THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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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.