high-pitched chirpings came from tiny creatures hidden under the
vegetation of the mountainsides.

Calhoun put a blaster in his pocket and stood up.

"We'll see what it looks like outside," he said with a certain
grimness. "I don't quite believe what the vision screens show."

Minutes later he stepped down to the ground from the Med Ship's exit
port. The ship had landed perhaps a hundred feet from what once had
been a wooden building. In it, ore from the mines was concentrated and
the useless tailings carried away by a conveyer belt to make a
monstrous pile of broken stone. But there was no longer a building.

Next to it there had been a structure containing an ore-crusher. The
massive machinery could still be seen, but the structure was in
fragments. Next to that, again, had been the shaft-head shelters of
the mine. They also were shattered practically to matchsticks.

The look of the ground about the building sites was simply and purely
impossible. It was a mass of hoofprints. Cattle by thousands and tens
of thousands had trampled everything. Cattle had burst in the wooden
sides of the buildings. Cattle had piled themselves up against the
beams upholding roofs until the buildings collapsed.

Then cattle had gone plunging over the wrecked buildings until there
was nothing left but indescribable chaos. Many, many cattle had died
in the crush. There were heaps of dead beasts about the metal girders
which were the foundation of the landing-grid. The air was tainted by
the smell of carrion.