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An Eyimalian police officer walked among the benches calling, "Time to get up!" The sleepers rose, walked around the benches and lay down again. When one man failed to rise, the officer hit him on the calf with his stick.

Paula turned away from the Information woman and marched back across the lobby. "There aren't any undergrounds in Merced," she declared. "Actually, there aren't very many on the whole planet."

Clark looked at the two packs that comprised their luggage. "Well, I can help carry yours, if you're too tired."

"Too tired--oh, we don't have to walk all the way. What you do is rent somebody's land cruiser."

"Land cruiser?"

"You know, automobile. Whiskey burner. Liquid sunshine car. Don't they have them back home?"

"Oh, those little methanol-powered things. You rent them?"

"It's sort of a job. You drive people around in your land cruiser and they pay you for it," Paula explained.

Outside it was a warm, windy night. The sharp odor of methanol exhaust, underscored by the cloying reek of hot oil, made Paula turn white. For a momlent Clark thought she was going to be sick. "It takes getting used to, doesn't it?" he said.

"You look pretty green yourself," she retorted. "Let's go outside."

When Clark's eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that they were in a long, poorly-lighted garage. They left it, and the odor dissipated. The air was cooler and the wind strong.

A bright yellow cruiser with "Muer Lines" painted in red letters on the side stopped in response to Paula's wave. A balding young man stuck his head out the window and motioned them to get in. He said something Clark did not understand, then asked, "Where to?" in Eyimalian. He must be an Outlander. A knife tatoo on his forearm gave the illusion that the blade had been slipped under a strip of his own skin.

Paula gave directions in Eyimalian.

The cruiser's back seat, where someone had carved the letters "JPA," and its walls were covered with in plastic. A clear partition separated the driver from the passengers, either for their protection or his.

"This thing is pretty big," Clark observed.

"Biggest on the street," the driver said gravely. He wore a microphone somewhere, and his voice seemed to come from behind them. "Nobody pushes us around."

Looking out the window, Clark saw that the road was lined with smaller, more brightly painted vehicles. "It is," he agreed. "You wind up paying for that, though."

"Yes. Harder to handle; not as much speed, power."

"How is it on maintenance? Need a lot of repairs?"

"That doesn't bother me. Not my car, see, I just drive whatever they give me to drive. The cars are Mr. Muer's." The driver's Eyimalian was heavily accented, but so slow that Clark had no difficulty understanding him.

"Who is he?" Paula asked.

"Mr. Muer? A rich man, I can tell you that."

"I guess so." She stifled a yawn.

"How come there aren't any overland buses or subterranians?" Clark asked.

"Well, it's a long story. Underground, that's easy. Takes money to build them. Around here we don't even ask the government to do anything that costs money, because we know we'll be sorry we did. There was a petition to ask for undergrounds, but we didn't sign it. First, they would have made everybody pay a lot of taxes. Then a lot of politicians would get rich and leave town. Then they would suddenly find out it was going to cost a lot more than they thought. Finally some people would go to jail, and the underways would be built. But it wouldn't be done right. Pretty soon they wouldn't work any more. They would be closed down and everybody would forget about it. It happened a while ago. It will probably happen again in a few years. Now, for buses, well, Mr. Muer wouldn't like that." The explanation seemed to have taken months.

"I bet he'd make sure the buses didn't work, either," Paula said.

The driver laughed. "He probably would. He's a pretty smart guy." After a minute, he added, "Besides, with these cruisers you can go anyplace you want."

"Right," Clark interjected.

"Listen," the driver said. "You people are going to the Ring district. That's good, because it's all Outlander there. We've had some trouble, so let me warn you. Keep out of the west end. That's pure Eyimalian. They might take you for one of our kind, know what I mean?"

Paula said, "Thanks."

They turned down a side street, and after driving for a few minutes between pressed-stone houses with low doorways and ornate grillwork over the windows, they pulled up before a tall corner building with narrow balconies around the upper two floors. The lower was a bar with plate windows. A sign hanging from the cornerpost announced The Words of Love Cafe. A smaller sign added, "Rooms Available." All down the street there were lights in the bedroom windows and an occasional door slammed as someone set off to work, but to Clark and Paula midnight had barely passed.

Their contact was the bartender and manager, Fuego Ariela, a big man who moved slowly. He studied them without expression, then produced a roomkey from beside the credit terminal. "Here you go, two beds. We've got people working all different hours here, so it's always quiet."

Two customers watched Paula and Clark pick up their bags and go to the stairs. Clark heard the conversation below resume as they reached the landing. Must be cops, he thought, hence Fuego's reserve.

"Here it is," Paula stage-whispered. She was well ahead of him, examining the resiliant plastic door as though it were a better clue to what lay within than the pressed-stone walls and metal doorframe.

"The door's new," Clark offered.

"This is a mining town. All the stone and metal could be new."

"Really?" he looked around again. Embossed metal plates formed a ceiling. Even the pipes were metal, left outside the walls as decoration. "No, it can't be new. They'd sell it, not use it for plumbing."

"Maybe they have to keep it scarce." She opened the door. "You want the bed away from the window, don't you."

The room was large. A wide space lay empty between the bed along the inner wall, whose foot grazed the doorframe, and the one opposite it under a window barred with the ornate grillwork he had seen on the houses. There was a multicolored rag carpet on the floor. A metal desk kept some of the window light from Clark's bed. He lay down for a moment before undressing.

When he awoke it was night, and he was still fully clothed. Clark lay listening to the room's quiet. Why is it that I like silence and darkness, he wondered. Is it a sincere desire to return to childhood? I'm following her all over creation, even out of my own life. Though it isn't following, strictly, at least not after Paula. It's a chase after Efirr's ghost.

Something moved. Paula had evidently done her laundry, for she sat on her bed, pairing leggings by the light that came in the window and threw the shadow of its grillwork on the counterpane beside her. A stocking fell silently from her hand as she put her elbows on the windowsill. Her face was pale in the light. She shook her head and let it sink onto the sill between her elbows. Clark guessed she was thinking about Sevit.

"Ambassador Maxwell was not pleased by the association between his daughter and myself," Sevit had once told him.

Marlow Maxwell told Paula not to see Sevit, but the Eyimalian Student Association invited her to live at Eyimalia house. Though Sevit was the association's president by then, so the invitation clearly came from him, it was something of an honor for Maxwell, not to be lightly spurned. Paula accepted, her father remained silent, and she moved into Sevit's house. The Eyimalian press, which followed most of Paula's activities as the glamorous and beautiful daughter of a Resheborian dignitary, began to cover him.

It became clear that Sevit's family would bear little scrutiny. Descended from theocrats who had lost their wealth in wars and famines, the Uchide family was heavily involved with organized crime. Several of the aunts and uncles were mobsters. Rumor had it that an aunt had deputized one of his cousins to kill Sevit.

Sevit's mother, the story had it, warned him. He surprised the cousin by meeting him at the travel center, embracing him and welcoming him to Reshebora. Sevit then took the hitman to Eyimalia House, introduced him to everyone, and gave him a room to sleep in. While the novice was trying to figure out how his lethal mission had turned into a family reunion, Sevit remarked, "You should have written before you came, you know. There is always a chance of an Eyimalian coming to Reshebora without my hearing of it, and then we might not be ready for you."

After that, the stories diverged. Efirr had said the cousin gave up his murder plan and went home, while the aunt who sent him was rebuked for her treachery and Paula began to avoid reporters. Paula said the cousin went to Sevit's room in the middle of the night with a drug that would kill and leave no trace, but Sevit was waiting with his hand on the light button and took the poison away.

"Is this how you treat your family?" he demanded.

"Don't give me that. You and your fat girlfriend are killing us. My father, my mother, two of my brothers, your own mother, our grandfather, they have the goods on all of us and if it keeps getting in the news they're going to throw us all in jail. You want your mother to rot in jail? If the casino goes, we all go," the cousin predicted, referring to an aunt's business. Sevit didn't tell Paula what went on in the casino. That illegal drugs and prostitution could be found there was obvious. Clark had also heard it was a sort of employment office for thieves and murderers.

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CONTINUE.....................

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INDEX