II

Glidden and I met in DuBois' office at 6:30 and concluded the deal, for fifty-six thousand. DuBois was a short man with a weatherbeaten face and a long shock of white hair. He'd opened his office at that hour because of my insistence on dealing that afternoon. I paid the money, the papers were signed, the keys were in my pocket, hands were shaken all around and the three of us departed. As we walked across the damp pavement toward our respective vehicles, I said, "Damni I left my pen on your desk, DuBois!"

"I'll have it sent to you. You're staying at the Spectrum?"

"I'm afraid I'll be checking out very shortly."

"I can send it to the place on Nuage."

I shook my head. "I'll be needing it tonight."

"Here. Take this one." He offered me his own.

By then Glidden had entered his vehicle and was out of earshot. I waved to him, then said, "That was for his benefit. I want to speak with you in private."

The squint that suddenly surrounded his dark eyes removed their look of incipient disgust and replaced it with one of curiosity.

"All right," he said, and we reentered the building and he unlocked his office door again.

"What is it?" he asked, reassuniing the padded chair behind his desk.

"I'm looking for Ruth Laris," I said.

He lit a cigarette, which is always a good way to buy a little thinking time.

"Why?" he asked.

"She's an old friend. Do you know where she is?"

"No," he said.

"Isn't it a trifle--unusual--to conserve assets in this quantity for a person whose whereabouts you don't even know?"

"Yes," he said, "I'd say so. But that is what I've been retained to do."

"By Ruth Laris?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Did she retain you personally, or did somebody else do it on her behalf?"

"I don't see that this is any business of yours, Mister Conner. I believe I am going to call this conversation to a close."

I thought a second, made a quick decision.

"Before you do," I said, "I want you to know that I bought her house only to search it for clues as to her whereabouts. After that, I'm going to indulge a whim and convert it into a hacienda, because I don't like the architecture in this city. What does that indicate to you?"

"That you're something of a nut," he observed.

I nodded and added, "A nut who can afford to indulge his whims. Therefore a crackpot who can cause a lot of trouble. What's _this_ building worth? A couple million?"

"I don't know." He looked a little uneasy.

"What if someone bought it for an apartment building and you had to go looking for another office?"

"My lease would not be that easy to cancel, Mister Conner."

I chuckled. "... And then," I said, "you were suddenly to find yourself the subject of an inquiry by the local Bar Association?"

He sprang to his feet.

"You _are_ a madman."

"Are you sure? I don't know what the charges would be," I said, "yet. But you know that even an inquiry would give you some trouble--and then if you started running into difficulties finding another place ..." I didn't like doing things this way, but I was in a hurry. So, "Are you sure? Are you very sure that I'm a madman?" I finished.

Then, "No," he said, "I'm not."

"Then, if you've nothing to hide, why not tell me how the arrangements were made? I'm not interested in the substance of any privileged communications, simply the circumstances surrounding the house's being put up for sale. It puzzles me that Ruth didn't leave a message of any sort."

He leaned his head against the back of his chair and studied me through smoke.

"The arrangements were made by phone--"

"She could have been drugged, threatened ..."

"That is ridiculous," he said. "What is your interest in this, anyway?"

"Like I said, she's an old friend."

His eyes widened and then narrowed. A few people still knew who one of Ruth's old friends had been.

"... Also," I continued, "I received a message from her recently, asking me to come see her on a matter of some urgency. She is not here and there is no message, no forwarding address. It smells funny. I am going to find her, Mister DuBois."

He was not blind to the cut and therefore the cost of my suit, and maybe my voice has a somewhat authoritarian edge from years of giving orders. At any rate, he didn't switch on the phone and call for the cops.

"All the arrangements were made over the phone and through the mails," he said. "I honestly do not know where she is presently. She simply said that she was leaving town and wanted me to dispose of the place and everything in it, the money to be deposited in her account at Artists Trust. So I agreed to handle the matter and turned it over to Sunspray." He looked away, looked back. "Now, she did leave a message with me, to be delivered to someone other than yourself should he call here for it. If not, I am to transmit it to that individual after thirty days have elapsed from the time I received it."

"May I inquire as to the identity of that individual?"

"That, sir, _is_ privileged."

"Switch on the phone," I said, "and call 73737373 in Glencoe, reversing the charges. Make it person-to-person to Domenic Malisti, the director of Our Thing Enterprises on this planet. Identify yourself, say to him, 'Baa baa blacksheep' and ask him to identify Lawrence John Conner for you."

DuBois did this, and when he hung up he rose to his feet, crossed the office, opened a small wall safe, removed an envelope and handed it to me. It was sealed, and across the face of it lay the name "Francis Sandow," typewritten.

"Thank you," I said and tore it open.

I fought down my feelings as I regarded the three items the envelope contained. There was another picture of Kathy, different pose, slightly different background, a picture of Ruth, older and a bit heavier but still attractive, and a note.

The note was written in Pei'an. Its salutation named me and was followed by a small sign which is used in holy texts to designate Shimbo, Shrugger of Thunders. It was signed "Green Green," and followed by the ideogram for Belion, who was not one of the twenty-seven Names which lived.

I was perplexed. Very few know the identities of the Name-bearers, and Belion is the traditional enemy of Shimbo. He is the fire god who lives under the earth. He and Shimbo take turns hacking one another up between resurrections.

I read the note. It said, _If you want your women, seek them on the Isle of the Dead. Bodgis, Dan go, Shandon and the dwarf are also waiting_.

Back on Homefree there were tri-dees of Bodgis, Dango, Shandon, Nick, Lady Karle (who might qualify as one of my women) and Kathy. Those were the six pictures I'd received. Now he'd taken Ruth.

Who?

I did not know Green Green from anywhere that I could recall, but of course I knew the Isle of the Dead.

"Thank you," I said again.

"Is something wrong, Mister Sandow?"

"Yes," I said, "but I'll set it right. Don't worry, you're not involved. Forget my name."

"Yes, Mister Conner."

"Good evening."

"Good evening."

I entered the place on Nuage. I walked through the foyer, the various living rooms. I found her bedroom and searched it. She had left the place completely furnished. She'd also heft several closets and dressers full of clothing, and all sorts of little personal items that you just don't leave behind when you move. It was a funny feeling, walking through that place which had replaced the other place and every now and then seeing something familiar--an antique clock, a painted screen, an inlaid cigarette box--reminding me how life redistributes what once was meaningful amidst- the always to be foreign, killing its personal magic, save in a memory you carry of the time and the place where once it stood, until you meet it again, it troubles you briefly, surrealistically, and then that magic, too, dies away as, punctured by the encounter, emotions you had forgotten are drained from the pictures inside your head. At least, it happened to me that way, as I searched for clues as to what might have occurred. As the hours passed and, one by one, each item in the place was passed through the sieve of my scrutiny, the realization which had come upon me in DuBois' office, the thing that had ridden with me from Homefree since the day the first picture had arrived, completed its circuit: brain to intestines to brain.

I seated myself and lit a cigarette. This was the room where the photo of Ruth had been taken; hers hadn't been the rocks-and-blue-sky setting of the others. I had searched though and found nothing: no evidence of violence, no clue as to the identity of my enemy. I said the words aloud, "My enemy," the first words I had spoken since "Good evening" to the suddenly cooperative, white-haired attorney, and the words sounded strange in that big fishbowl of a place. My enemy.

It was out in the open now. I was wanted, for what I wasn't sure. Offhand, I'd say death. It would have been helpful if I could have known which of my many enemies was behind it. I searched my mind. I considered my enemy's odd choice of rendezvous-point, battlefield. I thought back upon my dream of the place.

It was a foolish place for anyone to lure me if he wished to harm me, unless he knew nothing whatsoever concerning my power once I set foot upon any world I've made. Everything would be my ally if I went back to Illyria, the world I'd put where it was, many centuries ago, the world which held the Isle of the Dead, my Isle of the Dead.

... And I would go back. I knew that. Ruth, and the possibility of Kathy ... These required my return to that strange Eden I'd once laid out. Ruth and Kathy ... Two images which I did not like to juxtapose, but had to. They had never existed simultaneously for me, and I did not like the feeling now. I'd go, and whoever had baited the trap in this fashion would be sorry for a brief time only, and then he would dwell upon the Isle of the Dead forever.

I crushed out my cigarette, locked the ruddy castle gate and drove back to the Spectrum. I was suddenly hungry.

I dressed for dinner and descended to the lobby. I'd noticed a decent-looking little restaurant off to the left. Unfortunately, it had just closed a few minutes before. So I inquired at the desk after a good eating place that was still open.

"Bartol Towers, on the Bay," said the night clerk, smothering a yawn. "They'll be open for several hours yet."

So I took his directions on how to get there, and went out and nailed down a piece of the briar business. Ridiculous is a better word than strange, but then everybody lives in the shade of the Big Tree, remember?

I drove over, and I left the slip-sled to be parked by a uniform which I see wherever I go, smiling face above it, opening before me doors which I can open for myself, handing me a towel I don't want, snatching at a briefcase I don't care to check, right hand held at waist-level and ready to turn palm up at the first glint of metal or the crinkling of the proper type paper, large pockets to hold these items. It has followed me for over a thousand years, and it's not really the uniform that I resent. It's that damned smile, which is turned on by one thing only. My car went from here to there and was dropped between a pair of painted lines. Because we are all tourists.

At one time, tips were given only for things you logically would want to have done efficiently and promptly, and they served to supplement a lower payscale for certain classes of employment. This was understood, accepted. It was tourism, back in the century of my birth, cluing in the underdeveloped countries to the fact that all tourists are marks, that set the precedent, which then spread to all countries, even back to the tourists' own, of the benefits which might be gained by those who wear uniforms and render the undesired and the unrequested with a smile. This is the army that conquered the world. After their quiet revolution in the twentieth century, we all became tourists the minute we set foot outside our front doors, second-class citizens, to be ruthlessly exploited by the smiling legions who had taken over, slyly, completely.

Now, in every city into which I venture, uniforms rush upon me, dust dandruff from my collar, press a brochure into my hand, recite the latest weather report, pray for my soul, throw walk-shields over nearby puddles, wipe off my windshield, hold an umbrella over my head on sunny or rainy days, or shine an ultra-infra flashlight before me on cloudy ones, pick lint from my belly-button, scrub my back, shave my neck, zip up my fly, shine my shoes and smile--all before I can protest-- right hand held at waist-level. What a goddamn happy place the universe would be if everyone wore uniforms that glinted and crinkled. Then we'd all have to smile at each other.

I took the elevator up to the sixtieth floor, where the big place was. Then I realized that I should have called ahead from the hotel for a reservation. It was crowded. I'd forgotten that the following day was a holiday on Driscoll. The hostess took my name and told me fifteen or twenty minutes, so I went into one of a pair of bars and ordered a beer.

I looked about me as I sipped, and across the little foyer in the matching bar on the other side, hovering in the gloom, I saw a fat face that looked somewhat familiar. I slipped on a pair of special glasses which act like telescopes, and I studied the face, now in profile. The nose and the ears were the same. The hair was the wrong color and the complexion darker, but that's easily done.

I got up and started to walk that way when a waiter stopped me and told me that I couldn't carry a drink out of the place. When I told him I was going to the other bar, he offered to carry the drink for me, smiling, right hand at waist-level. I figured it would be cheaper to buy another one, so I told him he could drink it for me, too.

He was alone, a tiny glass of something bright before him. I folded my glasses and tucked them away as I approached his table, and in a fake-falsetto said, "May I join you, Mister Bayner?"

He jumped, just slightly, within his skin, and the fat only quivered for an instant. He photographed me with his magpie eyes in the following second, and I knew that the machine that lay behind them was already spinning its wheels like a demon on an exercise-bike.

"You must be mistaken--" he began, and smiled then, and followed that with a frown. "No, _I_ am," he corrected himself, "but then it's been a long time, Frank, and we've both changed."

"... Into our traveling clothes, yes," I said in my normal voice, seating myself across from him.

He caught the attention of a waiter as easily as if he'd had a lariat, and he asked me, "What are you drinking?"

"Beer," I said, "any brand."

The waiter overheard me, nodded, departed.

"Have you eaten?"

"No, I was waiting for a table, across the way there, when I spotted you."

"I've already eaten," he said. "If I hadn't indulged a sudden desire for an after-dinner drink on my way out, I might have missed you."

"Strange," I said, then, "Green Green."

"What?"

"_Verde Verde. Gr_n. Gr_n_."

"I'm afraid I don't follow you. Is that some kind of code-phrase I'm supposed to recognize?"

I shrugged.

"Call it a prayer for th-e confoundment of my enemies. What's new?"

"Now that you're here," he said, "I've got to talk with you, of course. May I join you?"

"Surely."

So, when they called for Larry Conner, we moved to a table in one of the countless dining rooms that filled that floor of the tower. We'd have had a pleasant view of the bay on a clear night, but the sky was overcast and an occasional buoy-light and an unpleasantly rapid searchlight were all that shone above the dark swells of the ocean. Bayner decided that he had a bit of an appetite left and ordered a full meal. He shoveled away a mound of spaghetti and a mess of bloody looking sausages before I'd half-finished my steak, and he moved on to shortcake, cheesecake and coffee.

"Ah, that was good!" he said, and he immediately inserted a toothpick into the upper portion of the first smile I'd seen him smile in, say, forty years.

"Cigar?" I offered.

"Thank you, I believe I will."

The toothpick went away, the cigars were lit, the check arrived. I always do that in crowded places when they're slow to bring me the check. A lit stogie, a quick blue haze and they're right beside me with the tab.

"This is on me," he announced as I accepted the bill.

"Nonsense. You're my guest."

"Well ... All right."

After all, Bill Bayner is the forty-fifth wealthiest man in the galaxy. It isn't every day I get a chance to dine with successful people.

As we left, he said, "I've got a place where we can talk. I'll drive."

So we took his car, leaving a uniform and a frown behind us, and spent about twenty minutes driving around the city, shaking off hypothetical tails, and we finally arrived at an apartment building about eight blocks from Bartol Towers. As we entered the lobby, he nodded to the doorman, who nodded back to him.

"Think it'll rain tomorrow?" he asked.

"Clear," said the doorman.

Then we rode up to the sixth floor. The wainscotting in the hallway was full of artificial gems, some of which had to be eyes. We stopped and he knocked at an ordinary-looking door: three, pause, two, pause, two. He'd change it tomorrow, I knew. A dour-faced young man in a dark suit answered the door, nodded, and departed when Bayner gestured over his shoulder with a thumb. Inside, he secured the door, but not before I'd noticed from its edge that a metal plate was sandwiched between its inner and outer veneers of fake wood. For the next five or ten minutes, he tested the room with an amazing variety of bug-detection equipment, after giving me a keep-quiet sign, and then set several bug-scramblers into operation as an added precaution, sighed, removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, turned to me and said, "It's okay to talk now. Can I fix you a drink?"

"Are you sure it'll be safe?"

He thought about it for a moment, then said, "Yes."

"Then I'll have bourbon and water if you've got it."

He withdrew into the next room and returned after about a minute with two glasses. His was probably filled with tea if he was planning on talking any kind of business with me. I couldn't have cared less.

"So what's up?" I asked him.

"Damn it, the stories they tell about you are true, aren't they? How'd you find out?"

I shrugged.

"But you're not going to move in on me on this one, not the way you did on those Vegan mining franchises."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Six years ago."

I laughed.

"Listen," I told him, "I don't pay much attention to what my money does, so long as it's there when I want it. I trust various people to handle it for me. If I got a good deal in the Vegan system six years ago, it's because some good man in my employ lined it up. I don't run around shepherding money the way you do. I've delegated all that."

"Sure, sure, Frank," he said. "So you're incognito on Driscoll and you arrange to run into me the night before I deal. Who'd you buy on my staff?"

"Nobody, believe me."

He looked hurt.

"I'd tell _you_," he said. "I won't hurt him. I'll just transfer him somewhere where he won't do any more harm."

"I'm really not here on business," I said, "and I ran into you by pure chance."

"Well, you're not going to grab the whole thing this time, whatever you've got up your sleeve," he said.

"I'm not even in the running. Honest."

"Damn it!" he said. "Everything was going so smoothly!" and his right fist smashed against his left palm.

"I haven't even seen the product," I said.

He got up and stalked out of the room, came back and handed me a pipe.

"Nice pipe," I said.

"Five thousand," he told me. "Cheap."

"I'm really not much of a pipe-smoker."

"I won't cut you in for more than ten percent," he said. "I've been handling this thing personally, and you're not going to queer it."

And then I got mad. All that bastard thought about, besides eating, was stacking up his wealth. He automatically assumed I spent my time the same way, just because a lot of leaves on the Big Tree say "Sandow." So, "I want a third, or I make my own deal," I said.

"A third?"

He leaped to his feet and began screaming. It was a good thing that the room was soundproof and debugged. It had been a long time since I'd heard some of those expressions. He grew red in the face and he paced. Greedy, money-grubbing, unethical me sat there thinking about pipes while he ranted.

A guy with a memory like mine has many odd facts in his head. Back in my youth, on Earth, the best pipes were made either of meerschaum or briar. Clay pipes draw awfully hot and wooden ones crack or burn out quickly. Corncobs are dangerous. In the latter part of the twentieth century, possibly because of a generation growing up in the shadow of a Surgeon General's Report on respiratory diseases, pipe smoking had undergone something of a renaissance. By the turn of the century, the world's supply of briar and meerschaum was largely exhausted. Meerschaum, or hydrous magnesium silicate, is a sedimentary rock which occurred in strata composed in part of seashells that had fused together over the ages, and when it was all gone, that was it. Briar pipes were made from the root of the White Heath, or _Erica Arborea_, which grew only in a few areas about the Mediterranean and had to be around a hundred years old before it was of any use. The White Heath had been subjected to wanton harvesting, with anything like a reforestation plan far from mind. Consequently, substances like pyrolitic carbon now do for the bulk of pipe smokers, but meerschaum and briar linger in memories and collections. Small deposits of meershaum have been discovered upon various worlds and turned into fortunes overnight. Nowhere but on Earth, however, has _Erica Arborea_ or a suitable substitute ever turned up. And pipe smoking is the mainliner's way of smoking these days, DuBois and me being mavericks. The pipe Bayner had shown me was a pretty, fiame-grained briar. Therefore ...

"... Fifteen percent," he was saying, "which barely allows me a small profit--"

"Nuts! Those briars are worth ten times their weight in platinum!"

"You cut my heart out if you ask for more than eighteen percent!"

"Thirty."

"Be reasonable, Frank."

"Then let's talk business, not nonsense."

"Twenty percent is all I can let you in for, and it will cost you five millions--"

I laughed.

So for the next hour I haggled, out of pure cussedness, resenting the estimation he'd placed on me and refused to disbelieve. I lived up to it, too. Like twentyfive and a half percent for four million, which required a phone call to Malisti to swing the financing. I really hated to wake him.

And that's how I nailed down a piece of the briar business on Driscoll. Ridiculous is a better word than strange, but then everyone lives in the shade of the Big Tree, remember?

After it was all over, he slapped me on the shoulder and told me I was a cool dealer and that he'd rather have me with him than against him, made us another round of drinks, sounded me out on getting Martin Bremen away from me, as he'd never been able to hire a Rigelian chef, and asked me once again who had tipped me off.

He dropped me at Bartol Towers, the uniform moved my car a few feet and held the door for me, got its money, turned off its smile and went away. I drove back to the Spectrum, wishing I'd eaten there and gotten to bed early instead of spending my evening autographing leaves.

The radio in the sled played a Dixieland number I hadn't heard in ages. That, and the rain that came a moment later, made me feel lonely and more than a little sad. Traffic was light. I hurried.

The following morning, I sent a courier-gram to Marling of Megapei, telling him to rest easy in the knowledge that Shimbo would be with him before the fifth season, and asking him if he knew a Pei'an named Green Green, or some equivalent thereof, who might in any way be associated with the Name Belion. I asked him to reply by courier-gram, reverse-charge, and send his answer to Lawrence j Conner, c/o Homefree, and I didn't sign it. I planned on leaving Driscoll for Homefree that same day. A courier-gram is about the fastest and one of the most expensive ways there is of sending an interstellar message; and even so, I knew there would be a lapse of a couple of weeks before I received a reply.

It was true that I was running a small risk of blowing my cover on Driscoll by sending a message of that class with a Homefree return on it, but I was leaving that day and I wanted to expedite things.

I checked out of the hotel and -drove to the place on Nuage, to give it a final once-over, stopping for a late breakfast on the way.

I found only one thing new at the Raspberry Palace. There was something in the message-slot. It was a wide envelope, bearing no return address.

The envelope was for "Francis Sandow, do Ruth Laris." I took it inside with me and did not open it until I'd satisfied myself that there were no lurkers. Then I repocketed a tiny tube, capable of producing instant, silent and natural-seeming death, seated myself and opened my mail.

Yes.

Another picture.

It was Nick, my old friend Nick, Nick the dwarf, dead Nick, snarling through his beard and ready to leap at the photographer, standing there on a rocky ledge.

"Come visit Illyria. All your friends live there," said a note, in English.

I lit my first cigarette of the day.

Malisti, Bayner and DuBois knew who Lawrence John Conner was.

Malisti was my man on Driscoll, and I paid him enough so that he was, I thought, above bribery. Admitted, other pressures can be brought to bear on a man--but he himself had only learned my true identity the day before, when _Baa-baa blacksheep_ had provided the key for the decoding of a special instruction. Not much time had passed in which to apply pressure.

Bayner had nothing, really, to gain by bugging me. We were partners in a joint venture which represented one of those drops in those buckets people talk about. That was all. Our fortunes were such that, even if our interests did conflict on occasion, it was a very impersonal thing. He was out.

DuBois didn't impress me as the sort to give away my name either, not after the way I'd spoken in his office concerning my willingness to resort to extreme means to obtain what I wanted.

Nobody at Homefree had known where I was going, except for S & F, whose memory of the fact I'd erased prior to my departure.

I considered an alternative.

If Ruth had been kidnapped, forced to write the note she had written, then whoever had taken her could safely assume I'd receive this latest if I responded, and if not, no harm done.

This seemed possible, probable.

So it meant there was somebody on Driscoll whose name I'd like to know.

Was it worth sticking around for? With Malisti on the job, I might be able to ferret out the sender of the latest picture.

But if there was a man behind the man and he was smart, his subordinate would know very little, might even be a totally innocent party. I resolved to put Malisti on the trail and have him send his findings to Homefree. I'd use a phone other than the one at my right hand, however.

In just a few hours, it wouldn't matter who knew that Conner was Sandow. I'd be on my way, and I'd never be Conner again.

"Everything that's miserable in the world," Nick the dwarf once said to me, "is because of beauty."

"Not truth or goodness?" I'd asked.

"Oh, they help. But beauty is the culprit, the real principle of evil."

"Not wealth?"

"Money is beautiful."

"So is anything else you don't have enough of--food, water, screwing ..."

"Exactly!" he announced, slamming his beer mug down so heavily on the tabletop that a dozen heads were turned in our direction. "Beauty, goddamn it!"

"What about a good-looking guy?"

"They're either bastards because they know they've got it made, or they're self-conscious because they know other guys hate their- guts. Bastards are always hurting other people, and the self-conscious guys screw themselves up. Usually they go queer or something, all because of that goddamn beauty!"

"What about beautiful objects?"

"They make people steal, or feel bad because they can't get at them. Damn--!"

"Wait a minute," I said. "It's not an object's fault that it's beautiful, or the pretty people's fault that they're pretty. It just happens that way."

He shrugged.

"Fault? Who said anything about fault?"

"You were talking about evil. That implies guilt somewhere along the line."

"Then beauty is guilty," he said. "Goddamn it!"

"Beauty, as an abstract principle?"

"Yes."

"And in individual objects?"

"Yes."

"That's ridiculous! Guilt requires responsibility, some kind of intent--"

"Beauty's responsible!"

"Have another beer."

He did, and belched again.

"Take a look at that good-looking guy over at the bar," he said, "that guy trying to pick up the broad in the green dress. Somebody's going to bust him one in the nose sometime. It wouldn't have to happen if he was ugly."

Nick later proved his point by busting the guy one in the nose, because he'd called him Shorty. So maybe there was something to what he said. Nick was around four feet tall. He had the shoulders and arms of a powerful athlete. He could beat anybody I knew at wrist-wrestling. He had a normal-sized head, too, full of blond hair and beard, with a couple blue eyes above a busted nose that turned off to the right and a mean smile that usually revealed only half a dozen of his yellow-stained teeth. He was all gnarled below the waist. He'd come from a family lousy with professional soldiers. His father'd been a general, and all of his brothers and sisters except for one were officers in something or other. Nick had grown up in an environment alive with the martial arts. Any weapon you cared to name, he could operate it. He could fence, shoot, ride, set explosive charges, break boards and necks with his hands, live off the land, and fail any physical examination in the galaxy because he was a dwarf. I'd hired him as a game hunter, to kill off my experiments that went bad. He hated beautiful things and things that were bigger than he was.

"What I think is beautiful and what you think is beautiful," I said, "might disgust a Rigelian, and vice-versa. Therefore, beauty is a relative thing. So you can't condemn it as an abstract principle if--"

"Crap!" he said. "So they hurt, rape, steal and screw themselves up over different things. It's still because beauty sits there demanding violation."

"Then how can you blame an individual object--"

"We do business with Rigelians, don't we?"

"Yes."

"Then it can be translated. Enough said."

Then the good-looking guy at the bar who'd been trying to pick up the broad in the green dress passed by on his way to the Men's Room and called Nick Shorty when he asked him to move his chair out of the way. That ended our evening in that bar.

Nick swore he'd die with his boots on, on some exotic safari, but he found his Kiimanjaro in a hospital on Earth, where they'd cured everything that was bothering him, except for the galloping pneumonia he'd picked up in the hospital.

That had been, roughly, two hundred and fifty years ago. I'd been a pallbearer.

I mashed out my cigarette and made my way back to the slip-sled. Whatever was rotten in Midi, I'd find it out later. It was time to go.

The dead are too much with us.

For two weeks, I puzzled over what I'd found and I kept myself fit. When I entered the Homefree system, my life was further complicated by the fact that Homefree had picked up an additional satellite. Not a natural one, either.

WHAT THE HELL, EXCLAMATION, I sent ahead in code.

VISITOR, came the reply. LANDING PERMISSION REQUESTED STOP DENIED STOP STILL CIRCLING STOP SAYS HES AN EARTH INTELLIGENCE MAN STOP

LET HIM LAND, I said, HALF A HOUR AFTER IM DOWN STOP

There came the acknowledgment, and I swung into a tight orbit and pushed the _Model T_ down and around and down.

After a frolic with the beasts, I repaired to my home for a shower, shucked my Conner face, then dressed for dinner.

It would appear that something finally meant enough to the wealthiest government in existence for someone to at last authorize a trip on the part of some underpaid civil servant in one of the cheapest interstellar vehicles available.

I vowed to at least feed him well.