owed her wordlessly up a mechanical staircase.

They flashed past many landings, and after a time Smith followed the
girl across one of them and into a long hall.

"Simple," she said. "You have the twenty-seventh room here on the
fortieth floor. Mine is room eighteen. Will we be seeing more of each
other, Smith?"

"As much as you'd like," he said, but it made him feel foolish. He had
merely spoken to the girl for a few minutes, and yet he could not quite
fathom his emotions. To some extent she had made him feel the same as
had the man Jorak, and yet she liked him. She wanted to see more of him.
She said so.

"Smith, you're blushing again. I tell you what: if you can do that every
day, then I will see you every day. It's so nice and--unaffected."

Was that the word she really had in mind? Smith remembered once when he
was little, a farmer had come to the city and everyone had called him an
ancient word which they said came from a still more ancient name. Rube
they had called him. Rube. He didn't like it. He had had a fight, Smith
recalled, and a big plateglass window was broken. He went to jail for a
few weeks on the moon, and after that he didn't come to the city any
more. Smith was little at the time, but he had never forgotten the look
on the farmer's face when the security officers took him off to the moon
rocket.

Had he known it, Jorak would have used the word rube, but what about
Geria?

The green number on the white door was painted sharply--4027. "Here's my
room," Smith said. He tried an indifferent wave, but it hardly worked,
and he began to blush again.

Geria skipped lightly down the hall, and he couldn't see her face to
tell if she were smiling. He shrugged, opened the door.

* * * * *

"Earthsmith! Oh, no ... I come half way across the galaxy to get here,
so what are the odds against any particular room mate? Huge, that's
what. But I got me--hello, Earthsmith."

It was the purple man, Jorak. He had just recently greased his shock of
bright green hair, and he had turned away from the mirror when Smith
opened the door. Now he turned back to the tinted glass and held his
head at various angles.

"Well, can you change rooms if you want to?" Smith asked pleasantly.

"You're not going to chase me out of my own room, Earthsmith. You can
change if you'd like. Not me."

"All right if you want me to I'll change."

"If I want you to! Don't pass the blame to me, Earthsm