sat up suddenly. Uncle Isadore—large-minded? Why hadn't he had the avuncular decency to leave me his fortune the usual way?

Why?

Because then he wouldn't be able to play penny-ante psychology and get me dreaming about wild schemes with perfume trees and African estates. That's why.

Or maybe there wasn't any fortune! Suddenly I understood why people smoke. It gives them something to do when they feel helpless.

If there wasn't any fortune, then I was hopelessly tied to the perfume trees. If Uncle Izzy had lost his last cent, it would be very like him to borrow enough from friends to finance a perfume tree scheme. And if he didn't make it to the planet he had in mind—why, he'd make the planet he'd crashed on do.

Anyone else would have shot the birds for fresh meat. Anyone else would have seen immediately that Alvarla was the last planet in the Galaxy where perfume trees would grow.

Anyone else would have seen immediately that I was one of the minor, comfortable people in the world who likes the happy regularities of a little job and an assured, if limited, future. Anyone else would have seen I had the sort of personality that could not be changed.

But Uncle Izzy wasn't anyone else.

Why did I keep smelling the perfume from my dream?

I followed my nose out of the crater and found the snow melting around a water tank about four feet long and two feet in diameter—part of the ruined fuel system from Uncle Izzy's ship.

I dislodged it from the ice beneath and shook it. The perfume was so strong, as it unfroze, that it made me dizzy. And all that smell was coming from a pinhole.

There seemed to be half a gallon in it. Enough to pay off Mother's bonds and whatever I owed Rene, with a handsome sum left over for me.

I could go home and forget about perfume trees and Alvarla and Uncle Isadore.

But that dream of the African estate kept irritating the back of my mind. And the large, free sky of Alvarla was soothing to the eye, when compared to the little squares of blue I noted occasionally when riding the slidewalks of Brooklyn.

What did I want out of life, anyway? Damn Uncle Isadore. I'd never test 10:9 on job adjustment again.

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