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 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
equipment loaded and lifted off from Koshchei, Conn had been
overoptimistic about the speed with which the top of the mesa could be
stripped off. Digging away the rubble with which the pit had been
filled, and even the solid rock around it, was easier than getting the
stuff out of the way. Farm-scows came in from all over, as fast as
they and pilots for them could be found; the rush to get brandy and
tobacco to Storisende had caused an acute shortage of vehicles.

One by one, the members of the old Fawzi's Office gang came drifting
in--Lorenzo Menardes, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes. None of them had
any skills to contribute, but they brought plenty of enthusiasm.
Rodney Maxwell came whizzing out from Storisende now and then to watch
the progress of the work. Of all the crowd, he and Conn watched the
two steel giants strip away the tableland with apprehension instead of
hope. No, there was a third. Carl Leibert had stopped secluding
himself in his quarters; he still talked rapturously about the
miracles Merlin would work, but now and then Conn saw him when he
thought he was unobserved. His face was the face of a condemned man.

The _Ouroboros II_ was finished. The whole planet saw, by
screen, the ship lift out; watched from the ship the dwindling away
of Koshchei and saw Poictesme grow ahead of her. Twelve hours before
she landed, work at Force Command stopped. Everybody was going to
Storisende--Sylvie, whose father would command her on her voyage to
Baldur, Morgan Gatworth, whose son would be first o