41 minute read
Ivan Rutherford Y Barra, Permanent Secretary of the United Planets, watched the thin trail of fire in the star-sprinkled night sky and felt stirrings of familiar panic. Although he had greeted incoming representatives of the inner and outer planets some three hundred-odd times during his six-year tenure as Permanent Secretary—although the curved window through which he watched was a two-foot-thick panel of plexiquartz—although he knew the descending space-ship was chained to its landing beam more securely than Prometheus to his mythical rock—yet panic persisted. It seemed to Rutherford, as it seemed to everyone else in the reception building at Lackawanna Spaceport, as if the great ship from Venus were headed directly for himself, must inevitably squash him like an ant under a size-twelve boot. It was not a nice feeling. He looked for reassurance, across the vast girth of the spaceport, at the flood-lit faery-towers of Newark, rising like some...