"My fault," I said. "I started you puzzling over a problem that concerns only me...."
He wasn't listening.
There were few pedestrians on this level of traffic; most people who walked places took the ambulators on the second level. Down here the sidewalks were narrow and the curbs high, the streets being used almost exclusively for heavy transfer and delivery trucks.
A high metal railing along the street-side of the walk prevented careless pedestrians from stepping in the path of the huge, swift, rumbling vehicles.
But there were no railings at the intersections.
And at the next intersection, Maxwell stepped off the curb, shifted his course just a fraction, and went on at a tangent that would have had him smack in the middle of a truck-traffic lane.
I grabbed his arm and pulled hard, to get him headed back in the right direction.
"What the hell are you trying to do—get yourself killed?"
Which was almost exactly what I'd started to say. But he was the one who said it.