And he was gone, slipping-sliding down the path back into his personal inferno.

Angers was already back at the car before I caught up with him again. He was wiping his forehead with a large handkerchief.

“I’m sorry about that outburst,” he said wryly. “I’d have warned you if I’d known we were likely to run into him. You don’t have to take any notice, of course — he always acts abusive like that.”

I shrugged and got into the car. But as we rolled back toward the main road, I saw a long-faced man with a bowed head, wearing a bright serape I was sure I had seen the previous afternoon in the Plaza del Sur. Juan Tezol, going home. I wondered if he had found his thousand dolaros yet.

“It’s a strange comedown for Sigueiras,” said Angers as the car fled along smooth concrete roadway. “I suppose it’s the type — but I remember him as an apparently intelligent and sensible man.”

“And now?” I said, keeping my face absolutely straight. He gave me a sharp glance. “You saw for yourself,” he said. Then he realized there was more to my remark than a foolish question and nodded reluctantly.

“You’re probably right,” he admitted. “He could still be a formidable person.”

He lapsed into a thoughtful silence. I wondered if he was picturing scores of peasants, cattle and all, actually forcing their way into his rooms.

We went next on a tour of the three shantytowns, and all of them were very much like Sigueiras’s slum spread out over a wider area, except that since they weren’t closed in, the smell hanging over them was less repulsive. But although they were superficially alike, I found that each of them had its own kind of organic structure and function, perhaps due to the fact that they were on different sides of Vados and the inhabitants came from districts differing slightly in cultural pattern. There was also, naturally, a marked difference between them because of the local traffic pattern, but this operated at third or fourth remove, and was not especially significant.

“I don’t quite understand how you fellows do it,” Angers said as he watched me doodling flow-curves on a scratch pad, standing on the shoulder of the highway overlooking one of the shantytowns.

“Coming from a highway engineer, that’s a handsome admission,” I said, more sardonically than I’d intended. “Most of the time your boys make me feel I want their permission to breathe in their vicinity.”

Angers colored a little. “No offense,” he said. “I mean it. Oh, it’s largely a matter of instinct and a particular sort of mind. Hard to explain; I suppose the closest analogy is with the way a river deposits silt at a bend — the direction and strength of the current and the nature of the silt determine the way the course of the river develops. In roughly the same way you can establish principles of traffic flow that sometimes — almost invariably in the case of unplanned towns or villages — determine the primary nature and layout of the result.”

I stripped off the sheet of the pad I’d been working on and screwed it up. “No luck?” Angers suggested.

“Oh, it could be done. But… well, I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in the obvious solution.”

Angers raised a sandy eyebrow at me. “I thought we’d considered all the obvious solutions,” he said rather stiffly. “That was why we called in an expert.”

“It’s still obvious. Use the money to build these people a nice clean new housing development and educate them into living there.”

“It may be obvious, but it’s superficial,” he said with the relieved air of one who has met and defeated the same argument many times before. “These aren’t the only peasants we have to cope with, remember. What do you think their relations back in the hills would say when they saw Cousin Pedro and his family of fourteen installed — and I mean in a stall, because they’d take their animals with them! — by the government for nothing?” He shook his head. “No, that would merely aggravate the problem.”

“All right,” I shrugged. “But I can tell you now that if that would aggravate the problem, the best I could do would be to alleviate it. I can make life difficult for these people; I can eliminate their market, so they have to tramp from door to door to sell their vegetables and chickens; I can make their shantytowns into nice clean new — something. But these people are fatalists, damn it! To them it will merely be something new to be endured, like a drought or a famine. The most that can be hoped for is to make things so difficult they can be persuaded back to their villages — but unless something is done there, too, they’ll come back, and you’ll get precisely the same thing happening all over again under new circumstances.”

“Yes, but — -well, frankly, Hakluyt, we aren’t looking for much more than a palliative, you know,” said Angers, blinking. “We’re tackling the other aspects of the problem, but that’s long-term stuff, you know. I mean, there are United Nations teams up in the villages, teaching elementary things like hygiene and baby-care, and there are Vados’s own educational shock troops trying to bring the literacy level up a few per cent. Oh, in another generation these people will probably be pretty well civilized! What we object to, we who are citizens and sweated blood over Vados, is seeing uncivilized people mucking up everything we’ve worked for so hard.”

I judged it better not to pursue the matter. “Well, I’m a stranger,” I said. “All I can do is warn you.”

I turned back toward the car and began to stroll down the shoulder of the highway.

“I think you’ve given me everything I need to be going on with — most other points I can clear up with maps and reference books. For the next week or so I want mainly to be left alone; I can’t say for sure what I’ll be doing, but I’ll most likely be standing around on street corners, taking the mono, getting into crowds wherever they form. Things like that.”

Angers hesitated. “Well, you’re in charge,” he allowed finally, and I had to hide a srnile. Like most traffic men who’ve come up by way of highway engineering, he was used to dealing in — literally — more concrete things. Accordingly, I went into a bit more detail as we returned to the city center.

“For instance,” I said, “consider the problem of that market you want to get rid of. As you pointed out, one reason why it continued to exist after the city was built was that the shanty-town squatters took over the tradition established by the peddlers who traded with the construction gangs in the first place. But a contributory factor to its survival must have been the absence of heavy traffic flow through the roads it occupies. So we have to create such a flow — and it has to be a functional flow in the sense that people have got to be better off when it operates. Okay, achieve that, and you create a sense that the market is a nuisance because it’s a brake on the smooth passage of people who want to get past it. Six months of that kind of irritation, and a contagious urge to get rid of it will enable the city council to legislate it away with the support of a large majority of the public.”

Angers nodded his head in reluctant admiration. “It amazes me that the abstract factors you traffic analysts handle can produce such positive results,” he said.

“It’s the way people work. We’re subject to a lot of pressures we’re not conscious of; some of them influence us out of proportion to their importance. But the problem lies here: a new traffic flow through the market quarter will have to pour into the main traffic nexus — there’s no room for it to do anything else. And that complex of intersections was designed — and very well designed — to cope with exactly its present amount and direction of traffic f.ow. You can’t just open a new road into it; you might very well slow the traffic down instead of speeding it up.”

I looked thoughtfully out of the car. We were traversing the Plaza del Este, just in front of the magnificent cathedral. Like ants against the blazing whites, blues, and reds of the frontage, a family of peasants was standing. Their heads were tilted back, staring at the three-hundred-foot aluminum cross rearing into the clear sky overhead, wondering whether the deity inhabiting this august edifice might not be different from the one occupying their little adobe-built village shrine at home.