The girl was small and slender, well under Mirrh Yahn y Cona's athletic six-foot height. She was warmly and roundly vital with a stunning abundance of life at which the two-dimensional simulacra of recorded soap-opera could only hint. "Miss Leila Anderson," Ellis introduced her. "Member of Diplomatic, so it's all in the family." She took the hand that Mirrh Yahn y Cona raised as if to defend himself. "I'm to see that you aren't bored to death here among strangers," she said. "All work and no play isn't good for anyone. Especially," she said to Ellis, "for one so handsome. I didn't dream he'd look so--" "So Terran," Ellis finished before she could say _so human_. "And why not? We're from the same original stock, separated ages before our history begins. Martian annals run back for millennia, did you know? Gold mine of information, settle problems our experts have puzzled over for centuries." "I am not truly representative of my people," Mirrh Yahn y Cona said with some bitterness. "A special case, reared from birth for this assignment." The multisensory projector swung into the _Tchulkione Serafi's_ Song of Parting. Mirrh Yahn y Cona's resonant baritone, operatically assertive above Yrml's reedy soprano, filled the room. He shut off the machine abruptly, feeling a sense of desecration that the tender scene had been bared to alien eyes. Still he felt a puzzling premonitory twinge of guilt when the projection collapsed. Yrml had been infinitely desirable when the sequence was cubed; why should she now seem so sallow and angular, so suddenly and subtly distant? "Remarkable voice," Ellis said. "You could make a fortune with it here." "It was lovely," Leila Anderson said. "Could I hear the rest of it some time?" "No." He realized his curtness and added, "It is the Song of Parting for lovers. Very personal." He found that he was still holding Leila's hand, and dropped it hastily. Ellis, who had risen high in Diplomatic for good reasons, stepped competently into the breach. "Night duty calls," Ellis said. "Let's be off." * * * * * A diplomatic limousine without insignia took them to a nightclub large enough, and dim enough, to promise anonymity. On the way a quick summer shower left the streets wet and glistening and turned the night into a many-scented freshness that was sheer fantasy to one accustomed to the sterile air of sealed underground ways. The rain had ended when they left the car, but the brief moment outside, under a vast openness of night sky empty except for dispersing clouds and speeding white moon, struck Mirrh Yahn y Cona suddenly cold with too-familiar panic. They had found their table before anyone spoke. "Agoraphobia?" Ellis said, in frowning concern. "I should think you'd be conditioned against that, with all the time they've had to prepare you." Leila Anderson put an impulsive hand on the Martian's.