I grew aware that I was being beckoned. I dropped my cigarette in a sand bowl and crossed the resilient floor to the customs desk. A porter trundled my bags down a roller conveyor to within reach of the official who had waved to me. This was a swarthy man in a severe black uniform with silver rank badges; his fingers were discolored with the blue chalk used for okaying passengers’ bags.

He glanced down at the passenger manifest and said in a bored tone, “Quiere Vd. decirme su nombre?”

“Me llamo Boyd Hakluyt,” I told him, reaching into my pocket for my passport. “Habla Vd. ingles?”

He put his elbow on the desk top, hand outstretched. “Si,” he agreed. “The señor is Norteamericano?”

“No, Australian. I’ve been in the States some time.” His eyebrows arched a little as he studied my Australian passport. Quite probably he hadn’t seen one before. “And what is it brings the señor to Aguazul?” he asked, as though genuinely interested. “Tourism, yes?”

He took up the stub of blue chalk lying nearest his hand and began to move it toward my bags. I told him no, in fact I was working in Vados as of the following day.

His eyes narrowed a very little. The hand with the chalk stopped an inch from the first bag. “So?” he said. “And what is the señor’s profession?”

“I’m a traffic analyst,” I answered. “I specialize in such problems as how to get cars moving faster in busy streets, how to prevent people blocking the exits at subway stations—”

He nodded impatiently. “Yo comprendo,” he snapped, as if I had implied he was of inferior intelligence. “And what do you do here in Vados?”

“I’m supposed to suggest a solution to a traffic problem.” This was factually accurate, and as I said it, I felt again a tingle of excitement — the same excitement that I had felt on first being assigned the job. Perhaps it wasn’t so much simple excitement as a sense of being awarded an accolade — Ciudad de Vados was more than a brand-new city in the circles where I worked; it was a byword for ultimate achievement in city planning and traffic analysis. And to be chosen to improve on near perfection was a kind of climax to a career.

Of course, it was to be expected that improvement had now become possible; it was twelve years since the plans had been approved, and there had been progress in that time. More to the point, the finest analogue computers in the world couldn’t get all the bugs out of a traffic plan — experiment was the only way of establishing where faults might lie.

And yet…

The customs officer seemed to be affected by the same kind of puzzlement as I. But he had a way of resolving it. He tossed the chalk in the air and as it fell closed his hand around it with a gesture of finality. “I shall require to examine your baggage, Señor Hakluyt,” he said.

I sighed, wondering what had made him change his mind. But experience had taught me it was always quicker not to raise objections. So I said only, “Everything I have with me is my personal property, and I checked with your consulate in Miami to make sure I wasn’t bringing any proscribed items.”

“Puede ser,” he answered noncommittally, and took my keys.

He asked questions about almost everything he found, but it was the quantity of clothing I had with me that he harped on most. He kept trying to insist that I could not possibly need everything I had brought; again and again I had to explain that my work often took me out on highway and other construction projects where there were no laundry facilities, and if I was to dress reasonably well, I had to bring as much as this.

“Señor Hakluyt, then, is a very wealthy man?” he pressed, altering his line of attack.

I resisted the growing temptation to make a smart crack in reply and shook my head.

“The señor is not wealthy and yet has so much baggage,” he said, as though propounding a major philosophical paradox to himself. “Will the señor tell me at what rate he is to be paid for the work he does in Vados?”

That was a little too much. “Is it any of your business?” I countered.

He showed his teeth, with the air of a card-player producing a fourteenth trump. I disliked him intensely from that moment on. “Señor Hakluyt is perhaps not aware that I am a police officer,” he purred. “But I am — and it is therefore illegal to refuse an answer to any question I may put.”

I gave ground. “I’m being paid twenty thousand dolaros and expenses,” I said.

He pushed down the lid on the last of my bags and slashed crosses on each item with the blue chalk. Then he dusted his hands off against each other in a way that suggested he was getting rid of something more than just smears of chalk. “It is to be hoped, then, that the señor is generous with his money,” he said. “Perhaps it is there, the reason why be is not already a wealthy man.”

He turned on his heel and stalked away. The examination had taken so long that the airline buses had all left for the center of town. I dug into my inadequate knowledge of Spanish and managed to persuade a porter to call me a cab and load my bags into it while I went to a change booth and turned a few dollars into a supply of dolaros — crisp new red-and-yellow paper bearing portraits of el Presidente, nominally at par to the United States dollar but worth in actual purchasing power about eighty-five cents. They were a monument to one of Vados’s first great achievements — the major currency reform he had carried through a year after coming to power. It was said that he had called his new monetary unit the dolaro in hope that it would become as hard a currency as its North American original; by Latin American standards he had worked miracles in even approaching this goal.

When I came to tip the porter who’d called my cab, I remembered what the customs officer had said about being generous with my money. By way of experiment I gave him two dolaros and looked for a reaction. There wasn’t one. He probably thought I was a tourist who couldn’t be bothered keeping track of foreign currency because he subconsciously felt it wasn’t real money anyway. I tried to shrug the whole thing off.

However, it wasn’t until the cab was on its way down from the mountainside airport that the matter was driven to the back of my mind. The road swung around in a wide quarter circle to ease the sharp descent into Vados, and since the air was clear and the sun was shining brilliantly, I had a perfect bird’s-eye view out over the area. I could even make out Puerto Joaquín, forty-odd miles distant, as a dark blur where the land merged into the ocean.

But after a superficial glance around, I didn’t again trouble to look so far away. I was too fascinated by Ciudad de Vados in the immediate foreground.

There was an impressive quality about the city that no amount of maps and plans had been able to convey to me. Without the distraction of Flores importuning me to look at things, I was able to soak up the true magnificence of it all.

Somehow — it was hard to define how — those who had planned this city had managed to give it an organic vitality akin to that of a giant machine. There was a slumbering controlled power that could be felt, implying business to be done; yet it was matched by a functional perfection that meant economy, simplicity, unity without uniformity. Just about everything, in fact, that idealistic city-planners had ever hoped for.

I told the cabdriver to pull off the road for a moment and got out to stare down through the limpid air from the edge of a bushy bluff. I recognized almost everything I could see: residential there, business there, government offices there, the parks, the museums, the opera house, the four great plazas, the viaducts carrying the superhighways. Fantastic. On the surface not a single flaw. I stayed long enough on the bluff to smoke half a cigarette; then I went back to the cab and told the driver to take me into town. I went on staring out of the window as we hurried down the mountainside.