PROLOGUE

Somewhere in the empty miles of New Mexico desert a spaceship was standing.

Not many people remembered that it was still there. To the West it was shielded by the sprawling, treeless humps of the Organ Mountains; to the East lay the scorched sand and twisted mesquite of the desert. A road lay somewhere to the South, but hardly anyone passed there any more; and the few that did were not thinking about spaceships. If they knew what was standing in the valley behind the mountains, they didn't care. They didn't want to know about it.

The ship had been sitting there for decades. Day by day the wind piled sand against the half-welded superstructure. The seams were splitting, and the hull-plates sagged and twisted in the wind. Below the ship, the fire-gutted buildings stood forlornly, their doors flapping on rusty hinges.

There had been violence here; now there was only desolation and decay. Twice a day the silence was shattered by the whine of engines as cargo missiles passed through the sky, bound for the great cities of the Southern Continent. Occasionally, bands of Qualchi raiders met in the ruined buildings on their way north to Oklahoma and Kansas, but this happened rarely, and only in the shadow of darkness.

But these things did not affect the ship. It stood unfinished and decaying in the desert, hated and untouched and slowly dying.

That was what the people thought.

Peter Elling had never seen the ship. He had died long before its time. There had been no spaceship in his calculations, no dream of space. Peter Elling had seen that fragment of the future that is revealed to idiots and geniuses, but it was only a fragment. In his dogged British fashion he had worked at his desk and blackboard and said, "This is what men could do," before his light had flickered out. There were no spaceships then.