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Reconstruction and Reclamation Corpsmen. They had left their wheelbarrows blocking the road, and were throwing rocks at a squirrel on a branch a hundred feet overhead.
    Halyard rolled down his window. “Get these damn wheelbarrows out of the way!” he shouted.
    “Ci-ti-zen!” piped the Shah, smiling modestly at his newly acquired bilinguality.
    “Drop dead,” called one of the rock throwers. Reluctantly, surlily, he came down to the road and moved two wheelbarrows very slowly, studying the car and its occupants as he did it. He stepped to one side.
    “Thanks! It’s about time!” said Halyard as the limousine eased past the man.
    “You’re welcome, Doc,” said the man, and he spat in Halyard’s face.
    Halyard sputtered, manfully regained his poise, and wiped his face. “Isolated incident,” he said bitterly.
    “Takaru yamu brouha, pu dinka bu,”
said the Shah sympathetically.
    “The Shah,” said Khashdrahr gravely, “he says it is the same with
Takaru
everywhere since the war.”
    “No
Takaru,”
said Halyard apathetically, and let it go.
    “Sumklish,”
sighed the Shah.
    Khashdrahr handed him the flask of sacred liquor.

3

    D OCTOR P AUL P ROTEUS , the man with the highest income in Ilium, drove his cheap and old Plymouth across the bridge to Homestead. He had had the car at the time of the riots, and among the bits of junk in the glove compartment—match cards, registration, flashlight, and face tissues—was the rusty pistol he had been issued then. Having a pistol where some unauthorized person might get at it was very much against the law. Even members of the huge standing army did without firearms until they’d disembarked for occupation duty overseas. Only the police and plant guards were armed. Paul didn’t want the pistol but was forever forgetting to turn it in. Over the years, as it had accumulated a patina of rust, he’d come to regard it as a harmless antique. The glove compartment wouldn’t lock, so Paul covered the pistol with tissues.
    The engine wasn’t working properly, now and thenhesitating, catching again, slowing suddenly, catching again. His other cars, a new station wagon and a very expensive sedan, were at home, as he put it, for Anita. Neither of the good cars had ever been in Homestead, and neither had Anita for many years. Anita never needled him about his devotion to the old car, though she did seem to think some sort of explanation to others was in order. He had overheard her telling visitors that he had had it rebuilt in such a way that it was far better mechanically than what was coming off the automatic assembly lines at Detroit—which simply wasn’t true. Nor was it logical that a man with so special a car would put off and put off having the broken left headlamp fixed. And he wondered how she might have explained, had she known, that he kept a leather jacket in the trunk, and that he exchanged his coat for this and took off his necktie before crossing the Iroquois. It was a trip he made only when he had to—for, say, a bottle of Irish whisky for one of the few persons he had ever felt close to.
    He came to a stop at the Homestead end of the bridge. About forty men, leaning on crowbars, picks, and shovels, blocked the way, smoking, talking, milling about something in the middle of the pavement. They looked around at Paul with an air of sheepishness and, as though there were nothing but time in the world, they moved slowly to the sides of the bridge, leaving an alley barely wide enough for Paul’s car. As they separated, Paul saw what it was they had been standing around. A small man was kneeling beside a chuckhole perhaps two feet in diameter, patting a fresh fill of tar and gravel with the flat of his shovel.
    Importantly, the man waved for Paul to go
around
the patch, not
over
it. The others fell silent, and watched to make sure that Paul did go around it.
    “Hey, Mac, your headlamp’s busted,” shouted one of the men. The others joined in, chorusing the