The Dogtown Tourist Agency by Jack Vance Page B

sour smile. “In the east.”
    “In the east is correct. Now, then, on the night previously, did the moon climb the northern sky or the southern sky?”
    “The southern sky. But what difference does all this make?”
    “Any information might be useful. In the room where you were held, did you notice any indication of the passing days? Any difference between night and day?”
    “No.”
    “But you think you were held prisoner two or three months.”
    “About that. I don’t really know.”
    “You never heard sounds outside your room? Conversation?”
    “Nothing. Never.”
    “If you think of anything,” said Hetzel, “make a note of it.”
    Dirby started to speak, then held his tongue. Hetzel watched him a moment. Perhaps his adventure had, for a fact, distorted his thinking processes. His perceptions must have been honed; he would experience events in terms of contrasts and extremes. All colors would seem saturated; all voices would ring with both truth and duplicity; all acts would seem pregnant with mysterious symbolism. In a certain sense, Dirby must be regarded as irresponsible. Hetzel spoke in an even voice. “Remember, do not leave the grounds of the hotel; in fact, you would be wise to stay indoors.”
    Dirby’s reply confirmed his suspicions. “Wisdom doesn’t work as well as you might imagine.”
    “Everything else works much worse,” said Hetzel. “I have some business in Dogtown, and I’ll be gone for an hour or two, or perhaps the rest of the afternoon. I suggest, first, that you rayogram your father, then sit quietly somewhere. Talk to the tourists. Relax. Sleep. Above all, don’t do anything to get yourself kicked out of the hotel.”
    From the rear of the Beyranion Hotel a flight of rock-melt steps zigzagged down the face of a sandstone bluff, to join the road connecting the space depot and Far Dogtown. Hetzel had not yet visited this district southeast of Dogtown proper, in Gomaz territory and outside the Gaean Reach. This was the Dogtown of popular imagination, the so-called City of Nameless Men. Every other building appeared to be an inn of greater or lesser pretension, each stridently asserting its vitality with a sign or a standard, painted, sometimes crudely, sometimes artfully, in colors which gave zest to structures built of drab stone from the bluff, or planks of local wormwood, or slabs sawed from burls.
    The time was now late afternoon; the folk of Far Dogtown had come forth to take a draft of beer, or a flask of wine, or a dram of spirits, at rude tables before taverns or under the acacias which grew down the center of the street. They sat alone or in small groups of twos and threes, talking in confidential mumbles punctuated with an occasional guffaw or a jocular curse, eyeing each passerby with stony, speculative gazes. Hetzel recognized garments and trinkets from half a hundred worlds. Here sat a man with hair in varnished ringlets after the fashion of Arbonetta; there sat another with the cropped ears of a Destrinary. This man with the slantwise velvet cap and the dangle of black pearls past his ear might be a starmenter from Alastor Cluster; what could bring him so far across the galaxy?
    And those two girls, sisters or twins, with pale snub-nose faces and orange hair; they seemed very young to be so far from Marmonfyre. But most of the folk taking their ease at the taverns of Far Dogtown wore garments much like those of Hetzel himself—the unobtrusive dress of the galactic wanderer, who preferred to attract a minimum of attention.
    The street took a jog and widened by a few yards; here was a cluster of small shops: food-markets; a pharmacy and dispensary; a haberdasher with racks of ready-to-wear garments and crates of boots, shoes, and sandals; a news-stand with journals from various sections of the Reach…Hetzel felt a sudden uneasy pang. Halting to study an offering of fraudulent identification papers and packets of counterfeit money, he managed to glance back the way he