n oxygen helmets, and
lived in airtight domes and generated their own oxygen. There had been
mines, and smelters, and blast furnaces and steel mills. And there had
been shipyards, where hyperships up to three thousand feet had been
built. They had all been abandoned when the War had ended; they were
waiting there, on an empty, lifeless planet. Some of them had been
built by the Third Fleet-Army Force during the War; most of them dated
back almost a century before that, to the original industrial boom.
All of them could be claimed under the Abandoned Property Act of 867,
since all had been taken over by the Federation, and the original
owners, or their heirs, compensated.

And there was the matter of selecting a crew. As an influential
non-office-holding stockholder in all the companies involved, Conn
Maxwell, of course, would represent them. He would also serve as
astrogator. Clyde Nichols would command the ship in atmosphere, and
act as first mate in space. Mack Vibart would be chief engineer at all
times. Yves Jacquemont would be first officer under Nichols, and
captain outside atmosphere. They had three real space crewmen, named
Roddell, Youtsko and O'Keefe, who had been in Storisende jail as a
result of a riotous binge when their ship had lifted out, six months
before. The rest of the company--Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, Charley
Gatworth, Mohammed Matsui, and four other engineers, Ludvyckson,
Gomez, Karanja and Retief--rated as ordinary spacemen for the trip,
and would do most of the exploration work after landing.

They got the controls put up; they would work in either position. The
engines were lifted in and placed. Conn finished the robo-pilot and
the astrogational computers and saw them installed. The air-and-water
recycling system went in. The collapsium armor went on. In the
news-screen, they saw the spaceship at Storisende still far from half
finished, with swarms of heavy-duty lifters and contragravity
machiners around it, and a set of landing-stands, on which the second
ship was to be built, in the process of construction.

A tramp hyperspace freighter landed at Storisende, the _Andromeda_,
five months from Terra, with a cargo of general merchandise. Rodney
Maxwell and Wade Lucas had assembled a cargo of medicines and hospital
equipment which they thought could be sold profitably. They began
dickering with the owner-captain of the hypership.

A farm-tramp down in the tobacco country to the south, evidentl