He had only the vague directions from the scrap of map Rip had uncovered.
To the west--he had no idea how far away--there stretched a length of
coastline, far enough from the radiation blasted area to allow small
settlements. For generations the population of Terra, decimated by the
atomic wars, and then drained by first system and then Galactic
exploration and colonization, had been decreasing. But within the past
hundred years it was again on the upswing. Men retiring from space were
returning to their native planet to live out their remaining years. The
descendants of far-flung colonists, coming home on visits, found the
sparsely populated mother world appealed to some basic instinct so that
they remained. And now the settlements of mankind were on the march,
spreading out from the well established sections which had not been
blighted by ancient wars.
It was mid-afternoon when Dane noted that the green carpet beneath the
flitter was displaying holes--that small breaks in the vegetation became
sizable stretches of rocky waste. He kept one eye on the counter and
what, when he left the spacer, had been an almost steady beam of warning
light was now a well defined succession of blinks.
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