Then I set out across the flat. Distance was deceptive, but I had calculated fairly closely, and an hour later saw me pacing up the runway to the entrance of Profaldo.
The guard in the cubicle stared when I stood before him. "You're not a citizen here," he said. "Do you know what place this is?"
"I know very well," I said. "Here are my papers, signed by the High Ganymedian Council. Let me pass, please."
The gate slid back, and an instant later I was inside the city.
Profaldo! Plague-ridden, feared, legendary! Like its six sister cities, the place was known throughout the System as a pest-hole, tenanted by doomed citizenry whose very futility of life made a mockery of everything decent and law-abiding.
Twenty yards down the street, and I saw indeed that the city was one vast slum. Gambling holes-in-the-wall stood cheek by jowl with sinister drink shops, all of them roaring full blast. A drooling fog that dimmed the intermittent blue street lights gave a grotesque unreality to the thoroughfare.
Here and there were groups of the inhabitants. Only a few showed visible signs of the horrible plague,—the greenish, leprous hue to the face and eyes, the disjointed, shambling walk—but I knew that all of them had the disease in one or more of its stages.
Following the directions I had memorized so carefully, I went straight down the street, turned left, then right. Yes, there it was. A slate-gray building, well out of plumb, with a dingy sign before the doorway: POWER DIVISION.
I went in. There were no ushers, no reception clerks, only a faint drone of machinery somewhere below me. A long corridor angled in either direction with marked doors every few feet. The sixth door bore the marking: COMMISSIONER.