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“You came here to see Stromboli, and you have not heard of me? Ah, such is fame! Once we were notorious, and I think perhaps that it was because of me that he retired. He lives with his wife now and wishes the world to think that he is a good husband, you understand; but my little house is not far away.”

I said something to the effect that I had been unaware of any other houses in the neighborhood.

“A few steps would have brought you in sight of it.” She cracked her whip expertly over the horse’s back, and he broke into a trot. “Little Maria does not like it, but I am only a few steps away for her husband too. But he is old. Do you think I am getting old also?”

She leaned back, turning her head to show me her profile—a tip-tilted nose, generous lips salved carmine. “My bust is still good. I am perhaps a little thicker at the waist, but my thighs are heavier too, and that is good.”

“You’re very beautiful,” I said, and she was, though the delicately tinted cheeks beneath the cosmetics showed craquelure.

“Very beautiful but older than you.”

“A few years, maybe.”

“Much more. But you find me attractive?”

“Most men would find you attractive.”

“I am not, you understand, a tart. Many times with Signor Stromboli, yes. But only a few with other man. And I have never been sold—no, not once for any price.” She was driving very fast, the buggy rattling down the turns.

After a few moments of silence she said, “There is a place, not far from here. The ground is flat and you may drive off the road to where a stream comes down from the mountain. There is grass there, and flowers, and the sound of the water.”

“I have to catch my ship.”

“You have two hours. We would spend perhaps one. For the other you can sit in a chair down there, yawning and thinking nice thoughts about Sarg and me.”

I shook my head.

“You say that Signor Stromboli has taught you much. He has taught me much too. I will teach it to you. Now. In an hour.” Her leg pressed hard against mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s somebody else.” It wasn’t true, but it seemed the best way of getting free of an embarrassing situation. I added, “Someone I can’t betray, if I’m going to live with myself.”

Lili let me off at the entrance to the spaceport, where I could pile my bags directly on the conveyor. As soon as the last of them were gone she touched the horse’s rump with the lash of her whip, and she, with the horse and the rattling buggy, disappeared in rising dust. A coin-operated machine inside the port vacuumed most of it out of my clothes.

As she had said, I had almost two hours to kill. I spent them alternately reading magazines and staring at the mountains I would be leaving.

“For the Sol system and Vega. Gate five. You have fifteen minutes before departure

I picked myself up in a leisurely way and headed toward Gate five, then stopped. Coming toward me was a preposterous figure, familiar from a thousand pictures.

“Sir!” (Actually it sounded more like “ SeeraughHa!” given a rising intonation all the way—the kind of sound that might have come from a chummy, intoxicated, dangerous elephant.)

“Sir!” The great swag belly was wrapped in a waistcoat with blue and white stripes as broad as my hand. The great shapeless nose shone with an officious cunning. “Sir, your shoes. I have your shoes!”

It was Zanni the Butler, Stromboli’s greatest creation. He held out my second-best shoes, well brushed. In his flipper of a hand they looked as absurd as I felt. People were staring at us, and already beginning to argue about whether or not Zanni was real.

“The master,” Zanni was saying, “insisted that I restore them to you. You will little credit it, sir, but I have run all the way.”

I took my shoes and mumbled, “Thank you,” looking through the crowd for Stromboli, who had to be somewhere nearby.

“The master has heard,” Zanni continued in a stage whisper that must have been audible out in the blast pits, “of your little talk with Madame Lili. He asks—well, sir, we sometimes call our little world the Planet of Roses, sir. He asks that you consider a part of what you have learned here—at least a part, sir—as under the rose.”

I nodded. I had found Stromboli at last, standing in a corner. His face was perfectly impassive while his fingers flew over the levers of Zanni’s controller. I said, “Joruri.”

“Joruri , sir?”

“The Japanese puppet theater. The operators stand in full view of the audience, but the audience pretends not to see them.”

“That is the master’s field, sir, and not mine; but perhaps that is the best way.”

“Perhaps. But now I’ve got to catch my ship.”

“So you said to Madame Lili earlier, sir. The master begs leave to remind you that he was once a young man very like yourself, sir. He expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith. He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know.”

I thought of the fine cracks I had seen, under the cosmetics, in Lili’s cheeks; and of Charity’s cheeks, as blooming as peaches.

Then I took my second-best pair of shoes, and went out to the ship, and climbed into my own little box.

—There was this traveling salesman, see—

COLD-SKINNED. Anyone who touched him remarked on it. Skin as cold as the Beadsman on St. Agnes’s Eve. As cold as the hymen of a virgin witch.

Not ugly, not handsome. Not much to speak of. Between tall and short, slim and fat, lined and smooth. Eyebrows, thick, were noticeable; eyes were not.

You couldn’t have called him a Willy Loman type because Willy Loman hadn’t been invented yet. You wouldn’t anyway since he was shy, promoted the product with reluctance, and had been shunted off to an unlucrative sales route by a compassionate district manager. He hated the road. All roads. Dirt, asphalt, concrete, patches of blobbed tar. He feared the miles ahead and drove with his eyes staring steadily down at a point just a few feet in front of the car.

—and one dark night—

All light switched off above, below, and to the side. Weak headlights that needed adjustment picked out a triangular section of monotonous gravel. Cold seeped in through the cracked rear window and entered his cold body at the neck. His eyes ached from staring at the road. He wanted to stop and rest but knew he would freeze in place if he did. What vengeful God had made the Great Plains so vulnerable? There must be a place near but in pitch blackness it was impossible to make out any outlines. He was well-read enough to ponder the meaninglessness of a death practically on the doorstep of an unseen farmhouse.

—his car breaks down on this lonely road, see—

Without even a wheeze or a decent dying gasp. Just rolled to a graceless stop. Wearily he leaned his head against the steering wheel, right up against the horn which blew or choked with a long echo that seemed to travel far without encountering a human ear. He sat up. The draft caught him a particularly frosty blast on the back of the neck. He listened for some sound, then began to pound the horn like crazy for comfort.

Finally he decided that freezing in motion was probably better than freezing still, and he left the car to hunt for shelter.

—comes finally to this farmhouse—

Hardly aware he had been going uphill, he came near the crest and saw the single light shining in the distance. Unshaped and too far away to tell whether it was a fire, another headlight (perhaps with another salesman cursing another dead car), or a window. Over the crest and downhill to the glittering beacon he ran. The shuffle of his shoes against the gravel sounded like rapid asthmatic breathing.