"Show!" Oliver echoed, "You mean all this is—is—"

"What else?" asked Mr. Furnay. He pointed with his antennae to the fluorescent hieroglyphs on the undersurface of the saucer-ship. "See, in our lingua galactica it reads: SKRRFF BROTHERS' INTERSTELLAR CIRCUS, THE GALAXY'S GREATEST. It is the best on the circuit."

He indicated the circle of identical Bivinses. "These are the Skrrff brothers, our owners. I, sir, am business manager."

"But not always a good one," one of the brothers said pointedly. "This time he has bought an entire menagerie of such fierceness that our trainers cannot exhibit it. It will have to be sold to some frontier-planet zoo, and our loss will be staggering."

It was left for Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above to deal with the problem, which she did with universal feminine practicality.

"Oliver made your bear well," she pointed out. "And he is afraid of nothing—nothing! Could he not train his own fierce beasts as well as I train my gentle ones?"

Oliver said, "Huh?"

The Skrrff brothers, of course, implored Oliver on the spot to join them at any salary.

Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above said demurely, in three octaves and for all the world to hear: "And I'm lonely, Oliver!"

Oliver never had a chance.

ife in Landsdale goes quietly on, the ripples made by Oliver's departure long since smoothed away by the years.

Miss Orella Simms has married the Methodist minister who was to have married her to Oliver. Aunt Katisha and Glenna have resigned themselves to Oliver's escape and have taken over the job of assisting Orella to superintend her husband's career, an occupation eminently satisfactory to all because the placid cleric never dreams troublesome dreams of adventure, as Oliver did, to try their matriarchal patience.

... But life is never dull for Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Watts, whose breathtaking performances currently electrify the thrill-hungry cultures of a thousand worlds. They have traveled from Sirius to Sagittarius, and at this writing have two children: a golden-haired daughter of four named Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-sharp-above, and a tow-headed boy of two who has a cowlick like his father's and whose name is Butch.

They are 

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