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. * * * * *