ng closed and now half
roofless and crumbling. Rows of warehouses, empty after the War until
taken over by homeless vagrants. Jerry-built shanties with rattletrap
aircars grounded around them. Tramptown, a festering sore on the south
side of Litchfield.

"If we put this over," he continued, "all those tramps will have
steady work and good homes. We can have a park there, with fountains
that'll work. Maybe even Flora and Mother will think we've done
something worth doing."

"It'll be kind of hard to take in the meantime, though, but if you can
take it, I can." Rodney Maxwell turned off the underside teleview
screen and put on the forward one. "See that little pink spot over
there? Sunrise on the east side of Snagtooth; Tenth Army's just behind
us. Now, let's see if this airspeed gauge is telling the truth or just
bragging."

Sudden acceleration pushed them back in their seats. The calibrations
on the gauge rose swiftly; the pink-lighted peak grew swiftly in the
teleview screen. The gauge hadn't been bragging, it had been
understating; the car had more speed than the instrument could
register. Two and a half minutes from Litchfield, they were
decelerating and swinging slowly around Snagtooth, looking down on a
tilted plateau that ended on the western side in a sheer drop of
almost a thousand feet.

There were ruinous buildings on it: barracks and storehouses and
offices, an airship dock and an air-traffic control tower from which
all the glass had long ago vanished, a great steel telecast tower that
had fallen, crushing a couple of buildings. Young trees had already
grown among the wreckage.

"Look over there, on the slope below it; there's one entrance to the
shelters." There was a clearing among the evergreens, half a mile from
the buildings, and raw earth, and a couple of big scows grounded near.
"They bulldozed rock and earth over the end of the tunnel. Then,
there's another one down on that bench, a couple of hundred feet below
the edge of the plateau. They blasted rock down over that. The main
entrance is a vertical shaft under that pre-stressed concrete dome.
That was chapel, auditorium, or something. They just covered it with
sheet metal and poured a foot of concrete on top."

They floated down above the broken roofs and crumbling walls, and
grounded in the area between the main administration building and the
offices, back of the ship docks. Once, he supposed, it had been a
lawn. Then it had been a jungl