As we swished through the gate, I said, "What's dynamite?"
"Explosive. Has nitroglycerin in it. Rasmussen killed two pigs with it. We can throw some at the Hog, if he's alive."
"He probably will be," I said. The riding was smoother and much quieter than in the steam tractor. "Explain this about looking alike," I said. "It's worried me since those emigrants boarded the Ap-GG-12C."
"Oh, that." Toal settled back on the saddle. She explained, "You and Yuko look alike. I've heard that unrelated people throughout the Explored Galaxy may look alike. They're called doubles. Even the Hog is similar to real pigs. When Joe Nordo settled Planet Maggie, decided everyone should be the same. Advertised for fifty years. Out of the billions in the Explored Galaxy, selected three hundred colonists who looked like him. Everyone on Maggie is descended from them."
"I see," I said, beginning to experience a new form of motion disturbance—pentacycle sickness. "I suspected new genetic discoveries, but it's only applied coincidence. If—"
Toal braked the pentacycle so quickly that I almost knocked her from the saddle with my head. "Tractor tracks," she said. Toal dismounted and studied the interlaced wheel marks on the damp road. "Must have been Rasmussen," she decided. "He has the only one with twelve wheels."
I said, "He's trying for the first shot again."
Toal dropped to hands and knees with her face close to the dirt. "Towing something," she said. "I don't know what. Something with two big wheels."
"You can see all that?"
"Why, yes, can't you?" Toal climbed back into the saddle.