st expensive equipment had been worth less than
the cost of removal.

The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, taking
their riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remained
had been living on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that
his father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one who
searched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit of
uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.

Now he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range;
ahead the misty Gordon Valley sloped and widened to the north. Twenty
minutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn't know what he was going to
tell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; he
just didn't know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearing
through thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glistening
redly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside its
curve. Six. Four. The _Countess Dorothy_ was losing speed and
altitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. The
Airlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. The
yellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. High
Garden Terrace; the Mall.

Moment by moment, the stigmata of decay became more evident. Terraces
empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild
growth; blank-staring windows, walls splotched with lichens. At first,
he was horrified at what had happened to Litchfield in six years. Then
he realized that the change had been in himself. He was seeing it with
new eyes, as it really was.

The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could see
cracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals,
waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, but
what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin.
There was a thing about dusty fountains, some poem he'd read at the
University.

_The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;
The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams._

Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire. The
Terran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated a
score, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System States
Alliance from seceding. It hadn't been a victory. It had only been a
lesser defeat.

There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody in
to