below:

"Shut up, you damn fools! We can't eat till this is over!"

Hutchinson introduced me, in very few words. I gathered that lengthy
speeches at barbecues were not popular on New Texas.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" I yelled into the microphone. "Appreciative as I
am of this honor, there is one here who is more deserving of your notice
than I; one to whom I, also, pay homage. He's over there on the fire,
and I want a slice of him as soon as possible!"

That got a big ovation. There was, beside the water pitcher, a bottle of
superbourbon. I ostentatiously threw the water out of the glass, poured
a big shot of the corrosive stuff, and downed it.

"For God's sake, let's eat!" I finished. Then I turned to Thrombley, who
was looking like a priest who has just seen the bishop spit in the
holy-water font. "Stick close to me," I whispered. "Cue me in on the
local notables, and the other members of the Diplomatic Corps." Then we
all got down off the platform, and a band climbed up and began playing
one of those raucous "cowboy ballads" which had originated in Manhattan
about the middle of the Twentieth Century.

"The sandwiches'll be here in a moment, Mr. Ambassador," Hutchinson
screamed--in effect, whispered--in my ear. "Don't feel any reluctance
about shaking hands with a sandwich in your other hand; that's standard
practice, here. You struck just the right note, up there. That business
with the liquor was positively inspired!"

The sandwiches--huge masses of meat and hot relish, wrapped in tortillas
of some sort--arrived and I bit into one.

I'd been eating supercow all my life, frozen or electron-beamed for
transportation, and now I was discovering that I had never really eaten
supercow before. I finished the first sandwich in surprisingly short
order and was starting on my second when the crowd began coming.

First, the Diplomatic Corps, the usual collection of weirdies, human and
otherwise....

There was the Ambassador from Tara, in a suit of what his planet
produced as a substitute for Irish homespuns. His Embassy, if it was
like the others I had seen elsewhere, would be an outsize cottage with
whitewashed walls and a thatched roof, with a bowl of milk outside the
door for the Little People ...

The Ambassador from Alpheratz II, the South African Nationalist planet,
with a full beard, and old fashioned plug hat and tail-coat. They were a
frustrated lot. They had gone into space to practice _apartheid_ and had