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In the remaining hours the lodka needed to limp into Elizavetaburg at reduced speed, the brothers learned more of what had happened, but not enough to justify conclusions. In places the heavy mesh of the vessel had been rent---broken wire-ends reminded the boy of his unruly hair when he awoke---despite her protective purge-fields. Strewn through the compartment they found dirt, soil-covered roots, broken rock from the roadcut, and surmised that some kind of expanding purge-field, maybe even chemenergic explosives, had been used in an attempt to bury them under a mountain of sundered earth.
Peering through the broken fabric at a single star winking back from the overcast, Zakh hefted one such fragment, tossing it from palm to palm while keeping an eye upon the greenway. He had ridden to the port upon excursions meant to keep the road from becoming overgrown but had never traveled this way after dark. Bereft of light from the moonring, the night absorbed the beam of the energy headlamp his brothers had rigged in the bow long before it could shed light upon much of the surface ahead. Eugene and Adam labored over the shattered remains of the droilodka's antique comlaser, although the arcane ceremony they attempted proved more funeral than resurrection. The object in Zakh's hand had pierced the cabinet from end to end, lodging beneath its skin which it had dented outward from inside.
"It is no use!" Adam confessed, finally.
Eugene rose stiff-legged from where he had knelt for one hour beside the dismantled apparatus, dusted his hands off against one another, and nodded. "It is as I thought," he agreed with his brother, "the poor abused, elderly thing was never meant to be repaired at all, but, in the unlikely event of failure, to be replaced by a fresh replica from the spreighformer."
Sitting full upon the deck, Adam stretched his long, thin legs before him and massaged his knees before he attempted, with a certain prudence, to imitate his brother and stand up. "Da, that was time wasted, was it not?"
Eugene took in the view Zakh had from behind the pedestal. "Barely," he laughed. "Fiddling with it passed many a weary and vexatious hour for us upon this altogether too-protracted journey, which we might otherwise have occupied chewing our fingernails to the armpit. And here, in consequence...." In triumph, he pointed through the damaged hull towards a series of bright lights that had, without warning, appeared in the darkness before them. "....is Elizavetaburg, long before we might have looked for it."181Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWBrI1vrTMQ
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The planet's one interstellar landing place lacked the glamor which anyone familiar with the realities of 42nd century life might have awaited, consisting, as it did, of no more than a series of large, upright plastic cylinders and horizontal half-cylinders, gleaming like abandoned bones, stark white, upon the high, dry, equatorial plain. Here and there gleamed the odd-colored light. Most of Elizavetaburg's lumitory embellishment, however, was intended to be visible only from above. The oscillating receptor of an ulsic-automated instrument broke the simple lines of one building. Another sprouted thermocouples and a cluster of firefighting nozzles directed towards the landing-point. For most of the year, no human attention was needed for maintenance of place, which was well, for the population upon Genrich was sparse and just a few possessed the requisite skills.
The droilodka had begun slowing her already balky pace even as Eugene spied the starport. Ulsic systems had drawbacks, one being that the damaged vehicle's program called for speed reductions in percentages of the maximum of which she was capable. Despite the fact they were traveling at half speed, the machine reduced that by half, the resultant by another half, and so forth, until, although they were still several verts from the port buildings, they might have walked faster than the droilodka carried them.
"Eugene! Adam! Look!" Zakh it was who first saw unmistakable signs that a great star-sailing ship had arrived in the system. In the quiet backwater which was Genrich (the youngest of the Sorokins might have substituted "moribund, had he but known the word), few such wondrous occurrences had come to pass during his short life. the last time he had been too sick to care, let alone come see. Now he pointed with excitement to a feature of the miniature man-deserted village which was not cylindrical. A huge five-cornered platform of the same cast plastic as the buildings, maybe five hundred paces in extent, had been laid out at the precise location of the planet's equator and (as Zakh well knew) the point highest in altitude which that imaginary demarcation crossed. More than anything else, this point had determined placement of the Holdings, situation northward in the planet's more comfortable and productive temperate zone. Countersunk in the middle of the star, a great shackle the thickness of a man's waist sent chrome-titanium roots half a vert into the plateau's bedrock.
Unused 330 ordinary days of the 341-day Genrichian year (Zakh's age, those of his brothers, and the dates of other events including many important to the natives were reckoned not in Genrichian years, but by a standard interval decreed by the Romonavoan Cosmopolity), now it tethered an alien, upright object, bigger than the droilodka, hexagonal in section, taller than it was wide, and windowed from the middle upward.
This peculiar object, however, was not what had caught the youngster's attention. From the roof-point of the object upward, far as the eye could see, stretched a fine, brilliant line of fire. The evening overcast was thin. Zakh believed he could discern an ending to that fiery cabelle which represented more than an ultimate dwindling of perspective. A faint knob seemed visible to him at its uppermost reach, although this may have been an artifact of enthusiastic self-deception. To be sure, he understood that his older, wiser, less-imaginative (and, in his opinion, vastly duller) brothers would deny him any satisfaction of it, as well they might. The knob, if knob there would be, would be sailing, ever above the same spot upon the planet's surface, some 46,791 verts aloft, upon Genrich's equatorial plane. Without a doubt the object he believed he saw might be as much as several verts across (he had handmade two models of such things and knew the specifications well), lit full and well by a glare of sunlight undiminished by the damp, thick atmosphere of Genrich.
Still, at this distance it might be too small to make out with the unassisted eye. Nonetheless, Zakh thought he could. Whether or not he was correct, he understood how the odd, windowed thing resting upon the center of the great star (about its doorway he could, without any question, discern half a dozen human figures as, at her infuriating pace, the droilodka's drew nearer) had been lowered with laborious pain upon that bright-blazed cabelle from synchronous orbit all the way down to Elizavetaburg.181Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAxQrrBLzFy
A "lubberlift" he knew the thing was named, although the hardiest star-sailors used it (and in point of fact, were always the first to test it at each orbitfall), right along with dirt-kissing passengers grateful to be shut of it after a nervous and protracted voyage to the ground. The annihilation-powered steam-launches that starships carried were too expansive of operation to be grounded, save in the direst emergency, and the keel had yet to be laid of a starsailing ship capable of reaching the surface of a full-sized world in any but the tiniest charred and tattered pieces.
Vibrating now with the damage done her, the droilodka drew up beside the landing pentagram and halted. Cleaned up as best they could manage, Eugene and Adam lowered the hatch-ladder and descended to the ground, waiting for Zakh to catch up. They strode across the pentagram, their boots making gritting noises upon the smooth, hard, dusty surface, towards those who had arrived by lubberlift.
"Father!" Zakh cried out upon meeting Eugene Senior halfway on the lubberlift.
