customer."

"You must have more money than sense," the waiter observed. "It'll be twenty vikdals, Martian."

Heydrick flicked a hundred vikdal platinum coin on the table. The octopus man uncoiled a tentacle and snatched it up, tested it for weight, then shambled off. He returned with a dusty bottle and the change. Heydrick let the change lie.

"Would you like to earn the rest of it?"

The octopus creature clucked somewhere within the unholy cavern which served him as mouth. "I'd kill anyone on Ganymede for half of that," he observed. "What'ya want me to do?"

Heydrick drew a deep breath. "You've a singer here who calls herself the Red Leopard of Mars. When does she go on?"

The waiter consulted a wrist-chron. "Anytime now. She's temperamental."

"When she's finished her turn, ask her to come to my table." The Jovian shrugged and moved off.

The houselights dimmed suddenly. A shower of colored lights played upon the raised stage. Soft nostalgic music poured from an unseen source. Soundlessly, a series of colored crystal screens slid back. At the back of the stage was a shadowy figure half-concealed by clouds of gossamer stuff blown wildly by concealed fans. Slowly, with infinite insolence, the figure moved to the point of the triangular stage. She stood motionless, waiting, while the babel of unearthly tongues died away in silence. The music grew louder. Veil by veil she flung off the filmy draperies until she stood revealed. Klathgar....

She wore the conventional garb of a woman of the ancient desert dwellers, jewelled copper breast-plates, a circlet of beaten bronze binding her wealth of red-violet hair, her eyes glittering like emerald fire; and the long divided skirt concealed little of her shapely body. Leashed, beside her, was the restless, slithering shadow of a red sand-leopard.

Against the wavering, eerie melody, and a patterned off-beat throb of tom-toms, she began to sing. Her voice was rich, throaty, and the song a poignant love song of the ancient desert people. For a moment Heydrick forgot where he was and who she was. The hopeless yearning and infinite tragedy of the music played unpleasantly with his soul-memories. The weird denizens of the Spacerat's Roost sat enthralled.

The song ended upon a note of earth-sick despair, 

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