Although knocking two meters on a good day when libido was swilling around the churn, Tom Lockhart found himself unable to see any of the action.
A crowd of a couple of hundred or so had packed the small plateau to its paved edge, and latecomers, one step down the side of the ziggurat, were out of luck.
Ever curious to know what was o'clock in the busy city, he shifted along to a corner feature, where a shrewd oldster in a weathered forage cap had got himself on the sloping plinth of an outsize stone virgin.
He rapped the nearer boot toe with the bowl of his pipe, and the man turned down a serious face, juxtaposed in surrealist fashion between massive stone thighs, so that he appeared to be newly born with the gift of speech. "It's those withered pansy nuts, son. Looks like an exhibition of grass and that. It's time security swept them up. Took six months if it took a day to quiet everybody down after that last scare on animal meat. I reckon they oughta be shot. It makes my wife nervous and that's a fact. And, mister, when she gets nervous, she's a dead drag."
Lockhart gave a courteous thumbs-up signal to the well placed columnist, reckoning wisely that speech would lead him into a life-shrinking situation, and backed off to continue the morning trek to his office. He had made two paces and his left foot was top dead center in its epicyclic course when he was grabbed by the ear and tried to change direction in mid-stride.
It was an interesting switch, and if attention had not been all the other way, he would have got a big hand from the fun-starved public. As it was, he fought his battle for balance in semiprivate, and the voice that had swung a velvet cosh at his synapses had spoken a whole paragraph before he got stabilized.
"Don't just believe what I say or even what you see here. Keep your eyes open when you travel outside city limits. Look at the fields. Look at the soya spreads. Look at every living thing and ask yourself if you like what you see."
It was a warm, husky voice, with an earnest timbre and a harmonic of straight up, no-nonsense honesty. He imagined the speaker to be about one point six meters; nine fourteen, six ten, nine fourteen; five and a half kilograms dead weight; fair hair, probably in a white headband and slightly buckteeth under a short upper lip.
He was all set to check out his theory by having another go at the back of the crowd, when there was a second assault on his data acquisition network. A security tender with its sirens in a frenetic howl swept into the square from a subzonal spur and dived for the center of the mass.
There was a scatter down the steps which caught him on the wrong foot and swept him to walkway level before he could get himself sorted.
When he finally made the top through a thinning stream, there was not much to see.
Seemingly the group had arranged their demo round a short run of back-to-back stone seats used in high summer by office staff to eat their frugal lunch in sight of the eternal river. There was a litter of specimen grasses trampled underfoot, a torn banner whose message was no longer readable, and kicked under one of the seats was a sling purse in dark brown leather.
Lockhart pulled it out of its hole and stood weighing it in his hand. The security tender was already fifty meters off with all the agitators on board.
Maybe he should hand it in at the nearest precinct law enforcement post. On the other hand, it could have been shoved under there as the nearest hiding place. It could be an embarrassment. Getting it back might be like having a dumped pack of compromising prints returned by a zealous dog.
A voice at his elbow identified the owner. It was Zacchaeas down from his high place and looking smaller than might be expected.
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