ospering world. Then the sun of the
Federation had gone down. Nobody knew what had happened on Tanith
after that, but evidently none of it had been good.

At first, the two towers seemed as sound as when they had been
built; gradually it became apparent that one was broken at the top.
For the most part, the smaller buildings scattered widely around
them were standing, though here and there mounds of brush-grown
rubble showed where some had fallen in. The spaceport looked good--a
central octagon mass of buildings, the landing-berths, and, beyond,
the triangular areas of airship docks and warehouses. The central
building was outwardly intact, and the ship-berths seemed clear of
wreckage and rubble.

By the time the _Nemesis_ was following the _Space Scourge_ and the
_Lamia_ down, towed by her own pinnaces, the illusion that they were
approaching a living city had vanished. The interspaces between the
buildings were choked with forest-growth, broken by a few small
fields and garden-plots. At one time, there had been three of the
high buildings, literally vertical cities in themselves. Where the
third had stood was a glazed crater, with a ridge of fallen rubble
lying away from it. Somebody must have landed a medium missile,
about twenty kilotons, against its base. Something of the same sort
had scored on the far edge of the spaceport, and one of the eight
arrowheads of docks and warehouses was an indistinguishable slag-pile.

The rest of the city seemed to have died of neglect rather than
violence. It certainly hadn't been bombed out. Harkaman thought most
of the fighting had been done with subneutron bombs or Omega-ray
bombs, that killed the people without damaging the real estate. Or
bio-weapons; a man-made plague that had gotten out of control and
all but depopulated the planet.

"It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot
of jobs, to keep a civilization running. Smash the installations and
kill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don't know
how to rebuild and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of the
masses and even if the planet and the know-how is left, there's
nobody to do the work. I've seen planets that decivilized both ways.
Tanith, I think, is one of the latter."

That had been during one of the long after-dinner bull sessions on the
way out from Gram. Somebody, one of the noble gentlemen-adventurers who
had joined the company after the piracy of the _Enterprise