"H. Beam Piper - The Cosmic Computer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; the
manufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no
longer find a profitable market. The mines and factories on
Jurgen and Koshchei, on

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Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruel
closed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the
offices emptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields,
and the wild game came back.

Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert
of crumbling concrete-landing fields and parade grounds, empty
barracks and toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun
emplacements and missilelaunching sites. These were more recent,
and dated from Poictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the
Gartner Trisystem had been the advance base for the Third
Fleet-Army Force, during the System States War.

It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on
or routed through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened
for war production. The Federation spent trillions on trillions
of sols, piled up mountains of supplies and equipment, left the
face of the world cluttered with installations. Then, without
warning, the System States Alliance collapsed, the rebellion
ended, and the scourge of peace fell on Poictesme.

The Federation armies departed. They took the clothes they stood
in, their personal weapons, and a few souvenirs. Everything else
was abandoned. Even the most 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

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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