Graveyard of Dreams | Page 5

to tell them.
"Yes, indeed, Mr. Fawzi," Conn said. "I know you're all anxious, but it's a long story.
This'll be a good chance to tell you."
Fawzi turned to his wife and daughter, interrupting himself to shout instructions to a
couple of dockhands who were floating the baggage off the ship on a contragravity-lifter.
Conn's father had sent Charley off with a message to his mother and Flora.
Conn turned to Colonel Zareff. "I noticed extra workers coming out from the hiring
agencies in Storisende, and the crop was all in across the Calders. Big wine-pressing this
year?"
"Yes, we're up to our necks in melons," the old planter grumbled. "Gehenna of a big crop.
Price'll drop like a brick of collapsium, and this time next year we'll be using brandy to
wash our feet in."
"If you can't get good prices, hang onto it and age it. I wish you could see what the bars
on Terra charge for a drink of ten-year-old Poictesme."
"This isn't Terra and we aren't selling it by the drink. Only place we can sell brandy is at
Storisende spaceport, and we have to take what the trading-ship captains offer. You've
been on a rich planet for the last five years, Conn. You've forgotten what it's like to live
in a poorhouse. And that's what Poictesme is."
"Things'll be better from now on, Klem," the mayor said, putting one hand on the old
man's shoulder and the other on Conn's. "Our boy's home. With what he can tell us, we'll
be able to solve all our problems. Come on, let's go up and hear about it."
They entered the wide doorway of the warehouse on the dock-level floor of the Airport
Building and crossed to the lift. About a dozen others had joined them, all the important
men of Litchfield. Inside, Kurt Fawzi's laborers were floating out cargo for the
ship--casks of brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates painted light blue and

marked with the wreathed globe of the Terran Federation and the gold triangle of the
Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance Service. Long cases
of rifles, square boxes of ammunition, machine guns, crated auto-cannon and rockets.
"Where'd that stuff come from?" Conn asked his father. "You dig it up?"
His father chuckled. "That happened since the last time I wrote you. Remember the big
underground headquarters complex in the Calders? Everybody thought it had been all
cleaned out years ago. You know, it's never a mistake to take a second look at anything
that everybody believes. I found a lot of sealed-off sections over there that had never
been entered. This stuff's from one of the headquarters defense armories. I have a gang
getting the stuff out. Charley and I flew in after lunch, and I'm going back the first thing
tomorrow."
"But there's enough combat equipment on hand to outfit a private army for every man,
woman and child on Poictesme!" Conn objected. "Where are we going to sell this?"
"Storisende spaceport. The tramp freighters are buying it for newly colonized planets that
haven't been industrialized yet. They don't pay much, but it doesn't cost much to get it out,
and I've been clearing about three hundred sols a ton on the spaceport docks. That's not
bad, you know."
Three hundred sols a ton. A lifter went by stacked with cases of M-504 submachine guns.
Unloaded, one of them weighed six pounds, and even a used one was worth a hundred
sols. Conn started to say something about that, but then they came to the lift and were
crowding onto it.
He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office a few times, always with his father, and he
remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and rambling conversations,
with deep, comfortable chairs and many ashtrays. Fawzi's warehouse and brokerage
business, and the airline agency, and the government, such as it was, of Litchfield,
combined, made few demands on his time and did not prevent the office from being a
favored loafing center for the town's elders. The lights were bright only over the big table
that served, among other things, as a desk, and the walls were almost invisible in the
shadows.
As they came down the hallway from the lift, everybody had begun speaking more softly.
Voices were never loud or excited in Kurt Fawzi's office.
Tom Brangwyn went to the table, taking off his belt and holster and laying his pistol
aside. The others, crowding into the room, added their weapons to his.
That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been five years since he
had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of them bothered. A gun was what a
boy