Grushenko nodded, not without compassion. "They may claim all the equality they will, Eben Petrovitch," he said. It was the first time he had offered that much friendship. "But they remain women. She will make a good wife for the first man who fully comprehends this is true in her own case too."
"Which I don't?" mumbled Holbrook.
Grushenko shook his head.
And the world Zolotoy grew. They decelerated, backing down upon it. A few whirling electrons piloted them; they stared through telescopes and held up photographs to the light, hardly believing.
"One city," whispered Ekaterina. "One city!"
Holbrook squinted at the picture. He was not a military man and had no experience with aerial photographs. Even greatly enlarged, it bewildered him. "A city over the whole planet?" he exclaimed.
Grushenko looked through the viewport. This close, the golden shield was darkly streaked and mottled; here and there lay a metallic gleam. "Well, perhaps twenty per cent of the total area," he replied. "But the city forms a continuous webwork, like a net spread over the entire oceanless globe. It is obviously a unit. And the open spaces are all used—mines, landing sites, transmission stations, I suppose. It is hard to tell, they are so different from any designs we understand."
"I imagine their food is synthetic," said Ekaterina. Her snub nose wrinkled. "I should not like that. My folk have been peasants too many centuries."
"There are no more peasants on Earth," said Grushenko stiffly. Then he shook his hairless skull and clicked his tongue in awe. "But the size of this! The power! How far ahead of us are they? A thousand years? Ten thousand? A million?"