to get outside and get lost as quickly as possible. While still jamming my arms through the sleeves of the jacket, I backed into the door, banged it open, and spun outside.
I found myself on the sidewalk of a busy city, jammed with people. That was good. I could blend in here, no problem. I quickly pulled the jacket around me to hide any sign of thetelltale red âchallengerâ shirt, and walked quickly through the crowd to get as far away from that arcade, and the dados, as I could. I kept my head down and moved as fast as possible without knocking anybody over. That wasnât easy. The sidewalk was pretty crowded. Mark, remember when weâd take the train into New York City and walk up Fifth Avenue to go to Central Park? Remember how crowded it always was, with hundreds of people all going one place or another? I always wondered why people didnât keep bumping into one another. Well, thatâs pretty much what it was like. I was in the center of a very busy downtown of a very busy city, but I didnât take the time to stop and look around until I was sure I had lost my pursuers. It wasnât until I had made a couple of turns, crossed a few streets, and finally turned onto a wide boulevard that I felt sure I had ditched them. I slowed down. My heart stopped racing. I had escaped. But to where? It was time to take a look and see what a city on Quillan was all about.
Tall gray buildings loomed above me. Some were like skyscrapers that would rival anything you could find in the big cities on Second Earth; others were smaller. But by smaller Iâm talking twenty to thirty stories high. The buildings themselves didnât have much personality. Whoever designed them must have been the same guy who designed the drab clothing. There wasnât a lot of imagination going on there. The buildings were big and gray and, well, boring. The windows were spaced out in uniform rows, floor after floor. Looking across the wide street and up and down the boulevard, I saw similar buildings as far as the eye could see. The only variation from building to building was in height. They were all boxy rectangles that reached up to a gray, cloudy sky. I felt that if I closed my eyes and spun around, I wouldnât know which way was which. The sick thought hit me that finding my way to the flume was going to be a challenge. I was standing inthe middle of busy foot traffic, so I backed away to the side and stood with my back to one of these big gray buildings to get a better look at what was happening on eye level.
The street was packed with traffic. They had cars, kind of like on Second Earth. Iâm sure you can guess what Iâm going to say about them. Yep. Boring. They all had the same basic shape, which was rounded front to back. They were kind of like VW Beetles, but not as interesting-looking. Some were black, some silver. Thatâs it. There were two-wheeled motor scooters as well. The people on those were able to move a little faster because there werenât as many, and they could slide between the cars. I guess it was kind of like those busy Asian cities at home, where thereâs so much traffic, many people ride motor scooters. It looked as if riding a scooter was the way to go because the cars were getting nowhere fast.
All the vehicles were pretty quiet, Iâm happy to say, because the street was choked with them. They must have been electric powered, because I couldnât hear any engine sounds. They were all moving in the same direction, slowly. Nobody seemed too angry about it. I didnât hear any car horns or frustrated shouts. There were signal lights at the corners, but rather than the round red and green lights weâre used to, a single, narrow blue light stretched above the roadway from sidewalk to sidewalk. When the light was lit, the traffic could move. When it went dark, the traffic stopped. I couldnât tell much difference between moving and stopped, but thatâs how
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