Higgens consulted a small notebook. "She can--if a milch bront is enough like a cow," he said presently. There was the inevitable drunk in the crowd. "Can she keep a man's bed warm?" Higgens played along. "She sure can, buddy, but you know the law as well as I do." "Can she scrub floors, lift, carry, wash clothes, do dishes and wait on people?" It was the Dutch colonist again. Higgens nodded. "Seems to me you've just about covered everything, friend. Want to make the first bid?" "200 credits," the Dutch colonist said. "I have 200 credits," Higgens intoned, "which, if I do say so, is about one tenth of what she's worth. Do I hear three?" "300," the drunk said. "350," the Dutch colonist said. "450." The Dutch colonist could outbid anybody in the crowd, and everybody in the crowd knew it, including the drunk. But the drunk didn't give a damn, and he went along to the one thousand mark before dropping out. The Dutch colonist got her for 1100 credits, and the first stage of Isolde's servitude began. The Dutch colonist's name was Vanderzee. You've seen him, too. Forget about his race: his race has nothing to do with it. All races have their Vanderzees. This one was a bachelor, and made a prosperous living buying seconds in large lots and selling them for firsts. The business he happened to be in was the clothing business, but no matter what business he had been in, he would have conducted it in the same way. There were Vanderzees in the time of Gautama Siddhartha; there were Vanderzees in the time of Christ; there were Vanderzees in the time of FDR. There will always be Vanderzees. This one took his purchase home in a ground skimmer. He looked at her sideways as they skimmed along, a little awed by her classic features, which even the converter's skill had been unable to destroy altogether. By the time they reached the apartment above his store, the first droppings of his sense of inferiority had already fertilized the ground where his latent hatred lay, and when he asked her a simple question, the hatred burst forth in twisted stems and ugly blossoms. For, instead of answering the question with the simple "yes sir" or "no sir" which was all it required, Isolde responded with the particular recitative it most closely provoked, and the windows rattled in the majestic blast from her Kirsten Flagstad tapes. Vanderzee, for all his shrewdness, had neglected to make the most obvious inquiry of all from Higgens, re his prospective purchase--i.e., _Can she talk?_ But Vanderzee didn't take her back. For one thing, he knew that Higgens had already closed his lock and would be blasting off any second. For another, taking her back would have been a tacit admission that he had been outwitted by a business man sharper than himself, and this he could not bear. No, Vanderzee had made a purchase, and he would stick with it: but he would get his money's worth out of it if it took him the rest of his life.