“How much did you pay her for those identochips?” Kate asked.
Fred told her, the two of them stepping onto the street, the one real street of modest width through the center of town. The street was a ribbon stretched east and west like a line laid down by a god, burning off everything along that ribbon with a thunderbolt from the heavens so straight and pure that only a god could have crafted such perfection. He wondered where the road west led. East was the spaceport.
They"d just stepped from the counterfeiter"s lair, a nondescript two-story building next to an empty culvert whose sides sprouted that same brown stubble that seemed to carpet the entire planet.
“What?” Kate replied, sounding distressed. “I can"t believe you paid that much!”
The price for the identochips had been agreed
