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pity if anything happened to spoil her loveliness … ’
    ‘You wouldn’t dare!’ Peter shouted, struggling to rise.
    ‘Wouldn’t I? What is your name?’
    ‘Rumplestiltskin is my –’ Something cracked him across the side of the head, a stunning blow that made bells ring and stars whirl.
    The bells and stars were real. In the control room of the space ship, the alarm signalled a meteor swarm dead ahead. Why isn’t the ship automatically veering off? Peter wondered.
    The answer was a shadowy figure hunched over the controls, keeping the steering wheel locked on course. It leered round at him, a ferine face with beady eyes and a cruel, mad smile.
    ‘Unless you give me that satchel this instant I shall – mmmf – send us both to our deaths,’ the little man chortled.
    ‘Speaking of death,’ said Peter, ‘I have heard tales from the West Indies of animal zombies. For example, the Undead Duck.’
    Deftly, Peter swung the satchel at the preoccupied face. The weasel was slapped to the floor, and the ship began to veer – but too late!Already the meteors were there, patiently boring into the hull!
    At once, Peter shifted into reverse, minus the speed of light. Hurtling across the universe, his ship met its counterpart, moving at plus the speed of light. POW! Matter met anti-matter, and both exploded in a flash of light and anti-light! Zungg! Off went Peter at sidewise the speed of light, pursued by residual matter in the form of a slimy alien. It was all mush, with two beady antennae.
    ‘Wait fill I get my mandibles on you. Mmmf!’ the alien thought at him.
    ‘You’ve got another think coming,’ Peter’s mind shot back. ‘I’ve been pursued by worse.’
    ‘Really? Put down your satchel and tell me about it.’
    Peter did not slacken his pace, but he began to spin his tale. He spoke of a time in India when he had been pursued by a giant, lumbering beast that was totally invisible – the Cellophant!
    But now the slimy alien was fast closing the gap between it and its prey! Seeing a lump of inert matter by the roadside, Peter dodged behind it and let the clumsy alien blunder on past.
    ‘Whew!’ he said, glancing at the lump of inert matter.
    On closer inspection, it proved to be really a fast, late-model car. Peter leaped in and wheeled the machine down the road.
    A speck appeared in the rear-view mirror, and grew to a taxi. ‘It follows, that cab,’ Peter said grimly. He speeded up, but the taxi continued to gain; now he could make out the driver’s sharp nose and beady eyes. Peter knew he could never outrun the taxi, for it was no doubt a disguised ground-effect machine.
    And dead ahead was Hairpin Turn. This spot had received its colourful name from the fact that one could throw a hairpin over its edge, and never hear it hit bottom. Often women came to toss bobby pins into the abyss, and listen in vain for their clatter. Just now, in fact, a lone woman stood at the brink, jettisoning
objets de coiffure
over the precipice, and unsuccessfully endeavouring to ascertain their collision with the ground. Disengaging a pin from her lovely auburn hair, she precipitated it into the chasm, and strained her ears without avail, to perceive its impact. She wore a trench coat.
    As the taxi drew abreast of him, Peter cramped the wheel sharply, then braked to a halt. The taxi plunged into space and tumbled end over end, finally bursting into flames.
    ‘Want a lift?’ said Peter, eyeing the girl. Without a word she was in his arms, sobbing and pressing her burning lips to his.
    As they drove away, he switched on the radio.
    ‘– and partly cloudy. The most sensational news story of the day is the escape of condemned criminal Peter O’Hare, alias Jean Pierre Lapin, slated to die this noon by the guillotine. Police say the notorious satchel-thief made his escape this morning, from the midst of an interrogation. He is believed hiding out in parallel universes, other dimensions or the Paris sewers.’
    The glove