The skit-trees began where the ground grew fairly level, and they went on beyond the horizon. They were clumps of thin and brittle stalks which rose straight up for eighty feet and then branched out and bore copious quantities of a fruit for which no human being could imagine any possible use. Each clump of trees was a geometrically perfect circle sixty feet in diameter. There was always just ninety-two feet between clumps. They reached out in rows far beyond the limit of vision. Only the day before, the flier had covered fifteen hundred miles of westing without coming to the end of this particular planting.
With the flier hovering, Wentworth used a high-power telescope to search below. He hunted for long, long minutes, examining minutely every square foot of half a dozen between-clump aisles without result. There was no sign of the passage of any creature, much less of the apparition he would much rather not believe in.
"I think," he said reluctantly, "I'm going to have to go down and hunt on foot. Maybe there wasn't anything. Maybe I'm crazy."
Haynes said mildly:
"Speaking of craziness, is or isn't that city yonder a delusion?"
He pointed, and Wentworth jerked about. Many, many miles away, something reared upward beyond the horizon. It was indubitably a city—and they had searched nine planets over without finding a single scrap of chipped stone to prove the reality of the skit-tree planters. Wentworth could see separate pinnacles and what looked like skyways connecting them far above-ground. He snapped his camera to his binoculars and focused them—and of course the camera with them. He saw architectural details of bewildering complexity. He snapped the shutter of his camera.
"That," said Wentworth, "gets top priority. There's no doubt about this!"
The thing he had seen before sunrise was so completely incredible that it was easier to question his vision than to believe in it. He flung over the jet-controls so that the drive jets took the fuel from the supporting ones. The flier went roaring toward the far-away city.
"Take over," he told Haynes. "I'm going to call McRae back. He'll break down and cry with joy."
He pushed the call-button. Seconds later a voice came out of the communicator, muffled and made indistinct by the roar of the jets. Wentworth reported. He turned a tiny television scanner on the huge, lacy construction rising from a site still beyond the horizon. McRae's shout of satisfaction was louder than the jets. He bellowed and cut off instantly.
"The Galloping Cow," said Wentworth, "is shoving off. McRae's giving this position and telling all mapping-parties to make for it. And he'll climb out of atmosphere to get here fast. He wants to see that city!"
The flier wobbled, as Haynes' hands on the controls wobbled.
"What city?" he asked in an odd voice.
Wentworth stared unbelievingly. There was nothing in sight but the lunatic rows of skit-trees, stretching out with absolutely mechanical exactitude to the limit of vision on the right, on the left, ahead, and behind to the very base of the mountains. There simply wasn't any city. Wentworth gaped.
"Pull that film out of the camera. Take a look at it. Were we seeing things?"
Haynes pulled out the already-developed film. The city showed plainly. It had gone on television to the Galloping Cow, too. It had not been an illusion. Wentworth pushed the call-button again as the flier went on toward a vanished destination. After a moment he swore.
"McRae lost no time! He's out of air already, and our set won't reach him. —Where'd that city go?"
He set the supersonic collision alarm in action, then the radar. They revealed nothing. The city simply no longer existed.
They searched incredulously for twenty minutes, at four hundred miles an hour. The radar picked up nothing. The collision-alarm picked up no echoes.
"It was here!" growled Wentworth. "We'll go back and start over!"
He sent the flier hurtling back toward the hills and the embankment where it had rested during the night. The communicator rasped a sudden furious burst of static. Wentworth, for no reason whatever, jerked his eyes behind. The city was there again.
Haynes photographed it feverishly as the flier banked and whirled back toward it. For a full minute it was in plain view, and the static was loud. Then the static cut off. Simultaneously, the city vanished once more.
Again a crazy circling. But the utterly monotonous landscape below showed no sign of a city-site, and it was impossible to be sure that the flier actually quartered the ground below, or whether it circled over the same spot again and again, or what.
"If McRae turns up in the Galloping Cow," said Haynes, "and doesn't find a damned thing, maybe he'll think we've all gone crazy and had better go home. And then—"
"Then you'll get married!" said Wentworth savagely. "Skip it! I've got an idea! Back to the mountains once more. . . ."
The flier whirled yet again and sped back toward its night's resting-place. Ten miles from it, and five thousand feet up, the static began still again. Wentworth kicked a smoke-bomb release and whirled the flier about so sharply that his head snapped forward from the sudden centrifugal force. There was the city. The flier roared straight for it. Static rattled out of the communicator. One minute. Two. He kicked the smoke-bomb release again. Already the first bomb had hit ground and ignited. A billowing mass of smoke welled up from its position. The second reached ground and made a second smoke-signal. Ten miles on, he dropped a third. The smoke-signals would burn for an hour, and gave him a perfect line on the vanishing city. This time it did not vanish. It grew larger and larger, and details appeared, and more details. . . .
It was a unit; a design of infinite complexity, but so perfectly integrated that it was a single design. Story upon story, with far-flung skyways connecting its turrets, it was a vision of completely alien beauty. It rose ten thousand feet from the skit-trees about its base. Its base was two miles square.
"They built high," said Wentworth grimly, "so they wouldn't use any extra ground they could plant their damned skit-trees on. I'm going to land short of it, Haynes."
The vertical jets took over smoothly as he cut the drive. The flier slowed, and two blasts forward stopped it dead, and then it descended smoothly. Wentworth had checked not more than a hundred yards from the outermost tower. It appeared to be made of completely seamless metal, incised with intricate decorative designs. Which was incredible. But the most impossible thing of all was that there was no movement anywhere. No stirring. No shifting. Not even furtive twinklings as of eyes peering from the strangely-shaped window-openings. And when the flier landed gently between two circular clumps of skit-trees and Wentworth cut off the jets and then turned off even the communicator—then there was silence.
The silence was absolute. Two miles high, there towered a city which could house millions of people. And it was utterly without noise and utterly without motion in any part.
"And then the prince went into the castle," said Wentworth savagely, "and he kissed the Sleeping Beauty on the lips, and she opened her eyes with a glad little cry, and they were married and lived happily ever after. Coming, Haynes?"
"I'll come," said Haynes. "But I don't kiss anybody. I'm engaged!"
Wentworth got out of the flier. Never yet had they found a single dangerous animal on any of the nine planets on which skit-trees grew—barring whatever it was he had seen that morning. Whoever planted skit-trees wiped out dangerous fauna. That had been one of the few seeming certainties. But all the same, Wentworth put a flame-pistol in his belt before he started for the city.
And then he stopped short. There was a flickering. The city was blotted out. A blank metal wall stood before him. It reared all around the flier and the men in it. Between them and the city. Shining, seamless, gleaming metal, perfectly circular and a hundred feet high. It neatly enclosed a circle two hundred yards across, and hence some clumps of skit-trees with the men.