The driver, who had been holding his car down to a conservative fifty out of deference to the strangers, wrenched the machine around a corner and halted neatly before Miramon’s door. Amalfi got out, his knees wobbly. Hazleton’s face was a delicate puce.
“I’m going to figure a way to make our cabs operate outside the city,” he muttered. “Every time we make a new planet-fall, we have to ride in ox carts, on the backs of bull kangaroos, in hot-air balloons, steam-driven airscrews, things that drag you feet first and face down through tunnels, or whatever else the natives think is classy transportation. My stomach won’t stand much more.”
Amalfi grinned and raised his hand to Miramon, whose expression suggested laughter smothered with great difficulty.
“What brings you here?” the Hevian said. “Come in. I have no chairs, but—”
“No time,” Amalfi said. He explained the situation quickly. “We’ve got to get those men out of there, if they’re still alive. This bindlestiff is a bandit city, like the ones you have here, but it has all the stuff we have and more besides. It’s vital to
find out what these survivors know about it. Can you locate the town that’s holding them? We have a fix on it.”
Miramon went back into his house—actually, like all the other living quarters in the town, it was a dormitory housing twenty-five men of the same trade or profession—and returned with a map. The map-making conventions of He were anything but self-explanatory, but after a while Hazieton figured out the symbolism involved. “That’s your city, and here’s ours,” he said, pointing. “Right? And this peeled orange is a butterfly grid. I’ve always claimed that was a lot more faithful to spherical territory than our parabolic projection, boss.”