, you poor son. I can't lose."

A nine.

"Nineteen in six," I crowed. I counted up my bets: five dollars. "You owe me fifteen bucks!"

Then I looked up at him.

I'll repeat myself. You know that hot flush of pure delight, of high triumph, even of mild avarice that possesses you from tingling scalp to tingling toe when you've pulled off a doozy? If you play cards, you've been there. If you don't play cards, just think back to the last time someone complimented the pants off you, or the last time you clinched a big deal, or the last time a sweet kid you'd been hot after said, "Yes."

That's the feeling I mean ... the feeling I had.

And Joe Arnold was eating it.

I knew it, somehow, the moment I saw his eyes and hands. His eyes weren't Joe Arnold's blue eyes any longer. They were wet balls of shining black that took up half his face, and they looked hungry. His arms were straight out in front of him; his hands were splayed tensely about a foot from my face. The fingers were thinner and much longer than I could recall Joe's being, and they just looked like antennae or electrodes or something, stretched wide-open that way and quivering, and I just knew that they were picking up and draining off into Joe's body all the elation, the excitement, the warmth that I felt.

I looked at him and wondered why I couldn't scream or move a muscle.

"Guess I made a boo-boo," he said. He blinked his big black globes of eyes. "No harm done, though."

His head had thinned down, just like his fingers, and now came to a peak on top.

He had practically no shoulders. He smiled at me, and I saw long black hair growing on the insides of his lips.

What are you? I screamed at him to myself.

Joe licked his hairy lips and folded those long inhuman hands in front of him.

"It hurts like hell," he said in a not-human voice, "to be slizzing you and then have you chill off on me that way, Jerry. But it's my own fault, I guess."

he door-bell rang—two soft tones. Joe got up and let in the other members of our Friday night poker group. I tried to move and couldn't.

Fred raised his eyebrows when he saw Joe's face and hands. "Jerry isn't here yet? Relaxing a little?" Then he saw me sitting there and whistled. "Oh, you slipped up, eh?"

Joe nodded. "You were late, and I was hungry, so I thought I'd go ahead and take my share. I gave him a big kick, and he really poured it out ... radiated like all hell. I took it in so fast that I fluhped and lost my plasmic control."

"We might as well eat now, then," Ray said, "before we get down to playing cards." He sat down across the table, his eyes—now suddenly enormous and black—eagerly on me. "I hate like hell waiting until you deal him a big pot—"

"No," Joe said sharply. "Too much at