He chided himself for lack of courage. What could they do, after all? The only man looked old enough to be Toba's father, and it seemed to be all the poor fellow could do just to keep breathing. And even the two women and the boy working together couldn't get through the hardened wood walls of a sealed Air-car... could they?

He frowned. Of course, they could always attack him from the outside. Kill the Air-pigs, for instance. Or just cut the reins.

He lifted the reins. Maybe it would be better to come back with help — get some of the coolies into a posse, and then...

Fifty percent of quota.

He dropped the reins, suddenly angry with himself. No, damn it; poor as it was, this was his patch of Crust, and he'd deserve to be Wheel-Broken if he let a gang of weaponless savages drive him away.

Full of a righteous resolve, Toba pulled the mouthpiece of the Speaker toward him and intoned into it, "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

The upfluxers startled like frightened Air-pigs, he was gratified to see. They Waved a little further from the car and poked their short spears toward him. Even the old fellow looked up — or tried to; Toba could see how the injured man's eyecups were sightless, clouded with pus-laced, stale Air.

Toba was filled with a sudden sense of confidence, of command of the situation. He had nothing to fear; he was intimidating to these ignorant savages. They'd probably never even heard of Parz City. His anger at their intrusion seemed to swell as his apprehension diminished.

Now the strong-looking woman approached the car — cautiously, he saw, and with her spear extended toward him — but evidently not paralyzed by fear... as, he conceded, he might have been were the positions reversed.

The woman shouted through the clearwood at him now, emphasizing her words with stabs of her spearpoint at his face; the voice was picked up by the Speaker system's external ear.

"Who do you think you are, a Xeelee's grandmother?"

Toba listened carefully. The voice of the upfluxer was distorted by the limitations of the Speaker, of course; but Toba was able to allow for that. He knew how the Speaker system worked, pretty well. Working a ceiling-farm as far from the Pole as Toba's — so far upflux, in such an inhospitable latitude — the car's systems kept him alive. The strongest of the coolies could survive for a long time out here and maybe some of them could even complete the trek back to the Pole, to Parz City. But not Toba Mixxax, City-born and bred; he doubted he would last a thousand heartbeats.