“Belzagor,” he said. “It’s a voluptuous sound, isn’t it? Rolls nicely off the tongue.”

The tourist couple beside him in the ship’s lounge nodded. They agreed readily with whatever Gundersen said. The husband, plump, pale, overdressed, said, “They were still calling it Holman’s World when you were last out here, weren’t they?”

“Oh, yes,” Gundersen said. “But that was back in the good old imperialist days, when an Earthman could call a planet whatever he damn pleased. That’s all over now.”

The tourist wife’s lips tightened in that thin, pinched, dysmenorrheal way of hers. Gundersen drew a somber pleasure from annoying her. All during the voyage he had deliberately played a role out of Kipling for these tourists — posing as the former colonial administrator going out to see what a beastly botch the natives must be making out of the task of governing themselves. It was an exaggeration, a distortion, of his real attitude, but sometimes it pleased him to wear masks. The tourist — there were eight of them — looked upon him in mingled awe and contempt as he swaggered among them, a big fair-skinned man with the mark of outworld experience stamped on his features. They disapproved of him, of the image of himself that he gave them; and yet they knew he had suffered and labored and striven under a foreign sun, and there was romance in that.

“Will you be staying at the hotel?” the tourist husband asked.

“Oh, no. I’m going right out into the bush, toward the mist country. Look — there, you see? In the northern hemisphere, that band of clouds midway up. The temperature gradient’s very steep: tropic and arctic practically side by side. Mist. Fog. They’ll take you on a tour of it. I have some business in there.”