Records from the colony's founding years stated that the town of Ferrydock had grown from an early base established near the river mouth, where a motorized pontoon raft originally provided the crossing to the peninsula. With its rocky prominences, dunes, and beaches, the peninsula, which later came to be called Strandside, was an attractive place for walks and swims, or just lazing around to get away from the routine of the settlement for a while. Later, it acquired some stores, a bar, and a small hotel and restaurant to become one of the more popular recreation spots. Although Ferrydock was now a fair-size town, and a sleek concrete bridge with a raisable center section--sitting incongruously on ornate steel piers reminiscent of nineteenth-century ideas of aesthetics--crossed the river, a ferryboat still ran alongside it. Not everybody was in enough of a hurry to need the road, one of the locals had explained to Duggan and another official with the mission sent from Earth to reestablish relations with Tharle. And besides, the kids liked the water ride. Notions of cost-effectiveness didn't seem to count for much here. And that fitted with the other bizarre notions of economics that had taken root, which the theorists up in the orbiting mother ship Barnet had already decided were probably the major factor responsible for the planet's evident regression from the levels of technological and political capability possessed by the founders.
Duggan stood in the "square," an open space at the heart of Ferrydock's central district--too irregular, really, to justify its name geometrically--bordered by narrow, erratic streets and buildings of the peculiarly curved architecture of orange brick walls and green or blue tiled roofs that brought back childhood memories of an illustrated edition of Oz. The Tharleans seemed to delight in turrets and towers too, which was odd, since there was no history of militancy or defense needs to have inspired them. Simply another of their peculiar whims and fancies expressing itself, Duggan supposed.
It was apparently market day. The stalls around the square were heaped with assortments of unfamiliar fruits, vegetable-like offerings, and other plant forms that grew under the purple-tinted sky. There were racks of strange fish, joints of meat, tanks of live fish, and cages containing furry and feathered animals of various kinds, whether intended for food or as pets, Duggan didn't know. And there were tables displaying tools and other hardware, ornaments, art works, kitchen ware, haberdashery, household goods, and clothing--much the same as market places anywhere, anytime. He watched a tall, weathered-looking man in a gray shirt and loose blue jacket, who was examining a pair of ceramic sculptures in the form of elongated feminine heads suggestive of styled Oriental features.
"How much for these?" he asked the graying-haired lady in charge of the stall. She was sitting in a chair, a many-colored, open-weave blanket pulled around her shoulders. A shaggy, yellow-haired creature with a huge-eyed, owl-like face studied the man alertly from the top of an upturned box next to her.
"Ten draks" the woman replied.
The dialect had drifted to a degree that now sounded quaint. Or was it that English as spoken on Earth had progressed? Schooling in Tharlean pronunciations, usage, and idioms had been required of all the delegates on the contact mission, and after a few days on the surface Duggan found he was experiencing few problems.
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