Billibotton was Billibotton-dirty, sprawling¹, dark, sinuous² Billibotton-exuding decay and yet full of a vitality³ that Raych was convinced was to be found nowhere else on Trantor. Perhaps it was to be found nowhere else in the Empire, though Raych knew nothing, firsthand, of any world but Trantor.
    He had last seen Billibotton when he was not much more than twelve, but even the people seemed to be the same; still a mixture of the hangdog and the irreverent; filled with a synthetic⁴ pride and a grumbling⁵ resentment⁶; the men marked by their dark rich mustaches and the women by their sacklike dresses that now looked tremendously slatternly to Raych's older and more worldly wise eyes.
    How could women with dresses like that attract men? -But it was a foolish question. Even when he was twelve, he had had a pretty clear idea of how easily and quickly they could be removed.
    So he stood there, lost in thought and memory, passing along a street of store windows and trying to convince himself that he remembered this particular place or that and wondering if, among them all, there were people he did remember who were now eight years older. Those, perhaps, who had been his boyhood friends-and he thought uneasily of the fact that, while he remembered some of the nicknames they had pinned on each other, he could not remember any real names.
    In fact, the gaps in his memory were enormous. It was not that eight years was such a long time, but it was two fifths of the lifetime of a twenty-year-old and his life since leaving Billibotton had been so different that all before it had faded like a misty⁷ dream.
    But the smells were there. He stopped outside a bakery, low and dingy⁹, and smelled the

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