Shhl-l-l-l-p.

The coffee was sucked from the silverplated tablespoon, rolled over, under, and around the tongue, then held at the back of Rudy Druett's mouth for a few seconds. He chewed, he gargled, he tipped his head back. His eyes closed, his eyes opened. Finally he leaned to one side and delicately dipped his chin.

Blupp.

Into the waist-high funnel of the spittoon it went. “Well now,” he said, his long, doleful face pensive. “It's…in my opinion it's…let me see…"

He moved his tongue over the inside of his mouth, chewed his cheek, hunched his narrow shoulders, muttered nasally to himself. While he thus marshaled his evaluative powers the others took their own spoons from bowls of water and dipped them one at a time into the sample of coffee under consideration. Four shl-l-l-l-ps, four blupps.

The tasting session had been under way for an hour. There were four of them in the room besides Rudy. Three were officers of the Paradise Coffee plantation: Nick Druett, easygoing, comfortably in charge, and carrying his sixty-nine years lightly; his nephew and comptroller Nelson Lau-John's older brother-looking like a Hong Kong businessman, pompous and serious in a conservative, pin-striped business suit; and Nick's older daughter, Maggie, casually and colorfully dressed in a bright Tahitian flowered skirt, but as blunt and outspoken as ever.

Although Maggie generally attended the tasting sessions, Nick had never managed to instill in her much interest in the business of growing and selling coffee. What Maggie was interested in was improving the lot of the world's laboring masses, particularly the Tahitian laboring masses, and, on a more general level, in saving the earth from the depredations of its human inhabitants.