A world whose most public figure is a super-powered alien from a lost planet is not startled or horrified or even particularly curious at the visit of an eccentric, erratic character from somewhere in space.  The world is amused.

Towbee visited Earth briefly a few years ago and caused some trouble for a day or so.  Apparently this character was a minstrel of some sort, like the wandering troubadours who turned up in feudal courts, only Towbee traveled among the outposts of space entertaining the idle, the harried, the lonely.  He sang, he clowned, he cast images with an instrument that formed clouds of air into corporeal shapes as well as made music.  When he came to Earth then, he said, it was because he was in a creative slump and he was running out of stories to tell.

He'd heard stories about Superman and wanted to see if he was real.  One day a repulsive flying lizard swooped down from the sky over Metropolis, snatched up Clark Kent in its claws, and dramatically dangled the hapless fellow over the city.  Towbee would see what Superman would do and then go on his way with a story of the remarkable Kryptonian to add to his repertoire.

The minstrel hovered twenty-two thousand miles above the city in his one-man flying toychest for several minutes before he caught onto the fact that while Superman wore civilian clothes he pretended not to have his powers.  This was a cultural idiosyncrasy, Towbee thought, which to understand would require more study of Earth's society than Towbee cared to undertake.  The storyteller quickly fashioned a stand-in Clark Kent.  The real Clark Kent immediately ducked into a real cloud, became Superman, and disposed of the illusion menace in characteristically flamboyant fashion.  The Man of Steel found the source of all the trouble and gave Towbee a threatening lecture on social responsibility.  Towbee happily left the Solar System and wrote his own equivalent of an epic poem about the incident.

Anything for his art.

This latest trip to Superman's city, Towbee decided, would be worthy of Earth's greatest showmen.  Ringling Brothers' Barnum and Bailey Circus was in Metropolis at the time.  The circus was managed by a young animal trainer named Gunter Gabel Williams who entered the center ring standing on the back of a galloping elephant and holding a leashed leopard.

At ten-thirty A.M. two days after the theft of the Einstein document all vehicular traffic in midtown Metropolis came to a honking halt.  Necks craned and jaws dropped and heads hung out of windows as the zany four-armed singer from space materialized on Fifth Avenue.

Pulled by a herd of seven Indian elephants each in a different color of the rainbow was a 90-foot-long transparent fishtank.  The tank was filled with water which in turn was filled with a great blue whale floating calmly on the surface.  On the whale's back was Towbee rocking in an easy chair with his feet up on the edge of a tub in which a large baboon was bathing.  With one pair of hands Towbee played a melody on his instrument as he sang "Annie Laurie," and with the other pair he held a copy of the previous day's Daily Planet and read.  And curled up under his legs was a Siberian tiger, sleeping like a fallen redwood.

Police cordoned the entrances to Fifth Avenue from traffic.  Thousands of people followed the procession past Governor's Plaza toward the park.  Towbee and his bizarre litter passed within sight of the offices of all the city's television stations and by the time he had rolled a block the swarm of newsmen and police who were following him were in danger of being trampled by the calm elephants as they mechanically pulled their load.

The alien wailed "Annie Laurie" gradually louder and louder.  When he was finally loud enough so that his voice drowned even the din of midtown, the elephants and the aquarium ceased their progress up the street, and the grand marshal rose from his seat to address the world from the back of his whale.

Towbee's instrument fashioned other-worldly sounds into a haunting, buoyant melody, and he and his pets and the faces and minds of everyone who saw him were clouded with remarkable shapes and colors in an ineffable random pattern as he sang: