It came to me—and with an eighth glass of water—that I must do what I had never done before in my life. No more invention, only selection—I must actually study a living person. Rick should become my prey. Instead of trying to avoid him when boredom or anger set in, I must reverse our situation. All the time he thought he was finding out about me I should be finding out about him. It was all the exhilaration of the hunt. Yoicks! Tally ho!

All the time, over breakfast then dressing, I was busy putting together what I knew of him and realized at last that it amounted to less than the police would want for a description. He was large, he was huge—how huge? The tall young man who had crouched behind our dustbin had filled out in every way. He was broad and thick. I called to mind the mat of hair, the forest of hair, I had seen all down his front. As well as that, there were thickets in his arm pits, small images of the same in his nostrils—probably the hair extended down his legs to end round his ankles like the feathers on a cob or, rather more aptly, on a cart horse. It grew thick and close over his head, thick on his eyebrows, thick and long as eyelashes. Had the hairy Ainu crossed by way of the frozen Bering Straits, or had later immigration brought this near-freak the other way across the Atlantic? Examined, rather than run from or derided, I began to see that Professor Tucker was not without interest. How much hair could the novelist get away with? Not quite so much—the bit down the front, the mop of black hair on his head, the eyebrows and eyelashes would be more than enough. Mostly the writer deals with the bits of his characters that stick out. The rest is silence—clothes, I mean. It was sheer luck I knew he was as shaggy between the legs as a Shetland pony.

Skin. Oddly white, in itself, but where a beard and moustache might have been the area was covered with the black roots of hairs all cut off by pressure of the safety razor just, as it were, below ground level but still there and visible, giving, with the white, slightly oily skin, an effect of—what? Absurdly, my mind could find nothing but a quotation from somewhere, a quotation the aptness of which was not apparent—silence and old night.

Hands, square, fat, white, the backs inevitably sprinkled with the standard Tuckerish hair. And so clean. Far too clean, the nails very nearly convex rather than—hell, which was which? They were dished, would hold rain water.

He must be strong, of course. One of those hands could squeeze—made into a fist could hit—or wielding an axe—but they had never done so. The typewriter was their weapon.

Those shaggy privates—no. Learn, old man, what is not to be thought, not to be touched on, what is nothing, nothing but sickness and pain. Forget. Let it be.