My mother looked the matter over. Yes, it was all very nice. Ten fine large volumes with plenty of pictures, many in colour. The man had charts and brochures to show her. Yes, very nice indeed. Would you like another cuppa? But the crunch was coming and the salesman knew it the moment he walked in the room and saw the drabness of everything about him. The carpet was threadbare, the vase on the centrepiece chipped, the couch sagging and its seams burst. My mother looked at the fine leather bindings and the gold lettering and knew it too.
    In the end, the inevitable could not be avoided. The price, oh yes, the price, and much hedging followed. In fact the man never named the price—he probably doubted that my mother would have survived it. Instead he talked about how an arrangement could be made with easy weekly or monthly payments. But to the our family, there was no such thing as easy payments. We were already over-committed to several hire purchase companies for such things as the radio and washing machine and the car which was falling apart and needed to be replaced, along with everything else. And no matter how you added it up, there was no money for encyclopaedias, not even cheap ones, let alone these fine volumes... It simply wasn’t possible. My mother was adamant about it. That was that. The man understood—in fact he had known all along that there was no hope of making a sale here, but you never knew when you might not encounter a rich eccentric or a lunatic and anyway, it gave him the chance to practice his spiel which, in such a poor neighbourhood, he only rarely got to try out. The man prepared to leave, everyone was very apologetic, and that was when the problem arose.
    I had not heard any of the sales spiel, nor looked at any of the brochures and I certainly hadn’t considered the price. The man had brought with him, as a sample, the first of the ten volumes and this I had seized, opened, and began to read. Or at least, look at the pictures and their captions. First there were other planets, and moons, and even asteroids like those they went after in Riders to the Stars.