nto the waiting arms of a tall toreador. Hyrel
gulped his whiskey and watched her nestle into the arms of her partner
and begin with him a sinuous, suggestive dance. The whiskey had begun
its warming effect, and he laughed.

This was the land of the lotus eaters, the sanctuary of the escapists,
the haven of all who wished to cast off their shell of inhibition and
become the thing they dreamed themselves to be. Here one could be among
his own kind, an actor upon a gay stage, a gaudy butterfly metamorphosed
from the slug, a knight of old.

The Persian dancing girl was probably the wife of a boorish oaf whose
idea of romance was spending an evening telling his wife how he came to
be a successful bank president. But she had found her means of escape.
Perhaps she had pleaded a sick headache and had retired to her room. And
there upon the bed now reposed her shell of reality while her inner
self, the shadowy one, completely materialized, became an exotic thing
from the East in this never-never land.

The man, the toreador, had probably closeted himself within his library
with a set of account books and had left strict orders not to be
disturbed until he had finished with them.

Both would have terrific hangovers in the morning. But that, of course,
would be fully compensated for by the memories of the evening.

Hyrel chuckled. The situation struck him as being funny: the shadowy
self got drunk and had a good time, and the outer husk suffered the
hangover in the morning. Strange. Strange how a device such as the
telporter suit could cause the shadow of each bodily cell to leave the
body, materialize, and become a reality in its own right. And yet ...

* * * * *

He looked at the heel of his left hand. There was a long, irregular scar
there. It was the result of a cut he had received nearly three weeks ago
when he had fallen over this very table and had rammed his hand into a
sliver of broken champagne glass. Later that evening, upon re-telporting
back home, the pain of the cut had remained in his hand, but there was
no sign of the cut itself on the hand of his outer self. The scar was
peculiar to the shadowy body only. There was something about the shadowy
body that carried the hurts to the outer body, but not the scars....

Sudden laughter broke out near him, and he turned quickly in that
direction. A group of gaily costumed revelers was standing in a
semi-circle about a small mound of c