TheHarriet Barnesettled comfortably at the dock, the bunting-swathed tugs lifting away from her. They had the outside sound pickups turned as low as possible, and still the noise was deafening. The spaceport was jammed, people on the ground and contragravity vehicles swarming above, with police cars vainly trying to keep them in order. All the bands in Storisende seemed to have been combined; they were blaring the "Planetary Hymn";
Genji Gartner's body lies a-moldering in the tomb,But his soul goes marching on!
When they opened the airlock, there was a hastily improvised ceremonial barge, actually a farm-scow completely draped in red and white, the Planetary colors. They all stopped, briefly, as they came out, to enjoy the novelty of outdoor air which could actually be breathed. Conn saw his father in the scow, and beside him Sylvie Jacquemont, trying, almost successfully, to keep from jumping up and down in excitement. Morgan Gatworth to meet his son, and Lester Dawes to meet his. Kurt Fawzi, Dolf Kellton, Colonel Zareff, Tom Brangwyn. He didn't see his mother, or his sister. Flora he had hardly counted on, but he was disappointed that his mother wasn't there to meet him.
Sylvie was embracing her father as he shook hands with his; then she threw her arms around his neck.
"Oh, Conn, I'm so happy! I was watching everything I could on-screen, everything you saw, and all the places you were, and everything you were doing...."
The scow—pardon, ceremonial barge—gave a slight lurch,throwing them together. Over her shoulder, he saw his father and Yves Jacquemont exchanging grins. Then they had to break it up while he shook hands with Fawzi and Judge Ledue and the others, and by the time that was over, the barge was letting down in front of the stand at the end of the dock, and the band was still deafening Heaven with "Genji Gartner's Body," and they all started up the stairs to be greeted by Planetary President Vyckhoven; he looked like an elderly bear who has been too well fed for too long in a zoo. And by Minister-General Murchison, who represented the Terran Federation on Poictesme. He was thin and balding, and he looked as though he had just mistaken the vinegar cruet for the wine decanter. Genji Gartner's soul stopped marching on, but the speeches started, and that was worse. And after the speeches, there was the parade, everybody riding in transparent-bodied aircars, and theLester Dawesand the two ships of the new Planetary Air Navy and a swarm of gunboats in column five hundred feet above, all firing salutes.
In spite of what wasn't, but might just as well have been, a concerted conspiracy to keep them apart, he managed to get a few words privately with Sylvie.
"My mother; she didn't get here. Is anything wrong?"
"Is anything anything else? I've been in the middle of it ever since you went away. Your mother's still moaning about all these companies your father's promoting—he never used to do anything like that, and it's all too big, and it's going to end in a big smash. And then she gets onto Merlin. You know, she won't say Merlin, she always calls it, 'that thing.'"
"I've noticed that."
"Then she begins talking about all the horrible things that'll happen when it's found, and that sets Flora off. Flora says Merlin's a big fake, and you and your father are using it to rob thousands of widows and orphans of their life savings, and that sets your mother off again. Self-sustaining cyclic reaction, like the Bethe solar-phoenix. And every time I try to pour a little oil on the troubled waters, I find I've gotten it on the fire instead. And then, Flora had this fight with Wade Lucas, and of course, she blames you for that."
"Good heavens, why?"
"Well, she couldn't blame it on herself, could she? Oh, you mean why the fight? Lucas is in business with your father now, and she can't convince him that you and your father are a pair of quadruple-dyed villains, I suppose. Anyhow, the engagement isphttt! Conn, is my father going back to Koshchei?"
"As soon as we can round up some people to help us on the ship."
"Then I'm going along. I've had it, Conn. I'm a combat-fatigue case."
"But, Sylvie; that isn't any place for a girl."
"Oh, poo! This is Sylvie. We're old war buddies. We soldiered together on Barathrum; remember?"
"Well, you'd be the only girl, and...."
"That's what you think. If you expect to get any kind of a gang together, at least a third of them will be girls. A lot of technicians are girls, and when work gets slack, they're always the first ones to get shoved out of jobs. I'll bet there are a thousand girl technicians out of work here—any line of work you want to name. I know what I'll do; I'll make a telecast appearance. I still have some news value, from the Barathrum business. Want to bet that I won't be the working girl's Joan of Arc by this time next week?"
That cheered him. A girl can punch any kind of a button a man can, and a lot of them knew what buttons to punch, and why. Say she could find fifty girls....
He had a slightly better chance to talk to his father before the banquet at the Executive Palace that evening. They shared the same suite at the Ritz-Gartner, and even welcoming committees seldom chase their victims from bedroom to bath.
"Yes, I know all about it," Rodney Maxwell said bitterly. "I was home, a couple of weeks ago. Flora simply will not speak to me, and your mother begged me, in tears, to quit everything we're doing here. I tried to give her some idea of what would happen if I dropped this, even supposing I could; she wouldn't listen to me." He finished putting thestuds in his shirt. "You still think this is worth what it's costing us?"
"You saw the views we sent back. There's work on Koshchei for a million people, at least. Why, even these two makeshift ships they're putting together here at Storisende are giving work, one way or another, to almost a thousand. Think what things will be like a year from now, if this keeps on."
Rodney Maxwell gave a wry laugh. "Didn't know I had a real Simon-pure altruist for a son."
"Pardner, when you call me that, smile."
"I am smiling. With some slight difficulty."
He didn't think well of the banquet. Back in Litchfield, Senta would have fired half her human help and taken a sledgehammer to her robo-chef for a meal like that. Even his father's camp cook would have been ashamed of it. And there were more speeches.
President Vyckhoven managed to get hold of him and Yves Jacquemont afterward, and steered them into his private study.
"Have you any real reason for thinking that Merlin might be on Koshchei?" the Planetary President asked.
"Great Ghu, no! We weren't looking for Merlin, Mr. President. We were looking for a hypership. We have one, too. Calling herOuroboros II. Twenty-five-hundred-footer. We expect to have her to space in a few months. I surely don't need to tell you what that will do toward restoring planetary prosperity."
"No, of course not; a hypership of our own. But...." He looked from one to the other of them. "But I understood.... That is, Mr. Kurt Fawzi was saying...."
"Mr. Fawzi is looking for Merlin here on Poictesme. If anybody finds it, that's where it'll be found. I'm interested in getting business started again. If Merlin is found, it would help, of course." He shrugged.
"Don't look at me," Jacquemont said. "Mr. Maxwell—both of them, father and son—want some spaceships. They hired me to help build them. That's all I have in it." Then he relit the cigar the President had given him and leaned back inhis chair, staring at the stuffed alcesoid head with the seven-foot hornspread above the fireplace.
Conn described the interview to his father after they were back at the hotel.
"I hope you convinced him. You know, he's afraid of Merlin. A lot of people have been saying that if Merlin's found, it should be used to determine Government policy. A few extremists are beginning to say that Merlin ought tobethe Government, and Jake Vyckhoven and his cronies ought to be dumped. Into the handiest mass-energy converter, preferably. You know, if anybody found Merlin and started it auditing the Planetary Treasury, Jake Vyckhoven'd be the one who'd be wanting a hypership."
Tom Brangwyn ran him down the next morning in the dining room.
"Conn, I wish you'd come along with me," he said. "Some of us are up in Kurt's suite; we'd all like to talk to you."
Somehow, he was acting as though he were making an arrest. That might have been nothing but professional habit. Conn went up to Fawzi's suite, and found Fawzi and Judge Ledue and Dolf Kellton and close to a dozen others there.
"I'm glad you could come, Conn," the Judge greeted him. Now that the defendant had arrived, the trial could begin. "I wish your father could have gotten here. I asked him to come, but he had a prior engagement. A meeting with some of the financial people here, about some company he's interested in."
"That's right; Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines."
"Interstellar!" Kurt Fawzi almost howled. "Great Ghu! Now it isn't enough to go out to Koshchei; he wants to go clear out of the Trisystem. That's what we wanted to talk about; all this nonsense you and your father are in. Merlin's right here on Poictesme. It's right at Force Command, and if your father hadn't robbed us of all our best men, like Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, we'd have found it by now. I don't think you and your father care a hoot if we ever find Merlin or not!"
"Kurt, that's a dreadful thing to say," Dolf Kellton objected in a shocked voice.
"It's a dreadful thing to have to say," Fawzi replied, "but you tell me what Conn Maxwell or Rodney Maxwell are doing to help find it."
"Who showed you where Force Command was?" Klem Zareff asked.
Nobody could think of any good quick comeback to that.
Conn took advantage of the pause to ask, "Why do you want to find Merlin?"
"Why do we ..." Fawzi spluttered indignantly. "If you don't know...."
"I know why I do. I want to see if you do. Do you?"
"Merlin would answer so many questions," Dolf Kellton told him gently. "Questions I can't answer for myself."
"With Merlin, we could set up a legal code and a system of jurisprudence that would give everybody absolute justice," Judge Ledue said.
As if absolute justice wasn't the last thing anybody in his right senses would want; a robot-judge would have the whole planet in jail inside a month.
"We have a man who joined us after you went off to Koshchei, Conn," Franz Veltrin said. "A Mr. Carl Leibert. He's some kind of a clergyman, from over Morven way. He says that Merlin could formulate an entirely new religion, which would regenerate humanity."
"Well, I don't have any such lofty ideas," Fawzi said. "I just want Merlin to show us how to get some prosperity here; bring things back to what they were before Poictesme went broke."
"And that's what Father and I are trying to do. You're going into the woods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax." Fawzi looked at him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better of it. "If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss of markets. If we find Merlin, and tape it with everything that's happened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tell us where to find new markets. But the markets won't come to us. We'll have to do our own exporting, and we'll needships. Now, you men have been studying about Merlin, and hunting for Merlin, all your lives. I can't add anything to what you know, and neither can my father. You find Merlin, and we'll have the ships ready when you do find it."
"Kurt, I think he has a point," somebody said.
"You're blasted well right he has," Klem Zareff put in. "If it wasn't for Conn Maxwell, you know where we'd be? Back in Litchfield, sitting around in Kurt's office, talking about how wonderful things'll be when we find Merlin, and doing nothing to find it."
"Kurt, I believe Conn is entitled to an apology," Judge Ledue ruled. "How close we are to finding Merlin I don't know, but it is due to him that we have any hope of finding it at all."
"Conn, I'm sorry," Fawzi said. "I oughtn't to have said some of the things I did. But we're all on edge; we've been having so much trouble.... Conn, it's right there at Force Command; I know it is. We've been all over the place. We have shafts sunk at each of the corners; we've used scanners, and put off echo shots. Nothing. We looked for additional passages out of the headquarters; there aren't any. But it has to be somewhere around. It justhasto be!"
"Maybe if I go out to Force Command with you, I might see something you've overlooked. And if I can't, I'll try to scrape up some stuff on Koshchei for you. Deep-vein scanners, that sort of thing, from the mines."
They took theLester Dawesout at a little past noon and turned south and east. Everybody aboard was happy—except Conn Maxwell. He was thinking of the years and years ahead of these trusting, hopeful old men, each year the grave of another expectation. Two hundred miles from Force Command, theGoblinmet them, her sides still spalled and dented from the hits she had taken in Barathrum Spaceport. When they came in sight of it, the mesa-top was deserted. Fawzi began wondering where in Nifflheim all the drilling rigs, and the seismo-trucks, were. Somebody with a pair of binoculars called attention to activity on the side of the highbutte on top of which the relay station was located. Fawzi began swearing exasperatedly.
"Might be something Mr. Leibert thought of," Franz Veltrin suggested.
"Then why in blazes didn't he screen us about it?"
"Who is this Leibert?" Conn asked. "Somebody mentioned him this morning, I think."
"He joined us after you left, Conn," Dolf Kellton said. "He's a clergyman from Morven. No regular denomination; he has a sect of his own."
"Yah, he would!" Klem Zareff rumbled. "Pious fraud!"
"He's really a good man, Conn; Klem's prejudiced. He says we ought to use Merlin to show us the true nature of God, and how to live in accordance with the Divine Will. He says Merlin can teach us a new religion."
A new religion, based on Merlin; that would be good. And then the fanatics who thought Merlin was the Devil would start a holy war to wipe out the servants of Satan, and with all the combat equipment that was lying around on this planet.... For the first time since this business started, he began to feel really frightened.
An aircar came bulleting away from the butte and landed on the mesa as theLester Dawesset down. The man who met them at the head of the vertical shaft wore Federation fatigues—baggy trousers, ankle boots and long smock, dyed black. He was bareheaded, and his white hair was almost shoulder-long. He had a white beard.
"Welcome, Brothers," he greeted, a hand raised in benediction. "And who is this with you?"
His voice was high and quavery; not a good pulpit voice, Conn thought.
Kurt Fawzi introduced Conn, and Leibert grasped his hand with a grip that was considerably stronger than his voice.
"Bless you, young man! It is to you alone that we owe our thanks that we are about to find the Great Computer. Every sapient being in the Galaxy will honor your name for a thousand years."
"Well, I hadn't counted on quite that much, Mr. Leibert.If it'll only help a few of these people to make a decent living I'll be satisfied."
Leibert shook his head sadly. "You think entirely in material terms, young man," he reproved. "Forget these things; acquire the higher spiritual values. The Great Computer must not be degraded to such uses; we should let it show us how to lift ourselves to a high spiritual plane...."
It went on like that, after they went down to Foxx Travis's—now Fawzi's—office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters instead of the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thick carpets on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi's office gang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no idea what a computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build a computer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn't need it, hewouldbe God.
As he talked, Conn began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition. He'd seen this Carl Leibert before, somewhere, and somehow he was sure that the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren't part of the picture. That puzzled him. He doubted if he'd have remembered Leibert from six years ago, almost seven, now, though a lot of itinerant evangelists showed up in Litchfield. That might have been it.
"I tell you, the Great Computer is there, in the heart of the butte," Leibert was insisting, now. "It has been revealed to me in a dream. It is completely buried. After it was made, no human touched it. The men who were here and used it in the War communicated with it only by radio."
That could be so. There were fully robotic computers, intended for use in places where no human could go and live. There was a big one on Nifflheim, armored against the fluorine atmosphere and the hydrofluoric-acid rains. But there was no point in that here, the things were enormously complicated, and military engineering of any sort emphasized simplicity—Aaaagh!Was he beginning to believe this balderdash himself?
Klem Zareff fell in with him as they were going to dinner. "Revealed in a dream!" the old Rebel snorted. "One thingyou can always get away with lying about is what you dream."
"You think he's lying? I think he's just crazy."
"That's what he wants you to think. Look, Conn, he knows Merlin is here; he's trying to keep us from it. That's why he shifted all that equipment over on the butte. He's working for Sam Murchison."
"I thought your theory was that the Federation had lost Merlin."
"It was, at first. It doesn't look that way to me now. It's right here at Force Command, somewhere. They don't want it found, and they're going to do everything they can to stop us. I oughtn't to have left this fellow Leibert here alone; well, I won't do that again. Get Tom Brangwyn to help me."
The voyage back to Koshchei had been a week-long nightmare. When she had been the pride and budget-wrecker of Transcontinent & Overseas Airline, theHarriet Barnehad accommodated two hundred first-class and five hundred lower-deck passengers, but the conversion to a spaceship had drastically reduced her capacity. The three hundred men and women who had been recruited for the Koshchei colony had been crammed into her with brutal disregard for comfort, privacy or anything else except the ability of the air-recyclers to keep them breathing. When Captain Nichols set her down at the administration building at Port Carpenter, a few had had to be carried off, but they were all alive, which made the trip an unqualified success.
The dozen leaders of the expedition were congratulating themselves on that in one of the executive offices after the first dinner at Port Carpenter. Rodney Maxwell, in Storisende,had joined them in screen-image; he was mostly listening, and sometimes contributing a remark apropos of something the rest of them had said five minutes ago.
"Our hypership," Conn was saying, "is going to have to be item two on the agenda. The first thing we need is a ship for the Poictesme-Koshchei run. By this time next year, we ought to have a thousand to fifteen hundred people here at the least. We can't haul them all on that flying sardine can."
"We'll need supplies, too. What was left here won't last forever," Nichols added.
"And you're going to have to run this at a profit," Luther Chen-Wong, who had come along for first hand experience and to help with administrative work, added. "You have a big payroll to meet, and you'll have to keep the stockholders happy. People like Jethro Sastraman and some of these Storisende bankers aren't going to be satisfied with promises and long-term prospects; they'll want dividends."
"We'll have to get claims staked on something besides Port Carpenter, too. Those ships that are building at Storisende will be finished before long," Jerry Rivas said. "If we don't get some more things claimed, the first thing you know, we'll own Port Carpenter and nothing else."
"Well, let's see what we can find in the way of a big airboat, or a small ship," Conn said. "Jerry, you can pick a party for exploring. Just zigzag around the planet and transmit in locations and views of whatever you find, and we'll send it on to Storisende."
"And don't pick anybody for your exploring party that can't be spared from anything here," Jacquemont added. "We don't want to have to chase you halfway around the world to bring back the only specialist in something yesterday at the latest."
"Are you going to come along, Conn?" Rivas asked.
"Oh, Lord, no! I'm going to be doing fifteen things at once here."
All the computer work. Finding materials to make astrogational equipment and robo-pilots. Studying hyperspace theory—fortunately, there was an excellent library here—and setting up classes, and teaching school. And keeping intouch with his father, on Poictesme. It was making him nervous not to know what sort of foolishness the older and wiser heads might be getting into.
The next morning, they began organizing work-gangs and setting up committees. Three men, two girls and about twenty robots got an open-pit iron mine started; as soon as the steel mill was ready, ore started coming in. Anse Dawes had a gang looking for something they could build a 350-foot interplanetary ship out of; Jacquemont and Mack Vibart were getting plans and specifications and making lists of needed materials. Conn gathered a dozen men and women and started classes in computer theory and practice; at the same time, he and Charley Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatial astrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into some everythingless noplace outside normal space-time, and then pulling her out again by her bootstraps at some other place in the normal continuum, light-years away.
Roughly, it compared to shooting hummingbirds on the wing, blindfolded, with a not particularly accurate pistol, from a mile-a-minute merry-go-round.
That was something you could only do with a computer. A human, with a slide rule, a pencil and pad, could figure it out, of course—if he had fifty-odd thousand years to do it. A good computer did it in thirty seconds. That was one difference between people and computers. The other difference was that the desirability of making a hyperspace jump would never occur to a computer, unless somebody pushed a button and taped in instructions.
They found a three-hundred-foot globular skeleton, probably the nucleus of a big hyperspace ship, and decided that was big enough for what they wanted. The entire colony got to work on it. Photoprinted plans and specifications poured out as Jacquemont and a couple of draftsmen got them up. Steel came out of the steel mill at one end while ore came in at the other. A swarm of big contragravity machines, some robotic and some human-operated, clustered around the skeletal hull like hornets building a nest.
Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines was chartered; the lawyers reported having to overcome a little more resistance than usual from the Government about that. And the bill to nationalize Merlin, which had died in committee, was resuscitated and was being debated hotly on the floor of Parliament. The Administration was now supporting it.
"Are they completely crazy?" Conn wanted to know, when he heard about that. "They pass that bill and nobody's going to look for Merlin if they know the Government will snatch it as soon as they find it."
"That is precisely Jake Vyckhoven's idea," his father replied. "I told you he was afraid of Merlin. He's getting more afraid of it every day."
He had reason to. There was a growing sentiment in favor of turning the entire Government over to the computer as soon as it was found. To his horror, Conn heard himself named as chairman of a committee that should be set up to operate it. The moderates, who had merely wanted Merlin used in an advisory capacity, were dropping out; the agitation was coming from extremists who wanted Merlin to be the whole Government, and now the extremists were developing an extreme wing of their own, who called themselves Cybernarchists and started wearing colored-shirt uniforms and greeting each other with an archaic stiff-arm salute, and the words, "Hail Merlin!"
And the followers of the gospel-shouter on the west coast were now cropping up all over the mainland, and on the continent of Acaire to the north, and another cult, non-religious, was convinced that Merlin was a living machine, with conscious intelligence of its own and awesome psi-powers, a sort of super-Golem, which, if found and awakened, would enslave the whole Galaxy. Fortunately, these two hated each other as venomously as both did the Cybernarchists, and spent most of their energies attacking each other's meetings. The news-services were beginning to publish casualty lists, some heavy enough for outpost fighting between a couple of regular armies.
One thing, it helped the employment situation. Everybody was hiring mercenaries.
"But what," Conn asked, "are the sane people doing?"
"You ought to know," his father told him. "I suspect that you have all of them on Koshchei now."
The sane people, if that was what they were, were being busy. They were putting a set of Abbott lift-and-drive engines together, and Conn's computer class was estimating the mass of the finished ship and the amount of energy needed to overcome gravitation and give it constant acceleration from Koshchei to Poictesme. They were learning, by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudograv engines. And they were putting together a hundred and one other things, all of which was good training for the time they'd be ready to start work onOuroboros II.
Jerry Rivas had found a contragravity craft which seemed to have been used by some top official for business and inspection trips, had gathered a crew of non-specialists who weren't urgently needed at Port Carpenter, and set out to circumnavigate the planet. It worked just the reverse of expectation. He found a big uranium mine, with an isotope-separation plant and a battery of plutonium-breeders; that meant that Mohammed Matsui and half a dozen other nuclear-power people had to get into another boat and speed after him to see what he had really found. As soon as they landed, Rivas took off again to discover a copper mine and a complex of smelters and processing plants. That took a few more experts, or reasonable facsimiles, away from Port Carpenter. And then he found a whole city that manufactured nothing but computers and robo-controls and things like that.
Conn loaded his whole computer-theory class onto a freight-scow and took them there. By the time he landed, his father was screening him from Storisende.
"When are you going to get the ship finished?" he was asking. "Kurt Fawzi's pestering the daylights out of me. He wants that equipment you promised him."
"We're working on it. What's happened, has Carl Leibert had another revelation?"
"I don't know about that. Kurt's sure Merlin is directlyunder Force Command. And speaking about Leibert, Klem Zareff's been after me about him. You know I've contracted for the full-time and exclusive services of this Barton-Massarra detective agency. Well, Klem wants me to put them to work investigating Leibert."
"Yes, I know; Leibert's a Terran Federation spy. Why do you need the full-time services of the biggest private detective agency on Poictesme?"
"There have been some odd things happening. People have been trying to bribe and intimidate some of my office help. I have found microphones and screen-pickups planted around. I caught one of our clerks trying to make copies of voice-tapes. I think it's some of these other Merlin-chasing companies, trying to find out how close we are to it. Klem Zareff is recruiting more guards. But how soon are you going to get that ship built?"
"We're working on it. That's all I know, now."
He went back to work getting a classroom ready for his students. If he'd accepted that instructorship at Montevideo, he wouldn't be a full professor now, but none of the rest of this would be happening, either.
That night, he had the dream about starting the big machine and not being able to stop it again.
There was street-fighting in Storisende between the Cybernarchists and Government troops. There was a pitched battle in the west between the Armageddonists (Merlin-is-Satan) and the Human Supremacy League (Merlin-is-the-Golem), with heavy losses and claims of victory on both sides. President Vyckhoven proclaimed planet-wide martial law, and then discovered that he had nothing to enforce it with.
Luther Chen-Wong screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice was almost inaudibly low at first.
"Conn, I just had a call from Jerry and Clyde. I think we can knock off work on that ship we're building now. We won't need it."
"Have they found a ship?" If they had, it would be the first one anybody had found. "Where?"
"They haven't foundaship, Conn; they've found all of them. All the ships in the Alpha System except theHarriet Barneand the two they're building at Storisende. The place is marked on the map as Sickle Mountain Naval Observatory. It's just a bitty little dot, but the map was made before the evacuation started. It's where most of the troops in the system were embarked on hyperships, I think. Wait till I show you the views."
Conn put on another screen; the first view was from an altitude of five miles. He didn't need Luther's voice to identify Sickle Mountain; a long curve, with a spur at right angles to one end, the name must have suggested itself to whoever saw it first. The observatory had been built where the handle of the sickle joined the blade; as the ship from which the view had been taken had approached, the details grew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plain inside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like tinsel dust on red-brown velvet.
"Great Ghu, are those all ships?"
"That's right. Look at this one, now."
The view changed. The aircraft was down, now, below the crest of the mountain, circling slowly above the plain. Hundreds, no, over a thousand, of them; two- and three-and five-hundred-footers, and here and there a thousand-footer that could have been converted into a hypership if anybody had wanted to take the trouble. The view changed again; this time from an aircar dropped from the ship, he supposed; it was down almost to the tops of the ships, and he could read names and home ports:Pixie, Chloris;Helen O'Loy, Anaïtis. They were from Jurgen.Sky-Rover, Port Saunders; she was from Horvendile. Ships from Storisende, and Yellowmarsh on Janicot, and....
"Now we know where they all went."
It was logical, of course. Most of the hyperships used in the evacuation had been built here. It had been less trouble to lead the troops and the civilian workers from Poictesme and the other planets onto small normal-space ships and bring them here than to take the big ships away on short interplanetary runs to the other planets.
"Have you screened my father yet?"
"Yes. This is going to knock the bottom out of the companies that are building those ships at Storisende, I'm afraid."
"Their tough luck."
"It could be everybody's tough luck. Both those companies have been issuing stock, and there's been a lot of speculation in it. This market's so inflated now that a puncture at one place might blow the whole thing out."
He knew that. He shrugged. "Father will have to think of something. Tell him I'll screen him from Sickle Mountain."
Then he went back to his classroom.
"All right, class dismissed," he said. "You have twenty minutes to get your bags packed. We're going to work for real, now."
Airboats and airships flocked to Sickle Mountain; some of them hastened back to Port Carpenter for loads of food, for there was none in the storehouses at the embarkation camp. They inspected ship after ship, and chose two three-hundred-footers. They sent airships and freight-scows to the dozen-odd cities and industrial centers that had been already explored, to gather cargo, as far as possible the items in shortest supply on Poictesme.
"Don't worry about a market smash," his father told him. "We have that taken care of. Trisystem Investments has just bought up a lot of stock in both of those companies, and we've set up agreements with them—informally, of course; we'll have to get them voted on by our own companies—to sell them ships from Koshchei. In return, the company that's building the ship out of four air-freighters will go to Janicot, and the company that's building a ship out of the old Leitzenring Building will go to Jurgen, and they'll both stay off Koshchei. Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong will probably be defending antitrust suits till the end of time. The Planetary Government has stopped liking us, you know."
"Then we'll have to get one that will like us. There'll be an election about this time next year, won't there?"
His father nodded. "To use one of your expressions, we're working on it. How soon can you get your ships in?"
"Well be loaded and ready to lift off in a week. Another week for the trip."
"Well, don't forget that equipment you promised Kurt Fawzi."
"We'll have that on. Jerry Rivas is gathering it up now."
"How are you fixed for arms on Koshchei?"
"Arms? Why, there are some. There was a pretty big force of Space Marines on duty here, and they left everything they couldn't carry in their hands. Why? The Armageddonists and the Cybernarchists and Human Supremacy bought all you had on hand?"
"They're buying, but I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking that your crews might need something to argue their way off the ships at Storisende with. Things are getting just slightly rugged here, now."
There were no bands or speeches when they came in this time. A lot of contragravity vehicles circled widely around the spaceport, but except for a few news-service cars, the police were keeping them back of a two-mile radius around the landing-pits. A couple of gunboats were making tight circles above, and on the dock were more vehicles and a horde of police and guards.
When Rodney Maxwell came across the bridge from the dock after they opened the airlocks, he was followed by a dozen Barton-Massarra private police, as villainous-looking a collection of ruffians as Conn had ever seen. He was wearing a new suit, with a waist-length jacket instead of the long coat he usually wore, and there was a holstered automatic on each hip. In Litchfield, he never carried more than one pistol, and Storisende was supposed to be anorderly place where nobody needed to go armed. More than anything else, that told Conn approximately what had been going on while he had been on Koshchei.
"Ship-guard," his father told Yves Jacquemont. "All your crew can come off; they'll take care of things. Get your people in that troop carrier over there. Everybody will stay at Interplanetary Building. None of the hotels are safe, not even the Ritz-Gartner. And be sure everybody's well armed when they come off the ship."
Jacquemont nodded. "I know the drill; I've been in Port Oberth on Venus and Skorvann on Loki. Any law we want, we make for ourselves."
"That's about it. I'll see you there. Conn, I wish you'd come with me. Somebody here wants to talk to you."
He wondered if his mother, or Flora, had come to Storisende. When he asked his father as they crossed onto the dock, there was a brief twinge of pain in Rodney Maxwell's face.
"No, they're not having anything to do—Duck; quick!"
Then his father was diving under a lifter-truck that stood empty on the dock. The private police were scattering for cover, and an auto-cannon began pom-pomming. Conn took one quick look in the direction in which it was firing, saw an aircar that had broken through the police line and was rushing toward them, and dived under the lifter after his father. As he did, he saw a missile flash out from one of the gunboats like a thrown knife. Then he huddled beside his father and put his arms over his head.
He felt the heat and shock of the explosion and, an instant later, heard the roar. When nothing immediately disastrous happened after he had counted fifteen seconds, he stuck his head out and looked up. The gunboat was struggling to regain her equilibrium, and the aircar had vanished in a fireball. They both emerged, straightening. His father was brushing himself with his hands and saying something about always having to duck under something when he had a new suit on.
"Robot control, probably; could have been launched from anywhere in town. Why, no; your mother and Flora aren'tspeaking to either of us, any more. Pity, of course, but I'm glad they're in Litchfield. It's a little healthier there."
They walked to the slim recon-car and climbed in, pulling the door shut after them. Wade Lucas was waiting for them at the controls.
"There, you see!" he began, as soon as he had the car lifting. "What I've been telling you. We'll have to stop this."
"Conn, meet our new partner. I told him everything you told me, out on the Mall, the day you came home. I had to," his father hastened to add. "He'd figured most of it out for himself. The only thing to do was admit him to the lodge and give him the oath."
"I didn't know about General Travis; I didn't even know he was still alive," Lucas said. "But the rest of it was pretty obvious, once I stopped jumping to conclusions and did a little thinking. You know, ever since I came here I've been preaching to these people to stop looking for Merlin and do something to help themselves. You're smarter than I am, Conn; instead of opposing them, you're guiding them."
"Did you tell Flora?"
Lucas shook his head. "I tried to explain what you're trying to do, but she wouldn't listen. She just told me I'd gotten to be as big a crook as you two." He had the car up to fifty thousand; putting it into a wide circle around the city, he locked the controls and got out his cigarettes. "Rod, we've got to stop this. You were just lucky this time. Some of these days your luck's going to run out."
"How can we stop?" Conn demanded. "Tell them the truth? They'd lynch us, and then go on hunting for Merlin."
"Worse than that; it'd be a smash worse than the one when the War ended. I was only ten then, but I can remember that very plainly. We can't stop it, and we wouldn't dare stop it if we could."
"What's been going on here in the last month?" Conn asked. "I've been too busy to keep in touch. I know there's been rioting, and these crackpot sects, but...."
"I think this is personal to us. There have been some ugly things happening. There were four attempts to burglarize our offices. I told you about some of the other stuff, themicrophones we found, and so on. The worst thing was Lucy Nocero, my secretary. She just vanished, a couple of weeks ago. Three days later, the police found her wandering in a park, a complete imbecile. Somebody who either didn't know how to use one or didn't care what happened had used a mind-probe on her. It's twenty to one she'll never recover."
"It's this Storisende financial crowd," Wade Lucas said. "They had things all their own way till Alpha-Interplanetary was organized. Now they're getting shoved into the background, and they don't like it."
"They're making more money than they ever did, and they just love it," Rodney Maxwell said. "I'd think it was either Jake Vyckhoven or Sam Murchison."
"Murchison!" Lucas hooted. "Why, he's nobody! Federation Minister-General; all the authority of the Terran Federation, and nothing to enforce it with. He doesn't have a position, here; he has a disease. Sleeping sickness."
"He certainly doesn't believe there is a Merlin, does he?" Conn asked.
"I don't know what he believes, but he's getting to be Klem Zareff's opposite number. He thinks this whole thing's a plot against the Federation. It's a good thing Klem didn't get around to repainting his combat vehicles black and green, the way he did the Home Guard stuff at Litchfield."
"I'd be more likely to think it was Vyckhoven."
"Could be. Or it could be the Armageddonists, or Human Supremacy; I am ashamed to say that this heil-Merlin Cybernarchist gang are friendly to us. Or it could be some of the banking crowd, or some of these rival space-companies. Barton-Massarra is trying to find out. Well, we have some of Wade's pet suspects at Interplanetary Building now. There's been a meeting going for the last week to partition the Alpha Gartner System."
The Interplanetary Building had been a medium-class residence hotel at the time of the War. Junior staff officers and civilian technicians and their families had lived there. It had been vacant ever since the disastrous outbreak of peace. Now it had a big new fluorolite sign, and housed theoffices of all the Maxwell companies. There was a truculent display of anti-vehicle weapons on the top landing stage, and more Barton-Massarra private police. They looked even more villainous then the ones at the spaceport. Conn recalled having heard that most of the Blackie Perales gang had been discharged for lack of evidence; he wondered how many of them had hired with Barton-Massarra.
The meeting was in a big conference room six floors down; it had been going on uninterrupted for days, with all the interested companies' representatives standing watch-and-watch around the clock. Lester Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes were there for L. E. & S.; Transcontinent & Overseas was represented; there were people from Alpha-Interplanetary, and bankers and financiers, and people from the companies building the two ships at the spaceport. And J. Fitzwilliam Sterber, the lawyer.
And reporters, phoning stories in and getting audiovisual interviews of anybody who would hold still long enough. They converged in a rush as Conn and his father and Lucas came in.
"No statement, gentlemen!" Rodney Maxwell shouted, above the babble of their questions. "When we have anything to release, it will be released to all of you."
Jacquemont and Nichols had already arrived; Lucas went to them and began talking about stevedores and lifters to get off the cargoes from the ships. Conn hastened to join them.
"The scanning and mining equipment aboard theHelen O'Loy," he said. "That shouldn't be unloaded here; we'll take the ship out to Force Command and unload it there."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw, a lurking reporter snatch the handphone off his radio and begin talking; it would be stated authoritatively that Merlin was at Force Command and would be uncovered as soon as special equipment from Koshchei arrived.
Everybody at the long table was shouting at everybody else. The Jurgen and Janicot Companies wanted to buy ships from Koshchei Exploitation & Development. The Alpha-Interplanetary director, who was also a vice-presidentof Transcontinent & Overseas, opposed that; another director of A-I, who was also board chairman of Koshchei Exploitation & Development, wanted to sell ships to anybody who had the price, the Transcontinent & Overseas man was calling him a traitor to the company, and one of the stockbrokers, who was also a vice-president of Trisystem Investments and a director of Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines, was wanting to know which company. And a banker who was stockholder in all the companies was shouting that they were all a gang of crooks, and J. Fitzwilliam Sterber was declaring that anybody who called him a crook could continue the discussion through seconds.
Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal on Poictesme. He wondered how many duels this meeting was going to hatch.
The next afternoon theHelen O'Loywas unloaded, all but the mining equipment; Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley Gatworth and a few others took her out to Force Command. They were met by Klem Zareff's armed airboats two hundred and fifty miles from the mesa, and they found the place in more of a state of siege than when the Badlands had been full of outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have been moved in from Barathrum Spaceport, and Zareff had more men and firepower than he had ever commanded during the System States War. If Minister-General Murchison was convinced that the Merlin excitement was a cover for some seditious plot against the Federation, this ought to give him food for thought.
There was still work, mostly boring lateral shafts for echo shots, going on at the butte, under the relay station. That was Leibert, who was still insisting that that was where Merlin was buried. There was also some work on top of the mesa, by those who were convinced that that was where Merlin was to be found. Kurt Fawzi was taking the lead in that. Franz Veltrin and Dolf Kellton sided with Leibert, and Fawzi's office clique had split into two factions. Judge Ledue was maintaining strict impartiality, as befitted his judicial position.
"Why hasn't your father gotten those detectives of his to work on this fake preacher?" Zareff wanted to know, when he and Tom Brangwyn were able to talk to Conn alone.
"Well, they've been busy," Conn said. "Trying to keep him alive, for one thing. You heard about the robo-bomb somebody launched at us the day we brought the ships in, didn't you?"
"Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl, too," Brangwyn said. "But hasn't it ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that calls himself Leibert might be mixed up with the gang that did that?"
"You suspect him, too?"
Brangwyn nodded. "I took a few audiovisuals of him, when he didn't know it; I sent them to some different law-enforcement people over in Morven, where he says he comes from. They never saw him before, and couldn't find anybody who did."
"Well? He just doesn't have a police record, then."
"He says he's a preacher. Preachers don't go off in the woods by themselves to preach; they get up in pulpits, in front of a lot of people. Those towns over in Morven are small enough for everybody to have known something about him. He's a fake, I tell you."
"Let me have copies of those audiovisuals, Tom. I'll see what can be found out about him. I'm beginning to wonder about him myself. I'm sure I've seen him, somewhere...."
When he got back to Storisende, he found that the marathon conference on the sixth floor down at the Interplanetary Building had finally come to an end. Everybody seemed satisfied, and apparently nobody was going to have pistols and coffee with anybody else about it.
"We have things fixed up," his father told him. "The gang who are building the ship out of four air-freighters are chartered as Janicot Industries, Ltd.; they're going to specialize in chemical products. The other company has a charter now, too. They're going to operate on Jurgen and Horvendile. We'll sell them ships, and Alpha-Interplanetary will put on scheduled trips to all three planets and also Koshchei. We're getting along very nicely with them, exceptthat everybody's competing for technicians and skilled labor. We have two hundred more people signed up for Koshchei. What you want to do is train as many of them as you can for ship-operation. Alpha-Interplanetary is going to start a training program here at Storisende; you'd better leave one of your ships for them to work on, and send back as many ships as you can find officers and crews for."
"We're getting things really started."
"Yes. The only trouble is...." His father frowned. "I don't understand these people, Conn. Everybody ought to be making millions out of this by this time next year, but all any of them, even these Storisende bankers, can talk about is how soon we're going to find Merlin."
"I wish we could stop that, somehow. Listen; I have it. Merlin never was on Poictesme; Merlin was a space-station a few thousand miles off-planet; there was a crew of operators aboard, and they communicated with Force Command by radio. When the War ended, they took it outside the system and shot off a planetbuster inside her. No more Merlin. How would that be?"
His father shook his head. "Wouldn't do. If anybody believed it, which I doubt, they'd just quit. The market would collapse, everybody would be broke, it would just be the end of the War all over again. Conn, we can't let it stop now. We're going too fast to stop; if we tried it, we'd smash up and break our necks."
Jerry Rivas, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping things running on Koshchei. Work on the interplanetary ship at Port Carpenter had stopped when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found; it had never beenresumed. When Conn returned, he found work started on theOuroboros II. Some of the two hundred newcomers who came in on theHelen O'Loyhad special skills needed on the hypership; most of them went with Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to Sickle Mountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. Some of them, it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. Sylvie, who had been one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping him with the long lists of needed materials, some of which had to be brought from other places as much as a thousand miles away. Jerry Rivas went back to exploring; Nichols had to drop his space-training work temporarily to organize a fleet of air-freighters; usually, the men best able to operate them were urgently needed on some job at the construction dock.
Ships lifted out almost daily from Sickle Mountain. They tried to get some kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselves of what they needed for themselves. Some of the ships came back loaded with provisions and bringing new recruits—for instance, the teaching of physics and mathematics almost stopped at Storisende College because the professors had been virtually shanghaied.
Conn found himself losing touch with affairs on Poictesme. Ships had landed on both Janicot and Horvendile and were sending back claims to abandoned factories. By that time they had all the decks into theOuroboros II, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogational and hyperspace instruments put in place. The hypershipAndromedawas back from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what the expedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures about Merlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral. Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, and combat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as it came out. The Government was buying some, but by no means all of it.
"Conn, can you come back here to Poictesme for a while?" his father asked. "Things have turned serious. I don't like totalk about it by screen—too many people know our scrambler combinations. But I wish you were here."
He started to object; there were millions, well, a couple of hundred, things he had to attend to. The look on his father's face stopped him.
"Ship leaving Sickle Mountain tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll be aboard."
The voyage back to Poictesme was a needed rest. He felt refreshed when he got off at Storisende Spaceport and was met by his father and Wade Lucas in one of the slim recon-cars. They greeted him briefly and took the car up and away from the city, where it was safe to talk.
"Conn, I'm scared," his father said. "I'm beginning to think there really is a Merlin, after all."
"Oh, come off it! I know it's contagious, but I thought you'd been vaccinated."
"I'm beginning to think so, too," Lucas said. "I don't like it at all."
"You know what that gang who took theAndromedato Panurge found?"
"They were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements for Merlin, weren't they?"
"Yes. They found it. My Barton-Massarra operatives got to some of the crew. This place had been turning out material for a computer of absolutely unconventional design; the two computermen they had with them couldn't make head or tail of half of it. And every blueprint, every diagram, every scrap of writing or recording, had been destroyed. But they found one thing, a big empty fiber folder that had fallen under something and been overlooked. It was marked:TOP SECRET. PROJECT MERLIN."
"Project Merlin could have been anything," Conn started to say. No. Project Merlin was something they made computer parts for.
"Dolf Kellton's research crew, at the Library here, came across some references to Project Merlin, too. For instance, there was a routine division court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a very trivial charge. Force Commandordered the court-martial stopped, and the two officers simply dropped out of the Third Force records, it was stated that they were engaged in work connected with Project Merlin. That's an example; there were half a dozen things like that."
"Tell him what Kurt Fawzi and his crew found," Wade Lucas said.
"Yes. They have a fifty-foot shaft down from the top of the mesa almost to the top of the underground headquarters. They found something on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped mass, fifty feet thick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium. It's directly over what used to be Foxx Travis's office."
"That's not a tenth big enough for anything that could even resemble Merlin."
"Well, it's something. I was out there day before yesterday. They're down to the collapsium on top of this thing; I rode down the shaft in a jeep and looked at it. Look, Conn, we don't know what this Project Merlin was; all this lore about Merlin that's grown up since the War is pure supposition."
"But Foxx Travis told me, categorically, that there was no Merlin Project," Conn said. "The War's been over forty years; it's not a military secret any longer. Why would he lie to me?"
"Why did you lie to Kurt Fawzi and the others and tell them there was a Merlin? You lied because telling the truth would hurt them. Maybe Travis had the same reason for lying to you. Maybe Merlin's too dangerous for anybody to be allowed to find."
"Great Ghu, are you beginning to think Merlin is the Devil, or Frankenstein's Monster?"
"It might be something just as bad. Maybe worse. I don't think a man like Foxx Travis would lie if he didn't have some overriding moral obligation to."
"And we know who's been making most of the trouble for us, too," Lucas added.
"Yes," Rodney Maxwell said, "we do. And sometime I'm going to invite Klem Zareff to kick my pants-seat. Sam Murchison, the Terran Federation Minister-General."
"How'd you get that?"
"Barton-Massarra got some of it; they have an operative planted in Murchison's office. And some of our banking friends got the rest. This Human Supremacy League is being financed by somebody. Every so often, their treasurer makes a big deposit at one of the banks here, all Federation currency, big denomination notes. When I asked them to, they started keeping a record of the serial numbers and checking withdrawals. The money was paid out, at the First Planetary Bank, to Mr. Samuel S. Murchison, in person. The Armegeddonists are getting money, too, but they're too foxy to put theirs through the banks. I believe they're the ones who mind-probed Lucy Nocero. Barton-Massarra believe, but they can't prove, that Human Supremacy launched that robo-bomb at us, that time at the spaceport."
"Have you done anything with those audiovisuals of Leibert?"
"Gave them to Barton-Massarra. They haven't gotten anything, yet."
"So we have to admit that Klem wasn't crazy after all. What do you want me to do?"
"Go out to Force Command and take charge. We have to assume that there may be a Merlin, we have to assume that it may be dangerous, and we have to assume that Kurt Fawzi and his covey of Merlinolators are just before digging it up. Your job is to see that whatever it is doesn't get loose."
The trouble was, if he started giving orders around Force Command he'd stop being a brilliant young man and become a half-baked kid, and one word from him and the older and wiser heads would do just what they pleased. He wondered if the pro-Leibert and anti-Leibert factions were still squabbling; maybe if he went out of his way to antagonize one side, he'd make allies of the other. He took the precaution of screening in, first; Kurt Fawzi, with whom he talked, was almost incoherent with excitement. At least, he was reasonably sure that none of Klem Zareff's trigger-happy mercenaries would shoot him down coming in.
The well, fifty feet in diameter, went straight down fromthe top of the mesa; as the headquarters had been buried under loose rubble, they'd had to vitrify the sides going down. He let down into the hole in a jeep, and stood on the collapsium roof of whatever it was they had found. It wasn't the top of the headquarters itself; the microray scannings showed that. It was a drum-shaped superstructure, a sort of underground penthouse. And there they were stopped. You didn't cut collapsium with a cold chisel, or even an atomic torch. He began to see how he was going to be able to take charge here.
"You haven't found any passage leading into it?" he asked, when they were gathered in Fawzi's—formerly Foxx Travis's—office.
"Nifflheim, no! If we had, we'd be inside now." Tom Brangwyn swore. "And we've been all over the ceiling in here, and we can't find anything but vitrified rock and then the collapsium shielding."
"Sure. There are collapsium-cutters, at Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. They do it with cosmic rays."
"But collapsium will stop cosmic rays," Zareff objected.
"Stop them from penetrating, yes. A collapsium-cutter doesn't penetrate; it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like a grinding-wheel, or a buzz-saw."
"Well, could you get one down that hole?" Judge Ledue asked.
He laughed. "No. The thing is rather too large. In the first place, there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. With them, you produce negamatter—atoms with negatively charged protons and positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them into contact with normal positive-matter—That's done in a chamber the size of a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about a hundred tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impart rotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door that would lift ten ships the size of theLester Dawes. Then you need another fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield your cutting-head. The cutting-head alone weighs three tons. The rotary beam that doesthe cutting," he mentioned as an afterthought, "is about the size of a silver five-centisol piece."
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated that Divine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert's stock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in the butte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of Force Command.
"Means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down to where that thing is," Zareff said. "That'll take a year."
"Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started," Conn told them. "It'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauled here than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened."
He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on Koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going to take charge here. He had just been unanimously elected Indispensable Man.
"Bless you, young man!" Carl Leibert cried. "At last, the Great Computer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of the Age of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks in prayer."
"He's been doing a lot of praying lately," Tom Brangwyn remarked, after Leibert had gone out. "He's moved into the chaplain's quarters, back of the pandenominational chapel on the fourth level down. Always keeps his door locked, too."
"Well, if he wants privacy for his devotions, that's his business. Maybe we could all do with a little prayer," Veltrin said.
"Probably praying to Sam Murchison by radio," Klem Zareff retorted. "I'd like to see inside those rooms of his."
He called Yves Jacquemont at Port Carpenter after dinner. When he told Jacquemont what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was a pity screens couldn't be fitted with olfactory sensors, so that he could smell Conn's breath.
"I am not drunk. I am not crazy. And I am not exercising my sense of humor. I don't know what Fawzi and his gang have here, but if it isn't Merlin it's something just as hot.We want at it, soonest, and we'll have to dig a couple of hundred feet of rock off it and open a collapsium can."
"How are we going to get that stuff on a ship?"
"Anything been done to that normal-space job we started since I saw it last? Can you find engines for it? And is there anything about those mining machines or the cutter that would be damaged by space-radiation or re-entry heat?"
Yves Jacquemont was silent for a good deal longer than the interplanetary time-lag warranted. Finally he nodded.
"I get it, Conn. We won't put the things in a ship; we'll build a ship around them. No; that stuff can all be hauled open to space. They use things like that at space stations and on asteroids and all sorts of places. We'll have to stop work onOuroboros, though."
"LetOuroboroswait. We are going to dig up Merlin, and then everybody is going to be rich and happy, and live happily forever after."
Jacquemont looked at him, silent again for longer than the usual five and a half minutes.
"You almost said that with a straight face." After all, Jacquemont hadn't been cleared yet for the Awful Truth About Merlin, but, like his daughter, he'd been doing some guessing. "I wish I knew how much of this Merlin stuff you believe."
"So do I, Yves. Maybe after we get this thing open, I'll know."
To give himself a margin of safety, Jacquemont had estimated the arrival of the equipment at three weeks. A week later, he was on-screen to report that the skeleton ship—they had christened herThe Thing, and when Conn saw screen views of her he understood why—was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big mining machines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshchei had done a stroke of work on anything else.
"Sylvie's coming along with her; so are Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and Ham Matsui and Gomez and Karanja and four or five others. They'll be ready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads," Jacquemont added.
That was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any of the Merlin-hunting factions at Force Command. In case trouble started, he could rely on them.
"Well, dig out some shootin'-irons for them," he advised. "They may need them here."
Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened that collapsium can on top of Force Command, and how the people there reacted to it.
The Thingtook a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip; conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabin were apparently worse than on theHarriet Barneon her second trip to Koschchei. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. Carl Leibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had to pray the ship across space.
At the same time, reports of the near completion ofOuroboros IIwere monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention from what was happening at Force Command. Cargo was being collected for her; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people would be drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses of everything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up and down the Gordon Valley. Melon and tobacco planters were talking about breaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for the next year. Agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing high prices. So were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery. It began to look as though the Maxwell Plan was really getting started.
It was decided to send the hypership to Baldur on her first voyage; that was Wade Lucas's suggestion. He was going with her himself, to recruit scientific and technical graduates from his alma mater, the University of Paris-on-Baldur, and from the other schools there. Conn was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on Koshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and a textbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to do while they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long on the leavings of wartimeproduction; too few people had bothered learning how to produce anything.
The Thingfinally settled onto the mesa-top. It looked like something from an old picture of the construction work on one of the Terran space-stations in the First Century. Immediately, every piece of contragravity equipment in the place converged on her; men dangled on safety lines hundreds of feet above the ground, cutting away beams and braces with torches. The two giant mining machines, one after the other, floated free on their own contragravity and settled into place.The Thinglifted, still carrying the collapsium-cutting equipment, and came to rest on the brush-grown flat beyond, out of the way.