"_Hai!_" Takeko said, agreeing. She leaped from her _giraffu_, packed the safety-suit and helmet onto the beast, and remounted. "We will now go to Yamamura," she said. Old Kiwa spoke, and she translated: "We must move quickly and with care," she said. "My father heard an _hikoki_--how do you say?" she asked, raising and lowering her hand. "A veeto-platform," Hartford said. "I mustn't be seen, Takeko. Colonel Nef would use my presence as an excuse to kill any of your people around me." The ride, though cautious, was indeed demanding. Hartford felt tendons stretch he didn't know he had. Muscles were bruised from his instep to his upper back, and the skin was chafed away from his inner thighs as though he'd been riding an unplaned plank. He understood, well before the journey to the mountain village was over, the importance of that lifetime exercise, best begun by riding young, known to generations of horsemen as "stretching the crutch." He swore to himself that his future transportation, if he had a future through which to transport himself, would be by boots or wheeled vehicle. The three of them were following no clear path. Kiwa led. Hartford noted that their course took them along the contours of streams, on the borders of fields, through contrasting background that would make their presence less obvious from the air. They were in a thicket of bamboo when the veeto-platform did appear. The instant they heard its whistle, Kiwa spoke a sharp word. He and his daughter slipped from their mounts, loosed the brow-bands of their camelopards and unlocked their girths, tossed off the saddles and dangling gambadoes and gave the animals each a sharp slap on the rump that sent them crashing through the bamboo. They helped Hartford unsaddle and send his beast off in another direction, and lay down in the direction the late-morning sun dialed the shadows of the bamboo stems. If the veeto-pilot saw the _giraffu_ now, they were saddleless and innocent. The downdraft of the veeto-platform puffed dust up from the ground around them, and pressed down the leafy tops of the bamboo like a great hand stroking across the thicket. Hartford, aware of the way his bald head and pink face would stand out, dusted his hands with the soil and laced his dusty fingers over his scalp. The platform passed almost directly over them, shooting fragments of dust and bamboo-duff into every particle of clothing, into ears and eyes and nostrils, with the whirl-wind of its passage. VIII It took them half an hour to recover their _giraffu_ and saddle up again, but Hartford did not regret the delay. Aboard the grotesque mount again, he groaned. To mask the misery of his unaccustomed pounding he paid scientific attention to the landscape, the gait of the camelopards, the leather of the saddles, and the posture and person of Takeko--this last by far the most effective of his analgesic thoughts.