Because then he wouldn't be able to play penny-ante psychology and get me dreaming about wild schemes with perfume trees and African estates. That's why. Or maybe there wasn't any fortune! Suddenly I understood why people smoke. It gives them something to do when they feel helpless. If there wasn't any fortune, then I was hopelessly tied to the perfume trees. If Uncle Izzy had lost his last cent, it would be very like him to borrow enough from friends to finance a perfume tree scheme. And if he didn't make it to the planet he had in mind--why, he'd make the planet he'd crashed on do. Anyone else would have shot the birds for fresh meat. Anyone else would have seen immediately that Alvarla was the last planet in the Galaxy where perfume trees would grow. Anyone else would have seen immediately that I was one of the minor, comfortable people in the world who likes the happy regularities of a little job and an assured, if limited, future. Anyone else would have seen I had the sort of personality that could not be changed. But Uncle Izzy wasn't anyone else. _Why_ did I keep smelling the perfume from my dream? I followed my nose out of the crater and found the snow melting around a water tank about four feet long and two feet in diameter--part of the ruined fuel system from Uncle Izzy's ship. I dislodged it from the ice beneath and shook it. The perfume was so strong, as it unfroze, that it made me dizzy. And all that smell was coming from a pinhole. There seemed to be half a gallon in it. Enough to pay off Mother's bonds and whatever I owed Rene, with a handsome sum left over for me. I could go home and forget about perfume trees and Alvarla and Uncle Isadore. But that dream of the African estate kept irritating the back of my mind. And the large, free sky of Alvarla was soothing to the eye, when compared to the little squares of blue I noted occasionally when riding the slidewalks of Brooklyn. What _did_ I want out of life, anyway? _Damn_ Uncle Isadore. I'd never test 10:9 on job adjustment again. I was still thinking when evening swept in fast, as it does in dry climates, and the birds began to wake up and climb out of the crater, presumably to forage for food. "Wait!" I cried. "Isadore!" * * * * * I drew out a lunch package and spread it to attract him. It attracted all of them. I pulled out "The Dodo." "'Tell me what thy lordly name is/On the Night's Plutonian shore.'" "Isadore," he volunteered, swallowing fast while I climbed aboard him. "Take me back." Then I realized I had made a mistake with the food. "Go!" I cried. "Spaceship! More food!" He just stood there, his beak poking around the ground for crumbs. But I had to get that skin spray washed off before twenty-four hours were up. "Nepenthe!" I shouted desperately. The dodo was off like a flash and didn't stop till we were back at the ship. "You were gone quite a while," Rene said nonchalantly. "Find anything?"