Over its wide entrance were the carved letters:

THE PLAN OF MAN
SUBTRAIN STATION

They made their way through a wide concourse, noisy and crowded...

"Track Six, was it?"

"Train 667, Compartment 93..."

"There's Track Six." Ryeland led the way. Track Six was a freight platform. They went down a flight of motionless moving stairs and emerged beside the cradle track of the subtrains.

Since the subtrains spanned the world, there was no clue as to where they were going. From Iceland they could be going to Canada, to Brazil, even to South Africa; the monstrous atomic drills of the Plan had burrowed perfectly straight shafts from everywhere to everywhere. The subtrains rocketed through air-exhausted tunnels, swung between hoops of electrostatic force. Without friction, their speed compared with the velocity of interplanetary travel.

"Where is it?" Oporto grumbled, looking around. A harsh light flooded the grimy platforms, glittering on the huge aluminum balloons that lay in their cradles outside the vacuum locks. Men with trucks and cranes were loading a long row of freightspheres in the platform next to theirs; a little cluster of passengers began to appear down the moving stairs of a platform a hundred yards away...

A warning horn shrieked into the pit. Ryeland jumped; Oporto turned more slowly, as though he had been expecting it. Which he had. Red signals flickered from the enormous gates of the vacuum lock on Track Six. Air valves gasped. The gates swung slowly open and a tractor emerged towing a cradle with the special car they were waiting for...

The car stopped. Equalizer valves snorted again, and then its tall door flopped out from the top, forming a ramp to the platform. Escalators began to crawl along it...

We're moving." The hand at the controls of the subtrain knew whose private car he was driving down the electrostatic tubes. The giant sphere was being given a featherbed ride. They had felt no jar at all on starting, but now they began to feel curiously light. That was intrinsic to the way of travel. The subtrain was arrowing along a chord from point to point; on long hauls the tunnels dipped nearly a thousand miles below the earth's surface at the halfway mark. Once the initial acceleration was over, the first half of a trip by subtrain was like dropping in a superspeed express elevator.