"If you'll put it on the veranda—" He paused and shouted back toward the house. "Edna, get out the grapplers. We're in business."
"Fun-ny," the skipper observed with dry derision. Then he signaled to his waiting assistants.
They came forward and, one by one, thrust their stacks of printed forms against Titus' chest. His arms came up in a reflex to accept the offerings. But, as the third assistant's contribution sent the stack soaring in front of his face, he went down under the weight.
When he had extricated himself from the mound of paper, the men had returned to their ship. And now its sides were folding down and scores of huge crates were drifting out on repulsor beams and fluttering to the ground.
Soon the freighter was gone and Edna was at his side.
"What have you gotten us into now, Titus?"
"Honest, Love—I don't know."
Suddenly his ears were splitting with the thunderous roar of a thousand ships plunging down to the surface as far as he could see around the perimeter of his small world. Each pulled to a halt a few feet from the ground, opened its sides and disgorged vast mounds of crates and sacks, boxes and barrels, naked hills of coarse material that hissed like gravel as it spewed from chutes, gleaming masses of machinery.
Confounded, Titus seized one of the slips of paper. It was an invoice listing two hundred earth movers, seventy-five instant pavers, five hundred concrete mixers.
Matching his frown, Edna read a second sheet and demanded, "What on earth do you expect to do with a hundred thousand barrels of wheat germ oil? Four thousand kegs of eight-penny nails? Forty-five hundred tons of soybeans?"