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It filled much the larger part of the level valley floor, and horned duryas and what Hoddan later learned were horses grazed in it. The animals paid no attention to the deep-toned humming noise the grid made in its operation. The ship seemed the size of a pea. Presently it was the size of an apple.
Then it was the size of a basketball, and then it swelled enormously and put out spidery metal legs with large splay metal feet on them and alighted and settled gently to the ground. The humming stopped. There were shoutings. Whips cracked. Straining, horn-tossing duryas heaved and dragged something, very deliberately, out from between warehouses under the arches of the grid.
There was a vast humming sound. The ship lifted sedately. It seemed to hover momentarily over the group of duryas and humans in the center of the grid's enclosure. But it was not hovering. It shrank. It was rising in an absolutely vertical line. It dwindled to the size of a basketball and then an apple. Then to the size of a pea.
Carts and wagons loaded the stuff discharged from the ship. Creaking, plodding, with the curved horns of the duryas rising and falling, the wagons overtook Hoddan and passed him. He saw his ship bag on one of the carts. It was a gift from the Interstellar Ambassador on Walden.
There were two dozen of the duryas, and despite the shouts and whip-crackings they moved with a stubborn slowness. It took a long time for the object with the wide-tired wheels to reach a spot below the spacecraft. Then it took longer, seemingly, for brakes to be set on each wheel, and then for the draught animals to be arranged to pull as two teams against each other.
When Hoddan showed no comprehension, the Ambassador explained, "The man your friend Derec thought was killed by deathrays. It develops that he'd gotten a terrific load on drunk, you know and climbed a tree to escape the pink, purple, and green duryas he thought were chasing him to gore him. He climbed too high, a branch broke, and he fell and was killed.
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