I hadn’t known how long it would last, though I did know how it would end. Consequently I threw myself into it body and soul. If there was a dull moment anywhere in those four days, I slept through it, and at that I didn’t get enough sleep. Elephant seemed to feel the same way. He was living life to the hilt; he must have suspected, as I did, that the Outsiders would not consider danger a factor in choosing his planet. By their own ethics they were bound not to. The days of Elephant’s life might be running short.

Buried in those four days were incidents that made me wonder why Elephant was looking for a weird world. Surely Earth was the weirdest of all.

I remember when we threw in the bridge hands and decided to go out for dinner. This was more complicated than it sounds. Elephant hadn’t had a chance to change to flatlander styles, and neither of us was fit to be seen in public. Dianna had cosmetics for us.

I succumbed to an odd impulse. I dressed as an albino.

They were body paints, not pills. When I finished applying them, there in the full-length mirror was my younger self. Blood-red irises, snow-white hair, white skin with a tinge of pink: the teenager who had disappeared ages ago, when I was old enough to use tannin pills. I found my mind wandering far back across the decades, to the days when I was a flatlander myself, my feet firmly beneath the ground, my head never higher than seven feet above the desert sands…They found me there before the mirror and pronounced me fit to be seen in public.

I remember that evening when Dianna told me she had known Elephant forever. “I was the one who named him Elephant,” she bragged.

“It’s a nickname?”

“Sure,” said Sharrol. “His real name is Gregory Pelton.”

“O-o-oh.” Suddenly all came clear. Gregory Pelton is known among the stars. It is rumored that he owns the thirty-light-year-wide rough sphere called human space, that he earns his income by renting it out. It is rumored that General Products—the all-embracing puppeteer company, now defunct for lack of puppeteers—is a front for Gregory Pelton. It’s a fact that his great-to-the-eighth-grandmother invented the transfer booth and that he is rich, rich, rich.

I asked, “Why Elephant? Why that particular nickname?”

Dianna and Sharrol looked demurely at the tablecloth.

Elephant said, “Use your imagination, Bey.”

“On what? What’s an elephant, some kind of animal?”

Three faces registered annoyance. I’d missed a joke.

“Tomorrow,” said Elephant, “we’ll show you the zoo.”

There are seven transfer booths in the Zoo of Earth. That’ll tell you how big it is. But you’re wrong; you’ve forgotten the two hundred taxis on permanent duty. They’re there because the booths are too far apart for walking.