thrown clear, was up before Hartford.

A scarlet bird circled the scene of the wreck, the dead beast, the stalled jeep, the man and the woman sprawled by the side of the path. "Miyo! Miyo! Miyo!" cried the blabrigar: "See! See! See!"

Hartford rose and went to the girl, who was rubbing the shoulder she'd landed on. She stared, but didn't back away. "Kinodoku semban," he said very carefully: a thousand-myriad pardons. His bitcher, unfortunately, was set on full volume; his words of comfort blatted at the girl with parade-ground force. She put her hands over her ears.

The blabrigar above them, impressed by Hartford's stentorian voice, circled repeating "Kinodoku semban" over and over, till the girl called it down to rest quietly on her shoulder. The girl spoke to the bird, which stared at her lips with his head cocked to one side, an attentive student. She repeated four times the same message. The bird nodded, and repeated the phrase to her. "Yuke!" the girl said. The blabrigar spread its scarlet wings and flew up. It circled twice, then headed north, up into the mountains. Of the girl's message Hartford had understood only the native word for camelopard: giraffu. His Kansan was inadequate. He could understand it only if it were slowly spoken.

Hartford tongued his bitcher's controls to a conversational level. "Kinodoku semban," he repeated, bowing.

The girl knelt beside the dead camelopard and stroked its head, over the central, vestigal horn. She looked up at Hartford with tears in her eyes. "Tonshu," Hartford said: I bow my head.

"Anata we dare desu ka?" she asked.

"Lee Hartford," he replied.

The girl spoke slowly. "I am named Take." She knit her hands before her and bowed. "Forgive my bad actions," she said.

"The fault is entirely mine, Takeko," Hartford replied. He was sorry, of course, to have killed the girl's steed and to have subjected her to danger; he was very glad to have met her. Takeko wore what must have been the Kansan riding costume: short trousers and a jacket woven of floss from retted sunflower stalk, dyed a golden brown. Most curious, he thought, was her perfume; mild, flowerlike, slightly pungent. The smell of this lovely Stinker belied the trooper epithet.

Then it hit him.

The filters of a safety-suit remove, together with all the dust of the ambient air, all its character, 

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