"If you please," said Bishop, speaking very tightly, holding himself in check.
"Please allow me," said the native.
Bishop blurred for just a second - a definite sense of blurring - as if the universe had gone swiftly out of focus, then he was standing, not in the parklike glade, but in a one-man-sized alcove off a hotel lobby, with his bags stacked neatly beside him.
4
He had missed the triumph before, sitting in the glade, waiting for the native, after the gig had left him, but now it struck him, a heady, drunken triumph that surged through his body and rose in his throat to choke him.
This was Kimon! He finally was on Kimon! After all the years of study, he finally was here - the fabulous place he'd worked for many years to reach.
A high IQ, they'd said behind their half-raised hands - a high IQ and many years of study, and a stiff examination that not more than one in every thousand passed.
He stood in the alcove, with the sense of hiding there, to give himself a moment in which to regain his breath at the splendor of what had finally come to pass, to gain the moment in would take for the unreasoning triumph to have its way with him and go.
For the triumph was something that must not be allowed to pass. It was something that he must not show. It was a personal thing and as something personal it must be hidden deep.
He might be one of a thousand back on Earth, but here he stood on no more than equal footing with the ones who had come before him. Perhaps not quite on equal footing, for they would know the ropes and he had yet to learn them.