e final shift, to
horizontal position, and turned the ship over to Nichols.

For a moment, the scout-boat tumbled away from the ship and Conn was
back in free fall. Then he got on the lift-and-drive and steadied it,
and pressed the trigger button, firing a green smoke bomb. Beside him,
Yves Jacquemont put on the radio and the screen pickups. He could see
the ship circling far above, and the manipulator-boat, with its
claw-arms and grapples, breaking away from it. Then he looked down on
the endless desert of iron oxide that stretched in all directions to
the horizon, until he saw a spot, optically the size of a
five-centisol piece, that was the shipbuilding city of Port Carpenter.
He turned the boat toward it, firing four more green smokes at
three-second intervals. The manipulator-boat started to follow, and
the _Harriet Barne_, now a distant speck in the sky, began coming
closer.

Below, as he cut speed and altitude, he could see the pock-marks of
open-pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal and
armor-glass roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces and
the twisted slag-flows, like the ancient lava-flows of Barathrum. And,
he reflected, he was an influential non-office-holding stockholder in
every bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storisende and get
claims filed.

A high tower rose out of the middle of Port Carpenter, with a
glass-domed mushroom top. That would be the telecast station; the
administrative buildings were directly below it and around its base.
He came in slowly over the city, above a spaceport with its empty
landing pits in a double circle around a traffic-control building,
and airship docks and warehouses beyond. More steel mills. Factories,
either hemispherical domes or long buildings with rounded tops.
Ship-construction yards and docks; for the most part, these were
empty, but on some of them the landing-stands of spaceships, like
eight-and ten-legged spiders, waiting for forty years for hulls to be
built on them. A few spherical skeletons of ships, a few with some of
the outer skin on. It wasn't until he was passing close to them that
he realized how huge they were. And stacks of material--sheet steel,
deckplate, girders--and contragravity lifters and construction
machines, all left on jobs that were never finished, the bright
rustless metal dulled by forty years of rain and windblown red dust.
They must have been working here to the very last, and then, when the
evacua