There was a gentle pressure beneath his feet. The gyros had compensated to their limit and had automatically cut out, and true gravity and inertia once more were settling their grip about the sleek ship.
"Switch the screen aft, captain."
"As she blasts, sir."
Blue. Great, incredible expanses of blue in every shade of color, every intensity of pastel, forced to the bending curve of a horizon that seemed like some great arching bulwark against the heavy, stifling whiteness that was the sky. For moments he was not able to distinguish land from ocean, but then he discerned it as the midnight blue, near-black mass that undulated slowly, in long, even swells—and it was the vari-shaded, lighter area, smaller in size than the state of Connecticut—that was the northern land mass. And it was toward that which they descended. Their formation had already split and far to starboard, he saw two long darts of silver pair off to land on the planet's southwestern mass.
He drew the cloak about his shoulders, secured the decorative dress sword at his waist.
Down. As silently as had been the long drift through Space, save for the nearly inaudible rumble of the great engine as it had checked in for deceleration. The descent was so perfectly controlled that if there was the heavy whine of atmosphere about their hull from too-great downward speed, he could not hear it. Down.
He drew on the gauntlets.
There was a gentle jar.
Their escort formed at once midway between his ship and Tayne's. They marched abreast, flanked by echelons of cadre officers and Quadrature Academy cadets. They marched silently toward a great, shining building that commanded the entire edge of the landing plaza. Its size alone made Doug catch his breath, yet it was dwarfed by a frozen human sea of tan-bodied pygmies, amassed before it in wave after spreading wave of superbly formed divisions. To realize at once that they were not formations of some stunted denizens of the planet, but children of Earth not yet eleven years old, was almost impossible for him although he had known, had seen the terrifying figures.... But here were the statistics, immobile, at rigid attention, not in black and white, but in the hue of living flesh, with red blood still coursing through them. Here were what tomorrow would be the numbers—small still things, cold, impersonal, and dead. Here was the stability factor of a people which had forged a device for peace. Here was the monument to their stupidity, the warrant for their ultimate place in infamy.