Read "The Cosmic Computer" by H. Beam Piper online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags of bare rock jutted up, lava-flows like black glaciers twisting among them. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash-cones. Except for the seabirds that nested among the cliffs and the few thin patches of green where seeds windblown from the mainland had taken root, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust it up from the sea, Barathrum was a dead Inferno, untenanted even by the damned; by comparison, the Badlands seemed lushly fertile.
The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked the division of sea and land; the gunboat _Goblin_ in the lead, her sisters, _Vampire_ and _Dragon_ to right and left and a little behind, and the _Lester Dawes_ a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the _Goblin's_ controls; Conn, beside him, was peering ahead into the teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back again.