The module train curved southwestward, gradually turning and accelerating due south. In time it crossed into more heavily populated country, and after four days the train began to slow.

For half a day Ryo watched as roads, ventilators, and surface facilities began to appear like growths on the land. His module was in hill country and still slowing when the train finally pulled into the transport center of Zirenba, where he changed for Ciccikalk. Seven additional days of steady southerly travel revealed vast panoramas of cultivated fields that put those of Paszex to shame. Huge black ventilator stacks hinted at great subterranean manufacturing complexes.

And finally it was night again and the long train of crowded modules was pulling into the central passenger terminal at Ciccikalk. As each module halted the doors automatically sprang open. The simple portion of his journey was at an end. From now on he would have to move as a fugitive.

Ciccikalk was a metropolis of nearly three million, home to 20 percent of the planet’s population. The central terminal was only one of a dozen of similar size that ringed the city’s boundaries, and was as large as Paszex.

Ryo had expected great size, but not confusion. No statistic can convey the feel and scope of a large city to someone from a small town.

Overhead, myriad signs flashed showing modules and their destinations or those arriving from outlying communities and towns. The terminal was filled with Thranx pressing tight upon one another as they made their way to tracks and exits.

Ryo found himself fighting for control. To one side, he saw a line of rest saddles, forced his way through the crowd to them, and settled gratefully into one. Now he could watch and study the teeming terminal without having to fight for a place to stand.

He tried to remember what he’d learned about Ciccikalk. Three million was the metropolitan population. There were several million more living and working in the peripheral cities and towns. As opposed to Paszex’s five levels, there were forty-three beneath him here, wrenched from the rock of the planet. In addition to this prodigious feat of excavation, a dozen upper levels had been cut into the hills that ringed the Cicci Valley, and that was the hardest fact to grasp; that there were more than twice as many levels here above the surface as there were in all of Paszex.

Though still dazed he tried to review his somewhat sketchy plan of action. The fare to the capital had cost him all but his last unmonitored chit. He had exactly eight credits left. That would not buy him the right to look at a shuttlecraft, much less passage on a posigravity transport. It might keep him alive for a month. That did not take into account the problem of lodgings. He could not touch his joint account with Fal.

He would have to ration himself very closely. Perhaps he might find sleeping quarters in the poorer sections of the city. When to eat was not a concern. Nothing ever closed completely in a city the size of the capital. This was not sleepy Paszex.