On a crisp, clear morning in the spring of the year 2261, the great city died. The sequence of events which caused the death of five million people began with the malfunction and failure of a reaction control force-field in the world's largest megafission reactor. A chain of coincidental failures, which according to all probabilities never should have happened, did. One by one the safety system's back-up failsafe devices were engaged, and one by one they fused, short-circuited, and failed. In one searing moment the homes, businesses, theaters, parks, and inhabitants vanished in a wave of blinding light and furious energy. All that remained was a seething pit of flaming, molten earth 25 kilometers across. Many miles away at the city's small starport, a few lucky travelers saw the thermal flash and watched as the city rose into a boiIing cloud of glowing radioactive dust. When city's powerful broadcast power stations disintegrated, the starport was plunged into darkness. The few remaining broadcast powered cars, bereft of energy, ground to a halt. Swiftly the back-up power plant was engaged but, to the survivors' horror, the starport's ultra-radar revealed that the radioactive cloud was moving quickly toward them. With desperate speed they evacuated the starport and shut down the emergency power plant, leaving the station's robots and other devices in powerless immobility. Days later, survivors returned to the starport for the stores of preserved food and water left there during their panicked evacuation. They found that the radioactivity remaining in the area was too great, and the starport was abandoned permanently. Eventually the city was rebuilt dozens of miles away from its old, poisoned location, but as the decades passed people forgot about the abandoned starport. Now, more than 200 years later, the radioactivity is gone and only a forest remains. The ever-shifting sands and trees cover the starport in a thick shroud many meters deep and now covered in snow as well. Only the top of the starport's tall radar tower remains above the surface of the burning desert in the year 2471.