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

on, ten miles a minute, tearing through thin puffs of cloud. Ten



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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

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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 topside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his
white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town
marshal, redfaced and bulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi,
the mayor, well to the front. Then he saw his father and mother,
and his sister Flora, and waved to them. They waved back, and