the interest of haste, grace was abandoned. Hartford monkey-crawled up a sturdy cane of bamboo growing nearby and, as Kiwa-san maneuvered his beast, stepped over into the saddle.

"I'd better take my safety-suit and helmet," he said. "If the troopers should find it, they could follow our trail."

"Hai!" Takeko said, agreeing. She leaped from her giraffu, packed the safety-suit and helmet onto the beast, and remounted. "We will now go to Yamamura," she said. Old Kiwa spoke, and she translated: "We must move quickly and with care," she said. "My father heard an hikoki—how do you say?" she asked, raising and lowering her hand.

"A veeto-platform," Hartford said. "I mustn't be seen, Takeko. Colonel Nef would use my presence as an excuse to kill any of your people around me."

The ride, though cautious, was indeed demanding. Hartford felt tendons stretch he didn't know he had. Muscles were bruised from his instep to his upper back, and the skin was chafed away from his inner thighs as though he'd been riding an unplaned plank. He understood, well before the journey to the mountain village was over, the importance of that lifetime exercise, best begun by riding young, known to generations of horsemen as "stretching the crutch." He swore to himself that his future transportation, if he had a future through which to transport himself, would be by boots or wheeled vehicle.

The three of them were following no clear path. Kiwa led. Hartford noted that their course took them along the contours of streams, on the borders of fields, through contrasting background that would make their presence less obvious from the air.

They were in a thicket of bamboo when the veeto-platform did appear.

The instant they heard its whistle, Kiwa spoke a sharp word. He and his daughter slipped from their mounts, loosed the brow-bands of their camelopards and unlocked their girths, tossed off the saddles and dangling gambadoes and gave the animals each a sharp slap on the rump that sent them crashing through the bamboo. They helped Hartford unsaddle and send his beast off in another direction, and lay down in the direction the late-morning sun dialed the shadows of the bamboo stems.

If the veeto-pilot saw the giraffu now, they were saddleless and innocent.

The downdraft of the veeto-platform puffed dust up from the ground around them, and pressed down the 

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