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Han pulled off his wraparound sun visor and grinned, raising his free hand to ward off his copilot’s pique.

“Hold on, hold it. We’ve got a new holofeature; Sonniod just brought it.” To prove it, Han held up the cube of clear material. Chewbacca forgot his anger for the moment and made a lowing, interrogative sound.

“It’s some kind of musical story or something,” Han replied. “The customers probably won’t understand this one either, but are we going to pack them in now! Music, singing, dancing!”

Han, waving the cube, beamed happily over their good fortune. He still retained a good deal of the ranginess of youth, but combined it with much of the confidence of maturity. He had shucked his vest in the heat of Kamar, and his sweat-stained pullover shirt clung to his chest and back. He wore high spaceman’s boots and military-cut trousers with red piping on their seams. At his side was a constant companion, a custom-made blaster that was fitted with a rear-mounted macroscope. Its front sight blade had been filed off with the speeddraw in mind. Han wore it low and tied down at his right thigh in a holster that had been cut away to expose his sidearm’s trigger and trigger guard.

“Chewie, we’re gonna be pulling in customers from all over the Badlands!”

With a noncommittal grunt Chewbacca went to pick up the fallen plasma torch. Kamar’s sun was lowering at the horizon, and he’d done just about all he could to make the ship spaceworthy anyway.

He was large, even for a Wookiee—an immense, shambling man-shaped creature with radiant blue eyes and a luxurious red-gold-brown pelt. He had a bulbous black nose and a quick, fang-filled smile; he was gentle with those whom he liked and utterly ferocious toward anyone who provoked him. There were few of his own species to whom Chewbacca was as close to as Han Solo, and the Wookiee was, in turn, Han’s only true friend in a very big galaxy.

Gathering his equipment, Chewbacca trudged back out from under the ship.

“Leave that stuff,” Han enjoined him. “Sonniod’s coming by to say hello.” He indicated Sonniod’s ship, a light cargo job, parked on her sandskid-mounted landing gear some distance out on the flats. As he had been close to the blast of his plasma torch, Chewbacca hadn’t even heard the landing.

Sonniod, a compact, gray-haired little man with a cocksure walk and a rakish tilt to his shapeless red bag of a hat, was approaching slowly behind Han. He took in the Falcon’s temporary resting place with an amused eye, being a former smuggler and bootlegger. One of the fastest smuggling ships in space, she looked out of place here in the middle of the Kamar Badlands, with little to see in any direction but sand, parched hills, miser-plants, barrel-scrub, and sting-brush. The hot white sun of Kamar was lowering and soon, Sonniod knew, night scavengers would be leaving their burrows and dens. The thought of digworms, bloodsniffers, nightswifts, and hunting packs of howlrunners made him shiver a little; Sonniod hated crawly things. He waved and called a greeting to Chewbacca, whom he’d always liked. The Wookiee returned the wave offhandedly, booming a friendly welcome in his own tongue while ascending the ramp to stow his welding equipment and run a test on his repair work.

The Millennium Falcon sat on her triangle of landing gear near a natural open-air amphitheater. The encircling slopes showed the prints and tail scuffs left on previous occasions by the Badlanders. Down in the middle of the depression the stubborn plantlife of Kamar had been cleared away. There rested a mass-audience holoprojector, a commercial model that resembled in size and shape a small spacecraft’s control console.

“I got word that you wanted a holofeature, any holofeature,” Sonniod remarked, following Han down the side of the bowl. “Love is Waiting was all I could find on short notice.”

“It’ll do fine, just fine,” Han assured him, fitting the cube into its niche in the projector. “These simpletons’ll watch anything. I’ve been running the only holo