ter they had a real
spaceship, elected themselves to that duty; it gave them plenty of
time for study. Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, with whomever they could
find to help them, were making a systematic search. They looked first
of all for foodstuffs, and found enough in the storerooms of three
restaurants on the executive level to feed their own party in gourmet
style for a year, and enough in the main storerooms to provision an
army. They even found refrigerators and freeze-bins full of meat and
vegetables fresh after forty years. That surprised everybody, for the
power units had gone dead long ago. Then it was noticed that they were
covered with collapsium. Anything that would stop cosmic rays was a
hundred percent efficient as a heat insulator.

Coming in, the first day, Conn had seen an almost completed hypership
bulking above the domes and roofs of Port Carpenter in the distance.
He saw it again on screen from a pickup atop the central tower. As
soon as the party was comfortably settled in the executive apartments
on the upper levels, he and Yves Jacquemont and Mack Vibart and Schalk
Retief, the construction engineer, found an aircar in one of the
hangars and went to have a closer look at her.

She had all her collapsium on, except for a hundred-foot circle at the
top and a number of rectangular openings around the sides. Yves
Jacquemont said that would be where the airlocks would go.

"They always put them on last. But don't be surprised at anything you
find or don't find inside. As soon as the skeleton's up they put the
armor on, and then build the rest of the ship out from the middle. It
might be slower getting material in through the airlock openings, but
it holds things together while they're working."

They put on the car's lights, lifted to the top, and let down through
the upper opening. It was like entering a huge globular spider's web,
globe within globe of interlaced girders and struts and braces,
extending from the center to the outer shell. Even the spider was
home--a three-hundred-foot ball of collapsium, looking tiny at the
very middle.

"Why, this isn't a ship!" Vibart cried in disgust. "This is just the
outside of a ship. They haven't done a thing inside."

"Oh, yes, they have," Jacquemont contradicted, aiming a spotlight
toward the shimmering ball in the middle. "They have all the engines
in--Abbott lift-and-drive, Dillingham hyperdrives, pseudograv, power
reactors, converters, everything. Th