But the things seemed to be basically functional, and soon they were moving across the recently created desert. They traveled over a good thirty miles of the loose-packed black dirt, the tanks spitting out trails of soot behind them, which rose like the waste of a chemical plant. At last the deposits of the sandstorm came to an end, and they were once again on the hard-packed prairie surface. It felt good just to see living things, even scraggly, flea-bitten cacti, after the sterile lifelessness of the sand world behind them. As triple peaks lined up along the horizon, Stone brought up the mag grid for this part of the territory and searched for Livermore. “Distance from present location to Livermore,” Stone keyed into the control panel. “17.587 miles,” the computer read out on its display monitor. It flashed the correct compass heading on another panel, and Stone slightly reset the course they had been following, off by less than a degree.
