nset. "If you can do all that, Conn.... You know, I believe you can.
I'm with you, as far as I can help, and we'll have a talk with Charley.
He's a good boy, Conn, and he has a lot of influence among the other
youngsters." He looked at his watch. "We'd better be getting along. You
don't want to be late for your own coming-home party."

Rodney Maxwell slid off the edge of the fountain to his feet, hitching
at the gunbelt under his coat. Have to dig out his own gun and start
wearing it, Conn thought. A man simply didn't go around in public
without a gun in Litchfield. It wasn't decent. And he'd be spending a
lot of time out in the brush, where he'd really need one.

First thing in the morning, he'd unpack that trunk and go over all those
maps. There were half a dozen spaceports and maintenance shops and
shipyards within a half-day by airboat, none of which had been looted.
He'd look them all over; that would take a couple of weeks. Pick the
best shipyard and concentrate on it. Kurt Fawzi'd be the man to recruit
labor. Professor Kellton was a scholar, not a scientist. He didn't know
beans about hyperdrive engines, but he knew how to do library research.

They came to the edge of High Garden Terrace at the escalator, long
motionless, its moving parts rusted fast, that led down to the Mall, and
at the bottom of it was Senta's, the tables under the open sky.

A crowd was already gathering. There was Tom Brangwyn, and there was
Kurt Fawzi and his wife, and Lynne. And there was Senta herself, fat and
dumpy, in one of her preposterous red-and-purple dresses, bustling
about, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some
laggard waiter the next.

The dinner, Conn knew, would be the best he had eaten in five years, and
afterward they would sit in the dim glow of Beta Gartner, sipping coffee
and liqueurs, smoking and talking and visiting back and forth from one
table to another, as they always did in the evenings at Senta's. Another
bit from Eirrarsson's poem came back to him:

_We sit in the twilight, the shadows among,
And we talk of the happy days when we were brave and young._

That was for the old ones, for Colonel Zareff and Judge Ledue and Dolf
Kellton, maybe even for Tom Brangwyn and Franz Veltrin and for his
father. But his brother Charley and the boys of his generation would
have a future to talk about. And so would he, and Lynne Fawzi.

--H. BEAM PIPER

End of the Project Gutenberg EBoo