questions that showed he understood what he was listening
to.

Bryce could not remember having had such a good time talking since he
left the company of the meteorite miners at the Belt. Everything he
said seemed right and even brilliant. As he talked and told anecdotes
of his life and sketched some of his plans he saw his past life with
peculiar vividness as if he were a stranger seeing it for the first
time. In the reflected light of the interest and enthusiasm of his
audience, events took on a new glow of entertainment and adventure and
success where they had seemed to be just work and risk and routine at
the time.

They had an evening to pass. Somehow Pierce got into conversation with
a little Egyptian who could have stood for Cyrano and had the same
merry impetuous way about him. Raz Anna was his name. He claimed to be
the Caliph of Baghdad, still incognito, or perhaps a professional
explorer disguised as a native. After a few drinks he enlisted them,
somewhat confusedly, as the two missing musketeers and they found
themselves wandering arm in arm from bar to bar and up and down dark
alleys interviewing the heathen natives.

Bryce realized that he was laughing steadily and enjoying himself in a
way that had nothing to do with the small number of drinks he had had.

He couldn't get any deference out of Raz. Raz wouldn't have deferred
to God himself, and it was no use trying to impress him, for nothing
impressed him. Apparently the hook-nosed, merry little man had no
ambition and no envy of anyone, and wanted no better of life than he
had at the moment.

It was a strange new world they led Bryce through--Not the ragged,
starving, crowded viciousness of his childhood--not the fighting
equality of spacemen and rock miners, many of them wanted by the
law--not the simple barren hospitality of the settlers in the Belt who
owed him money, and who invited him to their sparse dinners in
gratitude--Those he had always managed to keep in their places and
exact a certain measure of respect.

Even the smooth powerful men of wealth around him now accorded him a
certain measure of deference that was an acknowledgement of strength.
But the two musketeers he was with and the world they opened for him
seemed to respect neither distance nor politeness, nor hold any fear
for strength. Friendly insults, and uncritical friendliness mingled
oddly with the mock-solemn pretense of the fairy tale, and that part
was genuine and sponta