Lippincott was pleasantly surprised to see that the buzzer button on the gate worked. He tried it only after he found that the gate did not open to his pushing.

"Identify yourself," came a voice from a black box over the mother-of-pearl button.

"I was told I could find entertainment here."

"Identify yourself."

"I'm James Forsythe Lippincott, a close personal friend of the Minister of Public Safety."

"Then he sent you?"

If Lippincott had lived a life that exposed him to any sort of danger, he might have taken cautioned notice of the fact that in a country where brass doorknobs were stolen regularly, no one had pried loose the little mother-of-pearl buzzer from that front door. But James Lippincott was discovering himself, and in the excitement of finding that he truly loved to inflict pain, he neither worried nor cautioned.

"Yes, the Minister of Public Safety sent me and said everything would be okay," Lippincott lied. So what? Instead of a pre-guilt payment, there would be an after-guilt payment.

"All right," said the voice in the hollow raspiness of a speaker system. Lippincott could not place the accent, but it sounded faintly British.

"The car can't get through the gate," said Lippincott. "Will you send a boy out to watch it?"

"No one will touch a car in front of this gate," came the voice. The gate clicked open and such was Lippincott's anticipation that he did not wonder what might protect a car in front of this house, when ordinarily Busatians stripped a parked car like piranha working over a crippled cow.

The path to the door of the mansion was inlaid stone and the door handles shiny brass. The door of oak was polished to a gleam and the bell knob was the crafted head of a lion;—not African lion but British. Lippincott knocked. The door opened and a man in Busati Army whites, with sergeant's stripes on his sleeves, stood in the entrance.