The Builders

The only trouble was, there seemed to be fewer and fewer new plans as the years went by. And now, even when you found some, you had to check its potentialities exhaustively before you started building it. Markten shuddered a little when he thought of some of the first things that had been built without preconstruction study for analysis as to its probable use. One of them would have blown New City off the face of the earth had it been put into operation in a metropolitan proving lab. Fortunately, the thing had been too big, and had been taken for trial to a lab located in a southern desert. Today, there was still a ten-mile wide crater in the sand where the thing had gone off.