But what, she wondered, had put Drosmig "out of commission"? The taxi drew up before a building with a vulgar number of floors showing above ground. "Ah--before we--er--meet the others," Stet suggested, twitching his crest, "I was wondering whether you would care to--er--have dinner with me tonight?" This roused Tarb from her speculations. "Oh, I'd love to!" _A date with the boss right away!_ Stet fumbled in his garments for appropriate tokens with which to pay the driver. "You--you're not engaged or anything back Home, Miss Morfatch?" "Why, no," she said. "It so happens that I'm not." "Splendid!" He made an abortive gesture with his leg, then let her get out of the taxi by herself. "It makes the natives stare," he explained abashedly. "But why shouldn't they?" she asked, wondering whether to laugh or not. "How could they help but stare? We are different." _He must be joking._ She ventured a smile. He smiled back, but made no reply. The pavement was hard under her thinly covered soles. Now that walking looked as if it would present a problem, the ban on wing use loomed more threateningly. She had, of course, walked before--on wet days when her wings were waterlogged or in high winds or when she had surface business. However, the sidewalks on Fizbus were soft and resilient. Now she understood why the Terrestrials wore such crippling foot armor, but that didn't make her feel any better about it. A box-shaped machine took the two Fizbians up to the twentieth story in twice the time it would have taken them to fly the same distance. Tarb supposed that the offices were in an attic instead of a basement because exchange difficulties forced the _Times_ to such economy. She wondered ruefully whether her own expense account would also suffer. But it was no time to worry about such sordid matters; most important right now was making a favorable impression on her co-workers. She did want them to like her. Taking out her compact, she carefully polished her eyeballs. The man at the controls of the machine practically performed a ritual _entrechat_. "Don't do that!" Stet ordered in a harsh whisper. "But why not?" she asked, unable to restrain a trace of belligerence from her voice. He hadn't been very polite himself. "The handbook said respectable Terran women make up in public. Why shouldn't I?" He sighed. "It'll take time for you to catch on, I suppose. There's a lot the handbook doesn't--can't--cover. You'll find the setup here rather different from on Fizbus," he went on as he kicked open the door neatly lettered _THE FIZBUS TIMES_ in both Fizbian and Terran. "We've found it expedient to follow the local newspaper practice. For instance--" he indicated a small green-feathered man seated at a desk just beyond the railing that bisected the room horizontally--"we have a Copy Editor." "What does he do?" she asked, confused. "He copies news from the other papers, of course."