He shook hands again and watched Hoddan walk into the lift which raised him to the entrance port of the space-liner.
Twenty minutes later the forcefields of the giant landing-grid lifted the liner smoothly out to space. The vessel went out to five planetary diameters, where its Lawlor drive could take hold of relatively unstressed space. There the ship jockeyed for line, and then there was that curious, momentary disturbance of all one’s sensations which was the effect of the over-drive field going on. Then everything was normal again, except that the liner was speeding for the planet Krim at something more than thirty times the speed of light.
Normalcy extended through all the galaxy so far inhabited by men. There were worlds on which there was peace, and worlds on which there was tumult. There were busy, restful young worlds, and languid, weary old ones. From the Near Rim to the farthest of occupied systems, planets circled their suns, and men lived on them, and every man took himself seriously and did not quite believe that the universe had existed before he was born or would long survive his loss.
Time passed. Comets let out vast streamers like bridal veils and swept toward and around their suns. The liner bearing Hoddan sped through the void.
In time it made a landfall on the planet Krim. He went aground and observed the spaceport city. It was new and bustling with tall buildings and traffic jams and a feverish conviction that the purpose of living was to earn more money this year than last. Its spaceport was chaotically busy. Hoddan had time for swift sight-seeing in one city only. He saw slums and gracious public buildings, and went back to the spaceport and the liner which then rose upon the landing-grid’s forcefields until Krim was a great round ball below it. Then there was again a jockeying for line, and the liner winked out of sight and was again journeying at thirty times the speed of light.
Again time passed. In one of the most remote galaxies a super-nova flamed, and on a rocky, barren world a small living thing squirmed experimentally — to mankind the one event was just as important as the other.
But presently the liner from Walden via Krim appeared on Darth as the tiniest of shimmering pearly specks against the blue. To the north and east and west of the spaceport, rugged mountains rose steeply. Patches of snow showed here and there, and naked rock reared boldly in spurs and precipices. But there were trees on all the lower slopes, and there was not really a timber line.
The spaceliner increased in size, descending toward the landing-grid. The grid itself was a monstrous lattice of steel, a half-mile high and enclosing a circle not less in diameter. It filled the larger part of the level valley floor, and horned duryas and what Hoddan later learned were horses grazed in it. The animals paid no attention to the deep humming noise the grid made in its operation.
The ship seemed the size of a pea. Presently it was the size of an apple. Then it was the size of a basketball, and then it swelled enormously and put out spidery metal legs with large splay metal feet on which it alighted and settled gently to the ground. The humming stopped.
There were shoutings. Whips cracked. Straining, horn-tossing duryas heaved and dragged something, very deliberately, out from between warehouses and under the arches of the grid. There were two dozen of the duryas, and despite the shouts and whip cracking they moved with a stubborn slowness. It took a long time for the object with the big clumsy wheels to reach a spot below the spacecraft. Then it took longer, seemingly, for brakes to be set on each wheel, and then for the draft animals to be arranged to pull as two teams against each other.
More shoutings and whip-crackings. A long, slanting, ladder-like arm rose. It teetered, and a man with a vivid purple cloak rose with it at its very end. The ship’s airlock opened and a crewman threw a rope. The purple-cloaked man caught it and made it fast. From somewhere inside the ship, the line was hauled in. The end of the landing ramp touched the sill of the airlock. Somebody made these fast and the purple-cloaked man triumphantly entered the ship.
There was a pause. Men loaded carts with cargo to be sent to other remote planets. In the airlock, Bron Hoddan stepped to the unloading-ramp and descended to the ground. He was the only passenger. He had barely reached a firm footing when objects followed him. His own shipbag and then parcels, bales, boxes, and other such nondescript items of freight. For a mere five minutes the flow of freight continued. Darth was not an important center of trade.
Hoddan stared incredulously at the town outside one side of the grid. It was only a town, and was almost a village. Its houses had steep, gabled roofs, of which some seemed to be tile and others thatch. Its buildings leaned over the narrow streets, which were unpaved. They looked like mud. And there was not a power-driven ground-vehicle anywhere in sight, nor anything man-made in the air.
Great carts trailed out to the unloading-belt. They dumped bales of skins and ingots of metal, and more bales and more ingots. Those objects rode up to the airlock and vanished. Hoddan was ignored. He felt that without great care he might be crowded back into the reversed loading-belt and be carried back into the ship.
The loading process ended. The man with the purple cloak, who’d ridden the teetering ladder up, reappeared and came striding grandly down to ground. Somebody cast off, above. Ropes writhed, fell and dangled. The ship’s airlock door closed.
There was a vast humming sound. The ship lifted sedately. It seemed to hover momentarily over the group of duryas and humans in the center of the grid’s enclosure. But it was hovering. It shrank. It was rising in an absolutely vertical line. It dwindled to the size of a basketball and then an apple. Then to the size of a pea. And then that pea diminished until the spaceship from Krim, Walden, Cetis, Rigel and the Nearer Rim had become the size of a dust mote and then could not be seen at all. But one knew that it was going on to Lohala and Tralee and Famagusta and the Coalsack Stars.
Hoddan shrugged and began to trudge toward the warehouses. The durya-drawn landing-ramp began to roll slowly in the same direction. Carts and wagons loaded the stuff discharged from the ship. Creaking, plodding, with the curved horns of the duryas rising and falling, the wagons overtook Hoddan and passed him. He saw his shipbag on one of the carts. It was a gift from the Interstellar Ambassador on Walden. He’d assured Hoddan that there was a fund for the assistance of political refugees, and that the bag and its contents was normal. But in addition to this, Hoddan had a number of stun-pistols, formerly equipment of the police department of Warden’s capital city.
He followed his bag to a warehouse. Arrived there, he found the bag surrounded by a group of whiskered Darthian characters wearing felt pants and large sheath knives. They had opened the bag and were in the act of ferocious dispute about who should get what of its contents. Incidentally they argued over the stun-pistols, which looked like weapons but weren’t because nothing happened when one pulled the trigger. Hoddan grimaced. They’d been in store on the liner during the voyage. Normally they picked up a trickle charge from broadcast power, on Walden, but there was no broadcast power on the liner, nor on Darth. They’d leaked their charges and were quite useless. The one in his pocket would be useless, too.
He grimaced again and swerved to the building where the landing-grid control’s must be. He opened the door and went in. The interior was smoky and vile-smelling, but the equipment was wholly familiar. Two unshaven men in violently colored shirts languidly played cards. Only one, a redhead, paid attention to the controls of the landing-grid. He watched dials. As Hoddan pushed his way in, he threw a switch and yawned. The ship was five diameters out from Darth, and he’d released it from the landing-grid fields. He turned and saw Hoddan.