Graveyard of Dreams

Graveyard of Dreams

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Graveyard of Dreams, by Henry Beam Piper This
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Title: Graveyard of Dreams
Author: Henry Beam Piper
Release Date: April 3, 2006 [EBook #18109]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine February 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on this publication
was renewed.
Graveyard of Dreams
By H. Beam Piper

_Despite Mr. Shakespeare, wealth and name are both dross compared with the theft of
hope-- and Maxwell had to rob a whole planet of it!_
Standing at the armor-glass front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise
and grow on the horizon, Conn Maxwell gripped the metal hand-rail with painful
intensity, as though trying to hold back the airship by force. Thirty minutes--twenty-six

and a fraction of the Terran minutes he had become accustomed to--until he'd have to
face it.
Then, realizing that he never, in his own thoughts, addressed himself as "sir," he turned.
"I beg your pardon?"
It was the first officer, wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years,
or about ten regulation-changes, ago. That was the sort of thing he had taken for granted
before he had gone away. Now he was noticing it everywhere.
"Thirty minutes out of Litchfield, sir," the ship's officer repeated. "You'll go off by the
midship gangway on the starboard side."
"Yes, I know. Thank you."
The first mate held out the clipboard he was carrying. "Would you mind checking over
this, Mr. Maxwell? Your baggage list."
"Certainly." He glanced at the slip of paper. Valises, eighteen and twenty-five kilos, two;
trunks, seventy-five and seventy kilos, two; microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. The last
item fanned up a little flicker of anger in him, not at any person, even himself, but at the
situation in which he found himself and the futility of the whole thing.
"Yes, that's everything. I have no hand-luggage, just this stuff."
He noticed that this was the only baggage list under the clip; the other papers were all
freight and express manifests. "Not many passengers left aboard, are there?"
"You're the only one in first-class, sir," the mate replied. "About forty farm-laborers on
the lower deck. Everybody else got off at the other stops. Litchfield's the end of the run.
You know anything about the place?"
"I was born there. I've been away at school for the last five years."
"On Baldur?"
"Terra. University of Montevideo." Once Conn would have said it almost boastfully.
The mate gave him a quick look of surprised respect, then grinned and nodded. "Of
course; I should have known. You're Rodney Maxwell's son, aren't you? Your father's
one of our regular freight shippers. Been sending out a lot of stuff lately." He looked as
though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but said: "Sorry, I've got to go.
Lot of things to attend to before landing." He touched the visor of his cap and turned
away.
The mountains were closer when Conn looked forward again, and he glanced down. Five
years and two space voyages ago, seen from the afterdeck of this ship or one of her sisters,

the woods had been green with new foliage, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink
blossom. He tried to picture the scene sliding away below instead of drawing in toward
him, as though to force himself back to a moment of the irretrievable past.
But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the half-formed
anticipations of the things he would learn and accomplish on Terra. The things he would
learn--microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. One of the steel trunks was full of things he
had learned and accomplished, too. Maybe they, at least, had some value....
The woods were autumn-tinted now and the fields were bare and brown.
They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those
workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing. That extra hands were needed for
that meant a big crop, and yet it seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he
had gone away. He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown
up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills above