But he had told her that she was beautiful. And she had answered: No, she was not so now, but in a former time she had been.

When he had finished the meal and pulled the cigar from his pocket he was pleased when it exploded into its const.i.tuent parts. Teresa rescued it, rea.s.sembled it, and licked it. Her tongue had a tripart curve in it, more extensible, more flexible, more beautiful than other tongues. Then Peter rose and left as he had the day before. And again Teresa cleaned up the remnants -- ravenously and beautifully. He watched her till she finally went toward the beach haloed in blue smoke from the stub of the cigar.

Peter wrote up an order that day. It was not a good order, not sufficient to pay expenses, but something. Groll's Planet had acquired a glow for him, just as if it was a good order he had written up.

On the third day, Peter again sat on the mat that was very like a sidewalk-cafe, and Teresa was opposite him. Peter told the Grollian man that he should also bring food for the woman. He brought it, but angrily.

"You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen," said Peter, which is all the words that a man needs to get along in the English language.

"I have told you that I am not now beautiful, but that once I was,"

Teresa told him. "Through the grace of G.o.d, I may again regain my lost beauty."

"How is it that you know English?"

"I was the school-teach."

"And now?"

"Now it goes bad for our world. There is no longer schools. I am nothing."

"What are you, girl? Old human? Groll's Troll? That isn't possible.

What?"

"Who can say? A book-man has said that the biology of our planet goes from the odd to the incredible. Was that not nice thing to say about us? My father was old human, a traveling man, a b.u.m."

"And your mother?"

"A queer fish, mama. Of this world, though."

"And you were once even more beautiful than you are now, Teresa? How could you have looked?"

"How I looked then? As in English -- Wow! -- a colloquialism." "To me you are perfect."

"No. I am a poor wasted bird now. But once I was beautiful."

"There must be some livelihood for you. what did your father do?"

"Outside of b.u.m, he was fisherman."

"Then why do you not fish?"

"In my own way, I fish."

Peter heard again the swish of the invisible net, but he was very willing to be taken by it. After this, things went famously between them.

But two days later there came a shame to Peter. He and Teresa were sitting and eating together on the mat, and the Grollian man came out.

"Are you near finished?" he asked Peter.

"Yes, I am near finished. Why do you ask?"

"Are you finished with the fork yet?"

"No, not quite finished with it."

"I must have the fork," the Grollian man said. "There is anotherhuman man here, of the better sort. I must have the fork for him to eat with."

"Have you but one?"

"Am I a millionaire that I should have a multiplicity of forks in my house? He is a man with an important look, and I will not have him wait."

"This is humiliating," said Peter.

"I don't know what that is. I want my fork."

Peter gave the fork back to the Grollian man, and that man took it in and set it before the human man of the better sort as a sign of the modernity of his house.

"Were I not the meanest and weakest of men, he would not have abused me so," Peter said.

"Do you not feel it at all," Teresa said. "Somebody has to be the meanest and the weakest. The worlds are full of humiliating things. This brings us close together."

This would have to be the final day for Peter Feeney on Groll's Planet. Re had already garnered all the insufficient orders possible for his product. He walked with Teresa and said the difficult things.

"When you have caught one, Teresa, you must do something with it.

Even turn it loose if you do not mean to keep it."

"Do you want I should turn you loose, Peter?"

"No. I want you to go with me on the ship when it goes tonight."

"There is only one way I will go."

"I have never thought of any other way."

"You will never have cause to be ashamed of me, Peter. I can dress, where I have the means for it. I can play the lady, I understand how it is done. I have even learned to walk in shoes. Were we in some more lucky place, it might be that I would regain my beauty. It is the grinding hard times that took it from me. I would change your luck. I have the languages, and the sense of things, and I am much more intelligent than you are, With me, you could attain a degree of success in even your miserable trade. It can be a good life we make."

There is a sound when the invisible net is cast over one. There is another sound when it is pulled in -- the faint clicking of the floats, the tugging whisper of the weights, the squeaking of the lines when pulled taut.

Teresa was a fisherman's daughter, and she knew how to do it. The Peter-fish was not a large nor a fat one, but she knew that he was the best she could take in these waters.

They were married. They left in the ship for a happier place, a better planet in a more amenable location where Teresa might regain her lost beauty.

Floating Justice was achieved. All inequities were compensated. The meanest and weakest man in the universe now possessed the Ultimate Treasure of the universe.

Naturally they were happy. And naturally their happiness endured.

"There wasn't a catch to it?" you ask out of a crooked face. "There is always a catch to it. It always goes sour at the end."

No. There was not a catch to it. It was perfect, and forever. It is only in perverted fables that things go wrong at the end.

They grew in understanding of each other, received the glad news of coming progeny, waxed (by former standards) in wealth, and were no longer mean and inconsequential. Only one man can be married to the most beautiful woman in the universe, and it pa.s.ses all understanding that that one man should be Peter feeney.

This was perfection. It wasn't just that Teresa had regained her "former beauty" and now weighed well over two hundred pounds. Peter liked that part of it.

But is it possible for perfection to become too perfect?III For this was perfection. They lived on a kindred but larger and better world, one of richer resources and even more varied biology. They had a love so many-sided and deep that there is no accounting for it, and children so rare and different!

Floating Justice had been achieved. The least man in all the worlds did possess the Ultimate Creature. The balance was consummated. But Floating Justice had a grin on his face; there is something a little fishy about anything, even justice, that floats. You understand that there wasn't really a catch to this, nor any deficiency. It was rather a richness almost beyond handling. It was still better for Peter Feeney than for anyone else anywhere. That must be understood.

But, for all that, there was a small adjustment after the great compensation; a proportion must be re-established in all things, even happiness. It was the joke that the old Interior Ocean always cast up, and it must be taken in the salty humor that is intended.

Children so rare and so different -- and so many of them! No couple was ever so blessed as were Peter and Teresa with a rich variety of children. Some of them were playing and leaping in the hills and rocks behind Peter, and some of them were sporting in the Ocean before him.

Peter whistled some of these sea children up now as he pondered things in the marina. Some of them broke water, splashed, and waved to him.

So many of the kids there were, and such good ones!

"Whistle about four of them to come in for dinner!" Teresa called, and Peter did so. It had been an odd business about the children, not unpleasant certainly, but not what he had expected either. And even yet, every possibility was still open to them.

"I'd like to have a people-kid sometime," Teresa said. "After all, mama had me. A people kid have fun playing with the fish kids, and they like him, too. And he could climb in the rocks with the Groll's Trolls. He would sort of knit our family together. You think about it, Peter, and I think about it too, and we see what we come up with at the next milting time."

Peter Feeny gazed out at his children in the pools of the sea, and at his other sort of children climbing in the rocks, and he felt an uneasy pride in them all. One comes quickly to love Fish Kids and Groll's Trolls when they are the product of one's own loins. There was ever hope, there would ever be hope to the last, of children of Peter's own kind. But he loved his present progeny not the less for it. The four kids that he had whistled in came now.

"Oh, four such pretty kids of ours!" Teresa said. "Fry them, Peter."

And Peter took the pretty fish kids that came from the water and began to fix them for the pan.

This had taken the longest to get used to. But when you have so many of them -- more than ten thousand, and more coming all the time -- and when they are so good; and when, moreover, they are already flesh of your flesh.

Peter Feeney fixed the fish kids for the pan. And out of his fullness and mingled emotions, salt tears rolled down his shining face to the salt sea.

HOW THEY GAVE IT BACK.

He was the mayor of Big Island. Giuseppe Juan Sehiome O'Hanlon was his name, John the mayor, a shining black man. He was born into a political family and was given the names to please as many groups as possible. He had once been of imposing appearance and quiet dignity. He was not now. He shrilled and keened and moaned, and sometimes he was irrational. It was his leg that hurt him, and his soul.

His leg hurt him because of the pin clear through it, the pin that was part of the shackle. This shackle could not be unlocked mechanically. It was a psychic-coded lock on the shackle, and it could only be released when John had somehow fulfilled his job and obtained his own release. The shackle bound his leg not only to his desk but also to a steel stanchion that was part of the steel frame of the building.

John's soul hurt him because Big Island was no longer the great thing to which he had been devoted. It had never been so in his lifetime. It was neo-jungle now, probably the most savage of them all. Even now there were fires burning on the floor above him and on the floor below him. There were always fires burning somewhere in the building, in every building that still had anything that would burn There were rats in the room, in every room, but perhaps John saw more of them than were there. He lived in perpetual delirium.

There were (he knew, though he could no longer go out and see) people unburied in the streets, people knifed down hourly, people crazy and empty-eyed or glitter-eyed. There were horrible hom-music and git-fiddle music and jangle shouting; and he prisoner for life in his own office. This was not to be a great administrator of a great city. The emphasis had somehow shifted. But he had loved the city and the island, or the memory of them. And this hurt his soul.

"You have to stay on the job and run the place for the rest of your life," Commissioner Kreger had told John the mayor just before the commissioner had cut and run for it. "There will, of course, be no more elections. The burlesque that brought you in was enough to end the process.

It was fiasco."

"It was not," John the mayor moaned in pain. "It was high triumph, the man of the people called to head the people, a n.o.ble thing, the climax and sole goal of my life. I won it finally. They can't take that away from me."

"How does it taste, John?"

"I'm dying, do not taunt me. What went wrong?"

"It went wrong a hundred years before you were born, John. You lived all your life in a dream, and you had better try to re-enter it. You're here for good. You're the ultimate patsy, John."

"I'll kill myself."

"No, you will not. You were allowed to this job because by temperament and religion, the residue of your dream, you were incapable of suicide. So many of our mayors have taken that easy way out! It was a nuisance, John."

"I'll go crazy then," John the mayor moaned.

"No, you likely will not do that either, though it would not matter if you did. You are already psychotic, of course, but you will not go off much further. Stay and suffer, kid. You have no choice."

"Kreger, isn't there some way we can get shet of this whole island?

Sell it, transfer t.i.tle to it, give it back to someone? Can't we get out from under?"

"You find a way, John. Those things that we once thought of as abstractions have taken a direct hand now, Final Responsibility, Ultimate Justice, things like that. They must be satisfied. Whatever you do will have to satisfy the psychic-coded lock on your shackles to give you release. Sell the island legal, if you can find someone to sell it to. Transfer it, if you can find someone to accept the transfer. But it must be for Fair Value or Value Justified or Original Value from Original Entailment. The psychic-code thing will know. It's governed by the Equity Factor."

Then Commissioner Kreger left John the mayor, left the island, and went to rich fishing in other troubled (but not completely polluted) waters.

There was no more profit for that smart man to shake out of the island.

That had been two years ago, and John the mayor had been the onlyofficial on the island since that time, His only contacts with the world were the sharp noises and smells that came in through his broken windows, and the visits of five feudal or wrangle leaders, the Duke, the Sky, the Wideman, the Cloud, and the Lob.

Duke Durango was as smooth a gutter-fighter as ever came to the top of his heap, a happy fellow. Lawrence Sky was a fair white man named for the color of his big icy-blue eyes, a shambling giant, a giggling killer.

Wideman Wyle was a wide man indeed, a cheerful s.a.d.i.s.t who told really funny stories and was the most pleasant person in the group. Cloud Clinkenbeard was a dour and stormy fellow, mean and relentless, and always in search of dirty novelty. Lolo Loudermilk was a girl, sort of a girl, a flaming mixed creature full of vitality and noise.

They were the mayor's only contacts. They were the leaders of one of the gangs that had endured, when the ten thousand gangs had eaten each other up and declined to a hundred.

All five of them came into the mayor's office, eating noisily.

"Food train in!" announced the Duke. "We killed just one of the drivers. They say there'll never be another train in if we kill more than one driver at a time. And we had to give up four hostages for it. Isn't four too many, John?"

"Numbers have no meaning in this evil thing," said John the mayor.

How many hostages have you left?"

"Twenty," and a few more, I think. We don't all count the same when we get to the big numbers. But I think four is too many to give for a food train. What will happen when we run out of hostages? Who'll give the big d.a.m.n to subscribe a train for us then, when we have no more important people to trade to the important people off-island? Here, sign this, limp-leg John, and the Cloud will take it back to them."

The mayor read the release and signed it. Each of the five feudal leaders looked it over in turn then. Several of them could read a little (it was for this reason that they were the mayor's contacts), and it would he hard for Mayor John to write anything phony on that release and slip it past them. The mayor had to sign these releases every time a food train came, and he knew what would happen when they ran out of hostages. The blackmail would be over when the last hostage of value or affection to someone off-island had been turned over for a food train. The off-island people would let the island rot. The trains had been the only food source for the island for years.