The only exception to gracefulness was the sturdy landing grid itself, half a mile high and a mile across, which was a lace-work of massive steel girders with spider-thin lines of copper woven about in the complex curves the creation of its force-field required. Inside it, Calhoun could see the ship of the invaders. It had been brought down inside the circular structure and was dwarfed by it. It gleamed there.
"And we," said Calhoun, "are going to look for a prosaic, probably messy laboratory which people who make a sport of hunting fellow-humans won't find amusing. Characters like these, Murgatroyd, aren't interested in medical science. They consider themselves conquerors. People have strange ideas!"
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd.
Calhoun spread out his photographs. Kim Walpole had marked where he should go and a route to it. Having been in the city while it was building, he knew even the service-lanes which, being sunken, were not a part of the city's good looks.
"But our enemies," explained Calhoun, "will not deign to use such grubby routes. They consider themselves aristocrats because they were sent as conquerors, whose job it was to clean up the dead bodies of their victims. I wonder what kind of swine are in power in the planetary government which sent them?"
He put away the photos and headed for the city again. He branched off from the rural highway where a turn-off descended into a cut. This low-level road was intended for loads of agricultural produce entering the city. It was strictly utilitarian. It ran below the surface of the park areas and entered the city without pride. It wound between rows of service-gates, behind which waste matter was some day to be assembled to be carted away for fertilizer on the fields. The city was very well designed.
Rolling along the echoing sunken road, Calhoun saw, just once, a ground-car in motion on a far-flung, cobwebby bridge between two tall towers. It was high overhead. Nobody in it would be watching grubby commerce-roads.
The whole affair was very simple indeed. Calhoun brought the car to a stop beneath the overhang of a balconied building many stories high. He got out and opened the gate. He drove the car into the cavernous, so-far-unused lower part of the building. He closed the gate behind him. He was in the center of the city, and his presence was unknown.
He climbed a new-clean flight of steps and came to the sections the public would use. There were glassy walls which changed their look as one moved between them. There were the lifts. Calhoun did not try to use them. He led Murgatroyd up the circular ramps which led upward in case of unthinkable emergency. He and Murgatroyd plodded up and up. Calhoun kept count.