"You think, if you can get something like that started, that they"ll forget about the Brain?" his father asked skeptically.

"That crowd up in Kurt Fawzi"s office? Niflheim, no! They"ll go on hunting for the Brain as long as they live, and every day they"ll be expecting to find it tomorrow. That"ll keep them happy. But they"re all old men. The ones I"m interested in are the boys of Charley"s age. I"m going to give them too many real things to do--building ships, exploring the rest of the Trisystem, opening mines and factories, producing wealth--for them to get caught in that empty old dream."

He looked down at the dusty fountain on which his father sat. "That ghost-dream haunts this graveyard. I want to give them living dreams that they can make come true."

Conn"s father sat in silence for a while, his cigar smoke red in the sunset. "If you can do all that, Conn.... You know, I believe you can.

I"m with you, as far as I can help, and we"ll have a talk with Charley.

He"s a good boy, Conn, and he has a lot of influence among the other youngsters." He looked at his watch. "We"d better be getting along. You don"t want to be late for your own coming-home party."

Rodney Maxwell slid off the edge of the fountain to his feet, hitching at the gunbelt under his coat. Have to dig out his own gun and start wearing it, Conn thought. A man simply didn"t go around in public without a gun in Litchfield. It wasn"t decent. And he"d be spending a lot of time out in the brush, where he"d really need one.

First thing in the morning, he"d unpack that trunk and go over all those maps. There were half a dozen s.p.a.ceports and maintenance shops and shipyards within a half-day by airboat, none of which had been looted.

He"d look them all over; that would take a couple of weeks. Pick the best shipyard and concentrate on it. Kurt Fawzi"d be the man to recruit labor. Professor Kellton was a scholar, not a scientist. He didn"t know beans about hyperdrive engines, but he knew how to do library research.

They came to the edge of High Garden Terrace at the escalator, long motionless, its moving parts rusted fast, that led down to the Mall, and at the bottom of it was Senta"s, the tables under the open sky.

A crowd was already gathering. There was Tom Brangwyn, and there was Kurt Fawzi and his wife, and Lynne. And there was Senta herself, fat and dumpy, in one of her preposterous red-and-purple dresses, bustling about, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter the next.

The dinner, Conn knew, would be the best he had eaten in five years, and afterward they would sit in the dim glow of Beta Gartner, sipping coffee and liqueurs, smoking and talking and visiting back and forth from one table to another, as they always did in the evenings at Senta"s. Another bit from Eirrarsson"s poem came back to him:

_We sit in the twilight, the shadows among, And we talk of the happy days when we were brave and young._

That was for the old ones, for Colonel Zareff and Judge Ledue and Dolf Kellton, maybe even for Tom Brangwyn and Franz Veltrin and for his father. But his brother Charley and the boys of his generation would have a future to talk about. And so would he, and Lynne Fawzi.

--H. BEAM PIPER