There was nothing unprecedented about her popularity. Idiot waitresses have always enjoyed an exalted place in taverns. They make ideal patsies for jokes, for one thing, and are generally responsive to gooses, for another. While Isolde was neither an idiot nor responsive to gooses, the sounds she uttered whenever anyone said something to her, obscene or otherwise, were suggestive enough of idiot rantings to the ear of the average patron, for her to be classified as an idiot; and while she may not have been responsive to gooses, neither was she on her guard against them, taking them in her stride like everything else. None of which bears directly on the nature of Vanderzee's mistake. What does bear directly upon it is the fact that the variety of men who frequent bars, is infinite. Sooner or later someone had to come along who would recognize Isolde, either from her recitative or from her arias, or from her appearance, for what she was—or what she once had been. And presently someone did.
Enter, Elwood Parkhurst. You've seen him, too. In bars, mostly. But before he took exclusively to bars, you may have seen him in avantgarde ghettos where the philosophy of Rieder and Diems and Ghent lay thick in smoke-fogged atmospheres, or in off-beat book stores where the outre tomes of Cresniner and Hulp and Bredder pre-empted the shelves. And you may have seen him, too, if you happened along at the right time, standing impatiently in front of the Metropolitanette, smoking concatenations of cigarettes 'till the doors opened and egress to Verdi or Wagner could be obtained. And were you worldly enough, you may have seen him waiting outside the stage door behind the old Libido with a host of the macromammary Miranda's other pursuers, and you may even have read about the short-lived marriage he and she embarked on to the delight of the Sex Sheets and the Peeping Walters. After that, though, if you saw him at all, you saw him in bars—or staggering between them.
Parkhurst walked into Lanesce's, took one look at Isolde and knew her instantly.
He was sobering up at the time, having hit Sirius 21 a week ago, and the Spaceport Bar five minutes after arrival. Perhaps he would have acted as he did even if he hadn't been sobering-up, but there is a certain kind of remorse contained in the sobering-up process that makes the sufferer more than normally susceptible to symbols of the higher planes of civilization. In Isolde, Parkhurst saw the strength he needed at the moment, and the raison d'etre he would need later on to straighten out permanently. Before he even heard her voice raised in resounding recitative, as he did shortly when one of the good fellows present, goosed her, he knew he had to have her.
He didn't have enough capital to buy her, but he did have enough to abscond with her to Procyon 16 where a boom was in progress and where you could practically name your job. As Vanderzee kept Isolde quartered in the shed with his milch bront, abduction proved to be no problem, and Parkhurst managed to smuggle her on board a Procyon-bound tramp ship without any trouble.
On Procyon 16, however, misfortune awaited him: the ulwano herds which the good colonists had been systematically slaughtering for years in order that wealthy women all over the civilized sector of the galaxy might know the secure feeling that accompanies owning an ulwano coat or stole, and in order that the good colonists themselves might know the secure feeling that accompanies owning acres of real estate and scads of stock in interstellar banks, had perversely migrated into the inaccessible northern barrens, thereby precipitating a depression. Jobs were not merely scarce: they were non-existent. Even worse, Parkhurst didn't have enough money to buy passage back.
In common with most men of his kind, he could meet a crisis in one way, and in one way only. He had not taken a drink since Sirius 21, but as soon as the seriousness of his predicament got through to him, he headed straight for the Star and Traveler—a thriving little establishment convenient to the spaceport, dedicated to the enhancement of human relationships via the congenial consumption of cut-rate gin. The money he had left lasted him two days. His watch got him through two more. His extra clothing was going for three more. By that time, his physical thirst was sated; his emotional thirst, however, was merely stimulated. He had only one item left to sell, besides the clothes on his back, and so he sold Isolde—for one tenth of what she was worth, and without ever having heard her sing the aria which he loved above all others and which she had been created for most: the Liebestod. Three days later, when he had sobered sufficiently to realize what he had done, he hanged himself.