At the Altairian Consulate, Heddy looked bad, too. Scales the size of little pebbles were indelicately falling off her thighs like the tile on the walls of my flophouse back home on Tortoonda. That "Plink, Plink" sound they made as they hit the floor and expired into ashes made my teeth rattle and my head shiver.

Before I go on, I guess I should tell you that the Altairian Consulate is my favorite place in this dusty old backwater planet. Jesus. Every time I come here I think of Ovid, Sweet Ovid, poor bastard-trouble making-great Roman poet-Ovid, sentenced to spend his last days in that little Black Sea shit hole of his.

But the Consulate's not bad; it's the one place you can get a good bottle of zift rum around here without paying those goddam duties. And there's even a little bar on the premises where you can hustle some pool and then go in the back rooms and get laid. There's so many Altairian kids hooking now whose parents have disappeared -- you can just about have your pick out of the lice-ridden, scaly, bletching broods.

So the Consulate's not bad, even though you can hear the Altairian torture victims' screams echo through the pipes when you take a leak. But that's another story. . .