Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to
airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been
the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So
Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement
that had grown up around the first landing site had been called
Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing
the camp grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a massive monument.

Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been
opened, and atmosphere-domed factories and processing plants built. None
of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue-culture
foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive,
even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on
agriculture and grown wealthy at it.

Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner's death, the economics of
interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories
closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a
profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the
colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of space-freighting.

Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a
ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete--empty and roofless sheds
and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing
fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent,
dating from Poictesme's second brief and hectic prosperity, when the
Terran Federation's Third Fleet-Army Force had occupied the Gartner
Trisystem during the System States War.

* * * * *