"Boy friends?" "That's the one peculiar thing about her. After she became about eighteen and men really began to take an amorous interest in her she gave them all a cold shoulder. I asked her about it once, and she got in a terrible rage. She blurted out something about not being fit to think of men and marriage. I never found out what she meant by it. We never spoke of it again." "Hereditary stain of some kind?" "I don't know what it could have been. Her mother was a charming woman like herself. Her father was a healthy ape-like cuss. An anthropologist, but perfectly straightforward and normal. Mariana, however, developed a strange attachment for him that in itself was perhaps abnormal. She would never appear towards the last of her career unless he was present and many times she cancelled engagements because Sebours would not be in the same city. Finally, she gave up appearances altogether--in order to stay with him, perhaps. I don't know." "Did it seem like a psychological abnormality?" "I'm not qualified to say, but it seemed to me that she was afraid of something happening to him. Perhaps that was abnormal. I don't know." "What was her father like?" "I think I have an old snapshot of Mariana and him somewhere here." Harry Brooks got up heavily and began rummaging through a file drawer. "Yeah, here it is." Roal took the snapshot. It was small and not very good, but the identity of the man beside Mariana was unmistakable. It was the giant who had appeared in the doorway of the room at Starhouse. Roal took the picture back to the office with him and called in Ralph Bowen, a slender young artist who was head of the art department of Heliopolis SBI. "Think you can do some front views and profiles of this gent from this snapshot," said Roal. "It's not much to go on, but I've seen him and can go along with you and give you descriptions of his features." Bowen nodded, "I think so. If it doesn't come out the way you think it should look, I can touch it up to your specifications. The big boy done something?" "I wish I knew," said Roal. Roal found it necessary to spend the rest of the day with Bowen, coaching him from his memory of that fleeting glimpse of Sebours in the Starhouse. In the late afternoon the drawings were finished to Roal's satisfaction, however. "I'll want them reproduced," he said. "Distribution is to be made to every operator in the system, but first to those on Mars. I'll issue the necessary orders tomorrow if you can have the reproductions by then." "First thing in the morning," promised Bowen. * * * * * In the dimming Martian sunset Roal Hartford watched the city below. Somewhere in its depths was the phantom tavern Starhouse, and tonight there would be new spacemen lured to the drug _harmeena_ by the golden-haired Alayna, Queen of the Silver Stars. A queen whose heart revolted at the role she was forced to play--Roal was sure.