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keeping it in good repair. The streets are murderous on equipment, and the wheels in particular must be attended to with constant watchfulness. But even if you manage to stay on top of these matters, there is the additional obligation of never letting the cart out of your sight. Since the carts have become so valuable, they are especially coveted by thieves—and no calamity could be more tragic than losing your cart. Most scavengers therefore invest in some kind of tether device known as an “umbilical cord”—meaning a rope, or a dog leash, or a chain, which you literally tie around your waist and then attach to the cart. This makes walking a cumbersome business, but it is worth the trouble. Because of the noise these chains make as the cart goes bumping along the street, scavengers are often referred to as “musicians.”
    An object hunter must go through the same registration procedures as a garbage collector and is subject to the same random inspections, but his work is of a different kind. The garbage collector looks for waste; the object hunter looks for salvage. He is in search of specific goods and materials that can be used again, and though he is free to do whatever he likes with the objects he finds, he generally sells them to one of the Resurrection Agents around the city—private entrepreneurs who convert these odds and ends into new goods that are eventually sold on the open market. The Agents perform a multiple function—part junk dealer, part manufacturer, part shopkeeper—and with other modes of production in the city now nearly extinct, they are among the richest and most powerful people around, rivaled only by the garbage brokers themselves. A good object hunter, therefore, can stand to make an acceptable living from his work. But you must be quick, you must be clever, and youmust know where to look. Young people tend to do best at it, and it is rare to see an object hunter who is over twenty or twenty-five. Those who cannot make the grade must soon look for other work, for there is no guarantee that you will get anything for your efforts. Garbage collectors are an older and more conservative lot, content to toil away at their jobs because they know it will provide them with a living—at least if they work as hard as they can. But nothing is really sure, for the competition has become terrible at all levels of scavenging. The scarcer things become in the city, the more reluctant people are to throw anything out. Whereas previously you would not think twice about tossing an orange rind onto the street, now even the rinds are ground up into mush and eaten by many people. A frayed T-shirt, a pair of torn underpants, the brim of a hat—all these things are now saved, to be patched together into a new set of clothes. You see people dressed in the most motley and bizarre costumes, and each time some patchwork person walks by, you know that he has probably put another object hunter out of work.
    Nevertheless, that is what I went in for—object hunting. I was lucky enough to begin before my money ran out. Even after I bought the license (seventeen glots), the cart (sixty-six glots), a leash and a new pair of shoes (five glots and seventy-one glots), I still had more than two hundred glots left over. This was fortunate, for it gave me a certain margin of error, and at that point I needed all the help I could get. Sooner or later, it would be sink or swim—but for the moment I had something to hold on to: a piece of floating wood, a chunk of flotsam to bear my weight.
    In the beginning, it did not go well. The city was new for me back then, and I always seemed to be lost. I squanderedtime on forays that yielded nothing, bad hunches on barren streets, being in the wrong spot at the wrong time. If I happened to find something, it was always because I had stumbled onto it by accident. Chance was my only approach, the purely gratuitous act of seeing a thing with my own two eyes and then bending down to pick it