nd earth-moving equipment--that put the company
in the red more than anything else--and they began making
burrow-cities, like the ones built in the Northern Hemisphere of Terra
during the Third and Fourth World Wars, or like the cities on Luna and
Mercury Twilight Zone and Titan. There are a lot of valuable mineral
deposits over on the mainland; maybe in another century our
grandchildren will start working them again.

"But about six years before the Fenris Company went to pieces, they
decided to concentrate in one city, here in the archipelago. The sea
water stays cooler in the daytime and doesn't lose heat so rapidly in
the nighttime. So they built Port Sandor, here on Oakleaf Island."

"And for convenience in monster-hunting?"

I shook my head. "No. The Jarvis's sea-monster wasn't discovered until
after the city was built, and it was years after the company had gone
bankrupt before anybody found out about what tallow-wax was good
for."

I started telling him about the native life-forms of Fenris. Because
of the surface temperature extremes, the marine life is the most
highly developed. The land animals are active during the periods after
sunset and after sunrise; when it begins getting colder or hotter,
they burrow, or crawl into caves and crevices among the rocks, and go
into suspended animation. I found that he'd read up on that, and not
too much of his information was incorrect.

He seemed to think, though, that Port Sandor had also been mined out
below the surface. I set him right on that.

"You saw what it looked like when you were coming down," I said. "Just
a flat plateau, with a few shaft-head domes here and there, and the
landing pit of the spaceport. Well, originally it was a valley,
between two low hills. The city was built in the valley, level by
level, and then the tops of the hills were dug off and bulldozed down
on top of it. We have a lot of film at the public library of the
construction of the city, step by step. As far as I know, there are no
copies anywhere off-planet."

He should have gotten excited about that, and wanted to see them.
Instead, he was watching the cargo come off--food-stuffs, now--and
wanted to know if we had to import everything we needed.

"Oh, no. We're going in on the Bottom Level, which is mainly storage,
but we have hydroponic farms for our vegetables and carniculture
plants for meat on the Second and Third Levels. That's counting down
from the Main City Level. We m