Dan did not doubt that these three men were officials of the planet, and he strongly suspected that they were armed and knew how to use their weapons.
Across the street, at the edge of one corner of the green, was a tall hedge of flowering shrubs, back of which was a grove of young trees. Dan dodged past carts and small, square, silent automobiles, and ran through this hedge. Behind him there was a shout of anger.
To Dan's left were two young trees, growing close together. Dan still had with him two of his little mataform units, and he quickly thrust one of them between the two dark, slender tree trunks.
An instant later, he was in the dark corner of the bookstore, hearing the angry shouts dwindle into the distance outside. The door of the store closed as the elderly woman who ran the store stepped outside, apparently to see what had happened.
A moment later, Dan was in the shelter under the river. He worked quickly with a small brush and some dye, then got out another set of clothes. He checked his appearance swiftly and thoroughly.
Then with more of a tanned look than he had had before, with much darker hair, and wearing entirely different clothes, Dan mataformed back to the bookstore. The elderly woman was standing by the front window as he came forward, to pick up a thin scientific volume lying on a table and say, "I believe you were outside when I came in."
"Oh," she said, "the most frightful thing just happened." She then gave a highly inaccurate account of Dan's fight with the knife man, and described how the crowd was hunting him down right now at the far end of the park.
Dan took his change and said, "I'll have to go look."
He stepped outside and could see the path of the crowd with no difficulty. The flowering shrubs were flattened, and the ground under the trees showed the marks of many feet. Dan recovered his mataform unit and walked a short distance to look down toward the far end of the green, where the swimmers were all out of the pool—probably so that it could be searched for Dan.