It was St. Crispin's Eve on Sad al Bari IV when Captain John Truck, impelled by something he was forced to describe to himself as 'sentiment,' decided to visit The Spacer's Rave, on the corner of Proton Alley and Circuit (that chilly junction where the higher class of port lady goes to find her customers).

'Don't accept any cargo,' he told his bos'n as he prepared to leave My Ella Speed, 'for at least two weeks. Especially don't accept any vegetable seeds. I will never haul pumpkins again, any shape or form.'

'What's a pumpkin?' asked the bos'n, who was a Chromian dwarf called Fix. He was good with an axe — or so he said — but backward.

'A pumpkin is what your head is,' explained John Truck smugly. 'Children wear them for the same reason you have filed your teeth. 'Don't forget, no vegetable seeds.'

And with a jaunty wave, he quit the ship.

He reached the Alley by way of Bread Street and East Thing, a damp wind tangling his long hair. He walked with his shoulders hunched and his head bent as if he were bored with it all (which he was, to the extent that anybody is), his tight snakeskin combat jacket and big leather hat straight out of the questionable past of the Galaxy.

Spaceport hustlers and buskers worked the streets all the way from the port to the service areas, their peculiar instruments glimmering in the green street light They solicited him, but he ignored them. He had seen them before, shivering with cold and with fear of the long, incomprehensible future in the night winds of a hundred planets, waiting out their time in the bleak hinterlands of a thousand ports.