"We got your order," the other snapped. "Where do you want it?"
Titus' small eyes widened with an inner vision of the automatic
bather--a vision which went on in speculation to dispose of the crude
shower-masseur, for which he and Edna were getting a bit too old.
"If you'll put it on the veranda--" He paused and shouted back toward
the house. "Edna, get out the grapplers. We're in business."
"Fun-ny," the skipper observed with dry derision. Then he signaled to
his waiting assistants.
They came forward and, one by one, thrust their stacks of printed
forms against Titus' chest. His arms came up in a reflex to accept the
offerings. But, as the third assistant's contribution sent the stack
soaring in front of his face, he went down under the weight.
When he had extricated himself from the mound of paper, the men had
returned to their ship. And now its sides were folding down and scores
of huge crates were drifting out on repulsor beams and fluttering to
the ground.
Soon the freighter was gone and Edna was at his side.
"What _have_ you gotten us into now, Titus?"
"Honest, Love--I don't know."
Suddenly his ears were splitting with the thunderous roar of a thousand
ships plunging down to the surface as far as he could see around the
perimeter of his small world. Each pulled to a halt a few feet from the
ground, opened its sides and disgorged vast mounds of crates and sacks,
boxes and barrels, naked hills of coarse material that hissed like
gravel as it spewed from chutes, gleaming masses of machinery.
Confounded, Titus seized one of the slips of paper. It was an invoice
listing two hundred earth movers, seventy-five instant pavers, five
hundred concrete mixers.
Matching his frown, Edna read a second sheet and demanded, "What on
earth do you expect to do with a hundred thousand barrels of wheat germ
oil? Four thousand kegs of eight-penny nails? Forty-five hundred tons
of soybeans?"
* * * * *
At his secluded villa, Prime Minister Netath was entertaining his
foreign minister, Ugaza Bataul.
Netath leaned against the terrace bar and proposed a toast. "To an era
of plenty."