He dined alone, finally, on a variety of rare terrestrial foods that did not taste quite as he expected, and went to the theater. The play was one he had seen a hundred times before under a hundred different names on many different planets. He went then to a nightclub, but it was crowded and noisy, and the girls did not excite him. Going back to the hotel, he found that sleep, at least, came easily.
But I did not, he thought, do what I did merely for the sake of a good night's rest.
The third day, he wandered into a museum. He found himself less bored than he had expected. Perhaps culture would be most therapeutic for him until he reached his ultimate adjustments. Accordingly, he went from the museum to a revival of a nineteenth-century opera. He didn't like it; in fact, it disturbed him so much that he left before the final curtain and walked through the streets for hours, until he ran into a girl who was also walking the streets, and went home with her.
The experience with the drab, as with the courtesan, was mechanically satisfactory, emotionally inadequate. He paid her—knowing she, too, would have given herself for nothing, had she known how—and went to his hotel limp with the same not-physical weakness he had felt before. The effects of the trip or the accident were lingering. He half expected Uvrei to appear that night, but the old one did not come. Why should he? This talk of spirit-son and soul-father was sophistry; there had been a bargain and each had kept his part.
The afternoon of the fourth day, a vidicast reporter called to ask whether Emrys Shortmire was any relation to the Jan Shortmire who had invented the space-warp engines. Emrys could not deny his identity without jeopardizing his inheritance; however, he refused to be interviewed personally or let his picture be used. He did not, he said, want to be dwarfed by his father's reputation. Nonetheless, his arrival was mentioned on the newscasts and panic rose up in him when he heard his name spoken publicly.
The next day a letter came for him. People rarely wrote letters any more, except to the distant planets, yet this one had an Earth postmark. Cold with panic again, he tore it open and read:
My dear Mr. Shortmire:
This evening's vidicast informed me that you were on Earth. You will not, I am sure, know my name. However, I was a friend of your father's, when we were both young men, and it would give me great pleasure to make your acquaintance.
NICHOLAS DYALL