Dutifully Scribney remembered and commented on the change the Martian springs had effected in the Durants. "It's the very thing for you, Harp," he advised. "You'd get a good rest on the way out. This gas they use in the rockets nowadays is as good as a rest-cure; it sort of floats you along the time-track in a pleasant daze, they tell me. And you can finish the cure at the hotel while looking it over. And not only that." Confidentially he leaned toward his insignificant looking brother-in-law. "The chemists over at Dade McCann have just isolated an enzyme from one species of Martian fungus that breaks down crude oil into its components without the need for chemical processing. There's a fortune waiting for the man who corners that fungus market and learns to process the stuff!"
Scribney had gauged his victim's mental processes accurately. The magazine sagged in Harp's hands, and his sharp eyes became shrewd and calculating. He even forgot to twitch. "Maybe you're right, Scrib," he acknowledged. "Combine a rest-cure with business, eh?"
Raising the magazine, he began reading the advertisement. And that was when he saw the line about the robots. "—the only hotel staffed entirely with robot servants—"
"Robots!" he shrilled. "You mean they've developed the things to that point? Why hasn't somebody told me? I'll have Jackson's hide! I'll disfranchise him! I'll—"
"Harp!" exploded Bella. "Stop it! Maybe Jackson doesn't know a thing about it, whatever it is! If it's something at the Emerald Star Hotel, why don't you just go and find out for yourself instead of throwing a tantrum? That's the only sensible way!"
"You're right, Bella," agreed Harper incisively. "I'll go and find out for myself. Immediately!" Scooping up his hat, he left at his usual lope.
"Well!" remarked his sister. "All I can say is that they'd better turn that happy-gas on extra strong for Harp's trip out!"
The trip out did Harper a world of good. Under the influence of the soporific gas that permeated the rocket, he really relaxed for the first time in years, sinking with the other passengers into a hazy lethargy with little sense of passing time and almost no memory of the interval.
It seemed hardly more than a handful of hours until they were strapping themselves into deceleration hammocks for the landing. And then Harper was waking with lassitude still heavy in his veins. He struggled out of the hammock, made his way to the airlock, and found himself whisked by pneumatic tube directly into the lobby of the Emerald Star Hotel.