«They sell information. They can tell me about the world I want to find, the most unusual planet in known space.»

«They spend most of their time tracking starseeds.»

Dianna broke in. «Why?»

Elephant looked at me. I looked at Elephant.

«Say!» Elephant exclaimed. «Why don't we get a fourth for bridge?»

Dianna looked thoughtful. Then she focused her silver eyes on me, examined me from head to foot, and nodded gently to herself. «Sharrol Janss. I'll call her.»

While she was phoning, Elephant told me, «That's a good thought. Sharrol's got a tendency toward hero worship. She's a computer analyst at Donovan's Brains Inc. You'll like her.»

«Good,» I said, wondering if we were still talking about a bridge game. It struck me that I was building up a debt to Elephant. «Elephant, when you contact the Outsiders, I'd like to come along.»

«Oh? Why?»

«You'll need a pilot. And I've dealt with Outsiders before.»

«Okay, it's a deal.»

The intercom rang from the vestibule. Dianna went to the door and came back with our fourth for bridge. «Sharrol, you know Elephant. This is Beowulf Shaeffer, from We Made It. Bey, this is —»

«You!» I said.

«You!» she said.

It was the pickpocket.

My vacation lasted just four days.

I hadn't known how long it would last, though I did know how it would end. Consequently I threw myself into it body and soul. If there was a dull moment anywhere in those four days, I slept through it, and at that I didn't get enough sleep. Elephant seemed to feel the same way. He was living life to the hilt; he must have suspected, as I did, that the Outsiders would not consider danger a factor in choosing his planet. By their own ethics they were bound not to. The days of Elephant's life might be running short.

Buried in those four days were incidents that made me wonder why Elephant was looking for a weird world. Surely Earth was the weirdest of all.

I remember when we threw in the bridge hands and decided to go out for dinner. This was more complicated than it sounds. Elephant hadn't had a chance to change to flatlander styles, and neither of us was fit to be seen in public. Dianna had cosmetics for us.

I succumbed to an odd impulse. I dressed as an albino.

They were body paints, not pills. When I finished applying them, there in the full-length mirror was my younger self. Blood-red irises, snow-white hair, white skin with a tinge of pink: the teenager who had disappeared ages ago, when I was old enough to use tannin pills. I found my mind wandering far back across the decades, to the days when I was a flatlander myself, my feet firmly beneath the ground, my head never higher than seven feet above the desert sands … They found me there before the mirror and pronounced me fit to be seen in public.

I remember that evening when Dianna told me she had known Elephant forever. «I was the one who named him Elephant,» she bragged.

«It's a nickname?»

«Sure,» said Sharrol. «His real name is Gregory Pelton.»

«O-o-oh.» Suddenly all came clear. Gregory Pelton is known among the stars. It is rumored that he owns the thirty-light-year-wide rough sphere called human space, that he earns his income by renting it out. It is rumored that General Products — the all-embracing puppeteer company, now defunct for lack of puppeteers — is a front for Gregory Pelton. It's a fact that his great-to-die-eighth-grandmother invented the transfer booth and that he is rich, rich, rich.

I asked, «Why Elephant? Why that particular nickname?»

Dianna and Sharrol looked demurely at the tablecloth.

Elephant said, «Use your imagination, Bey.»

«On what? What's an elephant, some kind of animal?»

Three faces registered annoyance. I'd missed a joke.

«Tomorrow,» said Elephant, «we'll show you the zoo.»

There are seven transfer booths in the Zoo of Earth. That'll tell you how big it is. But you're wrong; you've forgotten the two hundred taxis on permanent duty. They're there because the booths are too far apart for walking.

We stared down at dusty, compact animals smaller than starseeds or Bandersnatchi but bigger than anything else I'd ever seen. Elephant said, «See?»

«Yeah,» I said, because the animals showed a compactness and a plodding invulnerability very like Elephant's. And then I found myself watching one of the animals in a muddy pool. It was using a hollow tentacle over its mouth to spray water on its back. I stared at that tentacle … and stared …

«Hey, look!» Sharrol called, pointing. «Bey's ears are turning red!»

I didn't forgive her till two that morning.

And I remember reaching over Sharrol to get a tabac stick and seeing her purse lying on her other things. I said, «How if I picked your pocket now?»

Orange and silver lips parted in a lazy smile. «I'm not wearing a pocket.»

«Would it be in good taste to sneak the money out of your purse?»

«Only if you could hide it on you.»

I found a small flat purse with four hundred stars in it and stuck it in my mouth.

She made me go through with it. Ever make love to a woman with a purse in your mouth? Unforgettable. Don't try it if you've got asthma.

I remember Sharrol. I remember smooth, warm blue skin, silver eyes with a wealth of expression, orange and silver hair in a swirling abstract pattern that nothing could mess up. It always sprang back. Her laugh was silver, too, when I gently extracted two handfuls of hair and tied them in a hard double knot, and when I gibbered and jumped up and down at the sight of her hair slowly untying itself like Medusa's locks. And her voice was a silver croon.

I remember the freeways.

They were the first thing that showed coming in on Earth. If we'd landed at night, it would have been the lighted cities, but of course we came in on the day side. Why else would a world have three spaceports? There were the freeways and autostradas and autobahns, strung in an all-enclosing net across the faces of the continents.

From a few miles up you still can't see the breaks. But they're there, where girders and pavement have collapsed. Only two superhighways are still kept in good repair. They are both on the same continent: the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Santa Monica Freeway. The rest of the network is broken chaos.

It seems there are people who collect old groundcars and race them. Some are actually renovated machines, fifty to ninety percent replaced; others are handmade reproductions. On a perfectly flat surface they'll do fifty to ninety miles per hour.

I laughed when Elephant told me about them, but actually seeing them was different.

The rodders began to appear about dawn. They gathered around one end of the Santa Monica Freeway, the end that used to join the San Diego Freeway. This end is a maze of fallen spaghetti, great curving loops of prestressed concrete that have lost their strength over the years and sagged to the ground. But you can still use the top loop to reach the starting line. We watched from above, hovering in a cab as the groundcars moved into line.

«Their dues cost more than the cars,» said Elephant. «I used to drive one myself. You'd turn white as snow if I told you how much it costs to keep this stretch of freeway in repair.»

«How much?»

He told me. I turned white as snow.

They were off. I was still wondering what kick they got driving an obsolete machine on flat concrete when they could be up here with us. They were off, weaving slightly, weaving more than slightly, foolishly moving at different speeds, coming perilously close to each other before sheering off — and I began to realize things.