Haklyut was a very important person, an architectural genius whose creative skill had won him an international reputation.

The City was famous and magnificent, a brand-new Latin-American showplace, built from scratch in the heart of the jungle with no expense spared, to prove to the world what a "backward" country could accomplish when its dictator really put his resources to work.

Yet Haklyut had been called in as consultant to solve the absurd of slums that had already developed under the flying roadways and high-arched bridgesof this most beautiful, most modern, and most up-to-date urban Paradise.