H Beam Piper - The Cosmic Computer.pdf - H. Beam Piper - margozap

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THIRTY MINUTES to Litchfield.

Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck,

watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath

the ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an

hourglass must feel with the sand slowly draining out.

It had been six months to Litchfield when the Mizar lifted out

of La Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had

been two months to Litchfield when he boarded the City of Asgard

at the port of the same name on Odin. It had been two hours to

Litchfield when the Countess Dorothy rose from the airship dock

at Storisende. He had had all that time, and now it was gone,

and he was still unprepared for what he must face at home.

Thirty minutes to Litchfield.

The words echoed in his mind as though he had spoken them aloud,

and then, realizing that he never addressed himself as sir, he

turned. It was the first mate.

He had a clipboard in his hand, and he was wearing a Terran

Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about a dozen

regulation-changes, ago. Once Conn

had taken that sort of thing for granted. Now it was obtruding

upon him everywhere.

"Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir," the first officer repeated,

and gave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises,

two; trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a

small flicker of anger, not at any person, not even at himself,

but at the whole infernal situation. He nodded.

"That's everything. Not many passengers left aboard, are there?"

"You're the only one, first class, sir. About forty farm

laborers on the lower deck." He dismissed them as mere cargo.

"Litchfield's the end of the run."

"I know. I was born there."

The mate looked again at his name on the list and grinned.

"Sure; you're Rodney Maxwell's son. Your father's been giving us

a lot of freight lately. I guess I don't have to tell you about

Litchfield."

"Maybe you do. I've been away for six years. Tell me, are they

having labor trouble now?"

"Labor trouble?" the mate was surprised. "You mean with the

farm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that

trouble."

"Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads

to the lower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just

pistols, either."

"Oh. That's on account of pirates."

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"Pirates?" Conn echoed.

"Well, I guess you'd call them that. A gang'll come aboard,

dressed like farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off

shotguns in their bindles. When the ship's airborne and out of

reach of help, they'll break

out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crew and

passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the mate

said. "You heard about the Harriet Barne, didn't you?"

She was Transcontinent & Overseas, the biggest contragravity

ship on the planet.

"They didn't pirate her, did they?"

The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There

was just a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time

the Air Patrol got to her estimated position it was too late.

Nobody's ever seen ship, officers, crew or passengers since."

"Well, great Ghu; isn't the Government doing anything about it?"

"Sure. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive.

And there hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city

limits of Storisende," he added solemnly.

The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon

ahead, and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks.

Below, the fields were bare and brown, and the woods were

autumntinted. They had been green with new foliage when he had

last seen them, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink

blossom. Must have gotten the crop in early, .on this side of

the mountains. Maybe they were still harvesting, over in the

Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was going to the

winepressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lot of cask

staves going aboard at Storisende.

Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six

years ago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that

had been melon fields recently,

among the new forests that had grown up in the past forty years.

The few stands of original timber towered above the second

growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planet

had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the

Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told

that-Surromanticist Movement, when they were rediscovering James

Branch Cabell. Old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and

half-piratical space-rover whose ship had been the first to

enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to the romantic writers of

the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets of the Alpha

System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from

Spenser's Faerie Queene, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of

course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one

had been called Storisende.

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Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing

Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member

Republic in the Terran Federation. The other planets were

uninhabitable except in airtight dome cities, but they were rich

in minerals. Companies had been formed to exploit them. No food

could be produced on any of them except by carniculture and

hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper to produce it

naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated on

agriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century.

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

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

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

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

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

then everybody was waving. The gangway-port opened, and the

Academy band struck up, enthusiastically if inexpertly, as he

descended to the dock.

His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut in the

same pattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout

curtain cloth. It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to

acquire a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the

pistol butt. His mother's dress was new, and so was Flora's,

made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure just which of the

Federation Armed

Forces had provided the material, but his father's shirt was Med

Service sterilon.

Ashamed to be noticing things like that, he clasped his father's

hand, kissed his mother, embraced his sister. There were a few,

but very few, gray threads in his father's mustache; a few more

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squintwrinkles around the eyes. His mother's hair was all gray,

now, and she was heavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be

because he'd grown a few inches in the last six years. For a

moment, he was surprised that Flora actually looked younger.

Then he realized that to seventeen, twenty-three is practically

middle age, but to twenty-three, twenty-nine is almost

contemporary. He noticed the glint on her left hand and caught

it to look at the ring.

"Hey! Zarathustra sunstone! Nice," he said. "Where is he, Sis?"

He'd never met her fiance; Wade Lucas hadn't come to Litchfield

to practice medicine until the year after he'd gone to Terra.

"Oh, emergency," Flora said. "Obstetrical case; that won't wait

on anything. In Tramptown, of course. But he'll be at the party

. . . Oops, I shouldn't have said that; that's supposed to be a

surprise."

"Don't worry; I'll be surprised," he promised.

Then Kurt Fawzi was pushing forward, holding out his hand.

Thinner, and grayer, but just as effusive as ever.

"Welcome home, Conn. Judge, shake hands with him and tell him

how glad we all are to see him back . . . . Now, Franz, put away

the recorder; save the

interview for the Chronicle till later. Ali, Professor Kellton;

one pupil Litchfield Academy can be proud of!"

He shook hands with them: Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin, old

Professor Dolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he

wondered, because he was Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son,

home from Terra, and how much because of what they hoped he'd

tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging him aside, was the first to speak

of it.

"Conn, what did you find out?" he whispered. "Do you know where

it is?"

He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klein Zareff

approaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and

the younger keeping .pace with him. Neither of them had been

born on Poictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about

where he came from, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been

political trouble on Hathor twenty years ago; the losers had had

to get off-planet in a hurry to dodge firing squads. Klein

Zareff never was reticent about his past. He came from Ashmodai,

one of the System States planets, and he had commanded a

regiment, and finally a division that had been blasted down to

less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He always

wore a little rosette of System States black and green on his

coat.

"Hello, boy," he croaked, extending a hand. "Good to see you

again."

"It sure is, Conn," the town marshal agreed, then lowered his

voice. "Find out anything definite?"

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