It was a sight that tended to increase the tremor in the astrogator's hands. He replied, "I only hope we can pull the crew through another pickup. Home and family! Do they think I want mine any less?"
Boswellister marched confidently down the road. He would succeed, for didn't he have the well oiled machinery of the whole Ipplinger starship crew of cultural contact specialists to back him up?
While he walked, he practiced the strident-voiced delivery of extravagant lies he had learned so well and had so magnificently imitated from the Ventura Boulevard pitch artists. He practiced the leering insinuendo of the barker outside the gambling hall; he gave it the Calsobisidine con come-on; he sold it solid, dripping with sex, twitching with lure.
He knew that here, finally, he would succeed.
Boswellister XIV, Noble Prince of Ippling, smiled his confidence in his sex-money-superstition equation as he walked briskly down the road to begin his contact with a world that had substituted vat-culture procreation for sex; that had abolished money in favor of a complicated system of verbal, personal-honor swapping credits; that had no religions or superstitions. A world of people who considered the most sweetly distilled essence of living to be the minute investigation of the fine points of logical discourse, engaged in on the basis of an incredibly multiplied logic structure composed of thirty-seven separate systems of discursive regulations, the very first of which was based on a planetary absolute, the rejection and ridicule of all persuasive techniques and those who used them.
—HELEN M. URBAN
