"H. Beam Piper - Graveyard of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

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 FleetтИТArmy 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
oldтИТтИТand 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.


Graveyard of Dreams 3
 Graveyard of Dreams
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 roseтИТтИТbands of farm tramps, camping on their way from harvest to
wineтИТpressing. 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 wondered 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 hotтИТjets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the coldтИТjet rotors.

Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so thick that it looked squat for all its height,
like a candleтИТstump 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....