'I'll be damned if I see it, either,' the Hermit said. 'I like to think of myself as a rational man, but the efficacy of verse is one thing that I am reluctantly forced to accept on faith. It works; what more can I say?'

'Have you ever thought of experimenting?' Marvin asked. 'I mean, speaking outside without your language of verse? You might find you don't need it.'

'So I might,' the Hermit replied. 'And if you tried walking on the ocean bottom, you might find that you didn't need air.'

'It's not really the same thing,' Marvin said.

'It's exactly the same thing,' the Hermit told him. 'All of us live by the employment of countless untested assumptions, the truth of falsehood of which we can determine only through the hazard of our lives. Since most of us value our lives more than the truth, we leave such drastic tests for the fanatics.'

'I don't try to walk on water,' Marvin said, 'because I've seen men drown.'

'And I,' the Hermit said, 'do not speak a prose language outside because I have seen too many men killed while speaking it; but I have not seen one single verse-speaker killed.'

'Well … to each his own.'

'The acceptance of indeterminacy is the beginning of wisdom,' the Hermit quoted. 'But we were talking about you and victimization. I repeat, you have an aptitude, which opens the possibility of an extremely interesting position for you.'

'I am not interested,' Marvin said. 'What else do you have available?'

'Nothing else,' the Hermit said.

By a remarkable coincidence, Marvin heard at that moment a great crashing and thundering in the underbrush outside, and deduced that it was either the Meldens or the Ganzers, or both, coming in pursuit of him.

'I accept the job,' Marvin said. 'But you're wrong.'

He had the satisfaction of the last word; but the Hermit had the satisfaction of the last deed. For, arranging his equipment and adjusting his dials, he closed the switch and sent Marvin off to his new career on the planet Celsus V.

Chapter 15

On Celsus V, the giving and receiving of gifts is a cultural imperative. To refuse a gift is unthinkable; the emotion it raises in a Celsian is comparable to the incest-dread of a Terran. Normally, this causes no trouble. Most gifts are white gifts, intended to express various shades of love, gratitude, tenderness, etc. But there are also grey gifts of warning, and black gifts of death.

Thus, a certain public official received a handsome snout ring from his constituents. It was imperiously designed for two week's wear. It was a splendid object, and it had only one flaw. It ticked.

A creature of another race might have flung it into the nearest ditch. But no Celsian in his right mind would do that. He wouldn't even have the ring examined. Celsians live by the motto: DO not look a gift in the teeth. Besides, if word of his suspicion leaked out, it would cause an irreparable public scandal.

He had to wear that damned ring for two weeks.

But the damn thing was ticking.

The official, whose name was Marduk Kras, pondered the problem. He thought about his constituents, and various ways he had helped them, and various other ways he had failed them. The ring was a warning, that much was clear. It was at best a warning – a grey gift. At worst, it was a black gift – a small bomb of popular design, which would blow his head off after the elapse of several anxiety-ridden days.

Marduk was not suicidal; he knew that he could not wear that damned ring. But he also knew that he had to wear that damned ring. Thus, he found himself facing a classic Celsian dilemma.

'Would they do that to me?' Marduk asked himself. 'Just because I re-zoned their dirty old residential neighbourhood for heavy industry, and entered into an agreement with the Landlords' Guild to raise their rents 320 per cent in return for a promise of new plumbing within fifty years? I mean to say, good Lord, I've never pretended to be omniscient; I may have made mistakes here and there, I freely admit it. But is that sufficient cause to commit what anyone must view as a deeply antisocial act?'

The ring ticked merrily away, tickling his snout and alarming his senses. Marduk thought of other officials whose heads had been blown off by dimwitted hotheads. Yes, it might very possibly be a black gift.

'Those stupid molters!' Marduk snarled, relieving his feelings with an insult he would never have dared voice in public. He was feeling sorely aggrieved. You worked your hearts out for those slack-skinned, wart-nosed idiots, and what was your reward? A bomb to wear in your nose!

For one hectic moment he contemplated throwing the ring into the nearest chlorine tank. That would show them! And there was precedent for it. Had not the saintly Voreeg spurned the Total Offering of the Three Ghosts?

Yes … but the Ghosts' Offering, according to accepted exegesis, had been a subtle attack upon the spirit of Gift-Giving, and therefore at the very core of society; for by making a Total Offering, they had precluded the possibility of any future gifts.

Besides – what was admirable for a Saint of the Second Kingdom would be execrable for a petty official of the Tenth Democracy. Saints can do anything; ordinary men must do what is expected of them.

Marduk's shoulders slumped. He plastered warm mud on his feet, but it brought no relief. There was no way out. One Celsian could not stand alone against organized society. He would have to wear the ring, and wait for the mind-splitting moment when the tick stopped …

But wait! There was a way! Yes, yes, he could see it now! It would take clever arrangement; but if he brought it off, he could have safety and social approval. If only that damned ring gave him time …

Marduk Kras made several urgent calls, and arranged for himself to be ordered to the planet Taami II (the Tahiti of the Ten-Star Region) on urgent business. Not corporeally, of course; no responsible official would spend local funds to ship his body across a hundred light years when all that was required was his mind. Frugal, trustworthy Marduk would travel by Mindswap. He would satisfy the form, if not the spirit, of Celsian custom by leaving his body behind with the gift ring ticking merrily in its nose.

He had to find a mind to inhabit his body during his absence. But that was not difficult. There are too many minds in the galaxy, and not enough bodies to go around. (Why this should be, no one really knows. After all, everyone was given one of each to begin with. But some people always seem to end up with more than they need, be it wealth, power, or bodies; and some with less.)

Marduk got in touch with Hermit Enterprises (Bodies for Any Purpose). The Hermit had just the thing for him: a clean-cut young Terran male who was in imminent danger of losing his life, and was willing to take his chances with a ticking nose ring.

Thus Marvin Flynn came to Celsus V.

For once there was no need to hurry. Upon arrival, Marvin was able to follow prescribed Swapping procedure. He lay perfectly still, growing slowly accustomed to his new corpus. He tested his limbs, checked out his senses, and scanned the primary culture-configuration load as radiated from the forebrain for analogue and similitude factors. Then he sized up the hindbrain emotional end structure factor for crux, nadir and saddlepoint. Nearly all of this was automatic.

He found the Celsian body a good fit, with a high aspect of jointure and an excellent main-sequence random-dispersion pattern. There were problems, of course: the delta curve was absurdly elliptic, and the UYPs (universal Y points) were falciform rather than trapezoidal. But you had to expect that on a Type 3B planet; under normal circumstances, it would never cause him any trouble.