Before long, I began noticing stacks of tallow-wax, put up in the
regular outside sausage skins but without the Co-op markings. They
just had the names of hunter-ships--_Javelin_, _Bulldog_, _Helldiver_,
_Slasher_, and so on.

"What's that stuff doing in here?" I asked. "It's a long way from the
docks, and a long way from the spaceport."

"Oh, just temporary storage," Tom said. "It hasn't been checked in
with the Co-op yet."

That wasn't any answer--or maybe it was. I let it go at that. Then we
came to an open space about fifty feet square. There was a jeep, with
a 7-mm machine gun mounted on it, and half a dozen men in boat-clothes
were playing cards at a table made out of empty ammunition boxes. I
noticed they were all wearing pistols, and when a couple of them saw
us, they got up and grabbed rifles. Tom let down and got out of the
jeep, going over and talking with them for a few minutes. What he had
to tell them didn't seem to bring any noticeable amount of sunlight
into their lives. After a while he came back, climbed in at the
controls, and lifted the jeep again.

4

MAIN CITY LEVEL

The ceiling on Main City Level is two hundred feet high; in order to
permit free circulation of air and avoid traffic jams, nothing is
built higher than a hundred and fifty feet except the square
buildings, two hundred yards apart, which rest on foundations on the
Bottom Level and extend up to support the roof. The _Times_ has one of
these pillar-buildings, and we have the whole thing to ourselves. In a
city built for a quarter of a million, twenty thousand people don't
have to crowd very closely on one another. Naturally, we don't have a
top landing stage, but except for the buttresses at the corners and
solid central column, the whole street floor is open.

Tom hadn't said anything after we left the stacks of wax and the men
guarding them. We came up a vehicle shaft a few blocks up Broadway,
and he brought the jeep down and floated it in through one of the
archways. As usual, the place was cluttered with equipment we hadn't
gotten around to repairing or installing, merchandise we'd taken in
exchange for advertising, and vehicles, our own and everybody else's.
A couple of mechanics were tinkering on one of them. I decided, for
the oomptieth time, to do something about cleaning it up. Say in
another two or three hundred hours, when the ships would all be in
port and work would be slack, and I could hire a couple of