He turned his back abruptly on the derricks and began to walk slowly eastward away from the city. “I feel like a walk,” he said. “Like to come along, Mark?”
“A walk?” Hazleton looked puzzled. “Why-sure. O.K., boss.”
For a while they trudged in silence over the heath. The going was rough; the soil was clayey, and heavily gullied, particularly deceptive in the early morning light. Very little seemed to grow on it: only an occasional bit of low, starved shrubbery, a patch of tough, nettlelike stalks, a few clinging weeds like crabgrass.
“This doesn’t strike me as good farming land,” Hazleton said. “Not that I know a thing about it.”
“There’s better land farther out, as you saw from the city,” Amalfi said. “But I agree about the heath. It’s blasted land. I wouldn’t even believe it was radiologically safe until I saw the instrument readings with my own eyes.”
“A war?”
“Long ago, maybe. But I think geology did most of the damage. The land was let alone too long; the topsoil’s all gone. It’s odd, considering how intensively the rest of the planet seems to be farmed.”
They half-slid into a deep arroyo and scrambled up the other side. “Boss, straighten me out on something,” Hazleton said. “Why did we adopt this planet, even after we found that it had people of its own? We passed several others that would have done as well. Are we going to push the local population out? We’re not too well set up for that, even if it were legal or just.”
“Do you think there are Earth cops in the Greater Magellanic, Mark?”
“No,” Hazleton said, “but there are Okies now, and if I wanted justice I’d go to Okies, not to cops. What’s the answer, Amalfi?”