THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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Koshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and a textbook
in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to do while
they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long on the
leavings of wartime[Pg 159] production; too few people had bothered
learning how to produce anything.

/The Thing/ finally settled onto the mesa-top. It looked like something
from an old picture of the construction work on one of the Terran
space-stations in the First Century. Immediately, every piece of
contragravity equipment in the place converged on her; men dangled on
safety lines hundreds of feet above the ground, cutting away beams and
braces with torches. The two giant mining machines, one after the other,
floated free on their own contragravity and settled into place. /The
Thing/ lifted, still carrying the collapsium-cutting equipment, and came
to rest on the brush-grown flat beyond, out of the way.

If Yves Jacquemont had overestimated the time required to get the