The Legend That Was Earth Read Free Page B

house. "Yes, Henry?"
    "Luke just called. He's at LAX now, with Dee. The aircraft has been cleared for landing. With traffic as it is, he says they'll be here in about an hour."
    "Tell the caterers to start setting out the food in thirty minutes," Cade instructed. "But let's have a few appetizers out here in the meantime."

CHAPTER TWO
    "SIDE-PANEL TO VIEW MODE," Vrel told the veebee, which he had laid on the tray at the front of his seat's armrest along with the screenpad he had been using during the flight. The veebee passed the order on to the control system of the Hyadean staff transport descending over the Terran city of Los Angeles, and the part of the wall alongside became transparent. Vrel rested his chin on a hand and stared out at the carpet of horizon-to-horizon lights. Of the dozen-odd other Hyadeans around him in the cabin, some were talking in murmurs, others wrapped in their own thoughts. Krossig, the anthropologist, was reading. Orzin had dozed through the flight, after a busy schedule in Washington as an official observer assessing Terran reactions to further moves in Hyadean-U.S. cooperation. Hyadean policy was to concentrate on the United States as the focus of Terran political and economic influence.
    As with all the cities he had seen here, the conception and layout showed little regard for efficiency or logic, although Terrans were not incapable of such qualities when it suited them. The failure to strike a better balance between building out and building up multiplied travel distances enormously. Trusting to manually controlled vehicles in this kind of traffic density brought appalling problems that the Terrans didn't deny, yet they made no serious attempt to do anything about them. Vrel sometimes thought that the chaotic daily sorties along the Interstates might provide some kind of ritual combat that their adversity-conditioned psyches needed. And they had no concept of segregating north-south traffic flows from east-west on different levels with connecting ramps, with the result that everything was squeezed onto a two-dimensional grid where all movement one way had to be stopped for half the time at every intersection. He wondered what they'd have thought of a computer chip designed that way, with all the wires on one plane, and switches to allow current through a crossover one way or the other at any time only.
    But things like electronics and optronics weren't really Vrel's line. A political economist and social commentator, he had first come to Earth almost six (Terran) years ago now, with several trips back and forth to Chryse in the interim. And even after that time, he still found himself more than occasionally bewildered by this intoxicating world with its wild extremes of ecology and climate: plunging chasms and slabs of crust thrown up into snow-topped mountains, and stupefying proliferation of every form of life imaginable to the Hyadean mind—and then some. And to crown all of it, this volatile, quarrelsome race of pinks and yellows and browns and black, short and slender in form, yet curiously appropriate as the culminating expression of the unruliness and vivacity that characterized the whole planet.
    At first, Vrel had been bemused by the diversity of governing systems: money-based, land-based, hereditary, military, planned and chaotic, popular choice or authoritarian; by the clashes of ideologies and traditions, spawning creeds and sects of every description, and mixtures of all of them which not even the Terrans seemed to understand. That was the usual Hyadean reaction. It was as if the only discernible universal attribute was the determination not to let anything be universal, leaving such authorities as existed virtually powerless to channel collective energies into achieving the kind of planetary efficiency that could have yielded ten times the productivity with a tenth the effort and spared all the grief and chaos entirely. Weren't the events that had occurred today in Washington