At Immigration they studied his passport briefly, noted that he was a government employee, and passed him along to Health. Here he felt a moment of alarm; about one out of every fifty incoming passengers from a starship was detained for a comprehensive medical exam, and if the finger fell upon him the game was up right here. Ten seconds in front of a fluoroscope would tell them that nobody with that kind of skeletal structure had ever been born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He got through with nothing more than a rudimentary checkup. At the last desk his passport was stamped with a re-entry visa, and the clerk said, "You haven't been on Earth for a long time, eh, Major?" "Not in ten years. Hope things haven't changed too much." "The women are still the same, anyway." The clerk shuffled Harris' papers together, stuck them back in the portfolio, and handed them to him. "Everything's in order. Go straight ahead and out the door to your left." Harris thanked him and moved along, gripping one suitcase in each hand. A month ago, at the beginning of his journey, the suitcases had seemed heavy to him. But that had been on Darruu; here they weighed only two-thirds as much. He carried them jauntily. _Soon it will be spring on Darruu_, he thought. The red-leaved jasaar trees would blossom and their perfume would fill the air. With an angry inner scowl he blanked out the thought. He was Major Abner Harris, late of Cincinnati, here on Earth for eight months' vacation. He knew his orders. He was to establish residence, avoid detection, and in the second week of his stay make contact with the chief Darruui agent on Earth. Further instructions would come from him. CHAPTER II It took twenty minutes by helitaxi to reach the metropolitan area from the spaceport. Handling the Terran currency as if he had used it all his life, Harris paid the driver, tipped him, and got out. He had asked for and been taken to a hotel in the heart of the city--the Spaceways Hotel. There was one of them in every major spaceport city in the galaxy; the spacelines operated them jointly, for the benefit of travelers who had no place to stay on the planet of their destination. He signed in and was given a room on the 58th floor. The Earther at the desk said, "You don't mind heights, do you, Major?" "Not at all." He gave the boy who had carried his bags a quarter-unit piece, received grateful thanks, and locked the door. For the first time since leaving Darruu he was really _alone_. Thumbing open his suitcases, he performed the series of complex stress-pressures that gave access to the hidden areas of the grips; miraculously, the suitcases expanded to nearly twice their former volume. There was nothing like packing your belongings in a tesseract if you wanted to keep the customs men away from them. Busily, he unpacked.