Item: Themus saw a woman in a televiz booth, rapidly erasing the wall. Viz numbers left there by a hundred occupants suddenly disappeared under the woman’s active hands. When she had the walls completely bare she reached into a bag at her feet and brought out a tube of spray paint.

In a few minutes the booth was repainted a cherry pink, and was completely dry.

Then she began writing new numbers in. After an hour and a quarter, she left, and Themus did too.

Item: a young woman lowered herself by her legs from the sign above a bar-and-grill, swinging directly into Themus’s path.

Even upside down she looked good to Themus. She was wearing a pretty print dress and lavender lace undies. Themus averted his eyes and began to step around her.

“Hello,” she said.

Themus stopped and found himself looking up at her, hanging by her knees from the wooden sign that said, YOU CAN EAT HERE TOO!

She was a beautiful girl, indeed; bright blue hair, a fair golden complexion, high cheekbones, lovely legs, delightful —

He drew himself to attention, turning his eyes slightly away from her, “Watcher Themus at your service, Miss.”

“I like you,” she said.

“Ummm?” asked Themus, not quite believing he had heard her correctly.

“Do I stutter?”

“Oh — no — certainly not! ”

“Then you heard what I said.”

“Well, yes, I suppose I did.”

“Then why ask me to repeat it?”

“Because — because — you just don’t come down that way and tell someone you like them. It isn’t — it isn’t — well, it isn’t — it just isn’t ladylike! ”

She did a double flip in the air and came down lightly on the balls of her feet, directly in front of the Watcher. “Oh, swizzlegup! It’s ladylike if I want to do it. If you can’t tell I’m a lady just from looking at me, then I’d better find someone who can tell the difference between the sexes.”

Themus found himself quite enthralled. Somehow she was not like the rest of the mad inhabitants of this world. She talked logically — although a bit more forwardly than what he had become accustomed to — and she was certainly delightful to look at. He began to ask her name, when a clear, bright picture of the damned Elix came to him. He turned to leave.

She grabbed him roughly by the sleeve, her fingernails tinkling on his armor.

“Wait a minute, where are you going? I’m not finished talking to you.”

“I can’t talk to you. The Superior doesn’t approve.” He nervously ran a hand across the bridge of his nose, while looking up and down the street for brother Watchers.

“Oh, urbbledooz! Him!” She giggled. “He doesn’t like anything, that’s his job. If you have a job to do, do it, you understand? ” She mimicked Furth’s voice faithfully, and Themus grinned in spite of himself. She seized on his gesture of pleasure and continued, hurriedly, “I’m nineteen. My name is Darfla. What’s yours, Themus?”

“I’ve got to go. I’ll be sent to the Mines. This isn’t part of my job. I’ve got to Watch, don’t you under —”

“Oh, all right! If I make it part of your stupid Stuffed-Shirt job, will you talk to me?” She drew him into a wide, shadowed doorway with much difficulty.

“Well, I don’t know how you can make it a part of my —” He looked about him in apprehension. Could he be court-martialed just for talking? Was he doomed already?

She cut in, “You’re looking for a man named Boolbak, aren’t you?”

“How did you —”

“Are you are you are you are you are you are you are you?”

“Yes, yes , stop that! I don’t know how you found out, but yes, we are, why?” Oddly, he found himself slipping into the running-away speech of these people, and it was both pleasing and distressing. He was somehow afraid he might be going native. But in less than two days?

“He’s my uncle. Would you like to meet him?”

“Record!” Themus barked at his dictobox.

“Oh, must you?” Darfla looked toward the twin suns and crossed her arms in exasperation.

Themus’s brow furrowed and he reluctantly muttered “Off” into the box. “I’m a Watcher, and that’s what I’m supposed to do. Watch. But if I don’t record it all, then they can’t send it to Kyben-Central and there won’t be any tapes for me, and I’ll get sent to the Mines.” He stopped, then added, with a finger stiffly pointed between her eyebrows, “And that may not bother you , but I’ve seen reels of the Mines and crawling through a bore shaft not much wider than your body, dragging an ore sack tied to your leg, and the chance that sterility won’t have time to hit before your face just ups and falls off, well, it sort of makes me worry.”

He looked at her, surprised. She was tinkling. Her laughter was actually a tinkle, falling lightly from her and pleasantly tingling his ears. “What are you laughing at?” he frowned, trying to be angry though her laughter made him feel lighter than he had since he’d hit this madball world.

“Your face ups and falls off! ” She laughed again. “That’s the kind of thing you Stuffed Shirts would expect me to say! Beautiful! Yes, I’m sure I like you.”

The underclass Watcher was confused. He looked about in confusion, feeling distinctly as though he had come in during the middle of a conversation. “I — I’d better be going. I don’t think I want to meet your —”

“All right, all right. Suppose I fix your stupid box so it keeps right on recording; recording things that are happening, in your voice, without your being here, then would you leave it and come with me?”

“Are you out of your mind?” he yelled in a hushed tone.

“Certainly,” she said, smiling broadly.

He turned once more to leave, angry and annoyed at her making fun of him. Again she stopped him.

“No, I’m sorry. Please, I can do it. Honestly. Here, let me have it.”

“Look, I can’t give you my dictobox. That’s about the most terrible thing a Watcher can do. I’d be — I’d be — they’d hang me, shoot me, starve me, kill me, then send the ashes of my cremated stump to our Mines to be used for feeding the slave apes. Leave me alone!” The last was a rising note, for the girl had lifted her skirt and drawn a curved knife from her garter belt and was determinedly prying off the top of the dictobox, still attached to Themus’s chest.

The Watcher fought down a mad impulse to ask her why she was wearing a garter belt when she wasn’t wearing hose, and tried to stop her.

“Wait! Wait! They’ll throw me out of the Corps. Stop! Here, let go there, wait a minute, I say waitaminute-forgod’s sake, if you won’t stop, at least let me take it off so you don’t slice my throat. Here.”

He slipped the shoulder straps off and unbuckled the belt. The dictobox fell into the girl’s hand and she set to work fumbling about in the machine’s intricate innards.

Finally she stood up, her feet lost in a pile of wirespools, vacuum tubes, metal separators, punch circuits, and plastic coils. The box looked empty inside, except for a strangely flotsamlike construction in one corner.

“Look what you’ve done now!”

“Stop whining, man! It’s all right.”

“If it’s all right, make it record and play back for me.” He was terrified, indignant, furious, and interested, all at once.

“I can’t.”

“Whaaaaaaat!”

“Why should I? I’m crazy, remember?”

Themus felt his face turn to lava. “Damn you! Look what you’ve done to me! In five minutes you’ve taken me from my Corps and sentenced me to a life that may be no longer than all the brains you have, stretched end to end!”

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic.” She was smiling, tinkling again. “Now you can come with me to meet my uncle. There’s no reason why you should stay here. There is a chance the box will play, if you come back to it later, as I said it would. But even if it doesn’t, staying here is no help, since it isn’t functioning. I’ll get a mechanic to fix it, if that will make you any happier.”