"Getting things balanced again."
"What are you going to do about all that stuff cluttering up our
beautiful planetoid?" She was near tears.
With Edna dogging his steps, he returned to the veranda, where his
julep was now quite thin and warm in the rays of the setting sun.
"We'll have to find out where it came from first," he said, staring
dismally over the mountains of machinery and grain, the tumbled stacks
of crates and barrels and kegs, the lesser rows of wheeled and winged
vehicles.
"Seems to me," Edna persisted, "that the invoices will show that." She
gestured at what remained of the stacks of printed forms.
The rest of the slips were strewn over the ground as far as he could
see. "Only the _first_ sheet will show the origin--_if_ we could ever
find it," Titus explained.
He went out to the air car, warmed it up and sent it churning skyward.
Near the attenuated top of the atmosphere, he was able to see exactly
how much extraneous stuff had been dumped on his world. The main area
of disposal seemed to have been within a two-mile radius of the house.
An ever-widening helical course, wending its way alternately from night
to day, eventually brought him on a great circle that sliced over both
poles. Then, with his searchlights still burning, he spiraled inward,
covering the other hemisphere. The rest of his world was in primal
order.
He started for home around the daylight side.
But even above the noise of his own rotorjets, the stridence of
descending freighters erupted in a pandemonium of sound all around him.
Great clouds of rockets, clustered in fleets, were darkening the sky
and raining down onto the surface.
He barely managed to pull out from under one of the formations before
it could pinch him against the ground. Swearing in oaths that he had
not used in years, he headed for the nearest group of ships. Before he
could close in, they had discharged their cargoes and thundered off
into space again.
He altered course for another detachment of freighters, only to meet
with the same frustrating results. By the time he had aimed his craft
at a third group, all the ships had blasted away, leaving everywhere
great, gleaming mounds and stacks and irregular rows of crates and
containers that completely obscured the surface.
Enraged, Titus gunned the craft for home. He picked his way between
several monstrous peaks of grain, some of them soaring nearly all the
way up through the six-hundred-foot-thick atmosphere, and threw on his
brakes to avoid collision with a tremendous pyramid of what looked like
corn kernels.
With stark apprehension, he envisioned his world shaking apart under
the eccentric forces. But he quelled his fears with logic: This new
addition of mass, apparently distributed evenly over all but the four
square miles that had already served as a dumping ground, would be
unbalanced only to a negligible degree.
* * * * *
Titus flicked on his landing lights as he headed into the night. But
from over the horizon came a glare considerably stronger than the
candlepower of his own electrical system. As he pulled up to the
mooring pylon, the explanation was evident.
Scores of Pullman crafts were packed so tightly around his house that
the blunt noses of several were sticking out over the veranda.
He cut off the idling jets. The militant strains of a Venurian march,
blaring from the instruments of a hundred-piece symphony, swelled up
mightily all around him. The orchestra itself was wedged between two
residential crafts while the roof of McWorther's generating house
served as the conductor's podium.
On the veranda, a full troupe of Simalean Ballet dancers swirled and
caracoled, not seeming to mind that they were occasionally overflowing
the tiles and flouncing not so lightly through Edna's caladiums.
His wife stood helplessly by, still gripping the autobroom which
she had evidently wielded without success in an attempt to rout the
intruders.
Dismayed, Titus elbowed his way through a dedicated choral group that
was patriotically rendering the "Fayothian Anthem," sidestepped a
tumbling foursome obviously from one of the Lesser Javapa planets and
pushed aside a debating team which was having little luck making itself
heard above the general cacophony.