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