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gleamed with sweat.
    “Liebchen, are you all right?” Kramer demanded. “I heard you moaning.”
    With lackluster eyes the woman regarded him. Seeming to come back from a great distance, she answered in a whisper. “I’m sorry, Hans. Sometimes the fever makes my mind wander. I hope you did not have a client—” She realized that I was present, and broke off.
    “Only a new friend, an Earthly friend!” Kramer exclaimed with false heartiness. “Friend Shaw—my wife, of course.”
    I nodded and licked my lips, not knowing what to say. Kramer went to the side of his wife’s couch, felt her hot face with light fingertips, and frowned. He poured a little more water from a jug into a cup on a low table beside her, and then apparently could do no more.
    “Don’t worry with me,” his wife said faintly. “See to your business. I shall be well soon.”
    So we returned to the room with the stacks of cans and Jars.
    As the drape fell behind Kramer, I said, nodding past him, “What is it?”
    “The sickness? Oh, the usual mixture.” He sounded bitter. “A mutated germ, plus impure water, plus trace-element deficiencies, plus allergy to Vorrish food, plus simple weariness. What’s to be done? We aren’t the first to be troubled, nor will we be the last. Your business, then!”
    His tone warned me not to ask any more questions. I simply recited the message Shavarri had given me to bring here. It made very little sense. In actual fact, I’d wondered at first if I was bringing a kind of coded message to a lover of hers, before I noticed that I was bound for the Acre.
    “Does she now!” Kramer said, apparently understanding what I had said better than I did. “Well, that’ll be five platina. Does she know that?”
    Guiltily I produced the four I had brought with me. “IH dig the other one out of her before I hand over,” I improvised.
    “Yes, do that,” Kramer agreed, unsuspecting. He clinked the coins together. “Cash on the nail is our inflexible rule. Still, she’s a new customer—I’d dearly like to know who put her on to us! Try and find out, will you?”
    “It’d be easier,” I ventured, “if I knew what I was taking her.”
    “Don’t you already?” He regarded me with astonishment, before reaching for a pound-size can without a label from one of the stacks beside him. “A love potion, of course! Here you are. And here”—he felt in his pocket and produced a slip of rather tattered paper—”are the directions for use. You might as well read them yourself before handing over.”
    “I’ll have to read them anyway,” I said. “I don’t think she knows how.”
    Love potion? Arcane lore? What in—?
    “Look,” I said, “is this serious? About a love potion, I mean?”
    “Where’ve you been since coming to Qallavarra?” Kramer demanded. “I thought everyone knew about—’
    And I saw the darkening of suspicion in his eyes. Hastily I interrupted,” I’m sorry, I haven’t been here long.”
    Then, by a miracle, the outer door was opened again. Kramer pointed curtly. “Out the other way!” he whispered. “And quickly!” Meantime he was grabbing his black cape again.
    As I departed through the back entrance, I faintly heard him demanding, in Vorrish, the new customer’s business.

CHAPTER VI

    I MADE A SORT of pouch out of my cloak and slung it over my shoulder with the can and my house shield in it, and got out of the Acre without further trouble. But I waited till I was well outside the boundary before I put my shield back on, and both before and after I was careful to imitate the Vorra in head angle, walk and position of my fingers.
    I got my return bus safely. Once in the back seat, with a journey of almost an hour before me, I was able to start thinking over what had happened.
    The most extraordinary thing out of a lot of extraordinary things was this. Why—being as far as I knew a loyal Earth-man—why hadn’t I actually taken advantage of my privileged position the way I’d