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It was hardly wobbling at all.
And Matt was faced with the most spectacular view he had ever known.
The fields and woods-orchards of Beta rolled beneath. Alpha Plateau was quite visible at this height. The Alpha-Beta cliff was a crooked line with a wide river following the bottom. The Long Fall. The river showed flashes of blue within the steep cha
Soon he would cross the cliff and turn toward the Hospital. Matt didn't know just what it looked like, but he was sure he'd recognize the huge hollow cylinders of the spacecraft. A few cars hovered over Beta, none very close, and a great many more showed like black midges over Alpha. They wouldn't bother him. He hadn't decided how close he would get to the Hospital before landing; even crew might not be permitted within a certain distance. Other than that he should be fairly safe from recognition. A car was a car, and only crew flew cars. Anyone who saw him would assume he was a crew.
It was a natural mistake. Matt never did realize just where he went wrong. He had fine judgment and good balance, and be was flying the car as well as was humanly possible. If someone had told him a ten-year-old crew child could do it better, he would have been hurt.
But a ten-year-old crew child would never have lifted a car without flipping the Gyroscope switch.
As usual, but much later than usual, Jesus Pietro had breakfast in bed. As usual, Major Jansen sat nearby, drinking coffee, ready to run errands and answer questions.
"Did you get the prisoners put away all right?"
"Yes, sir, in the vivarium. All but three. We didn't have room for them all."
"And they're in the organ banks?'
"Yes, Sir."
Jesus Pietro swallowed a grapefruit slice. "Let's hope they didn't know anything important. What about the deadheads?"
"We separated out the ones without ear mikes and turned them loose. Fortunately we finished before six o'clock. That's when the ear mikes evaporated."
"Evaporated, forsooth! Nothing left?"
"Doctor Gospin took samples of the air. He may find residues."
"It's not important. A nice trick, though, considering their resources," said Jesus Pietro.
After five minutes of uninterrupted munching and sipping sounds, he abruptly wanted to know, "What about Keller?"
"Who, Sir?"
"The one that got away."
And after three phone calls Major Jansen was able to say, "No reports from the colonist areas. Nobody's volunteered to turn him in. He hasn't tried to go home, or to contact any relative or anyone he knows professionally. None of the police in on the raid recognize his face. None will admit that someone got past him."
More silence, while Jesus Pietro finished his coffee., Then, "See to it that the prisoners are brought to my office one at a time. I want to find out if anyone saw the landing yesterday."
"One of the girls was carrying photos, Sir. Of package number three. They must have been taken with a scopic lens."
"Oh?" For a moment Jesus Pietro's thoughts showed clear behind a glass skull. Millard Parlette! If he found out--"I don't know why you couldn't tell me that before. Treat it as confidential. Now get on with it. No, wait a minute," he called as Jansen turned to the door. "One more thing. There may be basements that we don't know about. Detail a couple of echo-sounder teams for a house-to-house search on Delta and Eta Plateaus."
"Yes, sir. Priority?"
"No, no, no. The vivarium's two deep already. Tell them to-take their time."
The phone stopped Major Jansen from leaving. He picked it up, listened, then demanded, "Well, why 'call here? Hold on." With a touch of derision he reported, "A car approaching, sir, being flown in a reckless ma
"Now why the--mph. Could it be the same make as the car in Kane's basement?"
"I'll ask." He did. "It is, sir."
"I should have known there'd be a way to get it out of the basement. Tell them to bring it down."
Geologists (don't give me a hard time about that word) believed that Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of years ago, part of the planet's skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow extrusion had followed, with, viscous magma rising and cooling and rising and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top stood forty miles above the surface.
It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist the erosion of Mount Lookitthat's atmosphere.
And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier, and too high and too cold for comfort. Generally rivers and streams ran forth, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved deep canyons for themselves through the Southland. Both canyons ended in spectacular waterfalls. the tallest in the known universe. Generally the rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs and chasms.
Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical. Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted blocks and strange lakes with deep, pointed bottoms, and the land would have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of suburbia. The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around. The colonists had been forced to settle lower down. Though they were the more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and flying cars can make a distant mountain-home satisfactory where bicycles will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to live elbow to elbow with one's peers than out in the boondocks in splendid isolation. So Alpha Plateau was crowded. What Matt saw below him were all houses. They varied enormously in size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist's home. Two or three were as large as Matt's old grade school. When architectural coral first came to the Plateau, the crew had reserved it for their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style.
None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories tall. Someday there would be skyscrapers if the crew kept breeding. But in the distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead. Matt was begi
Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the empty space inside the i