"The raw? I do it all the time." Dusty took another puff and swung his
feet overboard onto the deck. It was not deliberate, Dusty was just
uninhibited and the question of wandering across a cabin dressed in
nothing did not even occur to him. The nurse said, "I'll be waiting for
you in the salon." She left, not precipitately, but with a certain air
that removed all embarrassment.
Dusty showered and shaved and dressed in his cleaned uniform. When he
got to the salon, Barbara was there already, also freshened and cleaned.
"So this," she said, "is Marandis."
The nurse nodded cheerfully. "This is Marandis. You'll have to tell me
how your Terra is; I've never been anywhere near that far from home,
you know."
"Sure," nodded Dusty. "But now that we're on Marandis, what do we do
next?"
"Oh. I'm to escort you to a formal meeting of the Bureau where you'll
meet Gant Nerley face to face."
"How's Scyth Radnor?"
"Why, he's doing very well. He's hospitalized and he'll be out and
howling for the skin of the man that shot him in about a week."
"He'd better take a month off for practise, first," grinned Dusty.
"Or," chuckled the nurse, "leave other men's women alone."
"Yes," agreed Barbara.
* * * * *
The nurse nodded. "You're very attractive," she said with no trace of
jealousy or envy. "I can see Scyth getting side-tracked along your
direction. I am a little disappointed in Scyth--seems to me he could do
better than a frauland for you."
"Better than a what?"
"Frauland. That bauble he gave you. You wouldn't know, of course,
but it comes from Selira, a stellar colony not far from here. It's
incredibly cheap."
Barbara tore the chain getting the bauble away from her. "Next time,"
she promised sharply, "I'll plug Scyth Radnor myself!"
The nurse shuddered a bit. Dusty merely laughed and said, "So now we
know where we stand. And now knowing, I'm hungry."
"Of course. We'll all dine at the meeting."
"Oh?"
"Naturally. You're here, aren't you? Marandis is not going to send you
back without a chance for you to present your case. There is a joint
meeting of the Bureaus of Galactic Navigation and New Colonial Affairs.
It will start with a formal breakfast during which no business will
be conducted. Then, once you are all acquainted with one another, the
business of the day will be discussed and a decision rendered."
She led them to the spacelock and Dusty Britton had his first glimpse
of a Marandanian spaceport. There was precious little to see, which
made it even more stunning to the senses.
The size of the place was completely obscured by spacecraft which stood
like the trunks in a pine forest. Most of the craft were larger than
Dusty's and so obscured his vision. Between those nearby (which were
rather wide-set) there were others at a little distance, and beyond
them there were still others, and behind those others were more
and more and more until all that could be seen were the tips of the
upthrust noses. The horizon was an irregular pattern of pointed shapes
that was somewhat reminiscent of the Greek egg and dart moulding of
ancient architecture.
Through some of the more distant lines of sight, the far spacecraft had
a haze around it, as though it were miles and miles away.
There was not a building to be seen, only spacecraft.
Dusty gave up trying to penetrate the forest to the edge of the 'port
and directed his attention to his nearby surroundings.
A road wound around in a zigzag manner, meeting and dividing around
each ship. There was an empty landing block not far from them, and
after a bit of puzzled interest--the shape of the block caught
Dusty's memory--he decided that the landing block was hexagonal. So
were all the rest of the landing blocks. Hexagonal pattern, like the
well-known hexagon tile floor; the road was the marker-lines between
the hex-shaped landing blocks. Those that were empty showed the effect
of heavy masses parked on them; a bit of char now and then; a chip or a
crack, probably made by a rough landing; a deep seam repaired with some
sort of cement or concrete (or whatever the Marandanians had devised
or discovered as a superior material) and at least one place where
the edge of the block had been chipped deeply as though the pilot had
missed his landing point and come down on the edge of the hexagonal
block.
* * * * *
As they looked, a muted whir attracted their attention and they turned
to see a ship lowering itself out of the sky to come down in a slowing
vertical drop that ended at the edge of a curtain of nearby spacecraft.
The landing ship inserted itself in the pattern behind ships until only
its nose was visible. Then to one side--and apparently with no warning,
a ship nosed upward, gaining speed rapidly until it disappeared in the
bright blue sky above.
The nurse said, "We land a ship every thirty seconds. There's a
take-off every thirty seconds, too."
"That is a lot of activity," said Dusty, swallowing the daily figure
with some amazement--7,200 ships landing--a like number taking
off--every hour, night and day. The traffic added up to a rather
monumental figure. No wonder they required a huge spaceport.
"Marandis is the center of Galactic culture," said the nurse proudly.
"And this is only the spaceport that handles affairs of the Space
Administration Department. Each of the many Departments of Galactic
Government has its own spaceport. The one at the Department of Space
Commerce is the largest because that is the one that takes care of
incoming transports carrying the necessities of living."
"Don't you do anything for yourself?"
"We have no room. Marandis is an urban planet. The only parts that
are not built-up are preserves, parks and recreation-forestry. There
is nothing on the entire planet that does not serve directly toward
Galactic Administration, in one manner or another."
Dusty nodded. He could grasp this even though the magnitude was great.
By simple proportion, if it took one complete city to administer the
government for a country, it should take one planet to administer the
government of a galaxy. He wondered even then how they managed to get
it all in.
He smiled and made a wave at the landing ramp. He had seen everything
he could see from the little platform outside of the spacelock.
At the bottom, in the zigzag road, was a lone, low-slung vehicle with
a man in a simple uniform leaning indolently against the wheel. He was
smoking a cigarette which he tossed onto the landing block as they
came down. He fired up the thing under the nose of the car after they
were inside, and as soon as the door slammed, he let the clutch out
with a rap and the car jack-rabbited into motion. They took off from a
standing start like a frightened deer at about five degrees lift so
that by the time Dusty and Barbara had pulled their heads forward from
the jerked-back angle, the car was about thirty feet in the air and
arrowing forward above the road. The speed climbed rapidly until Dusty
estimated something near to a hundred miles per hour.
The driver was, of course, cutting the tips of the corners between the
hexagonal blocks in a die-true line of flight and naturally paying no
attention to the zigzag road below them. Since the spacecraft were all
standing in the center of their particular blocks, like a bunch of
chessmen parked on a tile floor, there was plenty of space between the
ships themselves for such passage. Even at their thirty-foot altitude,
which raised them to a point on most ships where the bowed-out flanks
were quite wide, there was room to spare.
And now that they were in one of the aisles, distant buildings could be
seen dead ahead. It must have been ten miles from their landing block
to the edge of the spaceport.
The driver barreled along this aisle with the self-assurance of any
taxi-driver, hooting his horn now and then as they came to what seemed
to be a major intersection of the zigzag road below. Dusty wondered
worriedly what happened when two of these characters met in a draw,
because the man seemed to pay no attention to any other noise but his
own, which he made with great confidence, in the other guy.
Dusty was beginning to wonder about the need for any road below when
his question was answered by a caravan of heavy trucks making their way
along the road. They zipped over the caravan and were gone by the time
Dusty realized that air-travel was not for heavy cargo.
* * * * *
The buildings at the end of the aisle between the spacecraft loomed
larger. The driver whipped along at his thirty-foot altitude, making no
attempt to climb over the buildings which were growing taller and more
massive at a frightening rate. Dusty's palms went wet; the buildings
had seemed minute when they turned into the aisle, but now they were
tall and massive and millions and millions of windows could be seen,
with magnificent arches between the buildings spanning the gaps.
The aircab whipped across an empty perimeter about the
hexagonal-pattern of landing blocks, sped above a low building, and
howled into the tiny space between two buildings with an arch above
and a roof below, and then went into a flat climb. The car rose slowly
in the canyon between the buildings that lined the street below. There
were people working in those buildings, men and women that sat at
their desks behind windows and paid no attention to the passage of a
hundred-mile-per-hour skycab within forty feet of them.
Then the car was above the roof-level but it kept to the street-lanes.
Below them were the streets, and in the valley was slow-moving traffic,
ground cars and air-cars that ran at different levels to avoid
intersection-collisions. Up in the higher strata were the fast-moving
aircabs, each moving in its lane, and each lane for a different
direction. Even with separate lanes the traffic was a turmoil; constant
jockeying to gain position, to avoid trouble, to move a level higher
or a level lower so that a corner could be turned without entering the
intersection at the wrong level.
To make a right turn the driver jockeyed himself to the top of the
altitude allowed that line of traffic, and in the block before his turn
he rose above his lane, made his turn, and then entered the right-bound
traffic pattern from below, mingling with the speeding aircabs. To make
a left turn, the driver dropped to the floor of his lane, fell below,
made his turn, and mingled with the left-bound turmoil from above their
upper limit of altitude.
They raced along in the middle-altitude at high speed; cars above them,
below them, to the left and right, before and behind.
"My God!" breathed Dusty, "New York at rush hour--in three dimensions."
Their driver turned and winked at them. He flicked a lighter with
one hand and lit the smoke that was hanging from one corner of his
mouth. "Yeah man," he drawled. "Some of them guys should ought to take
lessons."
Then he turned back to his job with a shrug, lost a hundred feet of
altitude in three hundred feet of run, and whizzed around a corner and
fitted his aircab into a space between traffic that was just large
enough to let him in without scratching paint. The other cars moved up,
aside, down or sped or slowed to give him elbow room. He fought them
for position, dropping on a descending run through this cross traffic
until he whipped out of traffic on a spiral over the roof-top of one of
the buildings.
* * * * *
Here the driver phlegmatically put the aircab into a tight corkscrew
that dropped them onto the roof. Dusty got out slowly, testing the
stiffness of his knees after the ride. He helped Barbara out next and
the nurse came out on the other side at the same time.
Then they were almost roofed as the aircab took off on a flat,
screaming '_U_' turn that lofted him no more than ten feet, whipped
across the street between levels and swooped him down on the opposite
side, where he hit the other roof without a bounce and came to a fast
braking stop beside a man who had flagged him.
The man got in and the aircab whiffled off the roof in a crazy climbing
turn and burrowed into the fast traffic lane above. It forced its way
into the mass of traffic and was lost in a matter of seconds.
"Holy Rockets!"
Barbara wiped her damp forehead with the back of a shaking hand.
"Oh--for a film of this!"
Dusty grinned weakly. "Shucks, Barb. What's a fender for if you don't
fend with it?"
Quietly their nurse turned from the spectacle and led them to a roof
kiosk and down some steps into an elevator....
The operator cut the ropes and let them drop slightly slower than the
free-fall constant of the planet Marandis, leaving their stomachs
somewhere up on the hundred and ninety-first floor. He braked the
elevator somewhere down below-below-below, and their innards caught up
with them in such a sudden rush it buckled their knees.
Along a magnificent corridor and through massive carved doors opened
for them by men in uniform, and then they were ushered into a vast
ornamented room with a vaulted ceiling, tapestried walls, and a
polished floor. Deep armchairs were waiting around a huge table that
glistened with polished metal and blinding white cloth, the severity
broken by color of dish and fruit and fluid. Soft stringed music filled
the air that was also lightly scented.
As they entered, the music bridged from the stringed fugue to a
magnificent orchestration and the scent changed subtly from languid
sweetness to a pungent aroma that compelled the senses to pleasant
attention. The soft-key lighting swirled across the vaulted ceiling and
changed into a colored brilliance that made the blood leap high.
The music slid into a soft passage and a vibrant voice announced:
"Dusty Britton, Commander in Chief of The Junior Division of The Terran
Space Patrol. Barbara Crandall, Thespian and Vocal Musician of Terra.
In attendance, Lela Brandis, Mistress of Extra-Marandanian Medicine."
The music crashed, the scent came heavy and sharp, and the lights
flashed like the licking of summer lightning and came to rest outlining
them brilliantly.
Gant Nerley crossed the huge room and held out his hand to Dusty
Britton.
"We need no introduction, Dusty Britton," he said in a ringing tone. "I
say 'Greeting' to you with all my heart!"
Another stab of music, a touch of cinnamon-scent, and a play of lights.
Gant Nerley turned. "Stop the dramatics," he commanded. "What are we,
children to be impressed by theatrical tricks?"
The music shifted back to the string ensemble, the scent smoothed out
to something pleasant and pungent, and the lights faded back to their
neutral medium-key. Dusty thought that if this lights-and-music stuff
was strictly off the cuff, ad-lib, someone was a past master at the art
of extemporaneous composition. He liked it. And if it took Marandanian
children to appreciate it, you could give him ten years in school and
call him the Marandanian child.
Gant Nerley was holding out an elbow to Barbara. She took it and
the Marandanian led her towards the head of the table. Dusty looked
around; then he offered his own elbow to the nurse--Mistress of
Extra-Marandanian Medicine, Lela Brandis.
It was many years before Dusty identified the things he had for
breakfast. It was exotic and well-prepared; none of it was remotely
familiar but all of it was good.
Then over the after-dinner drinks and smokes, Gant Nerley rose, rapped
the table with his knuckles, and proposed the problem for the day.
* * * * *
"What are we going to do about Sol?" asked Gant Nerley seriously. Dusty
eyed the Marandanian soberly. "Leave it alone, I hope."
"You realize what you are asking?"
"My God! Do we have to go through all that mishmash again?"
"Again?"
Dusty slammed the table with his fist hard enough to make the glassware
jump. "Again and again. I'm getting sick and tired of explaining all
the many reasons why none of us want to move to another star and lose
a thousand years. And then being told that after all it won't hurt a
bit, and besides this move is necessary--and if we don't move willingly
we'll be moved anyway forcibly."
"Why are you so angry?"
Dusty looked at Gant Nerley and sat down wearily. "Because," he said
patiently, "all of us know that no matter what, you're going to go on
and do it anyway--but not until you've forced yourself to believe that
you have convinced us that we should accept this kick in the pants
gracefully."
"It isn't that simple."
"No?"
"No, it isn't. You see, we are bound by our own laws to hold to certain
programs under certain conditions. It is the conditions which prevail
that we are attempting to define, outline, determine, and pin down so
that we know what lawful action may be taken."
"You sound like a bureaucrat explaining away an awkward situation. Just
what do you mean by conditions and programs?"
Gant picked them off on his fingers. "There are the following," he
said. "First would be a race--remember I am talking about all the
races of mankind strewn across the galaxy; the races that are us, you
and we and all the rest that stem from a single source, the origin of
which is lost in the antiquity of a hundred thousand years. So, first
would be a race which was still in the growing-up stage, say the mound
building, early agricultural, perhaps later, in early metal. An age of
no true scientific grasp; what little of science they know has come
by guesswork, blundering discovery and hit-or-miss experiment. Such
a race could be moved across space without a qualm, because it would
only bring about a rather deep period of superstitious horror and a
religious fear. A few hundred years later the tale would be completely
discounted, because the astronomers would be rising and stating flatly
that no agency in the universe could change the constant stars. The
old sky would be wiped out of men's memory in a couple of generations,
although it might remain in myth and fairy tale for a long time. Such a
set of conditions would permit the moving program without a qualm."