Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 Read Online Free PDF

to pick up phrases from adults and use them back to the same people?
    "The woman," he lied, "the woman who took care of me said that that was the proper thing to say, here."
    "What woman?" demanded Henry.
    "The woman who took care of me," said Bleys. "She took care of me, arranged for my meals and my clothes and everything. She was from Harmony. She'd married somebody on New Earth, I guess. Her name was Laura."
    Henry stared hard at him, as if his eyes were searchlights which would illuminate and uncover any lie. But Bleys had had too much experience at looking completely blank, misunderstood, and innocent. He stared back.
    "Well," said Henry, turning back his head once more toward the front of the cart. He gave the reins a shake that started the goats to moving. There were eight of them, harnessed in pairs, pulling the cart; and they moved it, it seemed, with comparative ease. But it was strange to Bleys to feel the jolting of the wheels of the vehicle on the surface over which they were passing, used as he was to hovercraft and magnetic-floatcraft.
    "We'll talk more about this woman, then," said Henry.
    In spite of his last words, however, Henry MacLean said no more for a long time, merely concentrating on guiding his goat team and the goat cart along various roads leading away from the spaceport.
    At first the road was like a massive ribbon of half a dozen colors, draped over the surface of the ground. All around the land was bare, not even trees showing; only in the distance, occasionally, they would see one of the landing terminals.
    All Bleys' senses were alert, his eyes, his ears, his nose
    recorded the sights, sounds and smells of the goat-cart, the road surface beneath their wheels and the day outside the windscreen and cab of the cart.
    They were traveling in the lane on the far left of the highway, the darkest colored of all the stripes that made up a number of different parallel roadways leading away from the spaceport and obviously designed for different vehicles.
    At the far right, the striped road was so wide that Bleys was not able to see clearly the vehicles on it. But at its further edge must be the near-white surface, seamless and almost electronically smooth, above which Bleys could almost see magnetic float vehicles traveling. These were disk-shaped. They moved, by contrast with the goat-cart, at blinding speed; so that in any case it would have been hard to get a good look at them.
    Not that Bleys needed to know what they looked like, since he had traveled in many such during the earlier years of his life, going with his mother from one hotel to another, or from a hotel to some palatial private home.
    Just in from the strip for float vehicles was the one for hovercraft. Next was the strip for small passenger-carrying, wheeled vehicles that were also motorized, and then, next closest, the one for large, motorized transport-carrying wheeled vehicles.
    Last of all was their strip, the one for unmotorized wheeled vehicles, with the slowest, like the goat cart, at the extreme edge.
    In between the goat-cart and the wheeled vehicle strips were a number of other unmotorized vehicles of varying types. They ranged from other versions of goat wagons like Henry Mac-Lean's to odd vehicles, such as one whose wheels were moved by two men pumping a horizontal lever, see-saw fashion, between them. In among all the rest, in and out, were bicycles, some of them with carts pulled behind them.
    As their own cart moved along, strip after strip peeled off from the roadway. First to go was the near-white strip above which the magnetic vehicles moved. It headed off over the horizon to their right. Shortly thereafter, the strip for hovercraft also parted company with them. It was some longer time—whether it was a longer distance or not, Bleys was in no position to judge—before the two strips carrying motorized vehicles also left them. They were at last traveling on a single strip for unmotorized traffic, though this was still