say, said, "Thanks, Ambassador. I guess I owe you a
couple. If my eyes hadn't gone bad on me...."

Lindsay was tempted to admit his guilt in that matter but decided
against it. He had no desire to be caught in another riot. He picked up
Anderson's wallet, put it back in the still unconscious senator's breast
pocket. A white-clad interne was brought through the police cordon,
knelt beside Anderson and began to make repairs.

"You'd better leave now, Ambassador," said one of the boss policeman
respectfully to Lindsay when the senator had been carted away on a
stretcher. Lindsay nodded. Then he noticed a slip of paper lying beneath
the chair across which Anderson had fallen. It read: _rec. 10,000 cdt. 1
em. & di. neck_. It was from Zoffany, the jeweler.

"What the hell!" Lindsay discovered he was speaking aloud. He stuffed
the paper in his pocket and followed the officer through a maze of
underground passages out of the Colosseum. He still thought, _What the
hell!_ What could Nina have reported about him that was worth that sort
of money to the senator?

* * * * *

Spy, slattern or not, Nina was efficient, as he realised when a bowing
motley-clad waiter captain smilingly ushered him to a secluded table for
two in a banquet niche of the Pelican. It was Lindsay's first visit to
an Earthly after-dark cafe and he instinctively compared it with certain
of its imitations in the comparatively small cities of his native
planet.

It was sleeker, better run, far more beautiful. Its general color scheme
was darkly opalescent, subtly glowing, flattering to its clients. And,
of course, most of them needed flattering, at least to Lindsay's alien
eyes. He noted here a pair of scimitar-shaped spectacles whose
turquoise-studded rims caught the light like a pair of small lemon pies,
there a harmopan-covered female face that glowed pale green in the
darkness.

But even more numerous and decorative than at the stadium, the
gladiators and courtesans were present, reinforced by a larding of vidar
stars visiting or entertaining in the capital. And these, Lindsay
admitted to himself with awed reluctance, outshone in sheer beauty and
handsomeness any group of Martian humans.

They ought to, he thought. Direct descendants, figuratively if not
actually, of the advertising-Hollywood beauty fetish of the previous
century, they were selected almost from birth for their callings and
trained rigorously from childh