A high tower rose out of the middle of Port Carpenter, with a
glass-domed mushroom top. That would be the telecast station; the
administrative buildings were directly below it and around its base.
He came in slowly over the city, above a spaceport with its empty
landing pits in a double circle around a traffic-control building,
and airship docks and warehouses beyond. More steel mills. Factories,
either hemispherical domes or long buildings with rounded tops.
Ship-construction yards and docks; for the most part, these were
empty, but on some of them the landing-stands of spaceships, like
eight-and ten-legged spiders, waiting for forty years for hulls to be
built on them. A few spherical skeletons of ships, a few with some of
the outer skin on. It wasn't until he was passing close to them that
he realized how huge they were. And stacks of material--sheet steel,
deckplate, girders--and contragravity lifters and construction
machines, all left on jobs that were never finished, the bright
rustless metal dulled by forty years of rain and windblown red dust.
They must have been working here to the very last, and then, when the
evacuation elsewhere was completed, they had dropped whatever they
were doing, piled into such ships as were completed, and lifted away.
The mushroom-topped tower rose from the middle of a circular building
piled level on level, almost half a mile across. He circled over it,
saw an airship dock, and called the _Harriet Barne_ while Jacquemont
talked to Jerry Rivas, piloting the manipulator-boat. Rivas came in
and joined them in the air; they hovered over the dock and helped the
ship down when she came in, nudging her into place.
By the time Conn and Jacquemont and Rivas and Anse Dawes and Roddell
and Youtsko and Karanja were out on the dock in oxygen helmets, the
ship's airlock was opening and Nichols and Vibart and the others were
coming out, towing a couple of small lifters loaded with equipment.
The airlocked door into the building, at the end of the dock, was
closed; when somebody pulled the handle, it refused to open. That
meant it was powered from the central power plant, wherever that was.
There was a plug socket beside it, with the required voltage marked
over it. They used an extension line from a power unit on one of the
lifters to get it open, and did the same with the inner door; when it
was open, they passed into a dim room that stretched away ahead of
them and on either side.
It looked like a freight-shipping room; there were a few piles of
boxes and cases here and there, and a litter of packing material
everywhere. A long counter-desk, and a bank of robo-clerks behind it.
According to the air-analyzer, the oxygen content inside was safely
high. They all pulled off their fishbowl helmets and slung them.
"Well, we can bunk inside here tonight," somebody said. "It won't be
so crowded here."
"We'll bunk here after we find the power plant and get the ventilator
fans going," Jacquemont said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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