Luther Chen-Wong screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice was almost inaudibly low at first. "Conn, I just had a call from Jerry and Clyde. I think we can knock off work on that ship we're building now. We won't need it." "Have they found a ship?" If they had, it would be the first one anybody had found. "Where?" "They haven't found _a_ ship, Conn; they've found all of them. All the ships in the Alpha System except the _Harriet Barne_ and the two they're building at Storisende. The place is marked on the map as Sickle Mountain Naval Observatory. It's just a bitty little dot, but the map was made before the evacuation started. It's where most of the troops in the system were embarked on hyperships, I think. Wait till I show you the views." Conn put on another screen; the first view was from an altitude of five miles. He didn't need Luther's voice to identify Sickle Mountain; a long curve, with a spur at right angles to one end, the name must have suggested itself to whoever saw it first. The observatory had been built where the handle of the sickle joined the blade; as the ship from which the view had been taken had approached, the details grew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plain inside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like tinsel dust on red-brown velvet. "Great Ghu, are those all ships?" "That's right. Look at this one, now." The view changed. The aircraft was down, now, below the crest of the mountain, circling slowly above the plain. Hundreds, no, over a thousand, of them; two- and three-and five-hundred-footers, and here and there a thousand-footer that could have been converted into a hypership if anybody had wanted to take the trouble. The view changed again; this time from an aircar dropped from the ship, he supposed; it was down almost to the tops of the ships, and he could read names and home ports: _Pixie_, Chloris; _Helen O'Loy_, Anaitis. They were from Jurgen. _Sky-Rover_, Port Saunders; she was from Horvendile. Ships from Storisende, and Yellowmarsh on Janicot, and.... "Now we know where they all went." It was logical, of course. Most of the hyperships used in the evacuation had been built here. It had been less trouble to lead the troops and the civilian workers from Poictesme and the other planets onto small normal-space ships and bring them here than to take the big ships away on short interplanetary runs to the other planets. "Have you screened my father yet?" "Yes. This is going to knock the bottom out of the companies that are building those ships at Storisende, I'm afraid." "Their tough luck." "It could be everybody's tough luck. Both those companies have been issuing stock, and there's been a lot of speculation in it. This market's so inflated now that a puncture at one place might blow the whole thing out." He knew that. He shrugged. "Father will have to think of something. Tell him I'll screen him from Sickle Mountain." Then he went back to his classroom.