Lily, trying to extract more information from their guide, asked Bulaboldo how long he had lived on Maracanda.

He gave an evasive answer. "For the last few standard years, my dear, this strange place has been like a home to me, though I have not been continuously in residence. Maracanda, as you doubtless have discovered, already has a beauty, a fascination all its own. I'd say that if you like our Harry, you'll like it here. Above all, it is not dull."

All the crew now seemed to be on board, and the transporter's drive was humming. The train of interconnected wagons gave a lurch, and was suddenly in motion, at the speed of a fast walk. Swiftly the loading dock and the outlying buildings of the city fell behind. The caravan was on its way across the almost trackless wasteland, gradually building up speed.

Even as their caravan pulled away from the dock, another transporter and more cars were being moved into position to form another train.

Lily asked: "How often do these trains run?"

Bulaboldo seemed to enjoy playing guide. "It's somewhat irregular. But there are usually two or three a day in each direction."

The steady acceleration continued, until the cars had reached a speed that Harry estimated at about a hundred kilometers per hour. Large wheels spinning smoothly, gripping the surface of Maracandan land, the caravan settled into a steady, quiet run, swaying a little on the curves. Given the winding road and the endless formation of steep, low hills, it was seldom possible to see more than a hundred meters ahead.

Lily watched, with growing fascination. "It ought to be fun to ride a bicycle or unicycle along this road."

Kul shook his head. "A lot of people have tried, but none of them get far. Gyroscopic balancing is very difficult in breakdown zones. The pedicars run on four wheels."

Looking ahead across the rugged and unearthly landscape, Harry observed little more than a suggestion of a winding road. For the most part the faint track followed the single strand of telegraph line, several times passing beneath it. Now that he was closer to the telegraph poles, Harry could see by the visible grain that they were made of natural wood, which must have been imported at considerable expense. Some of them had been infected near the base by streaks of land form, creeping up like some kind of alien kudzu. In place of leaves and tendrils, there appeared small extensions of the land itself. The growth appeared to be soaking into the substance of the wood and taking it over, as in some special Maracandan system of osmosis.

Still seeming to be guided by the line of telegraph poles wandering off into the distance, the driver steered along a route marked by something less than a road, a little more than a trail. The ground was only faintly imprinted with wheel tracks, surprising given the number of people and machines that must be passing daily along this route. Only now did Harry notice that little wooden roadside signs, in the form of simple arrows, had been implanted at irregular intervals. These made a more reliable guide than the line of telegraph poles, which occasionally diverged from the roadway. The signs, like the telegraph poles, were infected by the creeping land, and some of the smaller signs had been almost entirely engulfed.

One of the other passengers was pointing out where natural objects, sprouting from a nearby hillside, had taken on the appearance of crude little imitation signposts. The resemblance to human artifacts wasn't great enough to seriously confuse a traveler, Harry supposed. But he wondered if in time it would become greater.

"Very odd," he commented.

"This is not a planet," Lily was murmuring, keeping up her mantra. "This is not a planet." But Harry got the impression that she enjoyed all the strangeness.

Here and there little branching trails, even fainter, curved away from the main route, to promptly lose themselves in the contours of the rugged landscape.

"If there's continual traffic, as you say, why isn't the road worn down more?" Harry wondered aloud. "The ground doesn't look that hard. And it can't be the wind that wipes out tracks. People keep telling us there is no wind."

"That's right, old sock. The air here is always moving about a bit, but very gently."

"I keep wondering if there's not some kind of rain, or at least fog. I thought maybe in certain areas - "

"We don't have fog either. No precipitation anywhere on Maracanda. You won't see any signs of ordinary erosion."

"Frost, maybe?"

"Nope. Air temperature never goes up or down by more than about five degrees."

"And all these are natural conditions? Or is nature beginning to give way to - something else?"

"For an azlaroc-type habitable body, at least for this particular one, they are natural. Hasn't someone proven mathematically that any real universe has to contain spots where the normal laws don't hold?"

"Not that I ever heard of." But it did sound to Harry like the kind of thing some twisted genius would want to prove, then brag about.

Bulaboldo assured his visitors, and a train crew member verified, that over time the land did change. Caravan tracks did disappear, about as fast as they were created, in accordance with the slow stretching or shrinking of the surface, which seemed to enjoy the property of being able to heal itself to some extent, tidy itself up. Natural surface activity seemed to follow the enigmatic processes that went on continually in the mysterious depths beneath the thin habitable region.

Harry could see the reason for the windscreens in front of the open seats. The speed of their train remained fairly steady at about a hundred kilometers per hour, on the straighter stretches perhaps a little more. Any normal vehicle would have had at least a simple optelectronic brain stocked with the answers to such questions, and a voice to announce them, but here there was nothing of the kind.

A member of the train crew, questioned in passing, gave the official version of their schedule: to reach Tomb Town and Minersville was going to take a good day and a half of standard measure, and the last hundred kilometers or so of the journey would be entirely within a breakdown zone.

Lily asked: "Do we keep rolling all through the night? But no, you mentioned something about a hostelry. By the way, there is a night here, isn't there? Back in Port City I did see what looked like streetlights."

"Oh, there is definitely a night. Light and darkness, alternating with a periodicity very close to that of the Earth-based standard day. Very interesting subject. Generally the caravans try to minimize night travel. We'll be putting in at the caravanserai around twilight."

"The caravanserai, yes, I saw that on the map. A strange name. Will we need reservations?"

"An old name, my dear, for an establishment whose like you will not see on any other world. It even provides a touch of luxury, in its own way. I should think you will not need reservations, unless business has picked up beyond all expectations." Bula-boldo closed his eyes, and adjusted his reclining seat. "Awaken me, if you will, when it is time to order lunch."

Harry thought of napping also, but there was still a lot to see. He was more worried over his ship than over the question of where he was going to spend the coming night.

His scalp was itching, which he took as a sign that his head wanted to get back into the pilot's helmet aboard the Witch. On most habitable worlds his ship could have paced off this crosscountry journey in only a few minutes, even limping along at a snail's pace, mushing her way through a deep Earth-like atmosphere, using a muffler if necessary to suppress the shock wave that would otherwise have dragged behind.

Lily was pointing at something different in the passing scenery. "Harry, look at that."

At a distance of several hundred meters from the thin, winding road, the passengers could see the upper part of a pile of wreckage, protruding above a low hill. Jagged metal and composite materials were intermingled, component shapes distorted as if by violent impact. The size of the wreck was hard to judge with no good reference object near it, but Harry interpreted what he could see as the remains of a small spaceship. Harry would have thought most space hardware virtually proof against any kind of natural deterioration, but parts of the mound were markedly discolored, the hues of the Maracandan land forms seeping up into them like dye.

"I wonder who piloted that?" Harry mused. "How long's it been there?"

"Whoever the poor bugger was, he showed a certain lack of competence." Bulaboldo had awakened when their voices rose, and his headshake was superior and pitying. "No doubt he was certain he had a safe course calculated. But either the calculations weren't quite right, or his mind wasn't quite sharp enough on the controls. Came down in a breakdown zone."

"Yeah, that's what it looks like. But you were implying earlier that there were other good landing spots, waiting to be discovered."

"Officially, none at all are known, but I shouldn't be at all surprised if some exist, hidden among the invisible folds of a breakdown zone." The big man had folded his hands comfortably over his ample paunch. "Of course, under those conditions it would take some ingenious searching to find one - and a really good pilot to make use of it. A good pilot, with a good, small ship."

"Sounds like a challenge." Then Harry frowned at the wreck again. "Must have hit with a hell of an impact, to break up a ship like that."

"Not necessarily all that great. As you know, the bust-up would ordinarily be cushioned by the ship's own artificially generated fields. But the field generators on any ship are sophisticated machines, and naturally they would have stopped at the same time as the drive. In fact, they might have malfunctioned in a way to make the impact worse."

Harry was silent, looking and thinking. No amount of piloting skill would help on any ship when all the hardware failed.

A female member of the train crew had stopped in the aisle nearby and was commenting on the sight. "Every now and then someone comes along and thinks they've found a spot that'll work for a new spaceport." This woman evidently had a different view of the odds than Bulaboldo did. "Or a temporary landing field at least."

Lily asked: "No one's ever succeeded?"

"Not that I know of. I think it would be real big news if they did."

Harry had to try to figure it out. "How about using a light aircraft of some kind? Much smaller, a lot more maneuverable." Back in Port City he had asked similar questions; he wanted to see if he got a different answer here.

The crewman's expression suggested that he thought that idea might have some merit. But it was Bulaboldo's turn to be discouraging. "No good. To get in here at all, you need a true spacecraft, and not a simple flyer. Because, you see, it's not a simple matter of wings and plain air. There are layers of different kinds of space, which accounts for the peculiar sky. Much more complex than any planetary atmosphere."

The caravan road was traversing an area where more strange markings decorated the land. Bulaboldo explained that ever since the days of the first settlers on Maracanda, some people had persisted in efforts to colonize the remote areas, usually on land that had been ignored, or dug over and abandoned, by people filing mining claims. So far every effort to grow crops or raise animals had ended in total failure.

The only way to water the crops was to somehow extract enough moisture from the air - some was available, but difficult to isolate, especially with very small natural temperature changes in the Maracandan atmosphere. In a work zone, with modern machinery, it might be possible on a small scale.

Some predicted that as this strange world evolved, it would become steadily more and more Earth-like, even to the extent of developing clouds and rain. A few settlers actually claimed to have witnessed small clouds and spots of fog. Most people, the authorities included, scoffed at such reports.

Harry wondered. "And where exactly do they think all this water is going to come from?"

Bulaboldo grimaced, signaling that he had no helpful answer.

Lily was ready to change the subject. "I wonder how many people ride this back and forth." Then she added: "I have an impulse to start asking people, like members of the train crew, if they remember a man named Alan Gunnlod, who was probably a passenger a few months ago. But why would they remember one man? And no one asks your name when you get on."

It seemed that now, when she was less than a day from where she expected to find Alan, her impatience was growing, her nerves wearing down, as if the long strain must be getting to her.

Harry's suspicions of his traveling companion still wouldn't go away entirely, but he had not a scrap of evidence to back them up. Since landing he had seen no overt signs of an illegal drug trade on this world - which, of course, did not mean that it did not exist. Bulaboldo's prosperous presence here was indirect evidence that it might.

She was still carrying her traveling bag with her, containing the modest luggage she said she had brought from home. Harry, in contrast, lacked a change of clothing or even a toothbrush. All his personal possessions, except what he was wearing - and the money in his pockets - were on his ship.

Bulaboldo was reassuring. "You'll be able to buy some necessities when we get to the caravanserai. They have a shop. By the way, if you should find yourself a bit short of liquid assets at the moment - "

"I told you, I'm okay, Kul. But thanks for the offer."

"Think nothing of it, old top."

But Harry couldn't keep from thinking of it. Even with plenty of other things to be uneasy about, it worried him that Bulaboldo was so enthusiastically willing to be helpful. It was not exactly like they had been the greatest of friends in the old days.

Soon it was time to order lunch. Prepackaged meal trays and drinks were served, while the caravan kept rolling.

"Nibble what you find absolutely necessary to stave off starvation, people, but no more. Because you may actually look forward with some confidence to the dinner table at the caravanserai. On my last trip I sent my compliments to the chef."

Between spells of dozing in his gently swaying seat, and glowering at the passing desert, whose unique scenery had begun to pall - every minute there was more of it between him and his suffering, lock-sealed Witch - Harry enjoyed intervals of swearing at the fate that had not only made him a fugitive, but also co-opted him into being a spy or the next thing to it.

Not that he would have had any objection to spying on real goodlife, or slaughtering them, for that matter. It was just highly unlikely there would be any goodlife here to spy on. For the moment, thinking up new variations of foul language to apply to the situation seemed to be about all that he could do.

Still, Harry could hardly have refused to cooperate with the general. If the Space Force on this world was out to get him, he needed a sturdy ally of some kind.

Lost in thought, Harry didn't notice the change in the light until Lily jogged his elbow. She said: "Harry. I think - I still don't understand what it can mean, on a world like this - but I think it's starting to get dark."

Harry looked. He had to admit that the false sky to the east had taken on a new and gloomier aspect.

Lily was deeply impressed - as well she might be, Harry thought. She said: "If we're actually going through some kind of cycle of day and night, then doesn't it seem there must be something like a normal sun, somewhere in this - "

"One thing this crazy system does not have is a normal sun. You saw that when we were on approach."

"I know. I'd like to think that I just missed it somehow."

A minute later, they passed a westbound caravan, a train of cars much like their own. Simple electric lamps were lighted on the lead car, the powered transporter. Both drivers edged to the right, to negotiate the passage on the narrow road.

The dimming of natural light in the east continued, dusk spreading across the sky until there remained only a last glow lingering in the west; and soon the visitors saw with their own eyes, that there was indeed an alternation of daylight and darkness on this strange world.

Bulaboldo, coming back from a stretching stroll along the aisle, commented that the first explorers - something like a standard century ago - had observed the beginning of the same effect, but at that time the diurnal change in illumination had been so slight that people argued about its reality. Over the years since the first human settlement, the effect had definitely become more pronounced.

Years ago, according to the old settlers ("They always tell you: 'You can check the records if you like.'") the changes had been sporadic and irregular, but gradually the pattern had settled into a close approximation of the twelve hours of daylight and twelve of night obtaining in the equatorial regions of old Earth and a number of other Earth-like planets.

"But how did that pattern get here?"

The big man was solemn for a moment. "The only answer seems to be that we have somehow brought it with us."

Bulaboldo said that he was continuing to give Harry's legal difficulties a great deal of thought. Before leaving Port City, he had got his own legal counsel started on figuring the best way to proceed if Harry's difficulties ever actually got into court on Maracanda.

"Be of good cheer, old chap. I still have high hopes of being able to work out a way for you to regain possession of your ship. The Force can't actually take it away from you without some legal process. I wonder, though... I suppose they might've searched her."

Harry shook his head. "I can readily believe they've slapped their seals over the hatches, but I doubt very much they've even got inside. The ship's fitted with good entry codes and downlocks, and they'd need to get pretty violent to force an entry. As I understand the law, they'll need some real evidence before they can do that."

"Commandant Rovaki is not above doing a sneaky and illegal search. When you say 'good downlocks,' old lad, I assume you mean - really pretty good ones."

"The Force people back on Hyperborea had a similar idea, and they didn't have much luck."

"That is reassuring." Bulaboldo settled back in his chair. "Then it would seem that as soon as you can return to your ship, and peel those seals, your dear Witch is readily available to take you... anywhere that you might want to go."

"Should be. Only problem is, I'm liable to get arrested before I can get near her."

"There is that." But in this matter, Bulaboldo seemed incurably optimistic. "Well, these things take time. Let me keep working on the difficulty, old bean. Meanwhile, of course, this caravan's the place for you."

Discreet electric lights had come on aboard the eastbound caravan - light enough to read by, as some passengers were doing. Harry assumed they would keep shining as long as the engine continued to function. Passengers got up from time to time just to stretch, or to visit the primitive chemical toilets on the lower deck, which presumably would keep on functioning when all the finest and newest optelectronics had sputtered to a halt. Reserve tanks of water for drinking and washing were also carried on the lower level of each wagon. The floor of the wagon lurched from time to time, more than the deck of any smoothly running spaceship.

With Lily half dozing in her chair, and no one else in earshot, Bulaboldo began a conversation, for once keeping his voice low. "Harry, old scout, now that we have some time to talk, let me tell you something about my business. You're sure to find it amusing."

Harry wasn't sure of that at all. He only grunted.

Bulaboldo turned to the lady. "Then hearing about it might amuse Madam Lily." He gave her a slight seated bow. "I'm sure you understand that not all of us have come to Maracanda in search of the high spiritual values."

Her eyes were fully open now, and she regarded him coolly. "I thought you understood that I had not."

Bulaboldo went on to explain that the rare earths obtainable in the remote corners of this world were rapidly becoming famous in certain quarters across settled portions of the Galaxy.

Harry mentioned hearing a newscast reporting last month's record output from the mines. He concluded: "I never got around to finding out exactly what kind of stuff it is that half the people here are digging up and selling."

Bulaboldo nodded. "Why, as to that, I can show you."

Digging in his pockets, Kul explained that the sought-after materials came in two basic varieties, both of which were quarried, with some difficulty, from two separate layers of Maracan-dan rock, that came close to the surface in a number of places, some known and others doubtless still to be discovered.

"That's the reason for the swarm of would-be prospectors. I expect that as word spreads across the Galaxy, we'll have another wave of 'em, and probably another after that. Until people are convinced that all the easy pickings have been picked."

A small amount of one variety of stuff, no more than a few grams, was not hard to find. Bulaboldo made no attempt to conceal it from other passengers. Some turned their heads to watch, while others, including a near majority who were dozing, ignored the whole procedure.

"This, my old friends, is what is commonly called 'fairy-ground.' It is quarried, quite legally though with some physical difficulty, in a number of small mining operations. Most, of course, are in the breakdown zones, which makes the extraction physically difficult."

Lily asked, in innocent tones: "It's not a drug, is it?"

Bulaboldo blinked. Anyone who didn't know him would have been certain he was shocked. "Drug? Whatever gave you that idea? No, perfectly harmless, my lady. An army of Earth-descended scientists have testified that you can wallow around in heaps of the stuff in perfect safety."

Harry poked at it with a calloused finger. "What would happen if I ate a pinch or two?"

"I'd say the odds are very high that you'd survive. Might not even get sick. But I shouldn't think it was really recommended for internal use."

Their guide offered more information. Fairyground had so far proven impossible to synthesize, representing as it did a distinctly unique state of matter.

Configured and sold as a toy, it repeatedly reformed itself into various geometric shapes and changed colors. Once a small amount of it had been together for a while, it resisted being subdivided further.

One of the train crew made what sounded like a routine announcement: passengers must prepare to shut down all equipment depending on advanced technology. The domain of solid breakdown zone was only a few minutes ahead.

Lily was pointing. "What's that?"

Harry turned his head and looked; he could hear rumbling movement in the dusk. In the middle distance, the shadowy outline of a hill was blurred with motion. At first he thought he saw a herd of running animals.

All the passengers on the caravan saw a herd of wild spheres, first blocking a strip of the road ahead, then parting to give the machine clear passage. One of the big rollers banged a telegraph pole, hard enough to make it wobble.

"Great Malako! I thought that we'd startled a herd of - what? I don't know. Deer?"

"Well, you might say we have."

Harry would never have imagined animals like these. Not that he was entirely convinced that they were animals.

Lily burst out: "I thought there was no native life!"

"If you mean carbon chemistry and DNA, genetic codes and all that, there isn't any of that. But..."

Suddenly passengers were pointing in excitement, and calling back and forth. The creatures, or objects, were back, as if drawn by something about the caravan itself.

Kul said: "They become completely inert if you take them away from the Maracandan surface."

Lily asked: "Do they display... purposeful behavior?"

"If you count just rolling back and forth as purposeful."

Several passengers whipped out recorders, trying to capture the distracting sight of a herd of rolling spheres, keeping pace with the caravan at some little distance. Others, perhaps old settlers themselves, had evidently seen this before and went on dozing or reading their books.

Harry was fascinated. "What now? They certainly look like they're alive. I mean, the way they're moving."

"You'll find some experts who agree with you on that, old son. Probably there are just as many who disagree. The spheres have no discoverable genetic content of any kind, no cells, no organs. No discernible sensory apparatus, though obviously they respond to their environment. So, life, maybe. Though it's not much like any kind of life I've seen on any planet."

Lily said: "Since this is not quite a planet, maybe what grows here is not quite life."

There was still enough light to see dim shapes, and the line of telegraph poles, when the caravan rolled past a grove of what Bulaboldo said were called nevergreens, tree-shaped fractals near pyramids of land, colored almost the same as the land from which they sprouted, that gave a good imitation of another kind of living thing. Harry was reminded of trees with autumn foliage.

Harry steered the talk back to an earlier subject. "You said that there were two varieties."

"What?"

"Two types of rare earth."

"I did?"

"Well, someone aboard this wagon told me that." Bulaboldo found a way to quickly change the subject.