Slushy snow and pools of water spotted the surface as far as he could see. The golden coating had been worn away, and the metal was gray and pitted beneath, streaked with ruddy rivulets of rust. Rows of great pipes, each thicker than a man is tall, snaked toward him from over the horizon and ended in funnel like mouths. The funnels were obscured by whirling clouds of vapor and snow that shot high into the air with a hushed roar, though one of the vapor columns collapsed and the cloud dispersed while Bill watched.
“Number eighteen blown!” the old man shouted into a microphone, grabbed a clipboard from the wall, and kicked his way through the slush toward a rusty and dilapidated walkway that groaned and rattled along parallel with the pipes. Bill followed, shouting at the man, who now completely ignored him. As the walkway, clanking and swaying, carried them along, Bill began to wonder just where the pipes led, and after a minute, when his head cleared a bit, curiosity got the better of him and he strained ahead to see what the mysterious bumps were on the horizon. They slowly resolved themselves into a row of giant spaceships, each one connected to one of the thick pipes. With unexpected agility the old man sprang from the walkway and bounded toward the ship at station eighteen, where the tiny figures of workers, high up, were disconnecting the seals that joined the ship to the pipe. The old man copied numbers from a meter attached to the pipe, while Bill watched a crane swing over with the end of a large, flexible hose that emerged from the surface they were standing on. It was attached to the valve on top of the spaceship. A rumbling vibration shook the hose, and from around the seal to the ship emerged puffs of black cloud that drifted over the stained metal plain.
“Could I ask just what the hell is going on here?” Bill said plaintively.
“Life! Life everlasting!” the old man crowed, swinging up from the glooms of his depression toward the heights of manic elation.
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“Here is a world sheathed in metal,” he stamped his foot and there was a dull boom. “What does that mean?”
“It means the world is sheathed in metal.”
“Correct. For a trooper you show a remarkable turn of intelligence. So you take a planet and cover it with metal, and you got a planet where the only green growing things are in the Imperial Gardens and a couple of window boxes. Then what do you have?”
“Everybody dead,” Bill said, for after all, he was a farm boy and up on all the photosynthesis and chlorophyll bowb.
“Correct again. You and. I and the Emperor and a couple of billion other slobs are working away turning all the oxygen into carbon dioxide, and with no plants around to turn it back into oxygen and if we keep at it long enough we breathe ourselves to death.”
“Then these ships are bringing in liquid oxygen?”
The old man bobbed his head and jumped back .onto the slideway; Bill followed. “Affirm. They get it for free on the agricultural planets. And after they empty here they load up with carbon extracted at great expense from the CO, and whip back with it to the hickworlds, where it is burned for fuel, used for fertilizer, combined into numberless plastics and other products …”
Bill stepped from the slideway at the nearest elevator, while the old man and his voice vanished into the vapor, and crouching down, his head pounding from the oxy jag, he began flipping furiously through his floor plan. While he waited for the elevator he found his place from the code number on the door and began to plot a new course toward the Palace Gardens.
This time he did not allow himself to be distracted. By only eating candy bars and drinking carbonated beverages from the dispensers along his route he avoided the dangers and distractions of the eateries, and by keeping himself awake he avoided missing connections. With black bags under his eyes and teeth rotting in his head he stumbled from a gravshaft and with-thudding heart finally saw a florally decorated and colorfully illuminated scentsign that said HANGING GARDENS There was an entrance turnstile and a cashier’s window.