“Not this time. I’m having them fit up an ambulance. They should be busy most of the day.”
Blalok grunted and started the turbine. He moved a lever and the jeep floated off the ground.
“An airboat too,” Kennon remarked. “I wondered why this rig was so boxy.”
“It’s a multipurpose vehicle,” Blalok said. “We need them around here for fast transport. Most of the roads aren’t so good.” He engaged the drive and the jeep began to move. “We’ll go cross country,” he said. “Hillside’s pretty far out—the farthest station since we abandoned Olympus.”
The air began whistling past the boxlike body of the jeep as Blalok increased the power to the drive and set the machine on automatic. “We’ll get a pretty good cross-section of our operations on this trip,” he said over the whine of the turbine. “Look down there.”
They were passing across a series of fenced pastures and Kennon was impressed. The size of this operation was beginning to sink in. It hadn’t looked so big from the substratosphere in Alexander’s ship, but down here close to the ground it was enormous. Fields of grain, wide orchards, extensive gardens. Once they were forced to detour a huge supply boat that rose heavily in front of them. Working in the fields were dozens of brown-skinned Lani who paused to look up and wave as the jeep sped by. Occasional clusters of farm buildings and the low barrackslike stations appeared and disappeared behind them.
“There’s about twenty Lani at each of these stations,” Blalok said, “They work the farm area under the direction of the stationmaster.”
“He’s a farmer?”
“Of course. Usually he’s a graduate of an agricultural school, but we have a few who are descendants of the crew of the first Alexander, and there’s one old codger who was actually with him during the conquest. Most of our stationmasters are family men. We feel that a wife and children add to a man’s stability—and incidentally keep him from fooling around with the Lani.”
A series of fenced pastures containing hundreds of huge grayish-white quadrupeds slipped past.