THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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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.[Pg 8]

Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing
Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republic