THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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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[Pg 109] 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 evacuation elsewhere was completed,