he continent under them
curving away to a distant sun-reflecting sea; beyond the curved horizon,
the black sky was spangled with unwinking stars. Fifty miles down, the
sun glinted from the three thousand foot globes of the two
transport-cruisers, _Canopus_ and _Mizar_.

Another screen, from _Mizar_, gave a clearer if more circumscribed view
of the surface--green countryside, veined by rivers and wrinkled with
mountains; little towns that were mere dots; a scatter of white clouds.
Nothing that looked like roads. There had been no native sapient race on
this planet, and in the thirteen centuries since it had been colonized
the Terro-human population had never completely lost the use of
contragravity vehicles. In that screen, farther down, the four
destroyers, _Irma_, _Irene_, _Isobel_ and _Iris_, were tiny twinkles.

* * * * *

From _Irene_, they had a magnified view of the city. On the maps, none
later than eight hundred years old, it was called Zeggensburg; it had
been built at the time of the first colonization under the old Terran
Federation. Tall buildings, rising from wide interspaces of lawns and
parks and gardens, and, at the very center, widely separated from
anything else, the mass of the Citadel, a huge cylindrical tower rising
from a cluster of smaller cylinders, with a broad circular landing stage
above, topped by the newly raised flag of the Galactic Empire.

There was a second city, a thick crescent, to the south and east. The
old maps placed the Zeggensburg spaceport there, but not a trace of that
remained. In its place was what was evidently an industrial district,
located where the prevailing winds would carry away the dust and smoke.
There was quite a bit of both, but the surprising thing was the streets,
long curved ones, and shorter ones crossing at regular intervals to form
blocks. He had never seen a city with streets before, and he doubted if
anybody else on the Empire ships had. Long boulevards to give
unobstructed passage to low-level air-traffic, of course, and short
winding walkways, but not things like these. Pictures, of course, of
native cities on planets colonized at the time of the Federation, and
even very ancient ones of cities on pre-Atomic Terra. But these people
had contragravity; the towering, wide-spaced city beside this
cross-gridded anachronism proved that.

They knew so little about this planet which they had come to bring under
Imperial rule.