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all, on the one night he had before flying back into the bush with the irascible Arabs. So he waited with confidence for Wan to excuse himself and his wife to allow herself to be convinced, and then with less confidence, and then with none at all. Although Walthers was a short man, the couch was shorter than he was, and he tossed and turned on it all night long, wishing he had never heard the name of Juan Henriquette Santos Schmitz- A wish shared by a whole lot of the human race, including me.
    Wan was not merely a nasty person-oh, it was not his fault, of course (yes, yes, Sigfrid, I know-get out of my head!). He was also a fugitive from justice, or would have been, if anyone had known exactly what he had swiped out of the old Heechee artifacts.
    When he told Walthers he was rich, he did not lie. He had a birthright to a lot of Heechee technology simply because his mom had pupped him on a Heechee habitat with no other human beings to speak of around. This turned out to mean a lot of money for him, once the courts had time to think it over. It also meant, in Wan’s own mind, that he had a right to just about anything Heechee that he could find that wasn’t nailed down.
    He had taken a Heechee ship-everybody knew that-but his money bought lawyers that stalled the Gateway Corporation’s suit to recover it in the courts. He bad also taken some Heechee gadgets not generally available, and if anyone had known exactly what they were, the case would have whisked through the courts in no time and Wan would have been Public Enemy Number One instead of merely an irritation. So Walthers had every right to hate him, though, of course, those were not the reasons involved.
    When Walthers saw the Libyans the next morning, they were hung over and irritable. He was ~worse, the difference between them and Walthers being that his mood was even more savage, and he wasn’t even hung over. That was part of the reason for the mood.
    His passengers didn’t ask him anything about the night before; in fact, they hardly spoke as the aircraft droned on over the wide savannahs, occasional glades, and very infrequent farm patches of Peggy’s Planet. Luqman and one of the other men were buried in false-color satellite bolos of the sector they were prospecting, one of the others slept, the fourth simply held his head and glowered out the window. The plane nearly flew itself, this time of year, with very little serious weather anywhere around. Walthers bad plenty of time to think about his wife. It had been a personal triumph for him when they were married, but why weren’t they living happily ever after?
    Of course, Dolly had had a hard life. A Kentucky girl with no money, no family, no job-no skills, either, and perhaps none too much brainpower-such a girl had to use all the assets she had if she wanted to get out of coal country. Dolly’s one commercial asset was looks. Good looks, though flawed. Her figure was slim, her eyes were bright, but her teeth were buck. At fourteen she got work as a bartop dancer in Cincinnati, but it didn’t pay enough to live on unless you hustled on the side. Dolly didn’t want to do that. She was saving herself She tried singing, but she didn’t have the voice for it. Besides, trying to sing without moving her lips and exposing her Bugs Bunny teeth made her look like a ventriloquist ... And when a customer, trying to hurt her because she’d turned his advances down, told her that, the light dawned over Dolly’s head. The M.C. considered himself a comic in that particular club. Dolly traded laundry and sewing for some old, used comedy routines, made herself some hand puppets, studied every puppet act she could find on PV or fantape, and tried out the act at the last show on a Saturday night when another singer was coming in to replace her on Sunday. The act was not boffo, but the new girl singer was even worse than Dolly, so she got a reprieve. Two weeks in Cincinnati, a month in Louisville, nearly three months in