my eyes,
readjusting them painfully to the cold yellowness of the lights.

The Traffic Division was efficiency made insolent, in glass and chrome
and polished steel, mirrors and windows and looming electronic clerical
machines. Most of one wall was taken up by a TV monitor which gave a
view of the spaceport; a vast open space lighted with blue-white mercury
vapor lamps, and a chained-down skyscraper of a starship, littered over
with swarming ants. The process crew was getting the big ship ready for
skylift tomorrow morning. I gave it a second and then a third look. I'd
be on it when it lifted.

Turning away from the monitored spaceport, I watched myself stride
forward in the mirrored surfaces that were everywhere; a tall man, a
lean man, bleached out by years under a red sun, and deeply scarred on
both cheeks and around the mouth. Even after six years behind a desk, my
neat business clothes--suitable for an Earthman with a desk job--didn't
fit quite right, and I still rose unconsciously on the balls of my feet,
approximating the lean stooping walk of a Dry-towner from the Coronis
plains.

The clerk behind the sign marked TRANSPORTATION was a little rabbit of a
man with a sunlamp tan, barricaded by a small-sized spaceport of desk,
and looking as if he liked being shut up there. He looked up in civil
inquiry.

"Can I do something for you?"

"My name's Cargill. Have you a pass for me?"

He stared. A free pass aboard a starship is rare except for professional
spacemen, which I obviously wasn't. "Let me check my records," he
hedged, and punched scanning buttons on the glassy surface. Shadows came
and went, and I saw myself half-reflected, a tipsy shadow in a flurry of
racing colors. The pattern finally stabilized and the clerk read off
names.

"Brill, Cameron ... ah, yes. Cargill, Race Andrew, Department 38,
transfer transportation. Is that you?"

I admitted it and he started punching more buttons when the sound of the
name made connection in whatever desk-clerks use for a brain. He stopped
with his hand halfway to the button.

"Are you Race Cargill of the Secret Service, sir? _The_ Race Cargill?"

"It's right there," I said, gesturing wearily at the projected pattern
under the glassy surface.

"Why, I thought--I mean, everybody took it for granted--that is, I
heard--"

"You thought Cargill had been killed a long time ago because his name
never turned up in news dispatches any more?" I grinned sourly, seeing