Raych had not entirely left the neighborhood after he had walked them back to their apartment house.

He had eaten well while waiting for the interview with Davan to be done and later had slept a bit after finding a bathroom that more or less worked. He really had no place to go now that all that was done. He had a home of sorts and a mother who was not likely to be perturbed if he stayed away for a while. She never was.

He did not know who his father was and wondered sometimes if he really had one. He had been told he had to have one and the reasons for that had been explained to him crudely enough. Sometimes he wondered if he ought to believe so peculiar a story, but he did find the details titillating.

He thought of that in connection with the lady. She was an old lady, of course, but she was pretty and she could fight like a man—better than a man. It filled him with vague notions.

And she had offered to let him take a bath. He could swim in the Billibotton pool sometimes when he had some credits he didn’t need for anything else or when he could sneak in. Those were the only times he got wet all over, but it was chilly and he had to wait to get dry.

Taking a bath was different. There would be hot water, soap, towels, and warm air. He wasn’t sure what it would feel like, except that it would be nice if she was there.

He was walkway-wise enough to know of places where he could park himself in an alley off a walkway that would be near a bathroom and still be near enough to where she was, yet where he probably wouldn’t be found and made to run away.

He spent the night thinking strange thoughts. What if he did learn to read and write? Could he do something with that? He wasn’t sure what, but maybe she could tell him. He had vague ideas of being paid money to do things he didn’t know how to do now, but he didn’t know what those things might be. He would have to be told, but how do you get told?

If he stayed with the man and the lady, they might help. But why should they want him to stay with them?

He drowsed off, coming to later, not because the light was brightening, but because his sharp ears caught the heightening and deepening of sounds from the walkway as the activities of the day began.

He had learned to identify almost every variety of sound, because in the underground maze of Billibotton, if you wanted to survive with even a minimum of comfort, you had to be aware of things before you saw them. And there was something about the sound of a ground-car motor that he now heard that signaled danger to him. It