r indirectly, in the business of governing a
planet. There were no shopping centers and no entertainment areas. The
small personal flyer, almost the same size as the old gasoline-driven
automobile, could, because of its inertia drive, move with the
three-dimensional ability of a hummingbird, so the rivers that cut the
island off from the mainland were no barrier. The shopping and
entertainment centers of Brooklyn, Queens, and Jersey were only five
minutes away, even through the thickest, slowest-moving traffic. It was
the personal flyer, not the clumsy airplane, that had really eliminated
distance along with national boundaries.

The majority of the government officers' homes were off the island, too,
but this commuting did not cause any great fluctuation of the island's
population. A city that governs a planet must operate at full capacity
twenty-four hours a day, and there was a "rush hour" every three hours
as the staggered six-hour shifts changed.

Physically the planet still revolved about the sun; politically, Earth
revolved around Government City.

In one of the towering buildings a group of men sat comfortably in a
medium-sized room, watching a screen that, because of the
three-dimensional quality and the color fidelity of the scene it showed,
might have been a window, except that the angle was wrong. They were
looking down from an apparent height of forty feet on a clearing in a
paper-tree forest in Siberia.

The clearing was not a natural one. The trees had been splintered,
uprooted, and pushed away from the center of the long, elliptical area.
The center of the area was apparently empty.

One of the men, whose fingers were touching a control panel in the arm
of his chair, said: "That is where the ship made its crash landing. As
you can see from the relatively light damage, it was moving at no great
speed when it hit. From the little information we have--mostly from a
momentary radar recording made when the incoming vessel was picked up
for a few seconds by the instruments of Transpolar Airways, when it
crossed the path of one of their freight orbits--it is estimated that
the craft was decelerating at between fifteen and seventeen gravities.
The rate of change of acceleration in centimeters per second cubed is
unknown, but obviously so small as to be negligible.

"This picture was taken by the fire prevention flyers that came in
response to an urgent call by the assistant of the forest ranger who was
in