Days, it took, to reach the city. The farmsteads lay dreaming as he passed, and he knocked on the lovely old wood of the doors sometimes, and asked for water or food. The upper door would open, and there would stand a woman. Not the same woman, but very like, too much alike—too much like his own first woman. She would smile and say: "Vey fanis vu?"
He would shake his head, make a motion of drinking or eating and the lower door would open. He would enter and sit at the wooden table. The food was always perfect, sublime taste, simple fruit or milk or garden greens, or the fried panhaus, or sometimes a thing that looked like meat but he was sure was not meat for She had never killed anything or possessed any meat.
Then there were no more of the farmsteads, and he came across a great empty plain, where the trail was wide and the earth beaten hard as stone. But nowhere did he see the vehicles that had made that track. In the distance he could see the tall spires of a city. But there was no noise of a city. The tall spires seemed silent, and there was none of that smoke he knew a city should make. Above the spires coiled the weird spirals of the upper air, like great brown snake forms gestating and birthing and changing, entwined and unentwining, wreathing over each other and seeming to peer down at the strange midge crossing their plain.
Steve Donay was puzzled trying to understand this planet. His feet plodded on across the grassy plain and he came to the first street of the city. There were people moving, and he went on eagerly for now he would learn the truth from real people!
He went up to the first man he saw and asked: "I am a stranger, can you tell me...."
The man said firmly, "Vey fanis vu?"
Donay shook his head, and the man walked on, not swiftly, not hurriedly, but with a measured, machine-like step.
The city did not seem crowded, and there were some huge freight vehicles trundling along, not like autos, but like huge wagons with little motors where a man would ordinarily sit driving a horse. And there was no man driving them.
"I am beginning to understand," Steve muttered, "this is a world of madmen, or simpletons, or robots. Why does no one act curious, or sympathetic, or human?..." He walked on, gloomily.