Graveyard of Dreams | Page 3

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 hot-jets
had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the cold-jet rotors.
Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so thick that it looked
squat for all its height, like a candle-stump 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....
At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata
of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens
untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with
lichens and grimy where the rains could not wash them.
For a moment, he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his father's letters, had
befallen. Then he realized that the change had not been in Litchfield but in himself. After
five years, he was seeing it as it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends
would look to him now. Or Lynne.
The ship was coming in over the Mall; he could see the cracked paving sprouting grass,
the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless fountains. He thought for an instant
that one of them was playing, and then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust
blowing from the empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he
had learned at the University. Oh, yes. One of the Second Century Martian Colonial poets,
Eirrarsson, or somebody like that:
_The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty and swing
with tiny screams._
There was more to it, but he couldn't remember; something about empty gardens under an
empty sky. There must have been colonies inside the Sol System, before the Interstellar
Era, that hadn't turned out any better than Poictesme. Then he stopped trying to
remember as the ship turned toward the Airport Building and a couple of tugs--Terran
Federation contragravity tanks, with derrick-booms behind and push-poles where the
guns had been--came up to bring her down.
He walked along the starboard promenade to the gangway, which the first mate and a

couple of airmen were getting open.
* * * * *
Most of the population of top-level Litchfield was in the crowd on the dock. He
recognized old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom
Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above the others. It took a few
seconds for him to pick out his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and then to realize
that the handsome young man beside Flora was his brother Charley. Charley had been
thirteen when Conn had gone away. And there was Kurt Fawzi, the mayor of Litchfield,
and there was Lynne, beside him, her red-lipped face tilted upward with a cloud of bright
hair behind it.
He waved to her, and she waved back, jumping in excitement, and then everybody was
waving, and they were pushing his family to the front and making way for them.
The ship touched down lightly and gave a lurch as she went off contragravity, and they
got the gangway open and the steps swung out, and he started down toward the people
who had gathered to greet him.
His father was wearing the same black best-suit he had worn when they had parted five
years ago. It had been new then; now it was shabby and had acquired a permanent
wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol-butt. Charley was carrying a gun, too; the belt
and holster looked as though he had made them himself. His mother's dress was new and
so was Flora's--probably made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure just which of the
Terran Federation services had provided