ered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family.
Lynne Fawzi, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and
Kurt Fawzi would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first
to blame him because it was bad. The hopes he had built for Lynne and
himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father
would regard him now.

But however any of them took it, he would have to tell them the truth.

* * * * *

The ship swept on, tearing through the thin puffs of cloud at ten miles
a minute. Six minutes to landing. Five. Four. Then he saw the river
bend, glinting redly through the haze in the sunlight; Litchfield was
inside it, and he stared waiting for the first glimpse of the city.
Three minutes, and the ship began to cut speed and lose altitude. The
hot-jets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the cold-jet
rotors.

Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so
thick that it looked squat for all its height, like a candle-stump in a
puddle of its own grease, the other buildings under their carapace of
terraces and landing stages seeming to have flowed away from it. And
there was the yellow block of the distilleries, and High Garden Terrace,
and the Mall....

At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by
second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces
empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild
growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy
where the rains could not wash them.

For a moment, he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his
father's letters, had befallen. Then he realized that the change had not
been in Litchfield but in himself. After five years, he was seeing it as
it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends would look to
him now. Or Lynne.

The ship was coming in over the Mall; he could see the cracked paving
sprouting grass, the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless
fountains. He thought for an instant that one of them was playing, and
then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the
empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he had
learned at the University. Oh, yes. One of the Second Century Martian
Colonial poets, Eirrarsson, or somebody like that:

_The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;
The hinges are