and the smell, and the undercurrent of noise. The crowds, too. And also the houses: squat, two- or three-story affairs, in the universally accepted architectural design, with gray whorls of greasy smoke spiralling up from their hearth fires.

Kesley wondered what cities had looked like in the Old Days, before the rain of bombs had leveled the world. New York had had millions of people in it. Buildings had towered to the skies. Kesley remembered how old Lester described a visit he had made to New York forty years earlier. The blistered hulks of the great towers still stood, jagged shells clawing at the sky. Forty, fifty, eighty stories high—it was unbelievable.

Cities were different now. The Twelve Dukes had laid down the unvarying pattern for the cities during the Time of Rebuilding, four hundred years before. The old names had been kept, and the old locations. But a city of the Twelve Empires now had a certain prescribed shape, and a city in Argentina Province looked much like one in Illinois Province, or Capetown Province. There was the wall, first of all, high and thick and protective. Within the wall, the radial spokes of streets, and the circling network of avenues, lined with low houses. At the heart of the city, the Building of Government or, as in Buenos Aires and eleven other cities in the world, the Ducal Palace.

Markets, shops, houses, schools, meeting-halls—these were all provided for, all according to plan.

"Why are you taking me to the Duke?" Kesley asked, as they trotted toward the towering palace.

The bandit chief shrugged. "The Duke wants norteamericanos. He pay us to bring them; he tell us where you and your friend are. We bring. See?"

Kesley nodded. It was the truth, he saw; the bandit had merely been following instructions.

Everyone follows instructions, he thought suddenly. He had followed van Alen's orders; the bandits were puppets of Don Miguel. And Miguel?

Who, he wondered, pulled the Duke's strings?

Kesley smiled. Van Alen had tainted him with philosophy. Life would undoubtedly have been much simpler if he'd remained in Iowa Province, on the farm.

The contradiction followed at once: he hadn't been happy there, he realized. Life had never been simple—not even in a world where the benevolent Dukes tried manfully to avoid the fatal complexity of the Old Days.

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