t; the car lifted, turned to nose
into the wind, and rose in a slow spiral. Below, the fort grew
smaller, a flat-topped rectangle of masonry overlooking the pass, a
gun covering each approach, and two more on the square keep to cover
the rocky hogback on which the fort had been built, with the flagpole
between them. Once that pole had lifted a banner of ragged black
marsh-flopper skin bearing the device of the Kragan riever-chieftain
whose family had built the castle; now it carried a neat rectangle of
blue bunting emblazoned with the wreathed globe of the Terran
Federation and, below that, the blue-gray pennant which bore the
vermilion trademark of the Chartered Uller Company.

"Where now, sir?" Harry Quong asked.

He looked at his watch. Seventeen-hundred; there wasn't time for a
visit to Zortolk's Old Fort, ten miles to the north at the next pass.

"Back to Konkrook, to the island."

The nose of the car swung east by south; the cold-jet rotors began
humming and then the hot-jets were cut in. The car turned from the
fort and the mountains and shot away over the foothills toward the
coastal plain. Below were forests, yellow-green with new foliage of
the second growing season of the equatorial year, veined with narrow
dirt roads and spotted with occasional clearings. Farther east, the
dirty gray woodsmoke of Uller marked the progress of the
charcoal-burnings. It took forty years to burn the forests clear back
to the flint cliffs; by the time the burners reached the mountains,
the new trees at the seaward edge would be ready to cut. Off to the
south, he could see the dark green squares, where the hemlocks and
Norway spruce had been planted by the Company. With a little chemical
fertilizer, they were doing well, and they made better charcoal than
the silicate-heavy native wood. That was the only natural fuel on
Uller; there was no coal, of course, since fallen timber and even
standing dead trees petrified in a matter of a couple of years. There
was too much silica on Uller, and not enough of anything else; what
would be coal-seams on Terra were strata of silicified wood. And, of
course, there was no petroleum. There was less charcoal being burned
now than formerly; the Uller Company had been bringing in great
quantities of synthetic thermoconcentrate-fuel, and had been setting
up nuclear furnaces and nuclear-electric power-plants, wherever they
gained a foothold on the planet.

Beyond the forests came the farmlands.