"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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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