Bulaboldo had a pronouncement to make. "If they're putting a seal on your ship, old chap, the next step will very likely be to put one on a cell door, with you inside it."

"I don't need you to tell me that." Whether Robledo Pike was really taking care of that problem or not, it wouldn't do for Harry to act as if he thought he had help in high places. "Then where's a good place to keep out of sight?"

The bulky one looked concerned, and seemed to be thinking rapidly. Meanwhile, he stood facing both visitors, his massive shape forming a substantial roadblock around which the people of Maracanda detoured as they went about whatever business or nonsense they had in mind this morning. Few of them paid any attention to Harry and Lily, another pair of newcomers, maybe religious pilgrims or maybe prospectors, still wearing their shipboard coveralls.

"Old man, this is not exactly the most welcoming town for an outsider who wants to hide out. Even I have been in that spot a time or two - though fortunately at the moment I can walk the unpaved streets of Maracanda openly, looking each citizen boldly in the eye."

Harry said: "If you've got an idea, let's hear it. Keep me out of jail, and I'll owe you one."

Bulaboldo's eyebrows went up. "Is that a serious pledge? Mind, old chap, I'll hold you to it."

"Never doubted that you would."

"Well, I'll do my best. My only idea is simple and to the point. We've got to get you aboard a caravan. That'll buy us some time to work out a more permanent solution."

Lily brightened, as if the suggestion were a new one to her. "A caravan to the place they call Tomb Town, I hope."

The big man turned his benevolent gaze her way. "All the caravans that start from here go there, my darling. And vice versa, because there's really no other destination. Trains of vehicles wend their way from port to Portal, so to speak, and back again, across the wilderness.

"But we must get you, both of you, quickly to the departure point and aboard the morning eastbound. Wait right here, chaps. I'll slide my ample bottom into a groundcar and be back before you know it."

He moved away with surprising quickness, light-footed despite his size. Harry and Lily moved also, sliding more casually, a short distance to a doorway, where they waited, trying to blend into the adobe walls.

As soon as Bulaboldo was out of sight, Lily commented: "I must say I think you were serious about his being a criminal. How long have you known him?"

"Too long."

"Do you think we can trust him?"

"Absolutely not. But he can be very effective when he wants to do something - and I believe that for some reason he genuinely wants to help me. Maybe he can speed up our passage east. So for the moment I'm going to act as if I don't have any choice - and I'm not sure how much I really have. You see his eyes light up when I said I'd owe him one? He's already got a payoff in mind, and he's probably on our side until he gets it."

"I hope you're right. Harry? I can't thank you enough for what you've done. Just getting me here alive - and then volunteering to help me the way you have."

"Forget it, kid."

Pondering the somewhat vague commission he and Lily had accepted from General Pike, Harry decided he wasn't going to work very hard at looking for nonexistent goodlife on the east side of Maracanda. He doubted that his former passenger would spend much time spying for the Templars either. Harry would have been willing to bet that there were no actual functioning berserkers within light-years of this crazy place.

Pike had given Harry and Lily each a key that ought to provide them access to the Templars' private telegraph terminals in the east. Harry sympathized with the general's objectives, but had doubts about his shrewdness. Pike seemed to be the kind who saw goodlife and berserkers everywhere.

He said to Lily: "Here's another point we can be thinking about: general is a high rank to be commanding such a small detachment as the Templar force on Maracanda seems to be."

"Indicating what?"

"Suggesting that Pike has been more or less put out to pasture here. It's the kind of thing that's likely to happen when an officer fairly seriously screws up on a tougher assignment."

Lily thought about it. Finally she said: "But the general might be right. There could be some goodlife here."

"Sure, they could be anywhere. So could vegetarians, or nudists. But I can't see any reason why goodlife, or berserkers, would favor Maracanda as a target. If your goal is to destroy life, why plot against a world that has so little? Outside of a few humans, a very few pets, and a modest mass of intestinal bacteria, the total count of living things on Maracanda must be very close to zero. And there are the famous breakdown zones - I don't see how berserkers are going to operate in them."

Lily was ready for a little argument. "The humans here all seem to be concentrated on the few small parts of the surface that are not breakdown zones. And you told me berserkers love killing Earth-descended humans best of all."

"Well, they would if they loved anything - which they don't. And there are many, many worlds with bigger populations than this one."

Back in Pike's office, he had thought of hitting the general with those arguments, but had decided against it.

But of course Lily was right. The fact that Maracanda seemed an unprofitable place for berserkers to spend their time and energy didn't mean that goodlife couldn't be here. Some charismatic worshiper of death might have come along and drawn a following unto himself. Probably they'd be pretending to be something else among the other cults that were obviously flourishing. There were always sick and disaffected people, ready to commit some form of suicide, and some of those decided to worship the damned machines without even having seen one.

Harry was not particularly eager to have either Space Force or Templar Pike to see him in the company of, and apparently on friendly terms with, a shady character like Bulaboldo. So Harry had his back turned to the ramped entrance of the administration building, and was leaning his right side against the tavern's peculiar adobe wall, washed in the diffused sky glow that passed for sunshine, here in this solar system without a sun.

He wanted to look inconspicuous, without giving the impression that he was working at it. Lily was standing at Harry's left side, facing in the same direction he was. "Do you feel all right, Harry?"

"Sure. Great."

Except for her interview with Rovaki, Lily had been almost continuously in his sight, ever since they'd landed. Harry was keeping an eye on her, alert for any indication that she had spent time on this world before and was already secretly familiar with Maracanda. So far, Harry's alertness had been totally wasted. But still the castaways' last accusation refused to absolutely die.

Bulaboldo had been gone no more than two minutes when he reappeared, driving a sleek groundcar, which he pulled up directly in front of the doorway, minimizing Harry's exposure to observation as he climbed in. Maybe it was done just out of habit: the fewer people who knew when you did anything, the better off you were in general.

Lily was right after him, slamming the door behind her. At once Bulaboldo pulled out into the broad street's modest traffic.

The vehicle looked, sounded, and felt new and expensive. Judging by the prices he'd seen so far, everything was expensive on this world. "Your car?" Harry asked.

"Of course, old fellow. Did you think I'd steal one?"

Harry didn't bother to answer that.

Bulaboldo was driving on manual control, one-handed, while he used the other to facilitate a private conversation on his communicator. "Excuse me just a moment, old ones. Must give certain of my associates a few hints of what I'm thinking." r His communicator, like most others, was equipped with a privacy device that kept any trace of the conversation from reaching his passengers' ears. The gadget even blurred Harry's line of sight to the speaker's lips, while Bulaboldo spoke briefly toward a spot on the dashboard.

His private talk on the communicator took less than a minute, and then he gave his companions his full attention once again.

"Tell me about these caravans," Harry suggested.

"Oh, you'll love 'em. But wait a couple of minutes and we'll be in sight of one, old top. Easier to show than tell."

During the next few minutes he gave Harry and Lily something of a guided tour of the city, as he drove smoothly through streets lined with houses and other buildings made almost entirely of the strange adobe, its colors varying in strips and panels. A number of these structures appeared to have been deliberately left roofless.

"So it's true that it never rains? Or do they use forcefields somehow, to - "

"It never rains."

There was a school. Yelling children in assorted sizes, evidently on some kind of break from lessons, filled a yard lightly fenced off from the street. That was something you didn't see every day, in most cities.

Bulaboldo said: "They tell me Maracanda has one of the Galaxy's highest birth rates. Can't think why, unless it's just a sense of all this empty space waiting to be filled, a lot of good air being generated that goes unbreathed."

The width of Port City from west to east proved to be no more than four or five kilometers. They had soon traversed that distance, and were pulling into a parking area, already about half occupied. Most of the other vehicles in sight looked basically similar to Bulaboldo's, though few were as elegant.

Climbing out of the car, Harry saw that they were only a short walk from a long, low, roofless structure that put him in j mind of a loading dock. Large signs at both ends cautioned:

"What's that all about?" Harry wondered, nodding at the warning.

Bulaboldo led his two companions forward. He seemed in a jovial mood, eager to play the guide. "The edge of town was established at this very spot for a reason, old sod. It's perfectly safe for people to travel beyond the sign - for thousands of kilometers beyond it, if they like. But" - he pointed dramatically into the peculiar desert - "as soon as one proceeds a few more meters in that direction, one immediately risks running into spots and strips of breakdown zone. See where that wire runs, mounted on poles?"

"It looks like some primitive telegraph," Lily said, squinting, as if the idea of this world possessing such a system were totally new to her. Harry nodded, silently approving. The thing looked like a mock-up of some ancient Earthly line of simple wire communication. A single strand, supported on a series of uprights spaced some twenty or thirty meters apart, went zigzagging off to vanish at last behind a hill, a kilometer or more away. He didn't suppose this was the Templars' private wire. More likely this was the public facility Pike had mentioned.

Bulaboldo went on: "The road itself is only faintly marked, and rather hard to see, but it generally follows the telegraph line. They both avoid the breakdown zones as much as possible. But every now and then the zone borders shift by a few meters. Usually the change is only temporary, but when it happens, telegraph service is likely to be interrupted. And if the road is overrun, caravans have to shift to primitive mode."

"How's that again?"

"Takes a bit of explaining. The engine that drives the caravan is the same type, hydrogen fusion, that's used in normal groundcars on most worlds, but the caravan also has an alternate system, much more primitive. Has to be seen to be believed. Private vehicles cleared for use in breakdown zones are lightweight shells, equipped with pedals, so the driver and passengers can... no, I'm not putting you on, old sod. Not a bit of it."

"So the telegraph only works intermittently?"

" 'Weirdly' or 'occasionally' might be closer to the mark. And the private lines, of which I'm told that one or two exist, are no better. There are instances on record of messages being delayed for months, even years."

Lily broke in: "When you get a chance, tell us more about the caravans."

"Of course." Bulaboldo leered at them both, as if about to launch into an obscene joke. "Let us concentrate upon essentials. The train of rolling wagons has comfortable seats. Needs 'em, because it takes two days to get to Tomb Town. There'll be lots of time for conversation." He turned a more benign gaze on Harry. "I'm sure that you and I, old sod, will have a lot to talk about."

"You're making the trip with us, then." Lily sounded startled.

"Oh, very much so. Didn't I tell you, my chick? I have extensive business interests over in the east - not in Tomb Town so much as in Minersville, which stands nearby - so yes, we will be mates, for a time, aboard the ship of the desert, fellow lodgers tonight at the caravanserai."

"What's that?"

"A hostelry of sorts. Not too uncomfortable, bit of an exotic experience. You'll see."

By now they were all three standing atop the loading dock. Harry was looking out into the open country - though "country" somehow seemed too natural a word for all these geometric curves and segments of straight line - beyond the city's edge. Bulaboldo had evidently told the truth, for civilization seemed to come to an abrupt end, right about here. To the west of the dock there were only a couple of small structures, whose purpose Harry could not determine.

Beyond those two small sheds, he could see nothing but a vast expanse of the odd land, stretching out to an improbable horizon. The horizon was not the result of any planetlike curvature, but only the apparent shrinkage of distant space between the strange land and the lowering sky.

It was very difficult to say exactly how vast the visible portion of the Maracandan surface might be, for it lacked a single human shape or other familiar object to give perspective. The scenery both far and near was so strange, so lacking in familiar visual clues, that Harry feared he might go dizzy staring at it.

Beside him, Lily was evidently experiencing some similar effect, for she clutched at his arm. Well, anyone could be upset, Harry thought, looking at this. Oddities of perspective, and the half artificial look of the peculiar overhead that was not quite a sky, made it difficult to judge distances.

She had shifted her gaze, and was pointing off to their right. "What's that?"

Just north of the loading dock stood another massive structure, even lower and wider in its profile, its volume stretching away for a city block or more. This one was mostly imported metal inside a partial facing of adobe slabs.

"That's where we get the stuff to breathe, m'dear." Bulaboldo explained that this was one of the vast atmospheric generators, installed a decade or more ago, that worked at keeping the air breathable, all across the habitable surface. Strangely enough, the first explorers had found the Maracandan atmosphere quite acceptable on their arrival; ever since then, time and energy had been devoted to keeping it that way. Another generator was implanted near the spaceport, most of its huge bulk also underground. Similar units were buried at a number of strategic locations, both here and in the east.

This was the installation General Pike had mentioned as a likely berserker-goodlife target. Harry assumed that oxygen and nitrogen were somehow extracted from the local land mass.

But now a sight of more immediate interest had presented itself. "There's your caravan."

Harry opened his mouth to make some comment, then decided he had better wait until he got a better look. Just coming into view from behind a nearby building was a small train of double-decker wagons, each with a lower level closed in by walls of sturdy mesh, and laden with what appeared to be miscellaneous freight, stacked crates, bags, and boxes. Adjoining the freight compartments, Harry could recognize a pair of small solid wall enclosures as relatively primitive chemical toilets, of a kind he had seen only in primitive conditions, and many years ago. The upper level of each car, entirely open to the air, held an array of passenger seats. This train was now being pulled up to the dock behind a transporter much like the one at the spaceport. A youth in coveralls, looking even younger than Lily, sat at the manual controls of the lead vehicle, which looked like a low-slung, house-sized, overgrown groundcar, carrying open seats for at least a dozen passengers, and running on smooth endless treads instead of wheels.

Harry and his two companions had soon boarded the train, amid a modest rush of other passengers. It was a simple matter of paying cash, or transferring credits, to a conductor who wore an odd, primitive kind of receptacle for coins hung round his neck and a distinctive logo on his coveralls. Other members of the small crew of transport workers were similarly dressed.

Harry had money ready to pay his fare and Lily's, but Bulaboldo insisted on picking up the tab for the two visitors. Then he helpfully explained the passenger accommodations. There were no reserved seats, but then there were no bad ones either.

Examining his chair, and the space in front of it, Harry observed: "No pedals on these."

"What? Oh, no. One would hate to try to propel anything the size of this train by pedaling. One might need a hundred active slaves, chained to their seats. No, when the caravan moves into the breakdown zone, it employs an entirely different system of propulsion. You'll see."

At the last moment a casually uniformed crew member came around asking all passengers if they had any advanced prostheses implanted in their bodies.

It seemed everyone on the train, Harry and Lily included, could answer no. "The breakdown zones again?" Lily asked.

Bulaboldo nodded. "That's right. Wouldn't do for your heart or brain to suddenly quit when its backup device shut down. For the first several hundred kilometers, there's just a possibility we'll hit a breakdown. After that, the problem is more or less continuous."

About three-fourths of the passenger seats were filled when the line of people waiting to get aboard had dwindled down to nothing. Looking over his fellow passengers, Harry decided that they seemed to be divided about equally between two groups. On one hand were traders and prospectors, some of them wearing odd-looking tool belts and dressed like ordinary folk for business or travel. On the other hand were the pilgrims of what Harry, judging by their diverse dress, took to be several different cults.

The mining engineers and workers tended to gather in one or two cars, while the pilgrims gravitated together in two other wagons, the population of each one dominated by one of the principal sects.

Bulaboldo grandly conceded that he was willing to join the religious folk if Lily wanted to be there. But she was quite willing to sit with the technocrats and dealers.

All seemed in readiness for departure, but there followed another delay, for no obvious reason. Bulaboldo used the time to hold one more brief conversation on his private handheld communicator, with someone a kilometer or two away in Port City. He said it was a contact who had accurate information about what was going on inside the administration building.

After making these calls, Bulaboldo assured Harry, in an almost inaudible whisper, that the Space Force people here on Maracanda were still not even aware that Harry was wanted for stealing the cannon.

"I guess that's something."

Trying to estimate his chances on a world he didn't know but Bulaboldo did, Harry soon thought of an objection. "Suppose Rovaki changes his mind and decides to arrest me. If there's no better communication system than yon telegraph, the cops shouldn't be able to radio ahead, to find out if I'm on the caravan."

"Right you are. By the time we're a kilometer from the city, the breakdown zones are so thick, no radio signal's going to find a way between them."

Lily put in: "Everyone keeps telling us about these zones. But I've never heard any clear explanation."

"Don't know if anyone could give you one, my sweet. This road winds around, avoiding major breakdown zones as much as possible, for the first thousand kilometers or so. But radio signal travels pretty much in a straight line, so radio's no good here, any more than it is in flightspace. Signals just can't get through."

That probably ought to have been reassuring, thought Harry, but it wasn't. He had something of the feeling of being caught up in an unpleasant dream. It seemed that only a few hours ago, entering the outer reaches of the Maracanda system, he had been fairly confidently in charge of his own life. The descent to practical near helplessness had been swift indeed.

"How the hell did this world get this way?" he burst out. "It's like somebody built it - or started to build it, then gave up when the job was only half finished."

Bulaboldo smiled. "Let it be my turn, old son, to employ a quotation from the ancients: 'You ain't seen nothing yet!'"