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shoulder. I spun around like a startled mooncat, snapping out my .38 as I turned.
    "Hello, Mr. Space," said a sad-eyed, solemn-faced humanoid standing in front of me. He was middle-aged. Basic earth-type body construction. Wearing dirt-streaked, ragged clothing. Frayed sandals. Scabs on his knees.
    "Who the hell are you?" I asked him.
    "The one you came to see," he told me in a soft voice. "I'm McKabe."
    Which stoned me. "You mean — you're Iberia's gray market contact?"
    "Yes. I do business with him, among many others."
    I gave him a slow lookover. But I understood that you were loaded . That you'd built your own pleasure world out here in the Lowenkopf sector."
    "All perfectly true," he nodded. "Furnishing this asteroid cost me several million credits."
    "I don't get you, McKabe."
    The sad-eyed humanoid walked over to a fallen, headless statue. He tapped the statue's chipped torso. "I paid to have all this done," he said. "Paid to have this whole city built here, and then paid to have it destroyed." He looked down at himself. "Even my clothing is custom destroyed. Good ragged, dirt streaked clothes don't come cheap. And where do you find the right size in frayed sandals these days?"
    "But why build a city and then have it destroyed?"
    "Sit down on this chipped torso and listen to a sad story," he said. I sat down, stowing my .38 in its holster.
    "I'm married. I love my wife and she loves me. But, like many marriages, ours had gone stale. Sex had become boring. Predictable. So I got the idea for this place. I considered it an inspiration."
    I still didn't follow him, and said so.
    "My wife and I had often speculated on what it would be like to be the last male and the last female in the world. The idea excited us. Two passionate, love-starved creatures grappling and grunting out their sexual release amid chipped torsos and tumbled buildings."
    "Love among the ruins, eh?"
    "Quite so," he nodded. "I got my world and paid to have it ruined. Everything seemed perfect. Here was I, the last male, stumbling aimlessly and numbly through the broken, empty streets. And there she was, the last surviving female."
    "Did you grapple and grunt out your release?"
    "We tried to," he said. "But my wife got sand in her mouth and a small stone lodged itself in her navel as we were rolling about. She found it all quite depressing. Now she's gone. Left me here. When I heard your ship I thought she might be returning for me."
    "You mean she left just before I got here?"
    "Correct. I suddenly found that I was the last male in the world, and it's no damn fun, let me tell you."
    "I've got a cab waiting outside town. You can get a ride back home with me."
    "That's most kind of you, Mr. Space," he said. "Makes me regret trying to have you killed back on Antar."
    "So that was your doing?"
    "Afraid so," he admitted. "I work hard. I try to do a good job. Sure, I'm in the gray market game, but you have to work just as hard being crooked as you do being honest. People like you don't understand a thing like that. You come along and want to take my money away from me."
    "You're full of beans," I told him. "I don't give a damn what you do with your money."
    His eyes widened. "You don't?"
    "No, I don't."
    "But … aren't you a federation snooper nosing into our gray market activities?"
    "Nope."
    "But that's why I tried to have you killed in Antar. We gray marketeers always kill federation snoopers. When you left Iberia's and booked passage for Antar we assumed you were a professional investigator."
    "I am, but I'm private. I don't work for the federation. Right now I'm on a missing asteroid trace for a client. It seemed to me that you market boys might be able to help me find the asteroid."
    McKabe chuckled. "Amazing how we turn simple things into complex ones by assuming that which is not always truly assumable."
    "Sorry I had to stiff your hairy friend," I told him.
    He shrugged. "Sonny was expendable. Spider wrestlers are fairly easy to come by. And, after