"What?"
"Yes, it's obvious to me that this planet must once have been a tremendous clearing-house and landing field for spacecraft. These plains couldn't be natural; they must have been leveled out by machinery. A laboratory-born grass was planted that had all the characteristics needed to hold the soil together and keep erosion away. Plus the fact that the islands themselves were, you might say, caretakers, and kept the whole field spruced up.
"Gods! I can imagine what a traffic this planet must have had to build such a landing-field! Ten thousand miles across! The mind boggles before the thought. They must have done things on a big scale then. Which makes it all the more difficult to figure out how they could have come to ruin. Will we ever know what force wrecked them?"
Grizquetr, of course, had even less of an answer than Green. Both were silent for a while; then they cried out simultaneously when the pointed tips of the white towers surrounding Estorya glittered upon the horizon. One of the screens began flashing a series of cone shapes that indicated the towers.
"If the island were still on automatic it would be forced to go around the entire nation," said Green. "But I'm running it now, and we're paying no attention to those towers."
"Knock 'em down!"
"That's just what I intend to do. But not right now. Let's see. Wonder how high we can go. Only one way to find out. Upsydaisy!"
He pulled back the lever and the island began rising, though still maintaining its horizontal attitude.
"The ancients, like us moderns, knew how to build anti-gravity machines. And they also must have kept building their spaceships in the conventional rocket-form long after there was any need for it. Perhaps, though, they did so in order for the islands to have a more definite radar image. Maybe. No one really knows."
He spoke to himself, meanwhile glancing at the screen which showed him the plains and the city of Estorya beneath, ever-dwindling as their height increased.