was no longer possible to ship the output to a
profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the
colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of space-freighting.

Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a
ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete--empty and roofless sheds
and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing
fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent,
dating from Poictesme's second brief and hectic prosperity, when the
Terran Federation's Third Fleet-Army Force had occupied the Gartner
Trisystem during the System States War.

* * * * *

Millions of troops had been stationed on or routed through Poictesme;
tens of thousands of spacecraft had been based on the Trisystem; the
mines and factories had reopened for war production. The Federation had
spent trillions of sols on Poictesme, piled up mountains of stores and
arms and equipment, left the face of the planet cluttered with
installations.

Then, ten years before anybody had expected it, the rebellious System
States Alliance had collapsed and the war had ended. The Federation
armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their
personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left
behind; even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost
of removal.

Ever since, Poictesme had been living on salvage. The uniform the first
officer was wearing was forty years old--and it was barely a month out
of the original packing. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his
father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an
explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of
uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.

The old replacement depot or classification center or training area or
whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all
forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted
buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose--bands of farm
tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the
eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the
granite spines of the Calder Range; the valley beyond was sloping away
and widening out in the distance, and it was time he began thinking of
what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course.

He wond