+--------------------------------------------------------------+| Transcriber's Note: || || Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the || U. S. Copyright on this publication was renewed. |+--------------------------------------------------------------+

THE COSMIC COMPUTERbyH BEAM PIPER

"There are incredible things stillundiscovered; most of the important installations were built induplicate as a precaution against space attack. I know where all ofthem are. 

"But I could find nothing, not one single word, about any giantstrategic planning computer called Merlin!"

Nevertheless the leading men of the planet didn't believe him. Theycouldn't, for the search for Merlin had become their abidingobsession. Merlin meant everything to them: power, pleasures, andprofits unlimited. 

Conn had known they'd never believe him, and so he had a trick or twoup his space-trained sleeve that might outwit even their fabled CosmicComputer . .. If they dared accept his challenge. 

_H. BEAM PIPER_ is rather enigmatic where his personal statistics areconcerned. It may be stated that he lives in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, that he is an expert on the history and use of handweapons, that he has been writing and selling science-fiction for manyyears to the leading magazines, and that he is highly rated amongreaders for his skill and imagination. He has had several novelspublished, including mysteries and juveniles. 

His previous appearances in Ace Books include two novels written incollaboration with John J. McGuire: CRISIS IN 2140 (D-227) and APLANET FOR TEXANS (D-299), and a longer entirely self-authored novelSPACE VIKING (F-225). 

THE COSMIC COMPUTER

(Original Title: Junkyard Planet)

H. BEAM PIPER

ACE BOOKS, INC. 

1120 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N. Y. 10036

THE COSMIC COMPUTER (JUNKYARD PLANET)

Copyright, 1963, by H. Beam Piper

An Ace Book, by arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons

All Rights Reserved

Printed in U. S. A. 

I

Thirty minutes to Litchfield. 

Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck, watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath theship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass mustfeel with the sand slowly draining out. 

It had been six months to Litchfield when the _Mizar_ lifted out of LaPlata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been twomonths to Litchfield when he boarded the _City of Asgard_ at the portof the same name on Odin. It had been two hours to Litchfield when the_Countess Dorothy_ rose from the airship dock at Storisende. He hadhad all that time, and now it was gone, and he was still unpreparedfor what he must face at home. 

Thirty minutes to Litchfield. 

The words echoed in his mind as though he had spoken them aloud, andthen, realizing that he never addressed himself as sir, he turned. Itwas the first mate. 

He had a clipboard in his hand, and he was wearing a Terran FederationSpace Navy uniform of forty years, or about a dozen regulation-changes, ago. Once Conn had taken that sort of thing for granted. Now it wasobtruding upon him everywhere. 

"Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir, " the first officer repeated, andgave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two;trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flickerof anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the wholeinfernal situation. He nodded. 

"That's everything. Not many passengers left aboard, are there?"

"You're the only one, first class, sir. About forty farm laborers onthe lower deck. " He dismissed them as mere cargo. "Litchfield's theend of the run. "

"I know. I was born there. "

The mate looked again at his name on the list and grinned. 

"Sure; you're Rodney Maxwell's son. Your father's been giving us a lotof freight lately. I guess I don't have to tell you about Litchfield. "

"Maybe you do. I've been away for six years. Tell me, are they havinglabor trouble now?"

"Labor trouble?" The mate was surprised. "You mean with thefarm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble. "

"Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to thelower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just pistols, either. "

"Oh. That's on account of pirates. "

"Pirates?" Conn echoed. 

"Well, I guess you'd call them that. A gang'll come aboard, dressedlike farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns intheir bindles. When the ship's airborne and out of reach of help, they'll break out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crewand passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses, " the matesaid. "You heard about the _Harriet Barne_, didn't you?"

She was Transcontinent & Overseas, the biggest contragravity ship onthe planet. 

"They didn't pirate her, did they?"

The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There wasjust a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the AirPatrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody's everseen ship, officers, crew or passengers since. "

"Well, great Ghu; isn't the Government doing anything about it?"

"Sure. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive. Andthere hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city limits ofStorisende, " he added solemnly. 

The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon ahead, and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks. Below, thefields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They hadbeen green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and thewine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the cropin early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were stillharvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below wasgoing to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lotof cask staves going aboard at Storisende. 

Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six yearsago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that had been melonfields recently, among the new forests that had grown up in the pastforty years. The few stands of original timber towered above thesecond growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planethad been colonized. 

That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the SeventhCentury, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told that--SurromanticistMovement, when they were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old GenjiGartner, the scholarly and half-piratical space-rover whose ship hadbeen the first to enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to theromantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planetsof the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta fromSpenser's _Faerie Queene_, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Ofcourse, the camp village at his first landing site on this one hadbeen called Storisende. 

Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeingStorisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republicin the Terran Federation. The other planets were uninhabitable exceptin airtight dome cities, but they were rich in minerals. Companies hadbeen formed to exploit them. No food could be produced on any of themexcept by carniculture and hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaperto produce it naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated onagriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century. 

Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; themanufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer finda profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei, on Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruelclosed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the officesemptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wildgame came back. 

Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert ofcrumbling concrete--landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracksand toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements andmissile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated fromPoictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem hadbeen the advance base for the Third Fleet-Army Force, during theSystem States War. 

It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on orrouted through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened for warproduction. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piledup mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the worldcluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System StatesAlliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fellon Poictesme. 

The Federation armies departed. They took the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons, and a few souvenirs. Everything else wasabandoned. Even the most expensive equipment had been worth less thanthe cost of removal. 

The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, takingtheir riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remainedhad been living on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends thathis father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one whosearched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit ofuranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles. 

Now he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range;ahead the misty Gordon Valley sloped and widened to the north. Twentyminutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn't know what he was going totell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; hejust didn't know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearingthrough thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glisteningredly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside itscurve. Six. Four. The _Countess Dorothy_ was losing speed andaltitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. TheAirlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. Theyellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. HighGarden Terrace; the Mall. 

Moment by moment, the stigmata of decay became more evident. Terracesempty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wildgrowth; blank-staring windows, walls splotched with lichens. At first, he was horrified at what had happened to Litchfield in six years. Thenhe realized that the change had been in himself. He was seeing it withnew eyes, as it really was. 

The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could seecracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals, waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, butwhat he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was a thing about dusty fountains, some poem he'd read at theUniversity. 

_The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams. _

Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire. TheTerran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated ascore, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System StatesAlliance from seceding. It hadn't been a victory. It had only been alesser defeat. 

There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody intopside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hairand plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced andbulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi, the mayor, well to thefront. Then he saw his father and mother, and his sister Flora, andwaved to them. They waved back, and then everybody was waving. Thegangway-port opened, and the Academy band struck up, enthusiasticallyif inexpertly, as he descended to the dock. 

His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut to the samepattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout curtain cloth. It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to acquire a permanentwrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol butt. His mother's dresswas new, and so was Flora's, made for the occasion. He couldn't besure just which of the Federation Armed Forces had provided thematerial, but his father's shirt was Med Service sterilon. 

Ashamed to be noticing things like that, he clasped his father's hand, kissed his mother, embraced his sister. There were a few, but veryfew, gray threads in his father's mustache; a few more squint-wrinklesaround the eyes. His mother's hair was all gray, now, and she washeavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he'd grown afew inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised thatFlora actually looked younger. Then he realized that to seventeen, twenty-three is practically middle age, but to twenty-three, twenty-nine is almost contemporary. He noticed the glint on her lefthand and caught it to look at the ring. 

"Hey! Zarathustra sunstone! Nice, " he said. "Where is he, Sis?"

He'd never met her fiance; Wade Lucas hadn't come to Litchfield topractice medicine until the year after he'd gone to Terra. 

"Oh, emergency, " Flora said. "Obstetrical case; that won't wait onanything. In Tramptown, of course. But he'll be at the party. .. . Oops, I shouldn't have said that; that's supposed to be a surprise. "

"Don't worry; I'll be surprised, " he promised. 

Then Kurt Fawzi was pushing forward, holding out his hand. Thinner, and grayer, but just as effusive as ever. 

"Welcome home, Conn. Judge, shake hands with him and tell him how gladwe all are to see him back. .. . Now, Franz, put away the recorder; savethe interview for the _Chronicle_ till later. Ah, Professor Kellton;one pupil Litchfield Academy can be proud of!"

He shook hands with them: Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin, old ProfessorDolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he wondered, because hewas Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how muchbecause of what they hoped he'd tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging himaside, was the first to speak of it. 

"Conn, what did you find out?" he whispered. "Do you know where itis?"

He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareffapproaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and theyounger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born onPoictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he camefrom, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble onHathor twenty years ago; the losers had had to get off-planet in ahurry to dodge firing squads. Klem Zareff never was reticent about hispast. He came from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and hehad commanded a regiment, and finally a division that had been blasteddown to less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He alwayswore a little rosette of System States black and green on his coat. 

"Hello, boy, " he croaked, extending a hand. "Good to see you again. "

"It sure is, Conn, " the town marshal agreed, then lowered his voice. "Find out anything definite?"

"We didn't have much time, Conn, " Kurt Fawzi said, "but we'vearranged a little celebration for you. We'll start it with a dinner atSenta's. "

"You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'dhave to have a meal at Senta's before I'd really feel at home. "

"Well, it'll be a couple of hours. Suppose we all go up to my office, in the meantime. Give the ladies a chance to fix up for the party, andhave a little drink and a talk together. "

"You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked. There was an oddundernote of anxiety, or reluctance, in his voice. 

"Yes, of course. I'd like that. "

His father turned to speak to his mother and Flora. Kurt Fawzi wasspeaking to his wife, interrupting himself to shout instructions tosome laborers who were bringing up a contragravity skid. Conn turnedto Colonel Zareff. 

"Good melon crop this year?" he asked. 

The old Rebel cursed. "Gehenna of a big crop; we're up to our necks inmelons. This time next year we'll be washing our feet in brandy. "

"Hold onto it and age it; you ought to see what they charge for adrink of Poictesme brandy on Terra. "

"This isn't Terra, and we aren't selling it by the drink, " ColonelZareff said. "We're selling it at Storisende Spaceport, for what thefreighter captains pay us. You've been away too long, Conn. You'veforgotten what it's like to live in a poor-house. "

The cargo was coming off, now. Cask staves, and more cask staves. Zareff swore bitterly at the sight, and then they started toward thewide doors of the shipping floor, inside the Airlines Building. Outgoing cargo was beginning to come out; casks of brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates, painted light blue and bearing theyellow trefoil of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed redstar of Ordnance. Cases of rifles; square boxes of ammunition; cratedauto-cannon. Conn turned to his father. 

"This our stuff?" he asked. "Where did you dig it?"

Rodney Maxwell laughed. "You know the old Tenth Army Headquarters, over back of Snagtooth, in the Calders? Everybody knows that wascleaned out years ago. Well, always take a second look at thesethings everybody knows. Ten to one they're not so. It always botheredme that nobody found any underground attack-shelters. I took a secondlook, and sure enough, I found them, right underneath, mined out ofthe solid rock. Conn, you'd be surprised at what I found there. "

"Where are you going to sell that stuff?" he asked, pointing at apassing skid. "There's enough combat equipment around now to outfit aprivate army for every man, woman and child in Poictesme. "

"Storisende Spaceport. The freighter captains buy it, and sell it onsome of the planets that were colonized right before the War andhaven't gotten industrialized yet. I'm clearing about two hundred solsa ton on it. "

The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504submachine guns. Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing forpacking weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less thana good cafe on Terra got for one drink of Poictesme brandy. 

II

He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office before, once or twice, with hisfather; he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel convivialityand rambling conversation. None of the lights were bright, and thewalls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they entered, TomBrangwyn went to the long table and took off his belt and holster, laying it down. One by one, the others unbuckled their weapons andadded them to the pile. Klem Zareff's cane went on the table with hispistol; there was a sword inside it. 

That was something else he was seeing with new eyes. He hadn't startedcarrying a gun when he had left for Terra, and he was wondering, now, why any of them bothered to. Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a yearin Litchfield, if you didn't count the Tramptowners, and they stayedsouth of the docks and off the top level. 

Or perhaps that was just it. Litchfield was peaceful becauseeverybody was prepared to keep it that way. It certainly wasn'tbecause of anything the Planetary Government did to maintain order. 

Now Brangwyn was setting out glasses, filling a pitcher from a keg inthe corner of the room. The last time Conn had been here, they'd givenhim a glass of wine, and he'd felt very grown-up because they didn'twater it for him. 

"Well, gentlemen, " Kurt Fawzi was saying, "let's have a toast to ourreturned friend and new associate. Conn, we're all anxious to hearwhat you've found out, but even if you didn't learn anything, we'restill happy to have you back with us. Gentlemen; to our friend andneighbor. Welcome home, Conn!"

"Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi, " he began. 

"Here, none of this mister foolishness; you're one of us, now, Conn. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, if we don't haveanything else. "

"You can say that again, Kurt. " That was one of the distillery people;he'd remember the name in a moment. "When this new crop gets pressedand fermented. .. . "

"I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat mine till itferments, " Klem Zareff said. 

"Or why, " another planter added. "Lorenzo, what are you going to bepaying for wine?"

Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he wasworrying about what he'd be able to get for brandy. 

"Oh, please, " Fawzi interrupted. "Not today; not when our boy's homeand is going to tell us how we can solve all our problems. "

"Yes, Conn. " That was Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer. "You did find outwhere Merlin is, didn't you?"

That set them all off. He was still holding his drink; he downed it inone gulp, barely tasting it, and handed the glass to Tom Brangwyn fora refill, and caught a frown on his father's face. One did not gulpdrinks in Kurt Fawzi's office. 

Well, neither did one blast everybody's hopes with half a dozen words, and that was what he was trying to force himself to do. He wanted toblurt out the one quick sentence and get it over with, but the wordswouldn't come out of his throat. He lowered the second drink by half;the brandy was beginning to warm him and dissolve the cold lump in hisstomach. Have to go easy, though. He wasn't used to this kind ofdrinking, and he wanted to stay sober enough to talk sense until he'dtold them what he had to. 

"I hope, " he said, "that you don't expect me to show you the cross onthe map, where the computer is buried. "

All the eyes around him began to look troubled. Most of them had beenexpecting precisely that. His father was watching him anxiously. 

"But it's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?" one of the melonplanters asked. "They didn't take it away with them?"

"Most of you gentlemen, " he said, "contributed to sending me to schoolon Terra, to study cybernetics and computer theory. It wouldn't do usany good to find Merlin if none of us could operate it. Well, I'vedone that. I can use any known type of computer, and train assistants. After I graduated, I was offered a junior instructorship to computerphysics at the University. "

"You didn't mention that, son, " his father said. 

"The letter would have come on the same ship I did. Besides, I didn'tthink it was very important. "

"I think it is. " There was a catch in old Dolf Kellton's voice. "Oneof my boys from the Academy offered a place on the faculty of theUniversity of Montevideo, on Terra!" He finished his drink and heldout his glass for more, something he almost never did. 

"Conn means, " Kurt Fawzi explained, "that it had nothing to do withMerlin. "

All right; now tell them the truth. 

"I was also to find out anything I could about a secret giant computerused during the War by the Third Fleet-Army Force, code-named Merlin. I went over all the records available to the public; I used yourletter, Professor, and the head of our Modern History departmentsecured me access to non-public material, some of it still classified. For one thing, I have locations and maps and plans of every Federationinstallation built here between 842 and 854, the whole period of theWar. " He turned to his father. "There are incredible things stillundiscovered; most of the important installations were built induplicate, sometimes triplicate, as a precaution against space attack. I know where all of them are. "

"Space attack!" Klem Zareff was indignant. "There never was a time wecould have attacked Poictesme. Even if we'd had the ships, we werefighting a purely defensive war. Aggression was no part of ourpolicy--"

He interrupted: "Excuse me, Colonel. The point I was trying to make isthat, with all I was able to learn, I could find nothing, not onesingle word, about any giant strategic planning computer calledMerlin, or any Merlin Project. "

There! He'd gotten that out. Now go on and tell them about the old manin the dome-house on Luna. The room was silent, except for the smallinsectile hum of the electric clock. Then somebody set a glass on thetable, and it sounded like a hammer blow. 

"Nothing, Conn?"

Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue's hand shook as though palsiedas he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at thedrink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The othersfound their voices, one by one. 

"Of course, it was the most closely guarded secret . .. "

"But after forty years . .. "

"Hah, don't tell me about security!" Colonel Zareff barked. "Youshould have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, onMephistopheles . .. "

"But there _was_ a computer code-named Merlin, " Judge Ledue wasinsisting, to convince himself more than anybody else. "Itsmemory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanningall its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations, and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce newfacts, and predicting future events, and . .. "

And if you'd asked such a computer, "Is there a God?" it would havesimply answered, "Present. "

"We'd have won the War, except for Merlin, " Zareff was declaring. 

"Conn, from what you've learned of computers generally, how big wouldMerlin have to be?" old Professor Kellton asked. 

"Well, the astrophysics computer at the University occupied a volumeof a hundred thousand cubic feet. For all Merlin was supposed to do, I'd say something of the order of three million to five million. 

"Well, it's a cinch they didn't haul that away with them, " LesterDawes, the banker, said. 

"Oh, lots of places on Poictesme where they could have hid a thinglike that, " Tom Brangwyn said. "You know, a planet's a mighty bigplace. "

"It doesn't have to be on Poictesme, even, " Morgan Gatworth pointedout. "It could be anywhere in the Trisystem. "

"You know where I'd have put it?" Lorenzo Menardes asked. "On one ofthe moons of Pantagruel. "

"But that's in the Gamma System, three light years away, " Kurt Fawziobjected. "There isn't a hypership on this planet, and it would takehalf a lifetime to get there on normal-space drive. "

Conn was lifting his glass to his lips. He set it down again and roseto his feet. 

"Then, " he said, "we will build a hypership. On Koshchei there areshipyards and hyperdrive engines and everything we will need. We onlyneed one normal-space interplanetary ship to get out there, and we'rein business. "

"Well, I don't know we need one, " Judge Ledue said. "That was only anidea of Lorenzo's. I think Merlin's right here on Poictesme. "

"We don't know it is, " Conn replied. "And we don't know we won't needa ship. Merlin may be on Koshchei; that's where the components wouldbe fabricated, and the Armed Forces weren't hauling anything anyfarther than they had to. Koshchei's only two and a half minutes awayby radio; that's practically in the next room. Look; here's how theycould have done it. "

He went on talking, about remote controls and radio transmission andpositronic brains and neutrino-circuits. They believed it all, eventhe little they understood. They would believe anything he told themabout Merlin--except the truth. 

"But this will take money, " Lester Dawes said. "And after thatinfernal deluge of unsecured paper currency thirty years ago . .. "

"I have no doubt, " Judge Ledue began, "that the Planetary Governmentat Storisende would give assistance. I have some slight influence withPresident Vyckhoven . .. "

"Huh-_uh_!" That was one of Klem Zareff's fellow planters. "We don'twant Jake Vyckhoven or any of this First-Families-of-Storisendeoligarchy in this at all. That's the gang that bankrupted theGovernment with doles and work relief, and everybody else withworthless printing-press money after the War, and they've beensquatting in a circle deploring things ever since. Some of these daysBlackie Perales and his pirates'll sack Storisende, for all they'd beable to do to stop him. "

"We get a ship out to Koshchei, and the next thing you know we'll bethe Planetary Government, " Tom Brangwyn said. 

Rodney Maxwell finished the brandy in his glass and set it on thetable, then went to the pile of belts and holsters and began rummagingfor his own. Kurt Fawzi looked up in surprise. 

"Rod, you're not leaving are you?" he asked. 

"Yes. It's only half an hour till time for dinner, and I think Connand I ought to have a little fresh air. Besides, you know, we haven'tseen each other for six years. " He buckled on the heavy automatic andsettled the belt over his hips. "You didn't have a gun, did you, Conn?" he asked. "Well, let's go. "

III

It wasn't until they were down to the main level and outside in thelittle plaza to the east of the Airlines Building that his fatherbroke the silence. 

"That was quite a talk you gave them, Conn. They believed every wordof it. I even caught myself starting to believe it once or twice. "

Conn stopped short; his father halted beside him. "Why didn't you tellthem the truth, son?" Rodney Maxwell asked. 

The question, which he had been throwing at himself, angered him. "Whydidn't I just grab a couple of pistols and shoot the lot of them?" heretorted. "It wouldn't have killed them any deader, and it wouldn'thave hurt as much. "

"There is no Merlin. Is that it?"

He realized, suddenly, that his father had known, or suspected thatall along. He started to say something, then checked himself and beganagain:

"There never was one. I was going to tell them, but you saw them. Icouldn't. "

"You're sure of it?"

"The whole thing's a myth. I'm quoting the one man in the Galaxy whoought to know. The man who commanded the Third Force here during theWar. "

"Foxx Travis!" His father's voice was soft with wonder. "I saw himonce, when I was eight years old. I thought he'd died long ago. Why, he must be over a hundred. "

"A hundred and twelve. He's living on Luna; low gravity's all thatkeeps him alive. "

"And you talked to him?"

"Yes. "

There'd been a girl in his third-year biophysics class; he'd found outthat she was a great-granddaughter of Force General Travis. It hadtaken him until his senior midterm vacation to wangle an invitation tothe dome-house on Luna. After that, it had been easy. As soon as FoxxTravis had learned that one of his great-granddaughter's guests wasfrom Poictesme, he had insisted on talking to him. 

"What did he tell you?"

The old man had been incredibly thin and frail. Under normalgravitation, his life would have gone out like a blown match. Even atone-sixth G, it had cost him effort to rise and greet the guest. Therehad been a younger man, a mere stripling of seventy-odd; he had beenworried, and excused himself at once. Travis had laughed after he hadgone out. 

"Mike Shanlee; my aide-de-camp on Poictesme. Now he thinks he's mykeeper. He'll have a squad of doctors and a platoon of nurses in hereas soon as you're gone, so take your time. Now, tell me how things areon Poictesme. .. . "

"Just about that, " he told his father. "I finally mentioned Merlin, asan old legend people still talked about. I was ashamed to admitanybody really believed in it. He laughed, and said, 'Great Ghu, isthat thing still around? Well, I suppose so; it was all through theThird Force during the War. Lord only knows how these rumors startamong troops. We never contradicted it; it was good for morale. '"

They had started walking again, and were out on the Mall; the sky wasflaming red and orange from high cirrus clouds in the sunset light. They stopped by a dry fountain, perhaps the one from which he had seenthe dust blowing. Rodney Maxwell sat down on the edge of the basin andgot out two cigars, handing one to Conn, who produced his lighter. 

"Conn, they wouldn't have believed you _and_ Foxx Travis, " he said. "Merlin's a religion with those people. Merlin's a robot god, something they can shove all their problems onto. As soon as they findMerlin, everybody will be rich and happy, the Government bonds will beredeemed at face value plus interest, the paper money'll be worth ahundred Federation centisols to the sol, and the leaves and wastepaperwill be raked off the Mall, all by magic. " He muttered anunprintability and laughed bitterly. 

"I didn't know you were the village atheist, Father. "

"In a religious community, the village atheist keeps his doubts tohimself. I have to do business with these Merlinolators. It's all Ican do to keep Flora from antagonizing them at school. "

Flora was a teacher; now she was assistant principal of the gradeschools. Professor Kellton was also school superintendent. He couldsee how that would be. 

"Flora's not a True Believer, then?"

Rodney Maxwell shook his head. "That's largely Wade Lucas's influence, I'd say. You know about him. "

Just from letters. Wade Lucas was from Baldur; he'd gone off-planetas soon as he'd gotten his M. D. Evidently the professional situationthere was the same as on Terra; plenty of opportunities, and fiftycompetitors for each one. On Poictesme, there were few opportunities, but nobody competed for anything, not even to find Merlin. 

"He'd never heard of Merlin till he came here, and when he did, hejust couldn't believe in it. I don't blame him. I've heard about itall my life, and I can't. "

"Why not?"

"To begin with, I suppose, because it's just another of these thingseverybody believes. Then, I've had to do some studying on the ThirdForce occupation of Poictesme to know where to go and dig, and I neverfound any official, or even reliably unofficial, mention of anythingof the sort. Forty years is a long time to keep a secret, you know. And I can't see why they didn't come back for it after the pressure toget the troops home was off, or why they didn't build a dozen Merlins. This isn't the only planet that has problems they can't solve forthemselves. "

"What's Mother's attitude on Merlin?"

"She's against it. She thinks it isn't right to make machines that aresmarter than people. "

"I'll agree. It's scientifically impossible. "

"That's what I've been trying to tell her. Conn, I noticed that afterKurt Fawzi started talking about how long it would take to get to theGamma System, you jumped right into it and began talking up a ship. Did you think that if you got them started on that it would take theirminds off Merlin?"

"That gang up in Fawzi's office? Nifflheim, no! They'll go on huntingMerlin till they die. But I was serious about the ship. An idea hitme. You gave it to me; you and Klem Zareff. "

"Why, I didn't say a word . .. "

"Down on the shipping floor, before we went up. You were talking aboutselling arms and ammunition at a profit of two hundred sols a ton, andKlem was talking as though a bumper crop was worse than a Green Deathepidemic. If we had a hypership, look what we could do. How much doyou think a settler on Hoth or Malebolge or Irminsul would pay for agood rifle and a thousand rounds? How much would he pay for hislife?--that's what it would come to. And do you know what a fifteen-ccliqueur glass of Poictesme brandy sells for on Terra? One sol;Federation money. I'll admit it costs like Nifflheim to run ahypership, but look at the difference between what these trampfreighter captains pay at Storisende and what they get. "

"I've been looking at it for a long time. Maybe if we had a few shipsof our own, these planters would be breaking new ground instead ofcutting their plantings, and maybe we'd get some money on this planetthat was worth something. You have a good idea there, son. But maybethere's an angle to it you haven't thought of. "

Conn puffed slowly at the cigar. Why couldn't they grow tobacco likethis on Terra? Soil chemicals, he supposed; that wasn't his subject. 

"You can't put this scheme over on its own merits. This gang wouldn'tlift a finger to build a hypership. They've completely lost hope ineverything but Merlin. "

"Well, can do. I'll even convince them that Merlin's a space-station, in orbit off Koshchei. I think I could do that. "

"You know what it'll cost? If you go ahead with it, I'm in it withyou, make no mistake about that. But you and I will be the only twopeople on Poictesme who can be trusted with the truth. We'll have tolie to everybody else, with every word we speak. We'll have to lie toFlora, and we'll have to lie to your mother. Your mother most of all. She believes in absolutes. Lying is absolutely wrong, no matter whomit helps; telling the truth is absolutely right, no matter how muchdamage it does or how many hearts it breaks. You think this is goingto be worth a price like that?"

"Don't you?" he demanded, and then pointed along the crumbling andlittered Mall. "Look at that. Pretend you never saw it before and arelooking at it for the first time. And then tell me whether it'll beworth it or not. "

His father took a cigar from his mouth. For a moment, he sat staringsilently. 

"Great Ghu!" Rodney Maxwell turned. "I wonder how that sneaked up onme; I honestly never realized. .. . Yes, Conn. This is a cause worthlying for. " He looked at his watch. "We ought to be starting forSenta's, but let's take a few minutes and talk this over. How are yougoing to get it started?"

"Well, convince them that I can find Merlin and that they can't findit without me. I think I've done that already. Then convince them thatwe'll have to have a ship to get to Koshchei, and--"

"Won't do. That'll take money, and money's something none of this ganghas. "

"You heard me talk about the stuff I found out on Terra? Father, youhave no idea what all there is. You remember the old Force CommandHeadquarters, the one the Planetary Government took over? I know wherethere's a duplicate of that, completely underground. It has everythingthe other one had, and a lot more, because it'll be cram-full ofsupplies to be used in case of a general blitz that would knock outeverything on the planet. And a chain of hospitals. And a spaceport, over on Barathrum, that was built inside the crater of an extinctvolcano. There won't be any hyperships there of course, but there'llbe equipment and material. We might be able to build a ship there. Andsupply depots, all over the planet; none of them has ever been openedsince the War. Don't worry about financing; we have that. "

His father, he could see, appreciated what he had brought home fromTerra. He was nodding, with quick head jerks, at each item. 

"That'll do it, all right. Now, listen; what we want to do is get acompany organized, a regular limited-liability company, with acharter. We'll contribute the information you brought back from Terra, and we'll get the rest of this gang to put all the money we can twistout of them into it, so we'll be sure they won't say, 'Aw, Nifflheimwith it!' and walk out on us as soon as the going gets a littletough. " Rodney Maxwell got to his feet, hitching his gun-belt. "I'llpass the word to Kurt to get a meeting set up for tomorrow afternoon. "

"What'll we call this company? Merlin Rediscovery, Ltd?"

"No! We keep Merlin out of it. As far as the public is supposed toknow, this is just a war-material prospecting company. I'll impress onthem that Merlin is to be kept a secret. That way, we'll have toengage in regular prospecting and salvage work as a front. I'll see toit that the front is also the main objective. " He nodded down theMall, toward the sunset, which was blazing even higher and redder. "Well, let's go. You don't want to be late for your own welcome-homeparty. "

They walked slowly, still talking, until they came to the end of theMall. The escalators to the level below weren't working. Now that hethought of it, they hadn't been when he had gone away, six years ago, but he could remember riding up and down on them as a small child. Fora moment they stood in the sunset light, looking down on the lowerterrace as they finished their cigars. 

Senta's was mostly outdoors, the tables under the open sky. The peoplegathered below were looking at the sunset, too; Litchfielders loved towatch sunsets, maybe because a sunset was one of the few thingseconomic conditions couldn't affect. There was Kurt Fawzi, the centerof a group to whom he was declaiming earnestly; there was his mother, and Flora, and Flora's fiance, who was the uncomfortable lone man inan excited feminine flock. And there was Senta herself, short anddumpy, in one of her preposterous red and purple dresses, bubblinghappily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter thenext. 

They threw away their cigars and started down the long, motionlessescalator. Conn Maxwell, Hero of the Hour, marching to Destiny. Heseemed to hear trumpets sounding before him. 

And an occasional muted Bronx cheer. 

IV

The alarm chimed softly beside his bed; he reached out and silencedit, and lay looking at the early sunlight in the windows, and foundthat he was wishing himself back in his dorm room at the University. No, back in this room, ten years ago, before any of this had started. For a while, he imagined himself thirteen years old and knowingeverything he knew now, and he began mapping a campaign to establishhimself as Litchfield's Juvenile Delinquent Number One, to the endthat Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and the rest of them would neverdream of sending him to school on Terra to find out where Merlin was. 

But he couldn't even go back to yesterday afternoon in Kurt Fawzi'soffice and tell them the truth. All he could do was go ahead. It hadseemed so easy, when he and his father had been talking on the Mall;just get a ship built, and get out to Koshchei, and open some of theshipyards and engine works there, and build a hypership. Sure;easy--once he got started. 

He climbed out of bed, knuckled the sleep-sand out of his eyes, threwhis robe around him, and started across the room to the bath cubicle. 

They had decided to have breakfast together his first morning home. The party had broken up late, and then there had been the excitementof opening the presents he had brought back from Terra. Nobody had hada chance to talk about Merlin, or about what he was going to do, nowthat he was home. That, and his career of mendacity, would start atbreakfast. He wanted to let his father get to the table first, to runinterference for him; he took his time with his toilet and dressedcarefully and slowly. Finally, he zipped up the short waist-lengthjacket and went out. 

His father and mother and Flora were at the table, and theserving-robot was floating around a few inches off the floor, steamtrailing from its coffee urn and its tray lid up to offer food. Hegreeted everybody and sat down at his place, and the robot came aroundto him. His mother had selected all the things he'd been most fond ofsix years ago: shovel-snout bacon, hotcakes, starberry jam, things hehadn't tasted since he had gone away. He filled his plate and poured acup of coffee. 

"You don't want to bother coming out to the dig with me this morning, do you?" his father was saying. "I'll be back here for lunch, andwe'll go to the meeting in the afternoon. "

"Meeting?" Flora asked. "What meeting?"

"Oh, we didn't have time to tell you, " Rodney Maxwell said. "You know, Conn brought back a lot of information on locations of supply depotsand things like that. An amazing list of things that haven't beendiscovered yet. It's going to be too much for us to handle alone;we're organizing a company to do it. We'll need a lot of labor, forone thing; jobs for some of these Tramptowners. "

"That's going to be something awfully big, " his mother said dubiously. "You never did anything like that before. "

"I never had the kind of a partner I have now. It's Maxwell & Son, from now on. "

"Who's going to be in this company?" Flora wanted to know. 

"Oh, everybody around town; Kurt and the Judge and Klem, and LesterDawes. All that crowd. "

"The Fawzis' Office Gang, " Flora said disparagingly. "I supposethey'll want Conn to take them right to where Merlin is, the firstthing. "

"Well, not the first thing, " Conn said. "Merlin was one thing Icouldn't find out anything about on Terra. "

"I'll bet you couldn't!"

"The people at Armed Forces Records would let me look at everythingelse, and make microcopies and all, but not one word about computers. Forty years, and they still have the security lid welded shut onthat. "

Flora looked at him in shocked surprise. "You don't mean to tell meyou believe in that thing?"

"Sure. How do you think they fought a war around a perimeter of closeto a thousand light-years? They couldn't do all that out of theirheads. They'd have to have computers, and the one they'd use tocorrelate everything and work out grand-strategy plans would have tobe a dilly. Why, I'd give anything just to look at the operatingpanels for that thing. "

"But that's just a silly story; there never was anything like Merlin. No wonder you couldn't find out about it. You were looking forsomething that doesn't exist, just like all these old cranks that sitaround drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin's going to dofor them, and never doing anything for themselves. "

"Oh, they're going to do something, now, Flora, " his father told her. "When we get this company organized--"

"You'll dig up a lot of stuff you won't be able to sell, like thatstuff you've been bringing in from Tenth Army, and then you'll golooping off chasing Merlin, like the rest of them. Well, maybe that'llbe a little better than just sitting in Kurt Fawzi's office talkingabout it, but not much. "

It kept on like that. Conn and his father tried several times tochange the subject; each time Flora ignored the effort and returned toher diatribe. Finally, she put her plate and cup on the robot's trayand got to her feet. 

"I have to go, " she said. "Maybe I can do something to keep some ofthese children from growing up to be Merlin-worshipers like theirparents. "

She flung out of the room angrily. Mrs. Maxwell looked after her indistress. 

"And I thought it was going to be so nice, having breakfast togetheragain, " she lamented. 

Somehow the breakfast wasn't quite as good as he'd thought it was atfirst. He wondered how many more breakfasts like that he was going tohave to sit through. He and his father finished quickly and got up, while his mother started the robot to clearing the table. 

"Conn, " she said, after his father had gone out, "you shouldn't havegotten Flora started like that. "

"I didn't get Flora started; she's equipped with a self-starter. Ifshe doesn't believe in Merlin, that's her business. A lot of thesepeople do, and I'm going to help them hunt for it. That's why they allchipped in to send me to school on Terra; remember?"

"Yes, I know. " Her voice was heavy with distress. "Conn, do you reallybelieve there is a . .. That thing?" she asked. 

"Why, of course. " He was mildly surprised at how sincerely andstraightforwardly he said it. "I don't know where it is, but it'ssomewhere on Poictesme, or in the Alpha System. "

"Well, do you think it would be a good thing to find it?"

That surprised him. Everybody knew it would be, and his mother didn'tshare his father's attitude about things everybody knew. She hadn'tany business questioning a fundamental postulate like that. 

"It frightens me, " she continued. "I don't even like to think aboutit. A soulless intelligence; it seems evil to me. "

"Well, of course it's soulless. It's a machine, isn't it? An aircar'ssoulless, but you're not afraid to ride in one. "

"But this is different. A machine that can think. Conn, people weren'tmean to make machines like that, wiser than they are. "

"Now wait a minute, Mother. You're talking to a computerman now. "Professional authority was something his mother oughtn't to question. "A computer like Merlin isn't intelligent, or wise, or anything of thesort. It doesn't think; the people who make computers and use them dothe thinking. A computer's a tool, like a screwdriver; it has to havea man to use it. "

"Well, but. .. . "

"And please, don't talk about what people are _meant_ to do. Peoplearen't _meant_ to do things; they _mean_ to do things, and nine timesout of ten, they end by doing them. It may take a hundred thousandyears from a Stone Age savage in a cave to the captain of a hyperspaceship, but sooner or later they get there. "

His mother was silent. The soulless machine that had been clearing thetable floated out of the room, the dishwasher in its rectangular bellygurgling. Maybe what he had told her was logical, but women aren'timpressed by logic. She knew better--for the good old feminine reason, _Because_. 

"Wade Lucas wanted me to drop in on him for a checkup, " he mentioned. "That's rubbish; I had one for my landing pratique on the ship. Hejust wants to size up his future brother-in-law. "

"Well, you ought to go see him. "

"How did Flora come to meet him, anyhow?"

"Well, you know, he came from Baldur. He was in Storisende, lookingfor an opening to start a practice, and he heard about some medicalequipment your father had found somewhere and came out to see if hecould buy it. Your father and Judge Ledue and Mr. Fawzi talked himinto opening his office here. Then he and Flora got acquainted. .. . "She asked, anxiously: "What did you think of him, Conn?"

"Seems like a regular guy. I think I'll like him. " A husband like WadeLucas might be a good thing for Flora. "I'll drop in on him, sometimethis morning. "

His mother went toward the rear of the house--more soulless machines, like the housecleaning-robot, and the laundry-robot, to look after. Hewent into his father's office and found the cigar humidor, just whereit had been when he'd stolen cigars out of it six years ago andthought his father never suspected what he was doing. 

Now, why didn't they export this tobacco? It was better than anythingthey grew on Terra; well, at least it was different, just as Poictesmebrandy was different from Terran bourbon or Baldur honey-rum. That wasthe sort of thing that could be sold in interstellar trade anytime andanywhere; the luxury goods that were unique. Staple foodstuffs, utility textiles, metal products, could be produced anywhere, andsooner or later they were. That was the reason for the original, pre-War depression: the customers were all producing for themselves. He'd talk that over with his father. He wished he'd had time to takesome economics at the University. 

He found the file his father kept up-to-date on salvage sites foundand registered with the Claims Office in Storisende. Some of thelocations he had brought back data for had been discovered, but, tohis relief, not the underground duplicate Force Command Headquarters, and not the spaceport on the island continent of Barathrum, to theeast. That was all right. 

He went to the house-defense arms closet and found a 10-mm Navypistol, and a belt and spare clips. Making sure that the pistol andmagazines were loaded, he buckled it on. He debated getting a vehicleout of the hangar on the landing stage, decided against it, andstarted downtown on foot. 

One of the first people he met was Len Yeniguchi, the tailor. He wouldbe at the meeting that afternoon. He managed, while talking, tocomment on the cut of Conn's suit, and finger the material. 

"Ah, nice, " he complimented. "Made on Terra? We don't see cloth likethat here very often. "

He meant it wasn't Armed Forces salvage. 

"Father ought to be around to see you with a bolt of material, to havea suit made, " he said. "For Ghu's sake, either talk him into having ashort jacket like this, or get him to buy himself a shoulder holster. He's ruined every coat he ever owned, carrying a gun on his hip. "

A little farther on, he came to a combat car grounded in the middle ofthe street. It was green, with black trimmings, and lettered in black, GORDON VALLEY HOME GUARD. Tom Brangwyn was standing besideit, talking to a young man in a green uniform. 

"Hello, Conn. " The town marshal looked at his hip and grinned. "Seeyou got all your clothes on this morning. You were just plainindecent, yesterday. .. . You know Fred Karski, don't you?"

Yes, now that Tom mentioned it, he did. He and Fred had gone to schooltogether at the Litchfield Academy. But the six years since they'dseen each other last had made a lot of difference in both of them. Hewas beginning to think that the only strangers in Litchfield were hisown contemporaries. They shook hands, and Conn looked at the combatcar and Fred Karski's uniform. 

"What's going on?" he asked. "The System States Alliance to businessagain?"

Karski laughed. "Oh, that's the Colonel's idea. Green and black werehis colors in the War, and he's in command of the regiment. "

"Regiment? You need a whole regiment?" Conn asked. 

"Well, it's two companies, each about the size of a regular armyplatoon, but we have to call it a regiment so he can keep his oldRebel Army rank. "

"We could use a regiment, Conn, " Tom Brangwyn said seriously. "Youhave no idea how bad things have gotten. Over on the east coast, theoutlaws are looting whole towns. About four months ago, they sackedWaterville; burned the whole town and killed close to a hundredpeople. That was Blackie Perales' gang. "

"Who is this Blackie Perales? I heard the name mentioned in connectionwith the _Harriet Barne_. "

"Blackie Perales is anybody the Planetary Government can't catch, which means practically any outlaw, " Fred Karski said. 

"No, Fred; there is a Blackie Perales, " Tom Brangwyn said. "He used tobe a planter, down in the south. The banks foreclosed on him when hecouldn't pay his notes, and he turned outlaw. That's the way it'sgoing, all around. Every time a planter loses his plantation or afarmer loses his farm, or a mechanic loses his job, he turns outlaw. Take Tramptown, here. We used to plant nothing but melons. Then, whenthe sale for wine and brandy dropped, the melon-planters began cuttingtheir melon crops and raising produce, instead of buying it from upnorth, and turning land into pasture for cattle. The people we used tobuy foodstuffs from couldn't sell all they raised, and that threw alot of farmhands out of work. So they got the idea there was workhere, and they came flocking in, and when they couldn't get jobs, theyjust stayed in Tramptown, stealing anything they could. We don't eventry to police Tramptown any more; we just see to it they don't come uphere. "

"Well, where do these outlaws and pirates who are looting whole townscome from?"

"Down in the Badlands, mostly. None of them have been bothering us, since we organized the Home Guard. They tried to, a couple of times, at first. There may have been a few survivors; they spread it aroundthat Gordon Valley wasn't any outlaws' health resort. "

"Why don't you join us, Conn?" Fred Karski asked. "All our old gangbelong. "

"I'd like to, but I'm afraid I'm going to be kind of busy. "

Brangwyn nodded. "Yes. You will be, at that, " he agreed. 

"So I hear, " Fred Karski said. "Do you really know where it is, Conn?"

"Well, no. " He went into the routine about Merlin being stillclassified triple-top secret. "But we'll find it. It may take time, but we will. "

They talked for a while. He asked more questions about the Home Guard. His father, it seemed, had donated all the equipment. They had ahundred and seventy men on the active list, but they had a reserve ofover eight hundred, and combat vehicles and weapons on all theplantations and in all the towns along the river. The reserve had onlybeen turned out twice; both times, outlaw attacks had been stoppeddead--literally. The Home Guard, it appeared, was not given to makingarrests or taking prisoners. Finally, he parted from them, strollingon along the row of stores and business places, many vacant, under thesouth edge of the Mall, until he saw a fluorolite sign, WADELUCAS, M. D. He entered. 

Lucas wasn't busy. They went into his consultation office, and Conntook off his gun-belt and hung it up; Lucas offered cigarettes, andthey lighted and sat down. 

"I see you've started carrying one, " he said, nodding to the pistolConn had laid aside. 

"Civic obligation. I'm going to be too busy for Home Guard duty, butif I can protect myself, it'll save somebody else the job ofprotecting me. "

"Maybe if there weren't so many guns around, there wouldn't be so muchtrouble. "

He felt his good opinion of Wade Lucas start to slip. The Liberals onTerra had been full of that kind of talk, which was why only four outof ten of last year's graduating class at Armed Forces Academy hadbeen able to get active commissions. The last war had been a disaster, so don't prepare for another one; when it comes, let it be a worsedisaster. 

"Guns don't make trouble; people make trouble. If the troublemakersare armed, you have to be armed too. When did you last see an AirPatrol boat around here, or even a Constabulary trooper? All we havehere is the Home Guard and Tom Brangwyn and three deputies, and hispay and theirs is always six months in arrears. "

Lucas nodded. "A bankrupt government, an unemployment rate that risesevery year, currency that buys less every month. And do-it-yourselfjustice. " The doctor blew a smoke ring and watched it float toward theventilator-intake. "You said you're going to be busy. This companyyour father's talking about organizing?"

"That's right. You're going to be at the meeting at the Academy thisafternoon, aren't you?"

"Yes. Just what are you going to do, after you get it organized?"

"Well, I brought back information on a great deal of undiscoveredequipment and stores that the Third Force left behind. .. . " He talkedon for some time, keeping to safe generalities. "It's too big for myfather and me to handle alone, even if we didn't feel morallyobligated to take in the people who contributed toward sending me toschool on Terra. You ought to be interested in it. I know of six fullysupplied hospitals, intended to take care of the casualties in case ofa System States space-attack. You can imagine, better than I can, whatwould be in them. "

"Yes. Medical supplies of all sorts are getting hard to find. But lookhere; you're not going to let these people waste time looking for thisalleged computer, this thing they call Merlin, are you?"

"We're looking for any valuable war material. I don't know thelocation of Merlin, but--"

"I'll bet you don't!" Lucas said vehemently. That was the same thingFlora had said. 

"--but Merlin is undoubtedly the most valuable item of abandoned TFequipment on this planet. In the long run, I'd say, more valuable thaneverything else together. We certainly aren't going to ignore it. "

"Good heavens, Conn! You aren't like these people here; you wereeducated at the University of Montevideo. "

"So I was. I studied computer theory and practice. I have some doubtsabout Merlin being able to do some of the things these laymen likeKellton and Fawzi and Judge Ledue think it could. Those sorts ofmisconceptions and exaggerations have to be allowed for. But I have nodoubt whatever that the master computer with which they did theirstrategic planning is probably the greatest mechanism of its sort everbuilt, and I have no doubt whatever that it still exists somewhere inthe Alpha System. "

He almost convinced himself of it. He did not, however, convince WadeLucas, who was now regarding him with narrow-eyed suspicion. 

"You mean you categorically state that that computer actually exists?"

"That, I think, was the general idea. Yes. I certainly do believe thatMerlin exists. "

Maybe he was telling the truth. Merlin existed in the beliefs andhopes of people like Dolf Kellton and Klem Zareff and Judge Ledue andKurt Fawzi. Merlin was a god to them. Well, take Ghu, the ThoranGrandfather-God. Ghu was as preposterous, theologically, as Merlin wastechnologically; Ghu, except to Thorans, was a Federation-wide joke. But he'd known a couple of Thorans at the University, funny littlefellows, with faces like terriers, their bodies covered with mattedblack hair. They believed in Ghu the way he believed in the Second Lawof Thermodynamics. Ghu was with them every moment of their lives. Takeaway their belief in Ghu, and they would have been lost and wretched. 

As lost and wretched as Kurt Fawzi or Judge Ledue, if they lost theirbelief in Merlin. He started to say something like that, and thenthought better of it. 

Yes, Virginia, there _is_ a Santa Claus. 

V

The meeting was at the Academy; when Conn and his father arrived, theyfound the central hall under the topside landing stage crowded. KurtFawzi and Professor Kellton had constituted themselves a receptioncommittee. Franz Veltrin was in evidence with his audiovisualrecorder, and Colonel Zareff was leaning on his silver-headed swordcane. Tom Brangwyn, in an unaccustomed best-suit. Wade Lucas, among agroup of merchants, arguing heatedly. Lorenzo Menardes, thedistiller, and Lester Dawes, the banker, and Morgan Gatworth, thelawyer, talking to Judge Ledue. About four times as many as had beenin Fawzi's office the afternoon before. 

Finally, everybody was shepherded into a faculty conference room;there was a long table, and a shorter one T-wise at one end. Fawzi andKellton conducted them to this. Both of them were trying to preside, Kellton because it was his Academy, and Fawzi ex officio as mayor andprofessional leading citizen, and because he had come to regard Merlinas his own private project. After everybody else was seated, the tworival chairmen-presumptive remained on their feet. Fawzi was saying, "Let's come to order; we must conduct this meeting regularly, " andKellton was saying, "Gentlemen, please; let me have your attention. "

If either of them took the chair, the other would resent it. Conn gotto his feet again. 

"Somebody will have to preside, " he said, loudly enough to cut throughthe babble at the long table. "Would you take the chair, Judge Ledue?"

That stopped it. Neither of them wanted to contest the honor with thepresident-judge of the Gordon Valley court. 

"Excellent suggestion, Conn. Judge, will you preside?" ProfessorKellton, who had seen himself losing out to Fawzi, asked. Fawzi threwone quick look around, estimated the situation, and got with it. "Ofcourse, Judge. You're the logical chairman. Here, will you sit here?"

Judge Ledue took the chair, looked around for something to use as agavel, and rapped sharply with a paperweight. 

"Young Mr. Conn Maxwell, who has just returned from Terra, needs nointroduction to any of you, " he began. Then, having established that, he took the next ten minutes to introduce Conn. When people beganfidgeting, he wound up with: "Now, only about a dozen of us were atthe informal meeting in Mr. Fawzi's office, yesterday. Conn, would youplease repeat what you told us? Elaborate as you see fit. "

Conn rose. He talked briefly about his studies on Terra to qualifyhimself as an expert. Then he began describing the wealth of abandonedand still undiscovered Federation war material and the manyinstallations of which he had learned, careful to avoid giving cluesto exact locations. The spaceport; the underground duplicate ForceCommand Headquarters; the vast underground arsenals and shops andsupply depots. Everybody was awed, even his father; he hadn't had timeto tell him more than a fraction of it. 

Finally, somebody from the long table interrupted:

"Well, Conn; how about Merlin? That's what we're interested in. "

Wade Lucas snorted indignantly. 

"He's telling you about real things, things worth millions of sols, and you want him to talk about that idiotic fantasy!"

There was an angry outcry. Nobody actually shouted "_To the stake withthe blasphemer!_" but that was the general idea. Judge Ledue wasrapping loudly for order. 

"I don't know the exact location of Merlin. " Conn strove to makehimself heard. "The whole subject's classified top secret. But I amcertain that Merlin exists, if not on Poictesme then somewhere in theAlpha System, and I am equally certain that we can find it. "

Cheers. He waited for the hubbub to subside. Lucas was trying to yellabove it. 

"You admit you couldn't learn anything about this so-called Merlin, but you're still certain it exists?"

"Why are you certain it doesn't?"

"Why, the whole thing's absurdly fantastic!"

"Maybe it is, to a layman like you. I studied computers, and it isn'tto me. "

"Well, take all these elaborate preparations against space attack youwere telling us about. I think Colonel Zareff, here, who served in theAlliance Army, will bear me out that such an attack was plainlyimpossible. "

Zareff started to agree, then realized that he was aiding andcomforting the enemy. "Intelligence lag, " he said. "What do youexpect, with General Headquarters thirty parsecs from the fighting?"

"Yes. A computer can only process the data that's been taped into it, "Conn said. That was a point he wanted to ram home, as forcibly and asoften as possible. "I suppose Merlin classified an Alliance attack onPoictesme as a low-order probability, but war is the province ofchance; Clausewitz said that a thousand years ago. Foxx Travis wasn'tthe sort of commander to let himself get caught, even by a verylow-order probability. "

"Well how do you explain the absence, after forty years, of anymention, in any history of the War, of Merlin? How do you get aroundthat?"

"I don't have to. How do you get around it?"

"_Huh?_" Lucas was startled. 

"Yes. Stories about Merlin were all over Poictesme, all through theThird Force, even to the enemy. Say the stories were unfounded; sayMerlin never existed. Yet the belief in Merlin was an importanthistorical fact, and no history of the War gives it so much as afootnote. " He paused for effect, then continued: "That can mean onlyone thing. Systematic suppression, backed by the whole force of theTerran Federation. A gigantic conspiracy of silence!"

Brother! If they swallow that, I have it made; they'll swallowanything!

They did, all but Lucas. He banged his fist on the table. 

"Now I've heard everything!" he shouted in disgust. 

"Not quite everything, Doctor, " Morgan Gatworth said. "You will hear, one of these days, that we have found Merlin. "

"Yes, that'll be the day!" Lucas sprang to his feet, his chairtoppling behind him. He shoved it aside with his foot. "I'm not goingto argue with you. Conn Maxwell gave you a thousand-year-oldquotation; I'll give you another, from Thomas Paine: 'To argue withthose who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futileas to administer medicine to the dead. ' I'll add this. Conn Maxwellknows better than this balderdash he's been spouting to you. I don'tknow what his racket is, and I'm not staying to find out. You will, though--to your regret. "

He turned and strode from the room. There was a moment's silence, after the door slammed behind him. Too bad, Conn thought. He wouldhave made a good friend. Now he was going to make a very nasty enemy. 

"Well, let's get to business, " his father said. "We don't have toargue about the existence of Merlin; we know that. Let's discuss thequestion of finding it. "

"I still think it's somewhere off-planet, " Lorenzo Menardes said. "Themoons of Pantagruel. .. . "

Evidently he'd read something, or seen an old film, about the moons ofPantagruel. 

"No, that's too far; they'd keep it where they could use it. "

"The old GHQ, " Lester Dawes suggested. "Suppose it's down under that, like the place Rodney found under Tenth Army. "

"I hope not, " Gathworth said. "The Planetary Government took thatover. "

"Well, wherever it is, finding it is going to be expensive, " RodneyMaxwell said. "Now, to finance the search, I propose we use thisinformation my son brought back from Terra. Doctor Lucas was rightabout one thing; that's worth millions of sols. Well, I propose, also, that we set up a company and get it chartered; a prospecting company, to operate under the Abandoned Property Act of 867. My son and I willcontribute this information as our share in the capitalization of thecompany. The work of opening these Federation installations can go onconcurrently with the search for Merlin, and the profits can financeit. "

Silence for a moment, then a bedlam of cheering. 

"Well, let's get organized, " Gatworth said. "What will we call thiscompany?"

A number of voices shouted suggestions. Rodney Maxwell managed to getrecognition and partial silence. 

"It is of the first importance, " he said, "that we keep our realobjective--Merlin--as close a secret as possible. The PlanetaryGovernment would like to get hold of it--and I leave you to askyourselves how far Jake Vyckhoven and his cronies are to be trustedwith anything like that--and I have no doubt the Federation might tryto take it away from us. "

"Couldn't do it, Rodney, " Judge Ledue objected. "Everything theFederation abandoned in the Trisystem is public domain now. We have aFederation Supreme Court ruling--"

"What's legality to the Federation?" Klem Zareff demanded. "Theyfought a criminally illegal war of aggression against my people. "

Down the table, somebody started singing "Rally Round the Banner, theBanner Black and Green. "

"Well, I think it's a good idea to keep quiet about it, myself, " KurtFawzi said. 

"All right, " Rodney Maxwell said. "Then we don't want this company tosound like anything but another salvage company. I suggest we call itLitchfield Exploration & Salvage. "

"Good name, Rodney, " Dawes approved. "That a motion? I second it. "

Unanimously carried. They had a name, now, anyhow. Everybody begansuggesting other topics for consideration--capitalization, applicationfor charter, election of officers, stock issues. Conn paid less andless attention. Industrial finance and organization wasn't hissubject, either. His father was plunging happily into it as though hehad been promoting companies all his life. Conn sat and doodled withhis six-color pen, mostly spherical hyperspace ships. 

"We can't get all this cleared up now, " Lester Dawes was protesting. "Your Honor, I mean, Mr. Chairman; I suggest that committees beappointed. .. . "

More hassling; everybody wanted to be on all the committees. Finally, they appointed enough committees to include everybody. 

"Well, that seems to be cleared up, " Judge Ledue said, "I suggest ameeting day after tomorrow evening; the committees should haveeverything set up, and we should be able to organize ourselves andelect permanent officers. Is there anything else to discuss, or do Ihear a motion to adjourn?"

Somebody thought they ought to have some idea of what the firstoperation would be. 

"You heard me mention a spaceport, " Conn said. "I can tell you, now, that it's over on Barathrum, inside the crater of an extinct volcano. I think we ought to have a look at that, first of all. "

"I know you seemed to think yesterday that Merlin is off-planet, "Fawzi said, "I'm inclined to disagree, Conn. I think it's right hereon Poictesme. "

"We ought to nail that spaceport down first, " Conn argued. 

"Conn, you mentioned an underground duplicate of Travis's generalheadquarters, " Zareff said. "They thought we'd possibly send a fleethere to blitz Poictesme, or they wouldn't have built that. And thisunderground headquarters would be the safest place on the planet;they'd make sure of that. Staff brass don't like to get caught out inthe rain, not when it's raining hellburners and planetbusters. Merlinwould be too big to take there along with them, so they'd put it therein the first place. "

That made sense. If he'd been Foxx Travis, and if there had been aMerlin, that was exactly where he'd have put it himself. But there wasno Merlin, and he wanted a ship. He argued mulishly for a little, thensaw that it was hopeless and gave in. 

"I want to find Merlin as much as any of you, " he said. "More. Merlinwas the only thing I was trained for. We'll look there first. "

Somebody asked where, approximately, this underground Force Commandheadquarters was. 

"Why, it's in the Badlands, over between the Blaubergs and the eastcoast. "

"Great Ghu! We'll need an army to go in there?" Tom Brangwyn said. "That's where all these outlaws have been coming from, Blackie Peralesand all. "

"Then we'll get an army together, " Klem Zareff said happily. "Mightmake a little of that reward money that's been offered. "

"We'll need more than that. Well need excavation equipment, and labor. Lots of labor, " Conn said. "It's a couple of hundred feet below thesurface; from the plans, I'd say they just dug a big pit, built theheadquarters in it, and filled it in. There are two entrances, avertical shaft and a horizontal tunnel. "

"When they pulled out, they probably filled the shaft and vitrifiedthe rock at the outer ends, " his father added. "That was what they didat Tenth Army. "

Another idea hit him. "Mr. Mayor, do you think you could set up somekind of a public-works program here in Litchfield? We can't start thistill after the wine-pressing's over, and we'll need a lot of labor, asI pointed out. Now, it's important that we keep all our projects asecret until we can get our claims filed. If we start this municipalfix-up-and-clean-up program, we can give work to a lot of thesedrifters who haven't been able to get jobs on the plantations, getthem organized into gangs, and keep them together till we're ready forthe Force Command job. "

Lorenzo Menardes supported the idea. "And while they were boondogglingaround in Litchfield, we could pick out the best workers, get rid ofthe incompetents, and train a few supervisors. That's going to be oneof our worst headaches; getting capable supervisors. "

"You telling me?" Rodney Maxwell asked. "That was what I was wonderingabout: where we'd get gang-bosses. And another thing; this municipalhousecleaning would mask our real preparations. "

"Well, we need something like that, " Fawzi said. "We've needed it fora long time. I guess it took Conn, coming home from Terra, to see howbadly we've let the town get run down. Franz, suppose you and TomBrangwyn and Lorenzo form a committee on that. Look around, see whatneeds fixing up worst, and set up a project. Who's city engineer now?"

"Abe O'Leary; he died six years ago, " Dawes said. "You never appointedhis successor. "

"Well, I guess I never got around to that, " the mayor of Litchfieldadmitted. 

When the meeting finally adjourned, they went up and got in the car;his father lifted it straight up to thirty thousand feet and startedcircling. An aircar was one place where they could talk safely. 

"Conn, I was kind of worried, down there. You were being a little toopositive. You know, you're only twenty-three. As long as you agreewith those people, you're a brilliant young man; you start gettingideas of your own, and you're just a half-baked kid. You let the olderand wiser heads run things. You can't begin to hope to foul things upthe way they can. Look at all the experience they've had. "

"But we've got to have a ship. Everything depends on that. "

"I know it does. We'll get a ship. Let Kurt Fawzi and Klem Zareff andthe rest of them have this duplicate Force Command thing first, though. Keep them happy. As soon as we have that opened, you can takea gang and run over to Barathrum and grab your spaceport. Wait tillthey find out that Merlin isn't at Force Command Duplicate. Then youcan convince them it's really on Koshchei. "

VI

The car Rodney Maxwell got out of the hangar the next morning wasn'tthe one he and Conn had gone to the meeting in; it was the one he hadflown in from Tenth Army HQ at noon of the previous day. An Armyreconnaissance job, slim and needlelike, completely enclosed, lookingmore like a missile than a vehicle, and armored in dazzling, iridescent collapsium. There was something to living on Poictesme, atthat; only a millionaire on Terra could have owned a car like that. 

"Nice, " Conn said. "Where did you dig it?"

"Where we're going, Tenth Army. "

"I'll bet she'll do Mach Three. "

"Better than that. I've never had her above 2. 5, but the airspeedgauge is marked up to four. And she has everything: all kinds ofdetection instruments, cameras, audiovisual pickups, armament. Andthe armor; you can take her through any kind of radiation. "

The armor was only a couple of micromicrons thick, but it would stopanything. It was collapsed matter, the electron shells of the atomscollapsed upon the nuclei, the atoms in actual contact. That platingmade eighth-inch sheet steel as heavy as twelve-inch armor plate, andin texture and shielding properties, lead was like sponge bycomparison. 

They climbed in, and Rodney Maxwell snapped on the screens that servedas windows. Conn leaned back and looked at the underside view in ascreen on the roof of the car, as his father started the lift-engine. 

"Still think it's worth the price, son?" his father asked. 

The price had begun to rise; even so, he was afraid that what they hadpaid so far was only the down payment. Dinner last evening. Flora, whohad evidently been talking to Wade Lucas, shouting accusations atthem; his mother fleeing from the table in tears. As the car rose, hereached out and turned on and adjusted the telescreen for theunder-view. 

"Keep your eye on that, Father, " he said. "That's what we're paying toget rid of. "

A distillery, bigger than the Menardes plant, long closed and now halfroofless and crumbling. Rows of warehouses, empty after the War untiltaken over by homeless vagrants. Jerry-built shanties with rattletrapaircars grounded around them. Tramptown, a festering sore on the southside of Litchfield. 

"If we put this over, " he continued, "all those tramps will havesteady work and good homes. We can have a park there, with fountainsthat'll work. Maybe even Flora and Mother will think we've donesomething worth doing. "

"It'll be kind of hard to take in the meantime, though, but if you cantake it, I can. " Rodney Maxwell turned off the underside televiewscreen and put on the forward one. "See that little pink spot overthere? Sunrise on the east side of Snagtooth; Tenth Army's just behindus. Now, let's see if this airspeed gauge is telling the truth or justbragging. "

Sudden acceleration pushed them back in their seats. The calibrationson the gauge rose swiftly; the pink-lighted peak grew swiftly in theteleview screen. The gauge hadn't been bragging, it had beenunderstating; the car had more speed than the instrument couldregister. Two and a half minutes from Litchfield, they weredecelerating and swinging slowly around Snagtooth, looking down on atilted plateau that ended on the western side in a sheer drop ofalmost a thousand feet. 

There were ruinous buildings on it: barracks and storehouses andoffices, an airship dock and an air-traffic control tower from whichall the glass had long ago vanished, a great steel telecast tower thathad fallen, crushing a couple of buildings. Young trees had alreadygrown among the wreckage. 

"Look over there, on the slope below it; there's one entrance to theshelters. " There was a clearing among the evergreens, half a mile fromthe buildings, and raw earth, and a couple of big scows grounded near. "They bulldozed rock and earth over the end of the tunnel. Then, there's another one down on that bench, a couple of hundred feet belowthe edge of the plateau. They blasted rock down over that. The mainentrance is a vertical shaft under that pre-stressed concrete dome. That was chapel, auditorium, or something. They just covered it withsheet metal and poured a foot of concrete on top. "

They floated down above the broken roofs and crumbling walls, andgrounded in the area between the main administration building and theoffices, back of the ship docks. Once, he supposed, it had been alawn. Then it had been a jungle. Now it was a scuffed, littered, bare-trodden work-yard. Men were straggling out of the administrationbuilding, lighting pipes and cigarettes; they all wore new butwork-soiled infantry battle dress. All of them waved and shoutedgreetings; one, about Conn's own age, approached. As he got out, Connsaw the resemblance to Lester Dawes, the banker, before he recognizedAnse Dawes, who had been one of his closest friends six years ago. They shook hands and pounded each other on the back. 

"Hey, you're looking great, Conn!" They all told him that; he'd beginto believe it pretty soon. "Sorry I couldn't make the party, butsomebody had to sit on the lid here, and Jerry Rivas and I cut cardsfor it and Jerry won. "

"You didn't tell me Anse was with you, " he reproached his father. Rodney Maxwell said he'd been saving that for a surprise. 

When Conn asked Anse what was the matter with the bank, he said: "Forthe birds; I'd as soon count sheets of toilet paper as this stuffwe're using for money. Sooner. Toilet paper can be used for something, and this paper money's too stiff. Maybe some of this stuff we'redigging here isn't worth much, but at least it's real. "

That was something else the Maxwell Plan would have to take care of. Gresham's Law was running hog-wild on Poictesme. A PlanetaryGovernment sol was worth about ten centisols, Federation, and asidefrom deposit boxes, woolen socks under the mattress, and tin cansburied in the corner of the cellar, Federation currency wasnonexistent. 

"Had breakfast yet?" Rodney Maxwell asked. 

"Oh, hours ago. I was out and shot another spikenose; it's hanging upback of the kitchen, waiting for the cook to skin it and cut it up. "He grinned at Conn. "You don't get this kind of hunting in a bank, either. "

"Jerry still inside? I want to see him. Suppose you take Conn aroundand show him the sights. And don't worry about him bumping you out ofa job. Worry about the six or eight extra jobs you'll have to dobesides your own, from now on. "

Conn and Anse crossed the yard and entered one of the officebuildings, through a big breach in the wall. Anse said: "I did thatmyself; 90-mm tank gun. When we want a wall out of the way, we get itout of the way. " Inside were a lot of lifters and skids and powershovels and things; laborers were assembling for work assignments. Most of them had been with his father six years ago and he knew them. They hadn't done any growing up in the meantime. They climbed into anairjeep and floated out over the edge of the plateau, letting downpast the sheer cliff to where the lower lateral shaft had been opened. A great deal of rock had been shoveled and bulldozed away to exposeit; it was twenty feet high and forty wide. Anse simply steered thejeep inside and up the tunnel. 

There were occasional lights on at the ceiling. Anse said they wereall powered from their own nuclear-electric conversion units. "Wedon't have the central power on here; there's a big mass-energyconverter, but we're tearing it down to ship out. "

That was something they could get a good price for. Maybe evenone-tenth of what it was worth. At least they wouldn't have to sell itby the ton. 

The tunnel ended in an enormous room a couple of hundred feet squareand fifty high. There was a wide aisle up the middle; on either side, contragravity equipment was massed. Tanks with long 90-mm guns. Combatcars. Small airboats. Rank on rank of air-cavalry single-mounts, egg-shaped things just big enough for a man to sit in, with quadruplemachine guns in front and flame-jets behind. Ambulances armoredagainst radiation; decontamination units; mobile workshops; mobilekitchens. Troop carriers, jeeps, staff cars; power shovels, manipulators, lifters. All waiting, for forty years, to swarm out assoon as the bombs that never came stopped falling. 

They floated the jeep along hallways beyond, and got down to look intorooms. Work was already going on in the power plant; a gang under aslim young man whom Anse introduced as Mohammed Matsui were usingrepair-robots to get canisters of live plutonium out of a reactor. Workshops. Laundries. Storerooms. Kitchens, some stripped and a fewstill intact. A hospital. Guardhouse and lockup. 

More storerooms on the level above, reached by returning to thevehicle hangar and lifting to an upper entrance. By this time, gangswere at work there, too, moving contragravity skids in empty and outloaded. 

"The CO here must have had squirrel blood, " Anse said. "I think whenthe evacuation orders came through he just gathered up everythingthere was topside and crammed it down here, any old way. Honest toGhu, this place was packed solid when we found it. Nobody'd believeit. "

"Wait till you see the next one. "

"You mean there's another place like this?"

"You can say so. You can say a twenty-megaton thermonuclear is like ahand grenade, too. "

Anse Dawes simply didn't believe that. 

When they got back to the Administration Building on top, they foundRodney Maxwell, Jerry Rivas, the general foremen, and half a dozengang foremen, in consultation. 

"We're getting a hundred and fifty more men and ten farm scows fromLitchfield, " his father said. "Dave McCade's coming out from our yard, and Tom Brangwyn's sending one of his deputies to help boss them. Wellhave to keep an eye on this crowd; they're all Tramptown hoodlums, butthat's the best we can get. We're going to have to get this placecleaned out in a hurry. We only have about two weeks till thewine-pressing's over, and then we want to start the next operation. Conn, did you see all that engineering equipment, down on the bottomlevel?"

"Yes. I think we ought to leave a lot of that here--the shovels andbulldozers and manipulators and so on. We can move it direct to ForceCommand. How are we fixed for blasting explosives?"

"Name it and we have it. Cataclysmite, FJ-7, anything you want. "

"We'll need a lot of it. "

"We're going to have to get a ship. I mean a contragravity ship, afreighter; first, to move this stuff out of here, and then to move thestuff out of Force Command. And we want it mounted with heavyarmament, too. We not only want a freighter, we want a fighting ship. "

"You think so?"

"I'm sure of it, " Rodney Maxwell said. "Where we're going is full ofoutlaws; there must be hundreds of them holing up over there. That'swhere all the trouble on the east coast comes from. Now, outlaws aresure-thing players. They want to be alive to spend their loot, andthey won't tackle anything that's too tough for them. A lot of guardsand combat equipment may look like a loss on the books, but the bookswon't show how much of a loss you might take if you didn't have them. I want this operation armed till it'll be too much for all the outlawson the planet to tackle. "

That made sense. It also made sense out of the billions of sols theFederation had spent preparing for an invasion that never came. If ithad come and found them unprepared, the loss might have been the waritself. 

The scows and the newly hired workers began arriving a little afternoon. The scows had been borrowed from plantations where the crophad been gotten in; there were melon leaves and bits of vine inthe bottoms. The workers were a bleary-eyed and unsavory lot;Conn had a suspicion, which Brangwyn's deputy confirmed, thatthey had been collected by mass vagrancy arrests in Tramptown. As soon as they started arriving, Jerry Rivas hurried down tothe old provost-marshal's headquarters and came back with a lotof rubber billy-clubs, which he issued to his gang-bosses, regularand temporary. A few times they had to be used. By evening, however, the insubordinate and troublesome had been quieted. They would allsteal anything they could put in their pockets, but that was to beexpected. By evening, too, the contents of the underground treasuretrove was moving out in a steady stream, and scows were shuttling toand from Litchfield. 

Rodney Maxwell was going back to town after lunch the next day. Connwanted to know if he should go along. 

"No, you stay here; help keep things moving. Remember what I told youabout the older and wiser heads? Let me handle them. I've been aroundthem, heaven pity me, longer than you have. Just give me anaudiovisual of your proxy and I'll vote your stock. "

"How much stock do I have, by the way?"

"The same as I have--ten thousand five hundred shares of common, attwenty centisols a share. But watch where it goes after we open ForceCommand. "

His father was back, two days later, to report:

"We're organized. Kurt Fawzi's president, of course, and does he loveit. That'll keep him out of mischief. Dolf Kellton's secretary; he hasan office force at the Academy and can conscript students to help. He's organizing a research team from his seniors and post-gradstudents to work in the Planetary Library at Storisende. There are alot of old Third Force records there; he may find something useful. Ofcourse, Lester Dawes is treasurer. "

"What are you?"

"Vice-president in charge of operations. That's what I spent allyesterday log-rolling, baby-kissing and cigar-passing to get. "

"And what am I, if it's a fair question?"

"You have a very distinguished position; you are a non-office-holdingstockholder. The only other one is Judge Ledue; as a member of thejudiciary, he did not feel it proper to accept official position in aprivate corporation. Tom Brangwyn's Chief of Company Police; KlemFawzi is Commander of the Company Guards. And we have a law firm inStorisende lined up to handle our charter application. Sterber, Flynn& Chen-Wong. Sterber's married to Jake Vyckhoven's sister, Flynn's sonis married to the daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, andChen-Wong is a nephew of the Chief Justice. All of them are directlydescended from members of Genji Gartner's original crew. "

"You don't anticipate any trouble about getting the charter?"

"Not exactly. And Lester Dawes is in Storisende now, trying to find usa contragravity ship. There are about a dozen in the hands ofreceivers for bankrupt shipping companies; he might find one that'sstill airworthy. Oh; you remember how I insisted on absolute secrecyabout our Merlin objective? That's working out better than my fondestexpectations. It's leaking like a machine-gunned water tank, andeverybody it leaks to is positive that we know exactly where Merlin isor we wouldn't be trying to keep it a secret. "

Three days later, Conn hitched a ride on a freight-scow to Litchfield. From the air, he could see a haze of bonfire smoke over High GardenTerrace, and a gang of men at work. There were more men at work on theMall and along the streets on either side. He went up from the yardbelow the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found hismother in the living room watching a screen play with one eye andkeeping the other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravitytank, which was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and takingswipes at the furniture with a rotary dustmop. She was glad to seehim, and then became troubled. 

"Conn, when Flora comes home, you won't argue with her, will you?"

"Only in self-defense. " That was the wrong thing to say. He changed itto, "No; I won't argue with her at all, " and then quoted Wade Lucasquoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple oftimes that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that itwouldn't get loose and hurt anybody if he did find it. 

In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, thehousecleaning-robot began knocking things off the top of a table. 

"Oscar! You stop that!" his mother yelled. 

Oscar, deaf as the adder, kept on. Conn yelled at his mother to useher control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like anold-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got therobot stopped. 

No wonder she was afraid of Merlin. 

He took advantage of the interruption to get to his room and changeclothes, then went up to the hangar and got out an air-cavalry mount. About fifty men were working on High Garden Terrace, pruning andtrimming and leveling the lawns. There was a big vitrifier on theMall--even at five hundred feet he could feel the heat fromit--chuffing and clanking and pouring lavalike molten rock for a newpavement. And all the nymphs and satyrs and dryads and fauns andcentaurs had had their pedestals rebuilt and were sand-blasted clean. 

He landed on the top of the Airlines Building and rode a lift down tothe office where Kurt Fawzi neglected the affairs of his shiplineagency, his brokerage business, and the city of Litchfield. Theafternoon habitues had begun to gather--Raymond Fitch, theused-vehicles dealer, Lorenzo Menardes, Judge Ledue, Tom Brangwyn, Klem Zareff. Fawzi was on the screen, talking to somebody with sandyhair and a suit that didn't seem to be made of any sort of FederationArmed Forces material, about warehouse facilities. The addresses theywere mentioning were in Storisende. 

"No, Leo, I don't know when, " Fawzi was saying, "but don't you worry. You just have space for it, and we'll fill it up. And don't ask mewhat sort of stuff. You know what a salvage operation's like; you justhaul out the stuff as you come to it. "

Tom Brangwyn, lounging in one of the deep chairs, looked up. 

"Hello, Conn. We're having a time. Another two hundred tramps came inon the _Countess_ this morning, and Ghu only knows how many in theirown vehicles, and they all seem to think if there's work for somethere ought to be work for all, and some of them are getting nasty. "

"We can use some more out at the dig. The ones you sent out Thursdayare doing all right, once they found out we weren't taking anyfoolishness. "

Fawzi turned away from the screen. "Well, Conn, we're in, " he said. "The charter was granted this morning; now we're LitchfieldExploration & Salvage, Ltd. And Lester Dawes has found us acontragravity ship. "

"How much will it cost us?"

Fawzi began to laugh. "Conn, this'll slay you! She isn't costing us acentisol. You know those old ships on Mothball Row, back of the oldWest End ship docks at Storisende?"

Conn nodded. He'd seen them before he had gone away, and from the

_City of Asgard_ coming in--a lot of old Army Transport craft, coveredwith muslin and sprayed with protectoplast. The Planetary Governmenthad taken them over after the War and forgotten them. 

"Well, Lester's getting one of them for us under the old 878Commercial Enterprise Encouragement Act. She's an Army combatfreighter, regimental ammunition ship. Of course, she still hasarmament; we'll have to pay to get that off. "

"Why?"

Fawzi looked at him in surprise. "It would only be in the way and addweight. We want her for a cargo ship, don't we?"

"That's what she was built for. What kind of armament?"

Fawzi didn't know. Klem Zareff did. 

"Four 115-mm rifles, two fore and two aft. A pair of lift-and-drivemissile launchers amidships. And a secondary gun battery of 70-mm'sand 50-mm auto-cannon. I know the class; we captured a few of them. Good ships. "

Fawzi was horrified. "Why, that's more firepower than the whole AirPatrol. Look, the Government won't like our having anything likethat. "

"They're giving her to us, aren't they?" Menardes asked. 

"Gehenna with what the Government likes!" the old Rebel swore. "Ifthey'd put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe outthese outlaws and a private company wouldn't need an armed ship. "

"May I use your screen, Kurt?" Conn asked. 

When Fawzi nodded, he punched out the combination of the operatingoffice at Tenth Army, and finally got his father on. He told him aboutthe ship. 

"There's talk about tearing the armament out, " he added. 

"Is that so, now? Well, I'll call Lester Dawes before he can getstarted on it. I think I'll go in to Storisende tomorrow and see theship for myself. See what I can do about ammunition for those guns, too. "

"But, Rod, " Fawzi protested, joining the conversation, "we don't wantto start a war. "

"No. We want to stay out of one. You don't do that by disarming. We'retaking that ship down into the Badlands. Remember?" Rodney Maxwellsaid. "Ever hear the name Blackie Perales?"

Fawzi had. He stopped arguing about armament. Instead, he beganworrying about how much the civic clean-up campaign was costingLitchfield. 

"You think we really need that, Rod?"

"Of course we do. You'd be surprised how much labor we're going toneed, and how hard up we're going to be for capable supervisors. Thisthing's a training program, Kurt, and we'll need every man we train onit. "

"But it's costing like Nifflheim, Rod. We're going to bankrupt thecity. "

"Worse than it is now, you mean? Oh, don't worry, Kurt. As soon as wefind Merlin, everything'll be all right. "

Franz Veltrin came in, shortly after Rodney Maxwell was off thescreen. He dropped his audiovisual camera and sound recorder on thetable, laid his pistol-belt on top of them and took a drink of brandy, downing it with the audible satisfaction of a thirsty horse at atrough. Then he looked around accusingly. 

"Somebody's been talking!" he declared. "I've had all the newsservices on the planet on my screen today; they all want the storyabout what's happening here. They've heard we know where Merlin is;that Conn Maxwell found out on Terra. "

"They just put two and two together and threw seven, " Conn said. "A_Herald-Guardian_ ship-news reporter interviewed me when I got in, andfound out I'd been studying cybernetics and computer theory on Terra. What did you tell them?"

"Complete denial. We don't know a thing about Merlin. Naturally, theydidn't believe me. A bunch of them are coming out here tomorrow. Whatare we going to tell them? We'll all have to have the same story. "

"I, " said Judge Ledue, "am not going to be interviewed, I am leavingtown till they're gone. "

"Why don't you steer them onto Wade Lucas?" Conn asked. "If you wantanything denied, he'll do it for you. "

Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, except Klem Zareff, andhe waited until Conn was ready to go and rode up to the landing stagewith him. 

"Conn, I know this Lucas is going to marry your sister, " he began, "but how much do you know about him?"

"Not much. He seems like a nice chap. I don't hold what he said at themeeting against him. I suppose if I'd come from off-planet, I wouldn'tbelieve in Merlin either. "

"Hah! But doesn't he believe in Merlin?"

"He makes noises like it. "

"You know what I think?" Klem Zareff lowered his voice to a whisper. "I think he's a Federation spy! I think the Federation's lost Merlin. That's why they haven't come back to get it long ago. "

"Pretty big thing to mislay. "

"It could happen. There'd only be a few scientists and some high staffofficers who'd know where it was. Well, say they all went back toTerra on the same ship, and the ship was lost at space. Sabotage, oneof our commerce raiders that hadn't heard the War was over, maybe justan ordinary accident. But the ship's lost, and the location ofMerlin's lost with her. "

"That could happen, " Conn agreed seriously. 

"All right. So ever since, they've had people here, listening, watching, spying. This Lucas; he showed up here about a year after youwent to Terra. And who does he get engaged to? Your sister. And whatdoes he do here? Goes around arguing that there is no Merlin, gettingpeople to argue with him, getting them mad, so they'll blurt outanything they know. I'm an old field officer; I know all theprisoner-interrogation tricks in the book, and that's always been oneof the best. "

"Then why did he act the way he did at the meeting? All he did therewas cut himself off from learning anything more from any of us. In hisplace, would you have done that? No; you'd have tried to take the leadin hunting for Merlin yourself. Now wouldn't you?"

Zareff was silent, first puzzled, and then hurt. Now he would have totear the whole idea down and build it over. 

Flora was quite friendly when she came home from school. She'd foundout, somewhere, that Conn had been the originator of the municipalface-lifting project. He was tempted, briefly, to tell her a little, if not all, of the truth about the Maxwell Plan, then decided againstit. The way to keep a secret was to confide it to nobody; every timeyou did, you doubled, maybe even squared, the chances of exposure. 

He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, abouthis talk with Klem Zareff. 

"How long's he been like that, anyhow?" he asked. 

"As long as I've known him. When it comes to melons and wine andbossing tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out ofthe rain, Klem Zareff's as sane as I am. But on the subject of theTerran Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"

"They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have placeslike Tramptown on Terra, too. "

"Uhuh. I suppose, in Klem's boots, I'd be just as crazy as he is, "Rodney Maxwell said. "One minute, he had a wife and two children inKindelburg, on Ashmodai, and the next minute Kindelburg was a puddleof radioactive slag. "

"That was in '51, wasn't it? I read about it, " Conn said. "It was afamous victory. "

That was from a poem, too. 

Rodney Maxwell flew to Storisende early the next morning. Conn rodeback to Tenth Army on an empty scow and pitched into the job ofgetting the stores and equipment out of the underground shelters. Morefarm-tramps arrived, and had to be pounded into obedience and taughtthe work. At the same time, Litchfield was getting a steady influx ofjob-seekers, and a secondary swarm of thugs, grifters and gangsterswho followed them. Klem Zareff, having gotten all his melons pressed, came out to Tenth Army, where he selected fifty of the best men fromthe work-gangs and began drilling them as soldiers to guard the nextoperation. The manual of arms, drill and salute he taught them was, ofcourse, System States Alliance. 

A week later, the ship arrived from Storisende; a hundred and sixtyfeet, three thousand tons, small enough to be berthed inside ahyperspace transport, and fast enough to get a load of ammunition totroops at the front, unload, and get out again before the enemy couldzero in on her, and armed to fight off any Army Air Force combatcraft. The delay had been in recruiting officers and crew. The captainand chief engineer were out-of-work shipline officers, the gunner wasa former Federation artillery officer, and the crew looked more likepirates than most pirates did. 

They christened her the _Lester Dawes_, because Dawes had secured herand because the name began with the initials of Litchfield Exploration &Salvage. From then on, it was a race to see whether the Tenth Armyattack-shelters would be emptied before the wine was all pressed, orvice versa. 

VII

Fifty-two years before, they had come to the mesa in the Badlands anddug a pit on top of it, a thousand feet in diameter and more than fivehundred deep, and in it they built a duplicate of the headquarters forThird Fleet-Army Force Command. They built a shaft a hundred feet indiameter like a chimney at one side, and they ran a tunnel out throughsolid rock to the head of a canyon half a mile away. Then they buriedthe whole thing. Twelve years later, when the War was over, theysealed both entrances and went away and left it. 

For a month each winter, cold rains from the east lashed the desert;for the rest of the year, it was swept by windblown sand. Wiregrasssprouted, and thornbush grew; Nature, the master-camoufleur, completedthe work of hiding the forgotten headquarters. Little things notunlike rabbits scampered over it, and bigger things, vaguely foxlike, hunted them. Hunted men came, too, their aircars skimming low. None ofthem had the least idea what was underneath. 

The mesa-top came suddenly to life, just as the sun edged up out ofthe east. Conn and his father and Anse Dawes came in first, in therecon-car with which they had scouted and photographed the site a fewdays before. They circled at a thousand feet, fired a smoke bomb, andthen let down near where Conn's map showed the head of the verticalshaft. The rest followed, first a couple of combat cars that circledslowly, scanning the ground, and then the _Lester Dawes_ with her bigguns and her load of equipment, and behind a queue of boats and scowsand heavy engineering equipment on contragravity and troop carriersfull of workmen and guards, flanked by air cavalry, which circledabove while everything else landed, then scattered out over afifty-mile radius. Occasionally there was a hammering of machine guns, either because somebody saw something on the ground that might needshooting at or simply because it was a beautiful morning to make anoise. 

The ship settled quickly and daintily, while Conn and Anse and RodneyMaxwell sat in the car and watched. Immediately, she began openinglike a beetle bursting from its shell, large sections of armorswinging outward. Except for the bridge and the gun turrets, almostthe whole ship could be opened; she had been designed to land in themiddle of a battle and deliver ammunition when seconds could mean thedifference between life and death. Jeeps and lifters and manipulatorsand things floated out of her. Scows began landing and unloadingprefab-hut elements. A water tank landed, and the cook-shed begangoing up beside it; a lorry came in with scanning and probingequipment, and a couple of men jumped off and huddled over aphotoprint copy of one of Conn's maps. 

Conn lifted the car again and coasted it half a mile to where thecleft in the mesa started. There were half a dozen claw-armedmanipulators already there, and two giant power shovels. Jerry Rivasand one of the engineers Kurt Fawzi had hired had gotten out of a jeepand were looking at another photoprint of the map. Rivas pointed tothe head of the canyon, where a mass of rock had slid down. 

"That's it; you can still see where they put off the shots. "

The canyon was long enough and wide enough for the _Lester Dawes_to land in it; she could be loaded directly from the tunnel. Themanipulators began moving in, wrestling with the larger chunks ofrock and dragging or carrying them away. Power shovels began gruntingand clanking and rumbling; dust rose in a thick column. Towardmidmorning, the troop carriers which served as school buses inLitchfield arrived, loaded with more workmen. A lorry letteredSTORISENDE HERALD-GUARDIAN came in, hovered over the canyon, andbegan transmitting audiovisuals. More news-folk put in an appearance. 

The earth and rock at the top of the tunnel entrance fell away, revealing the vitrified stone lintel; everybody cheered and dugharder. More aircars arrived, getting in each other's and everybodyelse's way. Raymond Fitch, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardes and MorganGatworth. Dolf Kellton, playing hookey from school. Kurt Fawzi; helanded in the canyon and watched every shovelful of rock lifted, asthough trying to help with mental force. Tom Brangwyn, with a score ofthe Home Guard to reinforce the Company Police. Klem Zareff called inhis air cavalry to help control the sightseers. Nobody was makingtrouble; they were just getting in the way. 

At eleven, Rodney Maxwell went aboard the _Lester Dawes_ to use theradio and telescreen equipment. By then, two time zones west inStorisende, the Claims Office was opening; he filed preliminary claimto an underground installation with at least two entrances inuninhabited country, and claimed a ten-mile radius around it. By thattime, the gang working on top had uncovered a vitrified slab over thehundred-foot circle of the vertical shaft and were cracking it withexplosives. According to the scanners, it was full of loose rubble fora hundred feet down. Below that, the microrays hit somethingimpenetrable. 

Toward midafternoon, the tunnel in the canyon was cleared. It had beenvitrified solid; the scanners reported that it was plugged for tenfeet. A contragravity tank let down in front of it, with a solenoidjackhammer mounted where the gun should have been, and began pounding, running a hole in for a blast shot. There were more explosionstopside; when Conn took a jeep up to observe progress there, he foundthe vitrified rock blown completely off the vertical shaft, exposingthe rubble that had been dumped into it. The gang on the mesa-top haddiscovered something else; a grid of auro-copper bussbars buried fourfeet underground. Ten to one, radio and telescreen signals would betransmitted to that from below, and then probably picked up andrebroadcast from a relay station on one or another of the high buttesin the neighborhood. Time enough to look for that later. He returnedto the canyon, where the lateral tunnel was now almost completelyopen. 

When it was clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot, looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by threefeet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it wentslowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were noharmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, thereshould be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred feetwide by a hundred on either side of the tunnel entrance. The robotentered this, and in its headlight they could see reconnaissance-cars, and contragravity tanks with 90-mm guns. It swerved slightly to theleft, and then the screen stopped receiving, the telemeteredinstruments went dead and the robot's signal stopped. 

"Tom, " Rodney Maxwell said, "you keep the crowd back. Klem, stay withthe screens; I'll transmit to you. I'm going in to see what's wrong. "

He started to give Conn an argument when he wanted to accompany him. 

"No, " Conn said. "I'm going along. What do you think I went to Terrato study robotics for?"

His father snapped on the screen and pickup of the jeep that wasstanding nearby. "You getting it, Klem?" he asked. "Okay, Conn. Let'sgo. "

Half a mile ahead, at the other end of the tunnel, they could see aflicker of light that grew brighter as they advanced. The snooperstill had its light on and was moving about. Once they caught amomentary signal from it. As Rodney Maxwell piloted the jeep, Connkept talking to Klem Zareff, outside. Then they were at the end of thetunnel and entering the room ahead; it was full of vehicles, like theone on the bottom level at Tenth Army HQ. As soon as they were inside, Klem Zareff's voice in the radio stopped, as though the set had beenshot out. 

"Klem! What's wrong? We aren't getting you, " his father was saying. 

The snooper was drifting aimlessly about, avoiding the parkedvehicles. Conn used the manual control to set it down and deactivateit, then got out and went to examine it. 

"Take the jeep over to the tunnel entrance, " he told his father. "Move out into the tunnel a few feet; relay from me to Klem. "

The jeep moved over. A moment later his father cried, "He's gettingme; I'm getting him. What's the matter with the radio in here? Thesnooper's all right, isn't it?"

It was. Conn reactivated it and put it up above the tops of thevehicles. 

"Sure. We just can't transmit out. "

"But only half a mile of rock; that set's good for more than that. It'll transmit clear through Snagtooth. "

"It won't transmit through collapsium. "

His father swore disgustedly, repeating it to Zareff outside. Conncould hear the old soldier, in the radio, make a similar remark. Theyshould have all expected that, in the first place. If the Third ForceHigh Command was expecting to sit out a nuclear bombardment in thisplace, they'd armor it against anything. 

"Bring the gang in; it's safe as far as we've gotten, " his fathersaid. "We'll just have to string wires out. "

Conn used his flashlight and found the power unit for the room lights;all the overhead lights were wired to one unit, if wired were the wordfor gold-leaf circuits cemented to the walls and covered withinsulating paint. For the heavy stuff, like the ventilator fans, they'd have to find the central power plant. He looked around the bigroom, poking into some of the closets that lined it. Radiation-proofclothing. Tools. Arms and ammunition. First-aid kits. Emergencyrations. All the vehicles were plated in shimmering collapsium. 

The crowd started coming in: the work-gangs selected for the firstexploration work, most of them old hands of Rodney Maxwell's; theengineers they had recruited; Mohammed Matsui--he had a gang of hisown, the same one he had been using in tearing down the converter atTenth Army; the stockholders and officials; the press. And everybodyelse Tom Brangwyn's police hadn't been able to keep out. 

The power plant was at the extreme bottom; Matsui began looking it overat once. Above it they found the service facilities--air-and-waterplant; pumps for the artesian well; sewage disposal. Then repair ships, and a laboratory, and laundries and kitchens above that. 

"Where do you suppose it is?" Kurt Fawzi was asking. "Up at the verytop, I suppose. Let's go up and work down; I can't wait till we'vefound it. "

Like a kid on Christmas Eve, Conn thought. And there was no SantaClaus, and Christmas had been abolished. 

The place was built in concentric circles, level above level. Combatequipment nearest the tunnel exit and nearest the vertical shaft, andambulances and decontamination units and equipment for relief andrebuilding next. Storerooms, mile on circular mile of them. Not thehasty packrat cramming he'd seen at Tenth Army; everything had beenbrought in in order, carefully piled or racked, and then left. Morestores for the next three levels up; then living quarters. Enlistedmen's and women's quarters, no signs of occupancy. Enlisted kitchensand mess halls, untouched. 

Most of the officers' quarters were similarly unused, but here andthere some had been occupied. A sloppily made bed. A used cake of soapin the bathroom. An empty bottle in a closet. Officers' commissarystores had been used from and replaced; the officers' mess hall andkitchen had been in constant use, and the officers' club had acomfortably scuffed and lived-in look. There had been a few peoplethere all the time of the War. 

"Men and women, all officers or civilians, " Klem Zareff said. "Didn'teven have enlisted men to cook for them. And we haven't found a scrapof paper with writing on it, or an inch of recorded sound-tape oraudiovisual film. Remember those big wire baskets, down at themass-energy converters? Before they left, they disintegrated everyscrap of writing or recording. This is where Merlin is; they were thepeople who worked with it. "

And above, offices. General Staff. War Planning, with an incrediblycomplex star-map of the theater of war. Judge Advocate General. Inspector General. Service of Supply. They were full of computers, each one firing the hopes of people like Fawzi and Dolf Kellton andJudge Ledue, but they were only special-purpose machines, the sort tobe found in any big business office. The Storisende Stock Exchangeprobably had much bigger ones. 

Then they found big ones, rank on rank of cabinets, long consolesstudded with lights and buttons, programming machines. 

"It's Merlin!" Fawzi almost screamed. "We've found it!"

One of the reporters who had followed them in snatched his radiohandphone from his belt and jabbered, then, realizing that thecollapsium shielding kept him from getting out with it, he replaced itand bolted away. 

"Hold it!" Conn yelled at the others, who were also becominghysterical. "Wait till I take a look at this thing. "

They managed to calm themselves. After all, he should know what itwas; wasn't that why he'd gone to school on Terra? They followed himfrom machine to machine, first hopefully and then fearfully. Finallyhe turned, shaking his head and feeling like the doctor in a filmshow, telling the family that there's no hope for Grandpa. 

"This is not Merlin. This is the personnel-file machine. It's tapedfor the records and data of every man and woman in the Third Force forthe whole War. It's like the student-record machine at theUniversity. "

"Might have known it; this section in here's marked G-1 all overeverything; that's personnel. Wouldn't have Merlin in here, " KlemZareff was saying. 

"Well, we'll just keep on hunting for it till we do find it, " KurtFawzi said. "It's here somewhere. It has to be. "

The next level up was much smaller. Here were the offices of the topechelons of the Force Command Staff. They, unlike the ones below, hadbeen used; from them, too, every scrap of writing or film orrecord-tape had vanished. 

Finally, they entered the private office of Force-General Foxx Travis. It had not only been used, it was in disorder. Ashtrays full, many ofthe forty-year-old cigarette ends lipstick tinted. Chairs shovedaround at random. Three bottles on the desk, with Terran bourbonlabels; two empty and one with about an inch of whisky left in it. Butno glasses. 

That bothered Conn. Somehow, he couldn't quite picture the commanderand staff of the Third Fleet-Army Force passing bottles around anddrinking from the neck. Then he noticed that the wall across the roomwas strangely scarred and scratched. Dropping his eye to the floorunder it, he caught the twinkle of broken glass. They had gatheredhere, and talked for a long time. Then they had risen, for a finaltoast, and when it was drunk, they had hurled their glasses againstthe wall and smashed them. 

Then they had gone out, leaving the broken glass and the emptybottles; knowing that they would never return. 

VIII

Before they returned to the lower level into which the lateral tunnelentered, Matsui and his gang had the power plant going; the ventilatorfans were humming softly, and whenever they pressed a starting button, the escalators began to move. They got the pumps going, and theoxygen-generators, and the sewage disposal system. Until thecommunication center could be checked and the relay station found, they ran a cable out to the _Lester Dawes_, landed in the canyon, andused her screen-and-radio equipment. Before the Claims Office inStorisende closed, Rodney Maxwell had transmitted in recorded views ofthe interior, and enough of a description for a final claim. They alsoreceived teleprint copies of the Storisende papers. The first story, in an extra edition of the _Herald-Guardian_, was headlined, MERLIN FOUND! That would have been the reporter who boltedoff prematurely when they first saw the personnel record machines. Conn wondered if he still had a job. A later edition corrected this, but was full of extravagant accounts of what had been discovered. Merlin or no Merlin, Force Command Duplicate was the biggestabandoned-property discovery since the Third Force left theTrisystem. 

The camp they had set up on top of the mesa was used, that night, onlyby Klem Zareff's guards. Everybody else was inside, eating coldrations when hungry and, when they could keep awake no longer, beddingdown on piles of blankets or going up to the barracks rooms above. 

The next day they found the relay station which rebroadcast signalsfrom the buried aerial--or wouldn't one say, sub-terrial--on top ofthe mesa. As Conn had expected, it was on top of a high butte threeand a half miles to the south; it had been so skillfully camouflagedthat none of the outlaw bands who roamed the Badlands had found it. After that, Force Command Duplicate was in communication with the restof Poictesme. 

They moved into the staff headquarters at the top; Foxx Travis'soffice, tidied up, became the headquarters for the company officialsand chief supervisors. The workmen quartered themselves in theenlisted barracks, helping themselves liberally to anything theyfound. The crowds of sightseers kept swarming in, giving TomBrangwyn's police plenty to do. Tom himself turned the marshal'soffice in Litchfield over to his chief deputy. Klem Zareff insisted onmore men for his guard force. A dozen gunboats, eighty-foot craftmounting one 90-mm gun, several smaller auto-cannon and onemissile-launcher, had been found; he took them over immediately, naming them for capital ships of the old System States Navy. It tooksome argument to dissuade him from repainting all of them black andgreen. He kept them all in the air, with a swarm of smaller airboatsand combat-cars, circling the underground headquarters at a radius ofa hundred miles. These patrols reported a general exodus from theregion. At least a dozen outlaw bands, all with fast contragravity, had been camped inside the zone. Some fled at once; the rest neededonly a few warning shots to send them away. Other bands, looking likelegitimate prospecting parties, began to filter into the Badlands. Zareff came to Rodney Maxwell--instead of Kurt Fawzi, the titular headof the company, which was significant--to find out what policyregarding them would be. 

"Well, we have no right to keep them out, as long as they stay outsideour ten-mile radius, " Conn's father said. "And as we're the onlything that even looks like law around here, I'd say we have anobligation to give them protection. Have your boats investigate them;if they're legitimate, tell them they can call on us for help if theyneed it. "

Conn protested, privately. 

"There's a lot of stuff around here, in small caches, " he said. "Equipment for guerrilla companies, in event of invasion. When workslacks off here, we could pick that stuff up. "

"Conn, there's an old stock-market maxim: 'A bear can make moneysometimes, and a bull can make money sometimes, but in the long run, ahog always loses. ' Let the other people find some of this; it'll allhelp the Plan. Fact is, I've been thinking of leaking someinformation, if I can do it without Fawzi and that gang finding out. Do you know a good supply depot or something like that, say over onAcaire, or on the west coast? Big enough to be important, and to starta second prospectors' rush away from us. "

"How about one of those hospitals?"

"No; not a hospital. We might use them to talk Wade Lucas into joiningus. A lot of medical stores would be a good bait for him. I'm afraidhe's going to make trouble if we don't do something about him. "

"Well, how about engineering and construction equipment? I know wherethere's a lot of that, down to the southwest. "

"That's farming country; that stuff'll be useful down there. I'll dothat. "

The next morning, Rodney Maxwell scorched the stratosphere toStorisende in his recon-car. The day after he got back, there was abig discovery of engineering equipment to the southwest and, as he hadanticipated, a second rush of prospectors. They had the vertical shaftclear now, and the _Lester Dawes_ was shuttling back and forth betweenForce Command Duplicate and Storisende. Other ships were coming in, now, mostly privately owned freighting ships. They bought almostanything, as fast as it came out. 

The stock market had been paralyzed for a couple of days after thediscovery of Force Command; nobody seemed to know what to sell andwhat to hold. Now it was going perfectly insane. Twenty or thirty newcompanies were being formed; unlike Litchfield Exploration & Salvage, they were all offering their stock to the public. A week after theopening of Force Command, the Stock Exchange reported the firsthalf-million-share day since the War. A week after that, there weretwo million-share days in succession. 

Some of the L. E. & S. Stockholders who had come out on the first daybegan drifting back to Litchfield. Lester Dawes was the first todefect; there was nothing he could do at Force Command, and a greatdeal that needed his personal attention at the bank. Morgan Gatworthand Lorenzo Menardes and one or two others followed. Kurt Fawzi, however, refused to leave. Merlin was somewhere here at Force Command, he was sure of it, and he wasn't leaving till it was found. Neitherwere Franz Veltrin or Dolf Kellton or Judge Ledue. Tom Brangwynresigned as town marshal; Klem Zareff was too busy even to think ofMerlin; he had almost as many men under his command, and twice as muchcontragravity, as he had had when the System States Alliance Army hadsurrendered. 

Conn flew to Litchfield, and found that the public works project hadcome to a stop at noon of the day when Force Command was entered, andthat nothing had been done on it since. The cold vitrifier was stillstanding in the middle of the Mall, and topside Litchfield waslittered in a dozen places with forsaken equipment and half-completedpaving. There was no one in Kurt Fawzi's office in the AirlinesBuilding, and the employment office was jammed with migratory workersvainly seeking jobs. 

He hunted up Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer. 

"Can't some of you get things started again?" he wanted to know. "Thisplace is worse than it was before they started cleaning up. "

"Yes, I know. " Gatworth walked to an open window and looked down onthe littered Mall. "But everybody just dropped everything as soon asyou opened Force Command. Kurt Fawzi's not been back here since. "

"Well, you're here. Lester Dawes and Lorenzo Menardes are here. Whydon't you just take over. Kurt Fawzi couldn't care less what you do;he's forgotten he is mayor of Litchfield. He's forgotten there is aLitchfield. "

"Well, I don't like to just move into the mayor's office and takeover. .. . "

From somewhere below, a submachine gun hammered. There were yells, pistol shots, and the submachine gun hammered again, a couple of shortbursts. 

"Some of the farm-tramps who can't get jobs, trying to steal somethingto eat, I suppose, " Conn commented. Gatworth was frowningthoughtfully. He'd only need one more, very slight, push. "Why don'tyou talk to Wade Lucas. He's got brains, and he's honest--nobody butan honest man would have made himself as unpopular as Lucas has. Ifyou pretend to be disillusioned with this Merlin business it mighthelp convince him. "

"He was blaming you and your father for what's been going on here inthe last two weeks. Yes. He'd help get things straightened out. "

At home, he found his mother simply dazed. She was happy to see him, and solicitous about his and his father's health. It seemed at times, though, as if he were somebody she had never met before. Events hadgotten so far beyond her that she wasn't even trying to catch up. 

Flora, returning from school, stopped short when she saw him. 

"Well! I hope you like what you've done!" she greeted him. 

"For a start, yes. "

"For a start! You know what you've done?"

"Yes. I don't know what you think I've done, though. Tell me. "

"You've turned everything into a madhouse; you've sent this wholeworld Merlin-crazy. Look at the stock market. .. . "

"You look at it. All I can see is a pack of lunatics playing Russianroulette with five chambers loaded out of six. Some of this so-calledstock that's being peddled around isn't worth five millisols ashare--Seekers for Merlin, Ltd. , closed today at a hundred andseventy. You notice, there isn't any L. E. & S. Being traded. If youdon't believe me, talk to Lester Dawes; he'll tell you what we thinkof this market. "

"Well, it's your fault!"

"In part it's my fault that any of these quarter-wits have any moneyto play the market with. They wouldn't have money enough to play afive-centisol slot machine if we hadn't gotten a little businessstarted. "

There was just a little truth to that, too. A few woolen socks werecoming out from under mattresses, and a few tin cans were beingexhumed in cellars, since the new flood of Federation equipment andsupplies had gotten on the market. He'd seen a freshly lettered signon Len Yeniguchi's tailor shop: QUARTER PRICE IN FEDERATIONCURRENCY. 

That night, however, he had one of the nightmares he used to have as achild--a dream of climbing up onto a huge machine and getting itstarted, and then clinging, helpless and terrified, unable to stop itas it went faster and faster toward destruction. 

Klem Zareff's patrols were encountering larger outlaw bands, theresult of gang mergers. They were fighting with prospecting parties, and prospecting parties were fighting one another. Much of this wasmaking the newscasts. One battle, between two regularly charteredprospecting companies, lasted three days, with an impressive casualtylist. 

Public demands were growing that the Planetary Government do somethingabout the situation; the Government was wondering what to do, or how. There were indignant questions in Parliament. Finally, the Governmentdragged a couple of armed ships off Mothball Row--a combat freighterlike the _Lester Dawes_, and a big assault transport--and began tryingto get them into commission. 

And, of course, the market boom was still on. The newscasts were fullof that, too. He had started worrying about _if_ a bust came; now hewas worrying about what would happen _when_ it did. Another goodreason for wanting to get to Koshchei and getting a hypership built;when the bust came, he and his father would want one, very badly. 

In any case, it was time to begin getting an expedition ready forBarathrum Spaceport. Quite a few of the new companies had largecontragravity craft, and the nascent Planetary Air Navy wasapproaching a state of being. He wanted to get out there beforeanybody else did. 

Maybe if they got the hypership built soon enough, it would start asecond, sound boom that would cushion the crash of the presentspeculative market when it came, as come it must. 

He talked to Klem Zareff about borrowing a couple of the eighty-footgunboats. Zareff's attitude was automatically negative. 

"We mustn't weaken our defense-perimeter; we'd be inviting disaster. Why, this whole country in here is simply swarming with outlaws. Theyfired on one of our gunboats, the _Werewolf_, yesterday. "

He'd heard about that; somebody had launched a missile from theground, and the _Werewolf_ had detonated it with a counter-missile. Ithad probably been some legitimate prospecting company who'd taken theL. E. & S. Craft for a pirate. 

"And there was a battle down in the Devil's Pigpen day beforeyesterday. "

That had been outlaws; they had been annihilated by something callingitself Seekers for Merlin, Ltd. , whose stock was still skyrocketing onthe Exchange. He mentioned that. 

"These other prospecting companies are doing a lot of ouroutlaw-fighting for us, and as long as the country's full of smallindependent parties, the outlaws go after them and leave us alone. "

"Yes, and I have my doubts about a lot of these prospecting companies, and a lot of the outlaws, too, " Zareff said. "I think a lot of bothare Federation agents; they're waiting till we find Merlin, and thenthey'll all jump us. "

"Well, " Conn adjusted his argument to the old Rebel's obsession, "I'lladmit that, as a possibility. If so, we'll need heavier weapons thanwe have. This spaceport on Barathrum might be just the place to getthem. "

"Yes. It might. Defense armament, and stored ships' weapons. Say, ifwe grab that place and move all the heavy guns and missiles here, wecould stand off anybody. " The thought of a fight with minions of theTerran Federation seemed to have shaved ten years off his age in atwinkling. "You take the _Lester Dawes_, and, let's say, three ofthese gunboats. Let me see. _Goblin_, Fred Karski. And _Vampire_, Charley Gatworth. And _Dragon_, Stefan Jorisson. They're all good men. Home Guard; trained them myself. "

"Aren't you coming, Colonel?"

"Oh, I'd like to, Conn, but I can't. I don't want to be away fromhere; no telling what might happen. But you keep in constantscreen-contact; if you get into any trouble, I'll come with everythingI can put into the air. "

IX

Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags ofbare rock jutted up, lava-flows like black glaciers twisting amongthem. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash-cones. Except for the seabirds that nested among the cliffs and the few thinpatches of green where seeds windblown from the mainland had takenroot, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust itup from the sea, Barathrum was a dead Inferno, untenanted even by thedamned; by comparison, the Badlands seemed lushly fertile. 

The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that markedthe division of sea and land; the gunboat _Goblin_ in the lead, hersisters, _Vampire_ and _Dragon_ to right and left and a little behind, and the _Lester Dawes_ a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the_Goblin's_ controls; Conn, beside him, was peering ahead into theteleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and backagain. 

Somebody behind him was saying that it would be a nice place to beair-wrecked. Somebody else was telling him not to joke about it. Fromthe radio, his father was asking: "Can you see it, yet?"

"Not yet. We're on the right map-and-compass direction; we shouldbefore long. "

"We're picking up radiation, " Fred Karski said. "Way above normalcount. I hope the place isn't hot. "

"We're getting that, too, " Rodney Maxwell said. "Looks like powerradiation; something must be on there. "

After forty years, that didn't seem likely. He leaned over to look atthe omnigeiger, then whistled. If that was normal leakage frominactive power units, there must be enough of them to power ten townsthe size of Litchfield. 

"Something's operating there, " he said, and then realized what thatmeant. Somebody had beaten them to the spaceport. That would be one ofthe new companies formed after the opening of Force Command. He waswishing, now, that he hadn't let himself be talked out of coming herefirst. Older and wiser heads indeed!

Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. "Attentioneverybody! General alert. Prepare for combat; prepare to takeimmediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport isoccupied, and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will youplease make ready aboard your ship? Reduce both speed and altitude, and ready your guns and missiles at once. "

"Well, now, wait a minute, young fellow, " Poole began to argue. "Youdon't know--"

"No. I don't. And I want all of us alive after we find out, too, "Karski replied. 

Rodney Maxwell's voice, in the background, said somethingindistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, "Well, all right, if youthink so. .. . "

The _Lester Dawes_ began dropping to the rear and going down towardthe ground. Conn returned to the teleview screen in time to see thetruncated cone of the extinct volcano rise on the horizon, dwarfingeverything around it. Fred Karski was talking to Colonel Zareff, backat Force Command, giving him the radiation count. 

"That's occupied, " the old soldier replied. "Mass-energy convertergoing. Now, Fred, don't start any shooting unless you have to, butdon't get yourself blown to MC waiting on them to fire the firstshot. "

The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be sevenmiles around the crater, and a mile deep; when that thing blew out, ten or fifteen thousand years ago, it must have been something to see, preferably from a ship a thousand miles off-planet. It was so hugethat it was hard to realize that the jumbled foothills around it werethemselves respectably lofty mountains. 

When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightlynear the summit. An instant later, the missileman, in his turretoverhead, shouted:

"Missile coming up; counter-missile off!"

"Grab onto something, everybody!" Karski yelled, bracing himself inhis seat. 

Conn, on his feet, flung his arms around an upright stanchion and hungon. Fred's hand gave a twisting jerk on the steering handle; the_Goblin_ went corkscrewing upward. In the rearview screen, Conn saw apink fireball blossom far below. The sound and the shock-wave neverreached them; the _Goblin_ outran them. _Dragon_ and _Vampire_ werespiraling away in opposite directions. The radio was loud with voices, and a few of the words were almost printable. A gong began clangingfrom the command post on top of the mesa on the mainland. 

"Be quiet, all of you!" Klem Zareff was bellowing. "And get back fromthere. Back three or four miles; close enough so they won't dare usethermonuclears. Take cover behind one of those ridges, where theycan't detect you. Then we can start figuring what the Gehenna to donext. "

That made sense. And get it settled who's in command of thisDonnybrook, while we're at it, Conn thought. He looked into the rearand sideview screens, and taking cover immediately made even moresense. Two more fireballs blossomed, one dangerously close to the_Dragon_. Guns were firing from the mountaintop, too, big ones, and shells were bursting close to them. He saw a shell land on andanother beside one of the enemy gun positions--115-mm's from the_Lester Dawes_, he supposed. He continued to cling to thestanchion, and the _Goblin_ shot straight up, and he was expectingto see the sky blacken and the stars come out when the gunboat leveledand started circling down again. The mountainside, he saw, was sendingup a lightning-crackling tower of smoke and dust that swelled into amushroom top. 

Klem Zareff, on the radio, was demanding to know who'd launched that. 

"We did, sir; _Dragon_, " Stefan Jorisson was replying. "We had to getrid of it. We took a hit. Gun turret's smashed, Milt Hennant's dead, and Abe Samuels probably will be before I'm done talking, and if weget this crate down in one piece, it'll do for a miracle till a realone happens. "

"Well, be careful how you shoot those things off, " his fatherimplored, from the _Lester Dawes_. "Get one inside the crater and wewon't have any spaceport. "

The _Lester Dawes_ vanished behind a mountain range a few miles fromthe volcano. The _Dragon_, still airborne but in obvious difficulties, was limping after her, and the _Vampire_ was covering the withdrawal, firing rapidly but with doubtful effect with her single 90-mm andtossing out counter-missiles. There was another fireball between herand the mountain. Then, when the _Dragon_ had followed the _LesterDawes_ to safety, she turned tail and bolted, the _Goblin_ following. As they approached the mountains, something the shape of a recon-carand about half the size passed them going in the opposite direction. As they dropped into the chasm on the other side, another nuclear wentoff at the volcano. 

When Conn and Fred left the _Goblin_ and boarded the ship, they foundRodney Maxwell, Captain Poole, and a couple of others on the bridge. Charley Gatworth, the skipper of the _Vampire_, Morgan Gatworth's son, was with them, and, imaged in a screen, so was Klem Zareff. One of theother screens, from a pickup on the _Vampire_, showed the _Dragon_lying on her side, her turret crushed and her gun, with themuzzle-brake gone, bent upward. A couple of lorries from the _LesterDawes_ were alongside; as Conn watched, a blanket-wrapped body, andthen another, were lowered from the disabled gunboat. 

"Fred, how are you and Charley fixed for counter-missiles?" Zareff wasasking. "Get loaded up with them off the ship, as many as you cancarry. Charley, you go up on top of this ridge above, and take coverwhere you can watch the mountain. Transmit what you see back to theship. Fred, you take a position about a quarter way around from whereyou are now. Don't let them send anything over, but don't startanything yourselves. I'm coming out with everything I can gather uphere; I'll be along myself in a couple of hours, and the rest will bestringing in after me. In the meantime, Rodney, you're in command. "

Well, that settled that. There was one other point, though. 

"Colonel, " Conn said, "I assume that this spaceport is occupied by oneof these new prospecting companies. We have no right to take it awayfrom them, have we?"

"They fired on us without warning, " Karski said. "They killed Milt, and it's ten to one Abe won't live either. We owe them something forthat. "

"We do, and we'll pay off. Conn, you assume wrong. This gang's been atthe spaceport long enough to get the detection system working and putthe defense batteries on ready. They didn't do that since thismorning, and up to last evening they neglected to file claim. I'llassume they're on the wrong side of the law. They're outlaws, Conn. All the raids along the east coast; everybody's blamed them on theBadlands gangs. I'll admit they're responsible for some of it, butI'll bet this gang at the spaceport is doing most of it. "

That was reasonable. Barathrum was closer to the scene of the worstoutlaw depredations than the Badlands, not more than an hour at MachTwo. And nobody ever thought of Barathrum as an outlaw hangout. Peoplerarely thought of Barathrum at all. He liked the idea. The only thingagainst it was that he wanted so badly to believe it. 

They brought the body of Milt Hennant aboard, and Abe Samuels, swathedin bandages and immobilized by narcotic injections. A few more of the_Dragon_'s six-man crew had been injured. Jorrisson, the skipper, hadone trouser leg slit to the belt and his right thigh splinted andbandaged; he took over the _Lester Dawes_' missile controls, which hecould manage sitting in one place. Fred Karski and Charley Gatworthwent aboard their craft and lifted out. 

For a long time, nothing happened. Conn got out the plans of thevolcano spaceport and the photomaps of the surrounding area. Theprincipal entrance, the front door of the spaceport, was the crater ofthe extinct volcano itself. It was ringed, outside, withlaunching-sites and gun positions, and according to the data he had, some of the guns were as big as 250-mm. How many outlaws there were toman them was a question a lot of people could get killed trying toanswer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the craterfloor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far backinto the mountain. There were two galleries, one above the other, extending entirely around the inside of the crater near the top;passages from them gave access to the outside gun and missilepositions. 

With a dozen ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_, about five thousandmen, and a CO who wasn't concerned with trivialities like casualties, they could have taken the place in half an hour. With what they had, trying to fight their way in at the top was out of the question. 

There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning, and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. Itwas a tunnel two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshopsand storerooms back of the ship berths from a big blowhole or smallcrater at the foot of the mountain. According to the fifty-year-oldplans, it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it lookedlike a royal highway straight to the heart of the enemy's stronghold. 

To Conn, it looked like a wonderful place to commit suicide. He'd onlyhad a short introductory course, in one semester, in military andprotective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wantedto go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough togive him an idea of the sort of booby-traps that tunnel could befilled with. He knew what he'd have put into it if he'd been defendingthat place. 

Colonel Zareff had sent one last message from Force Command when helifted off with a flight of recon-cars. After that, he maintained acommunication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got closeenough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately, thevolcano began spewing out missiles. Poole hastily took the _LesterDawes_ ten miles down the rift-valley in sixty seconds, while StefanJorisson put out a nuclear-warhead missile and left it circling aboutwhere the ship had been. From their respective positions, Fred Karskiand Charley Gatworth filled the airspace midway to the volcano withcounter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There wereexplosions, fireballs in the air and rising cumulus clouds ofvaricolored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reachedthe _Lester Dawes'_ former position. 

When their controllers, back at the volcano, couldn't see the ship intheir screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately, Jorissonsent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own, eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shookthe ground like an earthquake and churned the air like a hurricane. Klem Zareff came on-screen at once. 

"Now what did you do?" he demanded. "Blew the whole place up, didn'tyou?"

Rodney Maxwell told him. Zareff laughed. "They might just think theygot the ship; all the pickups would be smashed before they could seewhat really happened. You're about ten miles south of that? Be withyou in a few minutes. "

They got a screen on for his rearview pickup. Zareff had with him adozen recon-cars, some of them under robo-control; six gunboatsfollowed, and behind them, to the horizon, other craft were strungout--airboats, troop carriers, and freight-scows. They could see enemymissiles approaching in Zareff's front screen; counter-missiles gotmost of them, and a couple of pilotless recon-cars were sacrificed. The _Lester Dawes_ blasted more missiles as they crossed the top ofthe mountain range. Then Zareff's car was circling in and entering atone of the ship's open cargo-ports. Zareff and Anse Dawes got out. 

"Gunboats are only half an hour behind, " Zareff said. "Get somescreens on to them, Anse; you know the combinations. Now let's seewhat kind of a mess we're in here. "

It was almost a miracle, the way the tottering old man Conn had seenon the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra had beenrejuvenated. 

The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles andcounter-missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about thesupply; the enemy didn't seem to be running short. By 1300--Conn notedthe time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going onforever, instead of just four hours--the _Lester Dawes_ had movedhalfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and theeight gunboats were spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stoppedtransmitting; in the other screens, there was a rising fireball whereshe had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports. 

"_Poltergeist_, " Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two ofthem had been schoolmates of Conn's at the Academy; he knew how he'dfeel about it later, but now it simply didn't register. 

"They're launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down, " hesaid. 

"That's usually the beginning of the end, " Zareff said. "I saw ithappen too often during the War. We've got to get inside that place. It's a lot of harmless fun to send contragravity robots out to smasheach other, but it doesn't win battles. Battles are won by men, standing with their feet on the ground, using personal weapons. "

"We'll have to win this one pretty soon, " Rodney Maxwell said. "Theamount of nuclear energy we've been releasing will be detectableanywhere on the planet by now. The Government has a ship like the_Lester Dawes_ in commission; if this keeps on, she'll be coming outfor a look. "

"Then we'll have help, " Captain Poole said. 

"We need Government help like we need the polka-dot fever, " RodneyMaxwell said. "If they get in it, they'll claim the spaceportthemselves, and we'll have fought a battle for nothing. "

Well, that was it, then. The spaceport was essential to the MaxwellPlan. He'd gotten seven men killed--eight, if the recon-car that wastaking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn't make it intime--and it was up to him to see that they hadn't died for nothing. He spread the photo-map and the spaceport plans on the chart table. 

"Look at this, " he said. 

Klem Zareff looked at it. He didn't like it any better than Conn had. He studied the plan for a moment, chewing his cigar. 

"You know, it's possible they don't know that thing exists, " he said, without too much conviction. "You'll be betting the lives of at leasttwenty men; fewer than that couldn't accomplish anything. "

"I'll be putting mine on the table along with them, " Conn said. "I'lllead them in. "

He was wishing he hadn't had to say that. He did, though. It was theonly thing he could say. 

"You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel, " he continued. "Youknow them better than I do. We'll need working equipment, too; I haveno idea what we may have to take out of the way, inside. "

"I won't call for volunteers, " Zareff said. "I'll pick Home Guards;they did their volunteering when they joined. "

"Let me pick one man, Colonel, " Anse Dawes said. "I'll pick me. "

X

They sent a snooper in first; it picked up faint radiation leakagefrom inactive power units of overhead lights, and nothing else. Thetunnel stretched ahead of it, empty, and dark beyond its infraredvision. After it had gone a mile without triggering anything, the jeepfollowed Anse Dawes piloting and Conn at the snooper controlswatching what it transmitted back. The two lorries followed, loadedwith men and equipment, and another jeep brought up the rear. They hadcut screen-and-radio communication with the outside; they weren't evenusing inter-vehicle communication. 

At length, the snooper emerged into a big cavern, swinging slowly toscan it. The walls and ceiling were rough and irregular; it wasnatural instead of excavated. Only the floor had been leveled smooth. There were a lot of things in it, machinery and vehicles, all batteredand in poor condition, dusty and cobwebbed: the spaceport junkheap. Apassage, still large enough for one of the gunboats, led deeper intothe mountain toward the crater. They sent the snooper in and, after awhile, followed. 

They came to other rectangular, excavated caverns. On the plans, theywere marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shroudedobjects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they foundevidence of recent investigation. 

Beyond was another passage, almost as wide as the Mall in Litchfield;even the _Lester Dawes_ could have negotiated it. According to theplans, it ran straight out to the ship docks and the open craterbeyond. Anse turned the jeep into a side passage, and Conn recalledthe snooper and sent it ahead. On the plan, it led to another naturalcavern, half its width shown as level with the entrance. The otherhalf was a pit, marked as sixty feet deep; above this and just underthe ceiling, several passages branched out in different directions. 

The snooper reported visible light ahead; fluoroelectric light fromone of the upper passages, and firelight from the pit. Theair-analyzer reported woodsmoke and a faint odor of burning oil. Hesent the snooper ahead, tilting it to look down into the pit. 

A small fire was burning in the center; around it, in a circle, somehundred and fifty people, including a few women and children, sat, squatted or reclined. A low hum of voices came out of the soundbox. 

"Who the blazes are they?" Anse whispered. "I can't see any way theycould have gotten down there. "

They were in rags, and they weren't armed; there wasn't so much as aknife or a pistol among them. Conn motioned the lorries and the otherjeep forward. 

"Prisoners, " he said. "I think they were hauled down here on a scow, shoved off, and left when the fighting started. Cover me, " he told themen in the lorries. "I'm going down and talk to them. "

Somebody below must have heard something. As Anse took the jeep overand started floating it down, the circle around the fire began moving, the women and children being pushed to the rear and the men gatheringup clubs and other chance weapons. By the time the jeep grounded, themen in the pit were standing defensively in front of the women andchildren. 

They were all dirty and ragged; the men were unshaven. There was atall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls; another man witha black beard and an old Space Navy uniform, his head bandaged with adirty and blood-caked rag; another in the same uniform, wearing a capon which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced by theemblem of Transcontinent & Overseas Shiplines and the words CHIEF. And beside the tall man with the gray beard, was a girlin baggy trousers and a torn smock. Like the others, she was dirty, but in spite of the rags and filth, Conn saw that she was beautiful. Black hair, dark eyes, an impudently tilted nose. 

They all looked at him in hostility that gradually changed toperplexity and then hope. 

"Who are you?" the tall man with the gray beard asked. "You're none ofthis gang here. "

"Litchfield Exploration & Salvage; I'm Conn Maxwell. "

That meant nothing; none of them had been near a news-screen lately. 

"What's going on topside?" the man with the bandaged head and the fourstripes on his sleeve asked. "There was firing, artillery andnuclears, and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloodymurderers out?"

"We're working on it, " Conn said. "I take it they aren't friends ofyours?"

Foolish Question of the Year; they all made that evident. 

"They took my ship; they murdered my first officer and half my crewand passengers. .. . "

"They burned our home and killed our servants, " the girl said. "Theykidnapped my father and me. .. . "

"They've been keeping us here as slaves. "

"It's the Blackie Perales gang, " the tall man with the gray beardsaid. "They've been making us work for them, converting a blasted tubof a contragravity ship into a spacecraft. I beg your pardon, CaptainNichols; she was a fine ship--for her intended purpose. "

"You're Captain Nichols?" Anse Dawes exclaimed. "Of the _HarrietBarne_?"

"That's right. The _Harriet Barne's_ here; they've been making us workon her, to convert her to an interplanetary craft, of all idioticthings. "

"My name's Yves Jacquemont, " the man with the gray beard said. "I'm aretired hyperspace maintenance engineer; I had a little business atWaterville, buying, selling and rebuilding agricultural machinery. This gang found out about me; they raided and burned our village andcarried me and my daughter, Sylvie, away. We've been working for themfor the last four months, tearing Captain Nichols' ship down andarmoring her with collapsium. "

"How many pirates are there here?"

That started an argument. Nobody was quite sure; two hundred and fiftyseemed to be the highest estimate, which Conn decided to play safe byaccepting. 

"You get us out of here, " Yves Jacquemont was saying. "All we want isa chance at them. "

"How about arms? You can't do much with clubs and fists. "

"Don't worry about that; we know where to get arms. The treasurehouse, where they store their loot. There's plenty of arms andammunition, and anything else you can think of. They've used us tohelp stow the stuff; we know where it is. "

"Anse, you remember those scows we saw, in the big room before we cameto the broad passage? Take four men in the jeep; have them lift two ofthem and bring them here. Then, you get out to the end of the tunneland call the _Lester Dawes_. Tell them what's happened, tell them theycan get gunboats all the way in, and wait to guide them when theyarrive. "

When Anse turned and climbed into the jeep, he asked Yves Jacquemont:"Why does this Perales want an interplanetary ship?"

"He's crazy!" Jacquemont swore. "Paranoid; megalomaniac. He talks oforganizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band andmaking himself king. He's heard that there are Space Navy superweaponson Koshchei--I suppose there are, at that--and he wants to get a lotof planetbusters and hellburners and annihilators. " He lowered hisvoice. "Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that'dblow the _Harriet Barne_ up as soon as he got her out of atmosphere. "

He talked for a while to Jacquemont and his daughter Sylvie, and toNichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vibart. There wasevidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could bebuilt, but there were foundries and rolling-mills and acollapsed-matter producer. The _Harriet Barne_ was gutted, half torndown, and half armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. Itmight be possible to continue the work on her and take her to space. 

Then the two scows floated over the top of the pit and began lettingdown. They got the prisoners into them, the combat-effective men inone and the women and children in the other. At the top, he took overthe remaining jeep, getting Jacquemont, his daughter, and the twocontragravityship officers in with him. 

"Up to the top, " Jacquemont said. "Take the middle passage, and turnright at the next intersection. "

As they approached the section where the pirates stored their loot, the sound of guns and explosions grew louder, and they began pickingup radio and screen signals, all of which were scrambled andincomprehensible. The pirates, in different positions, talking amongthemselves. With all that, it ought to be safe to use their owncommunication equipment; nobody would notice it. 

The treasure room looked like a giant pack rat's nest. Cases andcrates of merchandise, bales, boxes, barrels. Machinery. Household andindustrial robots. The prisoners piled out of the two scows and beganrummaging. Somebody found a case of cigarettes and smashed it open; ina moment, cartons were being tossed around and opened, and everybodywas smoking. The pirates evidently hadn't issued any tobacco rationsto their prisoners. 

And they found arms and ammunition, began ripping open cases, handingout rifles, pistols, submachine guns. The prisoners grabbed them evenmore hungrily than the cigarettes. Sylvie Jacquemont took charge ofthe ammunition; she had three men opening boxes for her, while shepassed out boxes of cartridges and made sure that everybody hadammunition to fit their weapons. A ragged man who might have been afarm-tramp or a rich planter before his capture had gotten a bale ofcloth open and was tossing rags around while the chief engineerinspected weapons and showed people how to clean out the cosmoline andfill their spare magazines. 

Conn collected a few of his own party. 

"Let's look these robots over, " he said. "Find about half a dozen wecan load with blasting explosive and send ahead of us oncontragravity. "

They found several--an electric-light servicer, a couple ofwall-and-window washers, a serving-robot that looked as if it had comefrom a restaurant, and an all-purpose robo-janitor. In the passageoutside, they began loading the lorries with bricks of ionite andpackages of cataclysmite, packing all the scrap-iron and other junkaround the explosives that they could. As soon as they had weapons, the prisoners came swarming out, making more noise than was necessaryand a good deal more than was safe. Sylvie Jacquemont, with asubmachine gun slung from one shoulder and a canvas bag of sparemagazines from the other, came over to see what he was doing. 

"Well, look what you're doing to him!" she mock-reproached. "That's adirty trick to play on a little robot!"

He grinned at her. "You and my mother would get along. She alwaystreats robots like people. "

"Well, they are, sort of. They aren't alive--at least, I don't thinkthey are--but they do what you tell them, and they learn tricks, andthey have personalities. "

That was true. He didn't think robots were alive, either, thoughbiophysics professors tended to become glibly evasive when pinned downto defining life. Robots could learn, if you used the term looselyenough. And any robot with more than five hundred hours service pickedup a definite and often exasperating personality. 

"I've been working with them, and tearing them down and fixing them, ever since I was in pigtails, " she added. 

The half-dozen natural leaders among the prisoners--Jacquemont and hisdaughter, the two _Harriet Barne_ officers, and a couple ofothers--bent over the photoprinted plans Conn had, located theirposition, and told him as much as they could about what lay ahead. Sylvie Jacquemont could handle robots; she would ride in the frontseat of the jeep while he piloted. Vibart, the chief engineer, andYves Jacquemont would ride behind. Nichols would ride in the scow withthe fighting men. One lorry of his own party would follow the jeep;the other would bring up the rear. 

He snapped on the screen and punched the ship combination. StefanJorisson appeared in it. 

"Hi, Conn! You all right?" He raised his voice. "Conn's on-screen!"

His father appeared at Jorisson's shoulder and, a moment later, KlemZareff. 

"Well, we're in, all right, " he said. "We just picked up an army, too. " He swung the jeep to get the crowd in the pickup, explaining whothey were. "Did you hear from Anse?"

"Yes, he just screened in, " Rodney Maxwell said. "He said a gunboatcan get in. "

"That's right; clear into the crater. "

"Well, we're going to put three of them inside, " Zareff told him. "_Werewolf_, _Zombi_, and _Dero_. And a troop carrier with fifty men;flamethrowers, portable machine guns, bomb-launchers; regularspecial-weapons section. What can you do where you are?"

"Here? Nothing. We're going to work around to the other side of thecrater, and then find a vertical shaft and go up topside and make asmuch disturbance as we can. "

"That's it!" Zareff approved. "Pull them off balance; as soon as weget in, we'll go straight to the top. Look for us in about an hour;it's going to take time getting to the tunnel-mouth without beingspotted from above. "

He lifted the jeep and started off; the lorry, and the scows and theother lorry followed; the snooper and the bomb-robots went ahead likea pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark andsilent and bulking with dusty machines. Jacquemont explained that theprisoners had never gotten into this section; the _Harriet Barne_ wasa mile or so to their right. Conn turned left, when the noise offiring from outside became plainer. A foundry. A machine-shop whichseemed to have been abandoned in the middle of some rush job thathadn't really been necessary. They came to a place even the snoopercouldn't enter, choked to the ceiling with dead vegetation, hydroponicseed-plants that had been left untended to grow wild and die. Theyemerged into outside light, in vast caves a mile high and open ontothe crater, and looked across the floor that had been leveled andvitrified to the other side, three and a half miles away. 

He didn't know whether to be more awed by the original eruption thathad formed the crater or by the engineering feat of carving thesedocks and ship-berths, big enough for the hugest hyperspaceship, intoit. 

At first, he had been afraid of getting into position too soon beforethe task force from outside could profit by the diversion. Then hebegan to worry about the time it was taking to get halfway around thecrater. He could hear artillery thundering continuously above. Exceptat the very beginning of the battle, there had been little gunfire. Hewondered if both sides were running out of lift-and-drive missiles, orif the fighting had gotten too close for anybody to risk using nuclearweapons. 

He was also worrying about the women and children among the releasedprisoners. 

"Why did the pirates bother with them?" he asked Sylvie. 

"They used the women and some of the old men to do housekeepingchores for them, " she said. "Mostly, though, they were hostages; ifthe men didn't work, Perales threatened to punish the women andchildren. I wasn't doing any housework; I'm too good a mechanic. I washelping on the ship. "

"Well, what'll I do with them when the fighting starts? I can't takethem into battle. "

"You'll have to; it'll be the safest place for them. You can't leavethem anywhere and risk having them recaptured. "

"That means we'll have to detach some men to cover them, and that'llcut our striking force down. " He whistled at the sound-pickup of hisscreen and told his father about it. "What do I do with these people, anyhow?"

"You're the officer in command, Conn, " his father told him. "Yourdecision. How soon can you attack? We're almost through to thecrater. "

"There's a vertical shaft right above us, and a lot of noise at thetop. We'll send up a couple of bomb-robots to clear things at theshaft-head and follow with everything we have. "

"Noncombatants and all?"

He nodded. "Only thing we can do. " An old quotation occurred to him. "'If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs. '"

He wondered who'd said that in the first place. One of the oldPre-Atomic conquerors; maybe Hitler. No, Hitler would have said, "Ifyou want to make sauerkraut, you have to chop cabbage. " Maybe it wasCaesar. 

"We'd better send Gumshoe Gus up, first, " Sylvie suggested. 

"You handle him. Take a quick look around, and then pull him back. We'll need him later. " It was the first time he'd ever caught himselfcalling a robot "him, " instead of "it. " He thought for a second, andadded: "Give your father and Mr. Vibart the controls for the twowindow-washers; you handle the snooper. "

He gave more instructions: Yves Jacquemont to turn his bomb-robotright, Vibart to turn his left; the two lorries to follow the jeep upthe shaft, the scows to follow. Then he leaned back and looked at thescreens that had been rigged under the top of the jeep. A circle oflight appeared in one, growing larger and brighter as the snooperapproached the top of the shaft; two more came on as the bomb-robotsfollowed. 

"All right; follow me, " he said into the inter-vehicle radio, andstarted the jeep slowly up the shaft. 

The snooper popped out of the shaft, onto a gallery that had been cutinto the solid rock, fifty feet high and a hundred and fifty across, with a low parapet on the outside and the mile-deep crater beyond. There were a few grounded aircars and lorries in sight, and a mediumairboat rested a hundred or so feet on the right of the shaft-opening. Fifteen or twenty men were clustered around it, with a lifter loadedwith ammunition. They looked like any crowd of farm-tramps. Suddenly, one of them saw the snooper, gave a yell, and fired at it with arifle. Sylvie pulled it back into the shaft; her father and the chiefengineer sent the two bomb-robots up onto the gallery. The right-handrobot sped at the airboat; the last thing Conn saw in its screen was aface, bearded and villainous and contorted with fright, looking outthe pilot's window of the airboat. Then it went dead, and there was aroar from above. On the other side, several men were firing straightat the pickup of the other robot; it went dead, too, and there was asecond explosion. 

In the communication screen, somebody was yelling, "Give them anotherone for Milt Hennant!" and his father was urging him to get in fast, before they recovered. 

In peace or war, screen communication was a wonderful thing. The onlytrouble was that it let in too many kibitzers. 

The gallery, when the jeep emerged onto it, was empty except forcasualties, a few still alive. The side of the airboat was caved in;the lifter-load of ammunition had gone up with the bomb. He moved thejeep to the right of the shaft and waited for the vehicles behind him, suffering a brief indecision. 

 _Never divide your force in the presence of the enemy. _

There had been generals who had done that and gotten away with it, butthey'd had names like Foxx Travis and Robert E. Lee andNapoleon--Napoleon; that was who'd made that crack about omelets!They'd known what they were doing. He was playing this battle by ear. 

There was a lot of shouting ahead to the right. That meant livepirates, a deplorable situation which ought to be corrected at once. The communication screen was noisy, now; his father had gotten to thetop gallery with the three gun cutters, and was meeting resistance. Heformed his column, his jeep and one of the lorries in front, the scowsnext, and the second lorry behind, and started around the gallerycounterclockwise, the snoopers and the three remaining bomb-robotsahead. They began running into resistance almost at once. 

Bullets spatted on the armor glass in front of him, spalling it andblotching it with metal until he found that he could steer better bythe show-back of his view-pickup. He used that until the pickup wasshot out. Then his father began wanting to know, from thecommunication screen, what was going on and where he was. A bomb orsomething went off directly under the jeep, bouncing it almost to theceiling; he found that it was impossible to lift it again after itsettled to the floor of the gallery, and they all piled out to fighton foot. Sommers and his gang from the number one lorry were alsoafoot; their vehicle had been disabled. He saw them lifting woundedinto one of the scows. 

They blew up the light-service robot to clear a nest of pirates whohad taken cover ahead of them. They sent the robo-janitor up a sidepassage and exploded it in a missile-launching position on the outsideof the mountain; that produced a tremendous explosion. They beganrunning out of cartridges, and had to stop and glean more from enemycasualties. They expended their last bomb-robot, the restaurantserver, to break up another pirate resistance point. 

At length he found himself, with Sylvie and her father and one of theHome Guardsmen from Sommers' lorry, lying behind an aircar somebodyhad knocked out with a bazooka, with two dead pirates for company anda dozen distressingly live ones ahead behind an improvised barricade. Behind, there was frantic firing; the rear-guard seemed to have runinto trouble, probably from some gang that had come down from theupper level. He wondered what his father was doing with the gunboats;since abandoning the jeep, he had lost his only means of contact. 

Suddenly, the men in front jumped up from their barricade and camerunning toward him. Been reinforced, now they're counterattacking. Hisrifle was empty; he drew his pistol and shot one of them, and then hesaw that they were throwing up their hands and yelling for quarter. This was something new. 

He looked around quickly, to make sure none of the liberated prisonersexcept Jacquemont and his daughter were around, and then called to acouple of his own men to come up and help him. While they wererelieving the pirates of their pistol belts and cartridge bandoliers, more came up, their hands over their heads, herded by a combat carfrom which Tom Brangwyn covered them with a pair of 12-mm machineguns. Tom hadn't put in an appearance before he had taken his commandoforce into the tunnel; he hadn't even known the chief of CompanyPolice was on Barathrum. 

"Well, nice seeing you, " he greeted. "How did you get in?"

"Over the top, " Brangwyn told him. "Everything's caved in on the otherside. We have a quarter of the top gallery, and half of this one. Yourfather's cleaning up above. Klem's got some men working along theoutside. "

Sylvie was tugging at his arm. "Hey, look! Look at that!" she wasclamoring. "Who's she belong to?"

He looked; the _Lester Dawes_ was coming over the edge of the crater. 

"She's ours, " he said. "It's all over but the mopping up. And countingthe egg breakage. "

XI

The shooting died down to occasional rattles of small arms, usuallyfollowed by yells for quarter. An explosion thundered from across thecrater. The _Lester Dawes_ fired her big guns a few times. A machinegun stuttered. A pistol banged, far away. It took two hours before allthe pirates had been hunted out of hiding and captured, or killed iffound by their former captives, who were accepting no surrenderwhatever. 

Blackie Perales had been one of the latter; he had been found, hisclothes in rags and covered with dirt and grease, hiding under amachine in one of the shops back of the dock in which the _HarrietBarne_ was being rebuilt. He had tried to claim that he was one of thepirates' prisoners who had eluded the roundup at the beginning of thebattle and had been hiding there since. As soon as the real prisonerssaw and recognized him, they had fallen upon him and clubbed, kickedand stamped him out of any resemblance to humanity. At that, what hegot was probably only a fraction of what he deserved. 

The egg breakage had been heavy, and not at all confined to the badeggs. A third gunboat, the _Banshee_, had been destroyed with allhands during the final attack from outside; in addition, a dozen menhad been killed during the fighting in the galleries. Everybody wasshocked, except Klem Zareff, who had been in battles before. He wassurprised that the casualties had been so light. 

At first glance, the spaceport looked like a handsome prize ofvictory. The docks and workshops were all in good condition; at worst, they only needed cleaning up. There was a collapsium plant, with itsown mass-energy converter. There were foundries and machine-shops andforging-shops and a rolling-mill, almost completely robotic. At first, Conn thought that it might be possible to build a hyperdrive shiphere, without having to go to Koshchei at all. 

Closer examination disabused him of this hope. There was nothing ofwhich the framework of a ship could be built, and no way of producingheavy structural steel. The rolling-mill was good enough to turn outeighth-inch sheet material which when plated with a few micromicronsof collapsium would be as good as a hundred feet of lead againstspace-radiations, but that was the ship's skin. A ship needed askeleton, too. The only thing to do was go on with the _HarrietBarne_. 

It was sunset before he finished his tour of inspection and let hisjeep down in a vehicle hall off the lower gallery outside what hadoriginally been the spaceport officers' club. It was crowded, and avictory celebration seemed to be getting under way. He saw his fatherwith Yves Jacquemont, Sylvie, Tom Brangwyn, and Captain Nichols. Nichols had gotten clean clothes from the pirates' store of loot, andhad bathed and shaved. So had Jacquemont, though he had contentedhimself with trimming his beard. It took him a second or so torecognize the young lady in feminine garb as his erstwhile battlecomrade, Sylvie. 

"Well, our pay goes on from the day we were captured, " Nichols wassaying. "My instructions are to resume command of the ship. Tomorrow, they're sending a party out to go over her. "

Conn stopped short. "What's this about the ship?"

"Captain Nichols was in screen contact with his company's office inStorisende, " Rodney Maxwell said. "They're continuing him in commandof her. "

"But . .. But we took that ship! We lost three gunboats and abouttwenty-five men. .. . "

"She still belongs to Transcontinent & Overseas, " his father said. "That's been the law on stolen property as long as there's been anylaw. "

Of course; he should have known that. Did know it; just didn't think. 

"We broke an awful lot of eggs for no omelet; fought a battle fornothing. "

"Well, of course, I'm prejudiced, " Sylvie said, "but I don't thinkgetting us out of the hands of that bloodthirsty maniac and hiscutthroats was nothing. "

"Wiping out the Perales gang wasn't nothing, Conn, " Tom Brangwyn said. "You got no idea at all how bad things were, the last couple ofyears. "

"I know. I'm sorry. " He was ashamed of himself. "But I needed a ship, and now we have no ship at all. "

"A ship means something to you?" Yves Jacquemont asked. 

"Yes. " He told him why. "If we could get to Koshchei, we could build ahypership of our own, and get our brandy and things to markets wherewe could get a decent price for them. "

"I know. I was in and out of Storisende on these owner-captain trampsfor a couple of years before I decided to retire and settle here, "Jacquemont said. "The profit on a cargo of Poictesme brandy on Terraor Baldur is over a thousand percent. "

"Well, don't give up too soon, " Nichols advised. "You can't keep the_Harriet Barne_, of course, but you're entitled to prize-money on her, and that ought to buy you something you could build a spaceship outof. "

"That's right, " Jacquemont said. "Everything else besides the framecan be made here. Look, these pirates burned me out; except for themoney I have in the bank, I lost everything, home, business and all. As soon as I can find a place for Sylvie to stay, I'll come back andgo to work for your company building a spaceship. And a lot of the menwho were working here are farm-tramps and drifters, one job's as goodas another as long as they get paid for it. And I know a few good menin Storisende--engineers--who'd be glad for a job, too. "

"You think it would be all right with Mother and Flora if Sylviestayed with us?" Conn asked. 

"Of course it would; they'd be glad to have her. " Rodney Maxwellturned to Yves Jacquemont. "Let's consider that fixed up. Now, suppose you and I go into Storisende, and. .. . "

The Transcontinent & Overseas people arrived at Barathrum Spaceportthe next morning; a rear-rank vice-president, a front-ranklegal-eagle, and three engineers. They were horrified at what theysaw. The _Harriet Barne_ had been gutted. Bulkheads and decks hadbeen ripped out and relocated incomprehensibly; the bridge and thecontrol room under it were gone; she had been stripped to her framework, and the whole underside was sheathed in shimmering collapsium. 

"Great Ghu!" the vice-president almost howled. "That isn't _our_ship!"

"That's the _Harriet Barne_, " her captain said. "She looks a littleragged now, but--"

"You helped these pirates do this to her?"

"If I hadn't, they'd have cut my throat and gotten somebody else tohelp them. My throat's more valuable to me than the ship is to you; Ican't get anybody to build me a new one. "

"Well, understand, " one of the engineers said, "they were convertingher into an interplanetary ship. It wouldn't cost much to finish thejob. "

"We need an interplanetary ship like we need a hole in the head!" Thevice-president turned to Rodney Maxwell. "Just how much prize-money doyou think you're entitled to for this wreck?"

"I wouldn't know; that's up to Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong. Up to thecourt, if we can settle it any other way. "

"You mean you'd litigate about this?" the lawyer demanded, and beganto laugh. 

"If we have to. Look, if you people don't want her, sign her over toLitchfield Exploration & Salvage. But if you do want her, you'll haveto pay for her. "

"We'll give you twenty thousand sols, " the lawyer said. "We don't wantto be tightfisted. After all, you fought a gang of pirates and lostsome men and a couple of boats; we have some moral obligation to you. But you'll have to realize that this ship, in her present state, ispractically valueless. "

"The collapsium on her is worth twice that, and the engines are wortheven more, " Jacquemont said. "I worked on them. "

The discussion ended there. By midafternoon, Luther Chen-Wong, thejunior partner of the law firm, arrived from Storisende with a coupleof engineers of his own. Reporters began arriving; both sides wereanxious to keep them away from the ship. Conn took care of them, assisted by Sylvie, who had rummaged an even more attractive costumeout of what she called the loot-cellar. The reporters all used up alot of film footage on her. And the Fawzis' Office Gang arrived fromForce Command, bitterly critical of the value of the spaceport againstits cost in lives and equipment. Brangwyn and Zareff returned to ForceCommand with them. A Planetary Air Patrol ship arrived and removed thecaptured pirates. The liberated prisoners were airlifted toLitchfield. 

The third day after the battle, Conn and his father and Sylvie and herfather flew to Litchfield. To Conn's surprise, Flora greeted himcordially, and Wade Lucas, rather stiffly, congratulated him. Maybe itwas as Tom Brangwyn had said; he hadn't been on Poictesme in the lastfour or five years and didn't know how bad things had gotten. Hismother seemed to think he had won the Battle of Barathrumsingle-handed. 

He was even more surprised and gratified that Flora made friends withSylvie immediately. His mother, however, regarded the engineer'sdaughter with badly concealed hostility, and seemed to doubt thatSylvie was the kind of girl she wanted her son getting involved with. Outwardly, of course, she was quite gracious. 

Rodney Maxwell and Yves Jacquemont flew to Storisende the nextmorning, both more optimistic about finding a ship than Conn thoughtthe circumstances warranted. Conn stayed at home for the next fewdays, luxuriating in idleness. He and Sylvie tore down his mother'shousehold robots and built sound-sensors into them, keying them torespond to their names and to a few simple commands, and includingrecorded-voice responses in a thick Sheshan accent. All the smartpeople on Terra, he explained, had Sheshan humanoid servants. 

His mother was delighted. Robots that would answer when she spoke tothem were a lot more companionable. She didn't seem to think, however, that Sylvie's mechanical skills were ladylike accomplishments. Nicegirls, Litchfield model, weren't quite so handy with a spot-welder. That was what Conn liked about Sylvie; she was like the girls he'dknown at the University. 

They were strolling after dinner, down the Mall. The air was sharp andwarned that autumn had definitely arrived; the many brilliant stars, almost as bright as the moon of Terra, were coming out in the dusk. 

"Conn, this thing about Merlin, " she began. "Do you really believe init? Ever since Dad and I came to Poictesme, I've been hearing aboutit, but it's just a story, isn't it?"

He was tempted to tell her the truth, and sternly put the temptationbehind him. 

"Of course there's a Merlin, Sylvie, and it's going to do wonderfulthings when we find it. "

He looked down the starlit Mall ahead of him. Somebody, maybe LesterDawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes, had gotten thingsfinished and cleaned up. The pavement was smooth and unbroken; thelitter had vanished. 

"It's done wonderful things already, just because people startedlooking for it, " he said. "Some of these days, they're going torealize that they had Merlin all along and didn't know it. "

There was a faint humming from somewhere ahead, and he was wonderingwhat it was. Then they came to the long escalators, and he saw thatthey were running. 

"Why, look! They got them fixed! They're running!"

Sylvie grinned at him and squeezed his arm. 

"I get you, chum, " she said. "Of course there's a Merlin. "

Maybe he didn't have to tell her the truth. 

When they returned to the house, his mother greeted him:

"Conn, your father's been trying to get you ever since you went out. Call him, right away; Ritz-Gartner Hotel, in Storisende. It'ssomething about a ship. "

It look a little time to get his father on-screen. He was excited andhappy. 

"Hi, Conn; we have one, " he said. 

"What kind of a ship?"

"You know her. The _Harriet Barne_. "

That he hadn't expected. Something off Mothball Row that would have tobe flown to Barathrum and torn down and completely rebuilt, but notthe one that was there already, partly finished. 

"How the dickens did you wangle that?"

"Oh, it was Yves' idea, to start with. He knew about her; the T. &O. 's been losing money on her for years. He said if they had to payprize-money on her and then either restore her to original conditionor finish the job and build a spaceship they didn't want, it wouldalmost bankrupt the company. They got up as high as fifty thousandsols for prize-money and we just laughed at them. So we made aproposition of our own. 

"We proposed organizing a new company, subsidiary to both L. E. & S. And T. & O. , to engage in interplanetary shipping; both companies toassign their equity in the _Harriet Barne_ to the new company, thework of completing her to be done at our spaceport and the labor costto be shared. This would give us our spaceship, and get T. & O. Offthe hook all around. Everybody was for it except the president of T. &O. Know anything about him?"

Conn shook his head. His father continued:

"Name's Jethro Sastraman. He could play Scrooge in _Christmas Carol_without any makeup at all. He hasn't had a new idea since he got outof college, and that was while the War was still going on. 'Preposterous; utterly visionary and impractical, '" his fathermimicked. "Fortunately, a majority of the big stockholders didn'tagree; they finally bullied him into agreeing. We're calling the newcompany Alpha-Interplanetary, we have an application for charter in, and that'll go through almost automatically. "

"Who's going to be the president of this new company?"

"You know him. Character named Rodney Maxwell. Yves is going to bevice-president in charge of operations; he's flying to Barathrumtomorrow or the next day with a gang of technicians we're recruiting. T. & O. Are giving us Clyde Nichols and Mack Vibart, and a lot of menfrom their shipyard. I'm staying here in Storisende; we're opening anoffice here. By this time next week, we're all going to wish we'd beenborn quintuplets. "

"And Conn Maxwell, I suppose, will be an influentialnon-office-holding stockholder?"

"That's right. Just like in L. E. & S. "

XII

He found Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and a score of workmen making asurvey and inventory of the spaceport. Captain Nichols and four of theoriginal crew of the _Harriet Barne_, who had shared his captivityamong the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And FredKarski, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, waskeeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formationof Alpha-Interplanetary when Conn arrived. 

The next day, Yves Jacquemont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, agang from the T. & O. Shipyard, and a dozen engineers and constructionmen whom he had recruited around Storisende. More workers arrived inthe next few days, including a number who had already worked on theship as slaves of the Perales gang. 

It didn't take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in theconversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere andgravitation, the _Harriet Barne_ was long and narrow, like an oldocean ship; more than anything else, she had originally resembled ahuge submarine. Spaceships, either interplanetary or interstellar, were always spherical with a pseudogravity system at the center. This, of course, the _Harriet Barne_ lacked. 

"Well, are we going to make the whole trip in free fall?" he wanted toknow. 

"No, we'll use our acceleration for pseudograv halfway, anddeceleration the other half, " Jacquemont told him. "We'll be in freefall about ten or fifteen hours. What we're going to have to do willbe to lift off from Poictesme in the horizontal position the ship wasdesigned for, and then make a ninety-degree turn after we'reoff-planet, with our lift and our drive working together, just likeone of the old rocket ships before the Abbott Drive was developed. "

That meant, of course, that the after bulkheads would become decks, and explained a lot of the oddities he had noticed about theconversion job. It meant that everything would have to be mounted ongimbals, everything stowed so as to be secure in either position, andnothing placed where it would be out of reach in either. 

Jacquemont and Nichols took charge of the work on the ship herself. Chief Engineer Vibart, with a gang of half-taught, self-taught anduntaught helpers, went back to working the engines over, tearing outall the safety devices that were intended to keep the ship insideplanetary atmosphere, and arranging the lift engines so that theycould be swung into line with the drive engines. There was a lot ofcybernetic and robotic equipment, and astrogational equipment, thathad to be made from scratch. Conn picked a couple of helpers and wentto work on that. 

From time to time, he was able to snatch a few minutes to readteleprint papers or listen to audiovisual newscasts from Storisende. He was always disappointed. There was much excitement about the newinterplanetary company, but the emphasis was all wrong. People weren'tinterested in getting hyperships built, or opening the mines andfactories on Koshchei, or talking about all the things now in shortsupply that could be produced there. They were talking about Merlin, and they were all positive, now, that something found at Force CommandDuplicate had convinced Litchfield Exploration & Salvage that thegiant computer was somewhere off-planet. 

Rodney Maxwell flew in from Storisende; he was accompanied by WadeLucas, who shook hands cordially with Conn. 

"Can you spare us Jerry Rivas for a while?" Rodney Maxwell asked. 

"Well, ask Yves Jacquemont; he's vice-president in charge ofoperations. As an influential non-office-holding stockholder, I'dthink so. He's only running around helping out here and there. "

"We want him to take charge of opening those hospitals you weretelling us about. Wade and I are forming a new company, MainlandMedical Materials, Ltd. Going to act as broker for L. E. & S. Ingetting rid of medical stores. Nobody in the company knows where tosell that stuff or what we ought to get for it. "

Wade Lucas began to talk about how desperately some types of drug andsome varieties of diagnostic equipment were needed. Conn had it on thetip of his tongue to ask Lucas whether he thought that was a racket, too. Lucas must have read his mind. 

"I really didn't understand how much good this would do, " he said. "Iwouldn't have spoken so forcefully against it if I had. I thought itwas nothing but this Merlin thing--"

"Aaagh! Don't talk to me about Merlin!" Conn interrupted. "I have totalk to Kurt Fawzi and that crowd about Merlin till I'm sick of thewhole subject. "

His father shot him a warning glance; Lucas was looking at him insurprise. He hastened to change the subject:

"I see Len made you a suit out of that material, " he said to hisfather. "And I see you're not bulging the coat out behind with ahip-holster. "

"Oh, I stopped carrying a gun; I'm a city man, now. Nobody carries onein Storisende. Won't even be necessary in Litchfield before long. Ournew marshal had a regular reign of terror in Tramptown for a few days, and you wouldn't know the place. Wade, here, is acting mayor now. "

They went back to talking about the new company. "You're going to haveso many companies you won't be able to to keep track of them beforelong, " Conn said. 

"Well, I'm doing something about that. A holding company; TrisystemInvestments, Ltd. ; you're a non-office-holding stockholder in that, too. "

Merlin was now a political issue. A bill had been introduced inParliament to amend the Abandoned Property Act of 867 and nationalizeMerlin, when and if discovered and regardless by whom. The supportseemed to come from an extremist minority; everybody else, includingthe Administration, was opposed to it. There was considerableacrimony, however, on the propositions: 1) that Merlin was tooimportant to the prosperity of Poictesme to become a private monopoly;and 2) that Merlin was too important, etc. , to become a politicalfootball and patronage plum. 

It was discovered, after they were half assembled, that the controlsfor the _Harriet Barne_ would only work while she was in a horizontalposition. The whole thing had to be torn out and rebuilt. There wasalso trouble with the air-and-water recycling system. The _City ofNefertiti_ came in from Aton for Odin; Rodney Maxwell was almostfrantic because they hadn't gotten together a cargo of medical storesfrom the first hospital to be opened. 

"There's all sorts of stuff, " he was fuming, by screen. "Stuff that'sin short supply anywhere and that we could get good prices foroff-planet. Get Federation sols for it, too. "

"The _City of Asgard_ will be along in six months, " Conn said. "Youcan have a real cargo assembled by then. You can make arrangements inadvance to dispose of it on Terra or Baldur or Marduk. "

"There are a couple of other companies interested in interplanetaryships now, " his father added. "One of them had gotten four oldfreighters off Mothball Row, and they're tearing them down andcannibalizing them into one spaceship. That work's being done here atStorisende Spaceport. And another company has gotten title to a coupleof old office buildings and has a gang at work dismantling them forthe structural steel. I think they're going to build a realspaceship. "

That wasn't anything to worry about either. The _Harriet Barne_ wasbetter than half finished. There was a collapsium plant at StorisendeSpaceport, but Yves Jacquemont said it was only half the size of theone at Barathrum; it would be three months before it could producearmor for one, let alone both, ships. 

The crackpots were getting into the act, now, too. A spirit medium onthe continent of Acaire, to the north, had produced a communicationpurporting to originate with a deceased Third Force Staff officer, nowin the Spirit World. There was considerable detail, all ludicrous toConn's professional ear. And a fanatic in one of the small towns onthe west coast was quoting the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavadgitato prove that if Merlin were ever found, Divine vengeance in aspectacular form would fall not only on Poictesme but on the entireGalaxy. 

The spaceship that was building at Storisende got into the news;on-screen, it appeared that the work was progressing rapidly. So wasthe work of demolishing a block of empty buildings to get girders forthe second ship, on which work had not yet been started. The one underconstruction seemed to be of cruciform design, like an old-fashionedpre-contragravity winged airplane. The design puzzled everybody atBarathrum. Yves Jacquemont thought that perhaps there would be decksin the cross-arm which would be used when the ship was running oncombined lift and drive. 

"Well, till we can get a shipyard going on Koshchei and build somereal spaceships, there are going to be some rare-looking objectstraveling around the Alpha System. I wonder what the next one's goingto look like--a flying sky-scraper?" Conn said. 

"What I wonder, " Yves Jacquemont replied, "is where all the oldinterplanetary ships got to. There must have been hundreds of themrunning back and forth from here to Janicot and Koshchei and Jurgenand Horvendile during the War. They must have gone somewhere. "

"Couldn't they all have been fitted with Dillingham hyperdriveengines and used in the evacuation?"

"Possible. But the average interplanetary ship isn't very big; fivehundred to seven-fifty feet in diameter. One of those things couldn'tcarry more than a couple of hundred people, after you put in all thesupplies and the hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats and so on fora four- to six-month voyage. I can't see the economy of alteringanything that small for interstellar work. Why, the smallest of thesetramp freighters that come in here will run about fifteen hundredfeet. "

They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure. And there certainly weren't any of them left on Poictesme. He puzzledover it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things tothink about. 

In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work, everything he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had notgiven to anything since cramming for examinations at the University. There was a lot of it. 

The fourth planet of Alpha Gartner was older than Poictesme;geologists claimed that it was the oldest thing, the sun excepted, inthe system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn'tbeen captured from either Beta or Gamma when the three stars had beenmuch closer together. It had certainly been formed at a much highertemperature than Janicot or Poictesme or Jurgen or Horvendile. Forbetter than a billion years, it had been molten-hot, and it had lostmost of its lighter elements in gaseous form along with its primaryatmosphere, leaving little to form a light-rock crust. All that hadremained had been a core of almost pure iron and a mantle that wasmostly high-grade iron ore. 

The same process had gone on, as it cooled, as on any Terra-sizeplanet. After the surface had started to congeal, gases, mostly carbondioxide and water vapor, had come up to form a secondary atmosphere, the water vapor forming a cloud envelope, condensing, and sending downrain that returned immediately as steam. Solar radiations and electricdischarges broke some of that into oxygen and hydrogen; most of thehydrogen escaped into space. Finally, the surface cooled further andthe rain no longer steamed off. 

The whole planet started to rust. It had been rusting, slowly, for thebillion or so years that had followed, and almost all the free oxygenhad become locked in iron oxide. The air was almost pure carbondioxide. It would have been different if life had ever appeared onKoshchei, but apparently the right amino acids never assembled. Someattempts had been made to introduce vegetation after the colonizationof Poictesme, but they had all failed. 

Men went to Koshchei; they worked out of doors in oxygen helmets, andlived in airtight domes and generated their own oxygen. There had beenmines, and smelters, and blast furnaces and steel mills. And there hadbeen shipyards, where hyperships up to three thousand feet had beenbuilt. They had all been abandoned when the War had ended; they werewaiting there, on an empty, lifeless planet. Some of them had beenbuilt by the Third Fleet-Army Force during the War; most of them datedback almost a century before that, to the original industrial boom. All of them could be claimed under the Abandoned Property Act of 867, since all had been taken over by the Federation, and the originalowners, or their heirs, compensated. 

And there was the matter of selecting a crew. As an influentialnon-office-holding stockholder in all the companies involved, ConnMaxwell, of course, would represent them. He would also serve asastrogator. Clyde Nichols would command the ship in atmosphere, andact as first mate in space. Mack Vibart would be chief engineer at alltimes. Yves Jacquemont would be first officer under Nichols, andcaptain outside atmosphere. They had three real space crewmen, namedRoddell, Youtsko and O'Keefe, who had been in Storisende jail as aresult of a riotous binge when their ship had lifted out, six monthsbefore. The rest of the company--Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, CharleyGatworth, Mohammed Matsui, and four other engineers, Ludvyckson, Gomez, Karanja and Retief--rated as ordinary spacemen for the trip, and would do most of the exploration work after landing. 

They got the controls put up; they would work in either position. Theengines were lifted in and placed. Conn finished the robo-pilot andthe astrogational computers and saw them installed. The air-and-waterrecycling system went in. The collapsium armor went on. In thenews-screen, they saw the spaceship at Storisende still far from halffinished, with swarms of heavy-duty lifters and contragravitymachiners around it, and a set of landing-stands, on which the secondship was to be built, in the process of construction. 

A tramp hyperspace freighter landed at Storisende, the _Andromeda_, five months from Terra, with a cargo of general merchandise. RodneyMaxwell and Wade Lucas had assembled a cargo of medicines and hospitalequipment which they thought could be sold profitably. They begandickering with the owner-captain of the hypership. 

A farm-tramp down in the tobacco country to the south, evidentlyignorant that the former commander of the Third Force was still alive, had proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Foxx Travis and wasforbidding everybody, on pain of court-martial and firing squad, frommeddling with Merlin. And an evangelist in the west was declaring thatMerlin was really Satan in mechanical shape. 

The _Harriet Barne_ was finished. The first test, lifting her to threehundred miles, turning her bow-up, and taking her another thousandmiles, had been a success. They brought her back and set her down inthe middle of the crater, and began getting the supplies aboard. KurtFawzi, Klem Zareff, Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin and the others flewover from Force Command. Sylvie Jacquemont came from Litchfield, andso did Wade Lucas, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardes anda number of others. Neither Conn's mother nor sister came. 

"I don't know what's the matter with those two, " Sylvie told him. "They always seem to be scrapping with each other now, and the onlything they can agree on is that you and your father ought to stopwhatever you're doing, right away. Your mother can't adjust to yourfather being a big Storisende businessman, and she says he'll loseevery centisol he has and both of you will probably go to jail, andthen she's afraid you will find Merlin, and Flora's sure you and yourfather are swindling everybody on the planet. "

"Sylvie, I had no idea things would be like that, " he told hercontritely. "I wish I hadn't suggested that you stay there, now. "

"Oh, it isn't so bad, so far. Your mother and I get along all rightwhen Flora isn't there, and Flora and I get along when your motherisn't around. Mealtimes aren't much fun, though. "

His father came out from Storisende, looked the ship over, and seemedrelieved. 

"I'm glad you're ready to get off, " he said. "You know this hyperspacefreighter, the _Andromeda_? Some private group in Storisende haschartered her. She's loading supplies now. I have a private detectiveagency, Barton-Massarra, trying to find out where's she's going. Ithink you'd better get this ship off, right away. "

"We have everything aboard, all the supplies and everything, "Jacquemont told him. "We can lift off tonight. "

III

The ship lurched slightly. In the outside screens, the lights around, the crowd that was waving good-bye, and the floor of the crater beganreceding. The sound pickups were full of cheering, and the boom of abig gun at one of the top batteries, and the recorded and amplifiedmusic of a band playing the traditional "Spacemen's Hymn. "

"It's been a long time since I heard that played in earnest, "Jacquemont said. "Well, we're off to see the Wizard. "

The lights dwindled and merged into a tiny circle in the darkness ofthe crater. The music died away; the cannon shots became a faintthrobbing. Finally, there was silence, and only the stars above andthe dark land and the starlit sea below. After a long while a sunsetglow, six hours past on Barathrum, appeared in the west, behind thenow appreciable curvature of the planet. 

"Stand by for shift to vertical, " Captain Nichols called, his voiceechoing from PA-outlets through the ship. 

"Ready for shift, Captain Nichols, " Jacquemont reported from theduplicate-control panel. 

Conn went to the after bulkhead, leaning his back against it. "Readyhere, Captain, " he said. 

Other voices took it up. Lights winked on the control panels. 

"Shifting over, " Nichols said. "Your ship now, Captain Jacquemont. "

"Thank you, Mr. Nichols. "

The deck began to tilt, and then he was lying on his back, his feetagainst the side of the control room, which had altered its shape anddimensions. There was a jar as the drive went on in line with the newdirection of the lift and the ship began accelerating. He got to hisfeet, and he and Charley Gatworth went to the astrogational computerand began checking the data and setting the course for the point inspace at which Koshchei would be in a hundred and sixty hours. 

"Course set, Captain, " he reported to Jacquemont, after a while. 

A couple of lights winked on the control panel. There was nothing moreto do but watch Poictesme dwindle behind, and listen to the newscasts, and take turns talking to friends on the planet. 

They approached the halfway point; the acceleration rate decreased, and the gravity indicator dropped, little by little. Everybody wasenjoying the new sense of lightness, romping and skylarking like newlylanded tourists on Luna. It was fun, as long as they landed on theirfeet at each jump, and the food and liquids stayed on plates and inglasses and cups. Yves Jacquemont began posting signs in conspicuousplaces:

WEIGHT IS WHAT YOU LIFT, MASS IS WHAT HURTSWHEN IT HITS YOU. WEIGHT DEPENDS ON GRAVITY; MASS IS ALWAYS CONSTANT. 

His father came on-screen from his office in Storisende. By then, there was a 30-second time lag in communication between the ship andPoictesme. 

"My private detectives found out about the _Andromeda_, " he said. "She's going to Panurge, in the Gamma System. They have a couple ofcomputermen with them, one they hired from the Stock Exchange, and onethey practically shanghaied away from the Government. And some of thepeople who chartered the ship are members of a family that wereinterested in a positronic-equipment plant on Panurge at the time ofthe War. "

"That's all right, then; we don't need to worry about that any more. They're just hunting for Merlin. "

Some of his companions were looking at him curiously. A little later, Piet Ludvyckson, the electromagnetics engineer, said: "I thought youwere looking for Merlin, Conn. "

"Not on Koschchei. We're looking for something to build a hypershipout of. If I had Merlin in my hip pocket right now, I'd trade it forone good ship like the _City of Asgard_ or the _City of Nefertiti_, and give a keg of brandy and a box of cigars to boot. If we had a shipof our own, we'd be selling lots of both, and not for StorisendeSpaceport prices, either. "

"But don't you think Merlin's important?" Charley Gatworth, who hadoverheard him, asked. 

"Sure. If we find Merlin, we can run it for President. It would make abetter one than Jake Vyckhoven. "

He let it go at that. Plenty of opportunities later to expand thetheme. 

The gravitation gauge dropped to zero. Now they were in free fall, andit lasted twice as long as Yves Jacquemont had predicted. There were afew misadventures, none serious and most of them comic--For example, when Jerry Rivas opened a bottle of beer, everybody was chasing theamber globules and catching them in cups, and those who were splashedwere glad it hadn't been hot coffee. 

They made their second, 180-degree turnover while weightless. Thenthey began decelerating and approached Koshchei stern-on, and thegravity gauge began climbing slowly up again, and things beganstaying put, and they were walking instead of floating. Koshchei grewlarger and larger ahead; the polar icecaps, and the faint dappling ofclouds, and the dark wiggling lines on the otherwise uniform red-brownsurface which were mountain ranges became visible. Finally they beganto see, first with the telescopic screens and then withoutmagnification, the little dots and specks that were cities andindustrial centers. 

Then they were in atmosphere, and Jacquemont made the final shift, tohorizontal position, and turned the ship over to Nichols. 

For a moment, the scout-boat tumbled away from the ship and Conn wasback in free fall. Then he got on the lift-and-drive and steadied it, and pressed the trigger button, firing a green smoke bomb. Beside him, Yves Jacquemont put on the radio and the screen pickups. He could seethe ship circling far above, and the manipulator-boat, with itsclaw-arms and grapples, breaking away from it. Then he looked down onthe endless desert of iron oxide that stretched in all directions tothe horizon, until he saw a spot, optically the size of afive-centisol piece, that was the shipbuilding city of Port Carpenter. He turned the boat toward it, firing four more green smokes atthree-second intervals. The manipulator-boat started to follow, andthe _Harriet Barne_, now a distant speck in the sky, began comingcloser. 

Below, as he cut speed and altitude, he could see the pock-marks ofopen-pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal andarmor-glass roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces andthe twisted slag-flows, like the ancient lava-flows of Barathrum. And, he reflected, he was an influential non-office-holding stockholder inevery bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storisende and getclaims filed. 

A high tower rose out of the middle of Port Carpenter, with aglass-domed mushroom top. That would be the telecast station; theadministrative buildings were directly below it and around its base. He came in slowly over the city, above a spaceport with its emptylanding pits in a double circle around a traffic-control building, and airship docks and warehouses beyond. More steel mills. Factories, either hemispherical domes or long buildings with rounded tops. Ship-construction yards and docks; for the most part, these wereempty, but on some of them the landing-stands of spaceships, likeeight-and ten-legged spiders, waiting for forty years for hulls to bebuilt on them. A few spherical skeletons of ships, a few with some ofthe outer skin on. It wasn't until he was passing close to them thathe realized how huge they were. And stacks of material--sheet steel, deckplate, girders--and contragravity lifters and constructionmachines, all left on jobs that were never finished, the brightrustless metal dulled by forty years of rain and windblown red dust. They must have been working here to the very last, and then, when theevacuation elsewhere was completed, they had dropped whatever theywere doing, piled into such ships as were completed, and lifted away. 

The mushroom-topped tower rose from the middle of a circular buildingpiled level on level, almost half a mile across. He circled over it, saw an airship dock, and called the _Harriet Barne_ while Jacquemonttalked to Jerry Rivas, piloting the manipulator-boat. Rivas came inand joined them in the air; they hovered over the dock and helped theship down when she came in, nudging her into place. 

By the time Conn and Jacquemont and Rivas and Anse Dawes and Roddelland Youtsko and Karanja were out on the dock in oxygen helmets, theship's airlock was opening and Nichols and Vibart and the others werecoming out, towing a couple of small lifters loaded with equipment. 

The airlocked door into the building, at the end of the dock, wasclosed; when somebody pulled the handle, it refused to open. Thatmeant it was powered from the central power plant, wherever that was. There was a plug socket beside it, with the required voltage markedover it. They used an extension line from a power unit on one of thelifters to get it open, and did the same with the inner door; when itwas open, they passed into a dim room that stretched away ahead ofthem and on either side. 

It looked like a freight-shipping room; there were a few piles ofboxes and cases here and there, and a litter of packing materialeverywhere. A long counter-desk, and a bank of robo-clerks behind it. According to the air-analyzer, the oxygen content inside was safelyhigh. They all pulled off their fishbowl helmets and slung them. 

"Well, we can bunk inside here tonight, " somebody said. "It won't beso crowded here. "

"We'll bunk here after we find the power plant and get the ventilatorfans going, " Jacquemont said. 

Anse Dawes held up the cigarette he had lighted; that was all theair-analyzer he needed. 

"That looks like enough oxygen, " he said. 

"Yes, it makes its own ventilation; convection, " Jacquemont said. "Butyou go to sleep in here, and you'll smother in a big puddle of yourown exhaled CO_2. Just watch what the smoke from that cigarette'sdoing. "

The smoke was hanging motionless a few inches from the hot ash on theend of the cigarette. 

"We'll have to find the power plant, then, " Matsui, the power-engineersaid. "Down at the bottom and in the middle, I suppose, and anybody'sguess how deep this place goes. "

"We'll find plans of the building, " Jerry Rivas said. "Any big digI've ever been on, you could always find plans. The troubleshootersalways had them; security officer, and maintenance engineer. "

There were inside-use vehicles in the big room; they loaded what theyhad with them onto a couple of freight-skids and piled on, startingdown a passage toward the center of the building. The passageways werewell marked with direction-signs, and they found the administrativearea at the top and center, around the base of the telecast-tower. Thesecurity offices, from which police, military guard, fire protectionand other emergency services were handled, had a fine set of plans andmaps, not only for the building itself but for everything else in PortCarpenter. The power plant, as Matsui had surmised, was at the verybottom, directly below. 

The only trouble, after they found it, was that it was completelydead. The reactors wouldn't react, the converters wouldn't convert, and no matter how many switches they shoved in, there was no poweroutput. The inside telemetered equipment, of course, was self-powered. Some of them were dead, too, but from those which still workedMohammed Matsui got a uniformly disheartening story. 

"You know what happened?" he said. "When this gang bugged out, back in854, they left the power on. Now the conversion mass is all gone, andthe plutonium's all spent. We'll have to find more plutonium, and tearthis whole thing down and refuel it, and repack the mass-conversionchambers--provided nothing's eaten holes in itself after the massinside was all converted. "

"How long will it take?" Conn asked. 

"If we can find plutonium, and if we can find robots to do the workinside, and if there's been no structural damage, and if we keep atit--a couple of days. "

"All right; let's get at it. I don't know where we'll find shipyardslike these anywhere else, and if we do, things'll probably be as badthere. We came here to fix things up and start them, didn't we?"

XIV

It didn't take as long as Mohammed Matsui expected. They found thefissionables magazine, and in it plenty of plutonium, eachsubcritical slug in a five-hundred-pound collapsium canister. Therewere repair-robots, and they only had to replace the cartridges in thepower units of three of them. They sent them inside thecollapsium-shielded death-to-people area--transmitter robots, to relaywhat the others picked up through receptors wire-connected with theoutside; foremen-robots, globes a yard in diameter covered with hornsand spikes like old-fashioned ocean-navy mines; worker-robots, in avariety of shapes, but mostly looking like many-clawed crabs. 

Neither the converter nor the reactor had sustained any damage whilethe fissionables were burning out. So the robots began tearing outreactor-elements, and removing plutonium slugs no longer capable ofsustaining chain reaction but still dangerously radioactive. Nuclearreactors had become simpler and easier to service since the First Dayof the Year Zero, when Enrico Fermi put the first one into operation, but the principles remained the same. Work was less back-breaking andmuscle-straining, but it called for intense concentration on screensand meters and buttons that was no less exhausting. 

The air around them began to grow foul. Finally, the air-analyzersquawked and flashed red lights to signal that the oxygen had droppedbelow the safety margin. They had no mobile fan equipment, or time tohunt any; they put on their fishbowl helmets and went back to work. After twelve hours, with a few short breaks, they had the reactorsgoing. Jerry Rivas and a couple of others took a heavy-duty lifter andwent looking for conversion mass; they brought back a couple of tonsof scrap-iron and fed it to the converters. A few seconds after it wasin, the pilot lights began coming on all over the panels. They tooktwo more hours to get the oxygen-separator and the ventilator fansgoing, and for good measure they started the water pumps and theheating system. Then they all went outside to the ship to sleep. Thesun was just coming up. 

It was sunset when they rose and returned to the building. Theairlocks opened at a touch on the operating handles. Inside, the airwas fresh and sweet, the temperature was a pleasantly uniform 75degrees Fahrenheit, the fans were humming softly, and there wasrunning hot and cold water everywhere. 

Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, and the three tramp freighter fo'c'sle handstook lifters and equipment and went off foraging. The rest of themwent to the communications center to get the telecast station, theradio beacon, and the inside-screen system into operation. There werea good many things that had to be turned on manually, and more thingsthat had been left on, forty years ago, and now had to be repowered orreplaced. They worked at it most of the night; before morning, almosteverything was working, and they were sending a signal acrosstwenty-eight million miles to Storisende, on Poictesme. 

It was late evening, Storisende time, but Rodney Maxwell, who musthave been camping beside his own screen, came on at once, which is tosay five and a half minutes later. 

"Well, I see you got in somewhere. Where are you, and how iseverything?"

Then he picked up a cigar out of an ashtray in front of him and litit, waiting. 

"Port Carpenter; we're in the main administration building, " Conn toldhim. He talked for a while about what they had found and done sincetheir arrival. "Have you an extra viewscreen, fitted for recording?"he asked. 

Five and a half minutes later, his father nodded. "Yes, right here. "He leaned forward and away from the communication screen in front ofhim. "I have it on. " He gave the wave-length combination. "Ready toreceive. "

"This is about all we have, now. Views we took coming in, from theship and a scout-boat. " He started transmitting them. "We haven't sentin any claims yet. I wasn't sure whether I should make them forAlpha-Interplanetary, or Litchfield Exploration & Salvage. "

"Don't bother sending in anything to the Claims Office, " his fathersaid. "Send anything you want to claim in here to me, and I'll haveSterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong file them. They'll be made for a newcompany we're organizing. "

"What? Another one?"

His father nodded, grinning. "Koshchei Exploitation & Development;we've made application already. We can't claim exclusive rights to thewhole planet, like the old interstellar exploration companies didbefore the War, but since you're the only people on the planet, we cancome pretty close to it by detail. " He was looking to one side, at theother screen. "Great Ghu, Conn! This place of yours all togetherbeats everything I ever dug, Force Command and Barathrum Spaceportincluded. How big would you say it is? More than ten miles in radius?"

"About five or six. Ten or twelve miles across. "

"That's all right, then. We'll just claim the building you're in, now, and the usual ten-mile radius, the same as at Force Command. We'llclaim the place as soon as the company's chartered; in the meantime, send in everything else you can get views of. "

They set up a regular radio-and-screen watch after that. CharleyGatworth and Piet Ludvyckson, both of whom were studying astrogationin hopes of qualifying as space officers after they had a realspaceship, elected themselves to that duty; it gave them plenty oftime for study. Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, with whomever they couldfind to help them, were making a systematic search. They looked firstof all for foodstuffs, and found enough in the storerooms of threerestaurants on the executive level to feed their own party in gourmetstyle for a year, and enough in the main storerooms to provision anarmy. They even found refrigerators and freeze-bins full of meat andvegetables fresh after forty years. That surprised everybody, for thepower units had gone dead long ago. Then it was noticed that they werecovered with collapsium. Anything that would stop cosmic rays was ahundred percent efficient as a heat insulator. 

Coming in, the first day, Conn had seen an almost completed hypershipbulking above the domes and roofs of Port Carpenter in the distance. He saw it again on screen from a pickup atop the central tower. Assoon as the party was comfortably settled in the executive apartmentson the upper levels, he and Yves Jacquemont and Mack Vibart and SchalkRetief, the construction engineer, found an aircar in one of thehangars and went to have a closer look at her. 

She had all her collapsium on, except for a hundred-foot circle at thetop and a number of rectangular openings around the sides. YvesJacquemont said that would be where the airlocks would go. 

"They always put them on last. But don't be surprised at anything youfind or don't find inside. As soon as the skeleton's up they put thearmor on, and then build the rest of the ship out from the middle. Itmight be slower getting material in through the airlock openings, butit holds things together while they're working. "

They put on the car's lights, lifted to the top, and let down throughthe upper opening. It was like entering a huge globular spider's web, globe within globe of interlaced girders and struts and braces, extending from the center to the outer shell. Even the spider washome--a three-hundred-foot ball of collapsium, looking tiny at thevery middle. 

"Why, this isn't a ship!" Vibart cried in disgust. "This is just theoutside of a ship. They haven't done a thing inside. "

"Oh, yes, they have, " Jacquemont contradicted, aiming a spotlighttoward the shimmering ball in the middle. "They have all the enginesin--Abbott lift-and-drive, Dillingham hyperdrives, pseudograv, powerreactors, converters, everything. They wouldn't have put on theshielding if they hadn't. They did that as soon as they had theoutside armor on. "

"Wonder why they didn't finish her, if they got that far, " Retiefsaid. 

"They didn't need her. They'd had it; they wanted to go home. "

"Well, we're not going to finish her, not with any fifteen men, "Retief said. "One man has only two hands, two feet and one brain; hecan only handle so much robo-equipment at a time. "

"I never expected we'd build a ship ourselves, " Conn said. "We came tolook the place over and get a few claims staked. When we've done that, we'll go back and get a real gang together. "

"I don't know where you'll find them, " Jacquemont commented. "We'llneed a couple of hundred, and they ought all to be graduate engineers. We can't do this job with farm-tramps. "

"You made some good shipyard men out of farm-tramps on Barathrum. "

"And what'll you do for supervisors?"

"You're one. General superintendent. Mack, you and Schalk are a coupleof others. You just keep a day ahead of your men in learning the job, you'll do all right. "

Vibart turned to Jacquemont. "You know, Yves, he'll do it, " he said. "He doesn't know how impossible this is, and when we try to tell him, he won't believe us. You can't stop a guy like that. All right, Conn;deal me in. "

"I won't let anybody be any crazier than I am, " Jacquemont declared, and then looked around the vastness of the empty ship with itslacework of steel. "All you need is about ten million square feet ofdecks and bulkheads, and air-and-water system, hydroponic tanks andcarniculture vats, astrogation and robo-pilot equipment, about which Iknow very little, a hyperspace pilot system, about which I knownothing at all. .. . Conn, why don't you just build a new Merlin? Itwould be simpler. "

"I don't want a new Merlin. I'm not even interested in the originalMerlin. This is what I want, right here. "

He told his father, by screen, about the ship. "I believe we canfinish her, but not with the gang that's here. We'll need a couple ofhundred men. Now, with the supplies we've found, we can stay hereindefinitely. Should we do more exploring and claim some more of theseplaces, or should we come home right away and start recruiting, andthen come back with a large party, start work on the ship, and exploreand make further claims as we have time?" he asked. 

"Better come back as soon as possible. Just explore Port Carpenter, find out what's going to be needed to finish the ship and whatfacilities you have to produce it, and get things cleaned up a littleso that you can start work as soon as you have people to do it. I'morganizing another company--don't laugh, now; I've only startedpromotioneering--which I think we will call Trisystem & InterstellarSpacelines. Get me all the views you can of the ship herself and ofthe steel mills and that sort of thing that will produce material forfinishing her; I want to use them in promotion. By the way, has she aname?"

"Only a shipyard construction number. "

"Then suppose you call her _Ouroboros_, after Genji Gartner's oldship, the one that discovered the Trisystem. "

"_Ouroboros II_; that's fine. Will do. "

"Good. I'll have Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong make application for acharter right away. We'll have to make Alpha-Interplanetary one of thestockholding companies, and also Koschchei Exploitation & Development, and, of course, Litchfield Exploration & Salvage. .. . "

It was a pity there really wasn't a Merlin. If this kept on nothingelse would be able to figure out who owned how much stock in what. 

They found the on-the-job engineering office for the ship in a smalldome half a mile from the construction dock. Yves Jacquemont and MackVibart and Schalk Retief moved in and buried themselves to the ears inspecifications and blueprints. The others formed into parties of threeor four, and began looking about production facilities for material. There was a steel mill a mile from the construction site; it wasalmost fully robotic. Iron ore went in at one end, and finished sheetsteel and girders and deck plates came out at the other, and a dozenmen could handle the whole thing. There was a collapsium plant; therewere machine-shops and forging-shops. Every time they finishedinspecting one, Yves Jacquemont would have a list of half a dozen moreplants that he wanted found and examined yesterday morning at thelatest. 

Some of them were in a frightful mess; work had been suspended andeverybody had gone away leaving everything as it was. Some were inperfect order, ready to go into operation again as soon as power wasput on. It had depended, apparently, upon the personal character ofwhoever had been in charge in the end. The nuclear-electric power unitplant was in the latter class. The man in charge of it evidentlyhadn't believed in leaving messes behind, even if he didn't expect tocome back. 

It was built in the shape of a T. One side of the cross-strokecontained the cartridge-case plant, where presses formed sheet-steelcylinders, some as small as a round of pistol ammunition and some thesize of ten-gallon kegs. They moved toward the center on a productionline, finally reaching a matter-collapser where they were plated withcollapsium. From the other side, radioactive isotopes, mostlyreactor-waste, came in through evacuated and collapsium-shieldedchambers, were sorted, and finally, where the cross-arm of the Tjoined the downstroke, packed in the collapsium cases. The productionline continued at right angles down the long building in which theapparatus which converted nuclear energy to electric current wasassembled and packed; at the end, the finished power cartridges cameoff, big ones for heavy machines and tiny ones for things like handtools and pocket lighters and razors. There were stacks of them, inall sizes, loaded on skids and ready to move out. Except for theminute and unavoidable leakage of current, they were as good as theday they were assembled, and would be for another century. 

Like almost everything else, the power-cartridge plant was airtightand had its own oxygen-generator. The air-analyzer reported the oxygeninsufficient to support life. That was understandable; there were alot of furnaces which had evidently been hot when the power was cutoff; they had burned up the oxygen before cooling. They put on theiroxygen equipment when they got out of the car. 

"I'll go back and have a look at the power plant, " Matsui said. "Ifit's like the rest of this place, it'll be ready to go as soon as thereactors are started. I wish everybody here had left things likethis. "

"Well, we'll have to check everything to make sure nothing was left onwhen the main power was cut, " Conn said. "Don't do anything back theretill we give you the go-ahead. "

Matsui nodded and set off on foot along the broad aisle in the middle. Conn looked around in the dim light that filtered through the dustyglass overhead. On either side of the central aisle were twoproduction lines; between each pair, at intervals, stood massivemachines which evidently fabricated parts for the power cartridges. Over them, and over the machines directly involved in production, were receptor aerials, all oriented toward a stubby tower, twentyfeet thick and fifty in height, topped by a hemispherical dome. 

"That'll be the control tower for all the machinery in here, " hedecided. "Anse, suppose you and I go take a look at it. "

"We'll take a look at the machines, " Rivas said. "Clyde, you and I canwork back on the right and then come down on the other side. You knowanything about this stuff?"

"Me? Nifflheim, no, " Nichols said. "I know a robo-control when I seeone, and I know whether it's set to receive or not. "

There was a self-powered lift inside the control tower. Conn and Anserode it to the top and got out, Anse snapping on his flashlight. Itwas dark in the dome at the top; instead of windows there wereviewscreens all around it. Five men had worked here; at least, therewere four chairs at four intricate control panels, one for each of thefour production lines, and a fifth chair in front of a number ofcommunication screens. There was a heavy-duty power unit, turned off. Conn threw the switch. Lights came on inside, and the outsideviewscreens lit. 

They were examining the control-panels when Conn's belt radio buzzed. He plugged it in on his helmet. It was Mohammed Matsui. 

"There's one big power plant back here, " the engineer said. "Right inthe middle. It only powers what's in front of it. There must beanother one in either wing, for the isotope plant and thecartridge-case plant. I'll go look at them. But the power's been cutoff from the machines in the main building. There's four big switches, one for each production line--"

He was interrupted by a shout, almost a shriek, from somewhere. Itsounded like Jerry Rivas. A moment later, Rivas was clamoring:

"Conn! What did you turn on? Turn it off, right away!"

Anse jumped to the switch, pulling it with one hand and getting on hisflashlight with the other. The lights went out and the screens wentdark. 

"It's off. "

"The dickens it is!" Rivas disputed. "There are a couple of bigsupervisor-robots circling around, and a flock of workers. .. . "

At the same time, Clyde Nichols began cursing. Or maybe he waspraying; it was hard to be certain. 

"But we pulled the switch. It was only the lights and viewscreens inhere, anyhow. "

"It didn't do any good. Pull another one. "

Matsui, back at the power plant, was wanting to know what was wrong. Captain Nichols stopped cursing--or praying?--and said, "Mutiny, that's what! The robots have turned on us!"

He knew what had happened, or was almost sure he did. A radio impulsehad gone out, somehow, from the control tower. Something they hadn'tchecked, that had been left on. There was just enough current-leakagefrom the units in the robots to keep the receptors active for fortyyears. The supervisor-robots had gone active, and they had activatedthe rest. Once on, cutting the current from the control tower wouldn'tturn them off again. 

"Put the switch in again, Anse; the damage is done and you won't makeit any worse. "

When the screens came on, he looked around from one to another. Thetwo supervisors, big ovoid things like the small round ones they hadused in repairing the power reactors the first day, were circlingaimlessly near the roof, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, dodging obstructions and getting politely out of each other's way. Atlower altitude, a dozen assorted worker-robots were moving about, andmore were emerging from cells at the end of the building. Sweepers, with rotary brooms and rakes, crablike all-purpose handling robots, acouple of vacuum-cleaning robots, each with a flexible funnel-tippedproboscis and a bulging dust-sack. One tiling, a sort of special jobdesigned to get into otherwise inaccessible places, had a twenty-foot, many-jointed, claw-tipped arm in front. It passed by and slightly overthe tower, saw Clyde Nichols, and swooped toward him. With a howl, Nichols dived under one of the large machines between two productionlines. A pistol went off a couple of times. That would be Jerry Rivas. Nobody else bothered with a gun on Koshchei, but he carried one assome people carry umbrellas, whether he expected to need it or not andbecause he would feel lost without it. 

That he took in at one glance. Then he was looking at the controlpanels. The switches and buttons were all marked for machine-controlin different steps of power-unit production. That was all for the bigstuff, powered centrally. There weren't any controls tor lifters orconveyers or other mobile equipment. Evidently they were handled outin the shop, from mobile control-vehicles. He did find, on thecommunication-screen panel, a lot of things that had been left on. Hesnapped them off, one after another, snapping them on when a screenwent dark. There were fifteen or twenty robots, some rather large, inthe air or moving on the floor by now. 

"We can't do anything here, " he told Anse. "These are theshop-cleaning robots. They were the last things used here when theplace closed down, and the two supervisors were probably controlledfrom a vehicle, and it's anybody's guess where that is now. When youthrew that switch, it sent out an impulse that activated them. They'rerunning their instruction-tapes, and putting the others through alltheir tricks. "

Three more shots went off. Jerry Rivas was shouting: "Hey, whattayaknow! I killed one of the buggers!"

There were any number of ways in which a work-robot could be shot outof commission with a pistol. All of them would be by the purest ofpure luck. The next time we go into a place like this, Conn thought, we take a couple of bazookas along. 

"Turn everything off and let's go. See what we can do outside. "

Anse put on his flashlight and pulled the switch. They got into thelift and rode down, going outside. As soon as they emerged, they saw arectangular object fifteen feet long settle over their aircar, letdown half a dozen clawed arms, and pick it up, flying away with it. Ithad taped instructions to remove anything that didn't belong in theaisleway; it probably asked the supervisor about the aircar, and thesupervisor didn't return an inhibitory signal, so it went ahead. Connand Anse both shouted at it, knowing perfectly well that shouting wasfutile. Then they were running for their lives with one of thecrablike all-purpose jobs after them. They dived under the slightlyraised bed of a long belt-conveyer and crawled. Jerry Rivas firedanother shot, somewhere. 

The robots themselves were having troubles. They had done all the workthey were supposed to do; now the supervisors were insisting that theydo it over again. Uncomplainingly, they swept and raked andvacuum-cleaned where they had vacuum-cleaned and raked and swept fortyyears ago. The scrap-pickers, having picked all the scrap, were goingover the same places and finding nothing, and then getting deflectedand gathering a lot of things not definable as scrap, and thencircling around, darting away from one another in obedience to theirradar-operated evasion-systems, and trying to get to the outside scrappile, and finding that the doors wouldn't open because the dooropeners weren't turned on, and finally dumping what they were carryingwhen the supervisors gave them no instructions. 

One of them seemed to have dumped something close to where ClydeNichols was hiding; if his language had been a little stronger, itwould have burned out Conn's radio. Their own immediate vicinity beingfor the moment clear of flying robots, Conn and Anse rolled from underthe conveyer and legged it between the two production lines. Immediately, three of the crablike all-purpose handling-robots sawthem, if that was the word for it, and came dashing for them, followedby a thing that was mostly dump-lifter; it was banging its bin-lid upand down angrily. About fifty yards ahead, Jerry Rivas stepped frombehind a machine and fired; one of the handling-robots flashed greenfrom underneath, went off contragravity, and came down with a crash. Immediately, like wolves on a wounded companion, the other two pouncedupon it, dragging and pulling against each other. That was a hunk ofjunk; their orders were to remove it. 

The mobile trash-bin went zooming up to the ceiling, reversed withintwenty feet of it and came circling back to the ground, to go zoomingup again. It had gone crazy, literally. It had been getting too manycontradictory orders from its supervisor, and its circuits wereoverloaded and its relays jammed. Rats in mazes and human-type peoplein financial difficulties go psychotic in very much the same way. 

The two surviving all-purpose robots were also headed for a paddedrepair shop. They had come close enough to each other to activatetheir anticollision safeties. Immediately, they flew apart. Then theirorder to pick up that big piece of junk took over, and they startedforward again, to be bounced apart as soon as they were within fivefeet of one another. If left alone, their power units would run downin a year or so; until then, they would keep on trying. 

Soulless intelligences, indeed! Then it occurred to him that for thepast however-long-it-had-been he hadn't heard from Mohammed Matsui. Hejiggled his radio. 

"Ham, where are you? Are you still alive?"

"I'm back at the power plant, " Matsui said exasperatedly. "There's abig thing circling around here; every time I stick my head out, hemakes a dive at me. I didn't know robots would attack people. "

"They don't. He just thinks you're some more trash he's been told togather up. "

Matsui was indignant. Conn laughed. 

"On the level, Ham. He has photoelectric vision, and a picture of whatthat aisle is supposed to look like. When you get out in it, he knowsyou don't belong there and tries to grab you. "

"Hey, there's a lot of junk in here in a couple of baskets at theconverter. Say I chuck one out to him; what would he do?"

"Grab it and take it away, like he's taped to do. "

"Okay; wait a minute. "

They couldn't see the archway to the power plant, or even the robotthat had Matsui penned up, but after a few minutes they saw it soaringaway, clutching a big wire basket full of broken boxes and otherrubbish. It headed for the mutually repelling swarm of robots aroundthe door that wouldn't open for them. Conn and Anse and Jerry rantoward the rear, joined by Clyde Nichols, who popped up from behind apile of spools of electric wire. They made it just before thecoffin-shaped thing that had carried off the aircar came over toinvestigate. 

"You want to be careful back there, " Matsui told them, as they startedtoward the temporary safety of the power plant. "All thereactor-repair robots are there; don't get _them_ on the warpathnext. "

Of course! There were always repair-robots at a power plant, to gointo places no human could enter and live. Behind the collapsiumshielding, they wouldn't have been activated. 

"Let's have a look at them. What kind?"

"Standard reactor-servicers; the same we used at the administrationcenter. "

Matsui opened the door, and they went into the power plant. Conn andMatsui put on the service-power and activated the two supervisors;they, in turn, activated their workers. It was tricky work gettingthem all outside the collapsium-walled power-plant area; each workerhad to be passed through by the supervisor inside, under Matsui'scontrol. Because of the close quarters at which they worked inside thereactor and the converter, they weren't fitted with anticollisionrepulsors, and, working under close human supervision, they all hadaudiovisual pickups. It took some time to get adequate screens set upoutside the collapsium. 

Finally, they were ready. Their two supervisors went up to theceiling, one controlled by Conn and the other by Matsui. The larger, egg-shaped shop-labor supervisors were still moving in irregularorbits; those of the workers still able to receive commands weretrying to obey them, and the rest were jammed in a swarm at the otherend. 

First one, and then the other of the labor-boss robots were captured. They were by now at the end of what might, loosely, be called theirwits. They weren't used to operating without orders, and had beensending out commands largely at random. Now they came to a stop, andthen began moving in tight, guided circles; one by one, the workerrobots still able to heed them were brought to ground and turned off. That left the swarm at the door. The worker-robots under directcontrol of the power-plant supervisors went after them, grappling themand hauling them down to where Anse and Jerry Rivas and CaptainNichols could turn them off manually. 

The aircar was a hopeless wreck, but its radio was still functioning. Conn called Charley Gatworth, who called a gang under Gomez, workingnot far away; they came with another car. 

It took all the next day for a gang of six of them to get the placestraightened up. Neither Conn nor Gomez, who was a roboticist himself, would trust any of the workers or the two supervisors; theirexperiences out of control had rendered them unreliable. They took outtheir power units and left them to be torn down and repaired later. Other robots were brought in to replace them. When they were through, the power-unit cartridge plant was ready for operation. 

Jerry Rivas wanted to start production immediately. 

"We'll have to go back to Poictesme pretty soon, " he said. "We don'twant to go back empty. Well, I know that no matter what we dug up, andwhat we could sell or couldn't sell, there's always a market forpower-unit cartridges. Electric-light units, household-applianceunits, aircar and airboat units, any size at all. We run that plant atfull capacity for a few days and we can load the _Harriett Barne_full, and I'll bet the whole cargo will be sold in a week after we getin. "

XV

The _Harriet Barne_ settled comfortably at the dock, thebunting-swathed tugs lifting away from her. They had the outside soundpickups turned as low as possible, and still the noise was deafening. The spaceport was jammed, people on the ground and contragravityvehicles swarming above, with police cars vainly trying to keep themin 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 improvisedceremonial barge, actually a farm-scow completely draped in red andwhite, the Planetary colors. They all stopped, briefly, as they cameout, to enjoy the novelty of outdoor air which could actually bebreathed. Conn saw his father in the scow, and beside him SylvieJacquemont, trying, almost successfully, to keep from jumping up anddown in excitement. Morgan Gatworth to meet his son, and Lester Dawesto meet his. Kurt Fawzi, Dolf Kellton, Colonel Zareff, Tom Brangwyn. He didn't see his mother, or his sister. Flora he had hardly countedon, 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 shethrew 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 youwere doing. .. . "

The scow--pardon, ceremonial barge--gave a slight lurch, throwingthem together. Over her shoulder, he saw his father and YvesJacquemont exchanging grins. Then they had to break it up while heshook hands with Fawzi and Judge Ledue and the others, and by the timethat was over, the barge was letting down in front of the stand at theend of the dock, and the band was still deafening Heaven with "GenjiGartner's Body, " and they all started up the stairs to be greeted byPlanetary President Vyckhoven; he looked like an elderly bear who hasbeen too well fed for too long in a zoo. And by Minister-GeneralMurchison, who represented the Terran Federation on Poictesme. He wasthin and balding, and he looked as though he had just mistaken thevinegar cruet for the wine decanter. Genji Gartner's soul stoppedmarching on, but the speeches started, and that was worse. And afterthe speeches, there was the parade, everybody riding intransparent-bodied aircars, and the _Lester Dawes_ and the two shipsof the new Planetary Air Navy and a swarm of gunboats in column fivehundred feet above, all firing salutes. 

In spite of what wasn't, but might just as well have been, a concertedconspiracy to keep them apart, he managed to get a few words privatelywith Sylvie. 

"My mother; she didn't get here. Is anything wrong?"

"Is anything anything else? I've been in the middle of it ever sinceyou went away. Your mother's still moaning about all these companiesyour father's promoting--he never used to do anything like that, andit's all too big, and it's going to end in a big smash. And then shegets 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 happenwhen it's found, and that sets Flora off. Flora says Merlin's a bigfake, and you and your father are using it to rob thousands of widowsand orphans of their life savings, and that sets your mother offagain. Self-sustaining cyclic reaction, like the Bethe solar-phoenix. And every time I try to pour a little oil on the troubled waters, Ifind I've gotten it on the fire instead. And then, Flora had thisfight 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 whythe fight? Lucas is in business with your father now, and she can'tconvince him that you and your father are a pair of quadruple-dyedvillains, I suppose. Anyhow, the engagement is _phttt_! Conn, is myfather 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 togetheron Barathrum; remember?"

"Well, you'd be the only girl, and. .. . "

"That's what you think. If you expect to get any kind of a gangtogether, at least a third of them will be girls. A lot of techniciansare girls, and when work gets slack, they're always the first ones toget shoved out of jobs. I'll bet there are a thousand girl techniciansout of work here--any line of work you want to name. I know what I'lldo; 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 workinggirl's Joan of Arc by this time next week?"

That cheered him. A girl can punch any kind of a button a man can, anda lot of them knew what buttons to punch, and why. Say she could findfifty girls. .. . 

He had a slightly better chance to talk to his father before thebanquet at the Executive Palace that evening. They shared the samesuite at the Ritz-Gartner, and even welcoming committees seldom chasetheir 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 yourmother begged me, in tears, to quit everything we're doing here. Itried to give her some idea of what would happen if I dropped this, even supposing I could; she wouldn't listen to me. " He finishedputting the studs in his shirt. "You still think this is worth whatit's costing us?"

"You saw the views we sent back. There's work on Koshchei for amillion people, at least. Why, even these two makeshift ships they'reputting together here at Storisende are giving work, one way oranother, to almost a thousand. Think what things will be like a yearfrom now, if this keeps on. "

Rodney Maxwell gave a wry laugh. "Didn't know I had a real Simon-purealtruist 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 wouldhave fired half her human help and taken a sledgehammer to herrobo-chef for a meal like that. Even his father's camp cook would havebeen ashamed of it. And there were more speeches. 

President Vyckhoven managed to get hold of him and Yves Jacquemontafterward, and steered them into his private study. 

"Have you any real reason for thinking that Merlin might be onKoshchei?" the Planetary President asked. 

"Great Ghu, no! We weren't looking for Merlin, Mr. President. We werelooking for a hypership. We have one, too. Calling her _Ouroboros II_. Twenty-five-hundred-footer. We expect to have her to space in a fewmonths. I surely don't need to tell you what that will do towardrestoring planetary prosperity. "

"No, of course not; a hypership of our own. But. .. . " He looked fromone to the other of them. "But I understood. .. . That is, Mr. KurtFawzi was saying. .. . "

"Mr. Fawzi is looking for Merlin here on Poictesme. If anybody findsit, that's where it'll be found. I'm interested in getting businessstarted again. If Merlin is found, it would help, of course. " Heshrugged. 

"Don't look at me, " Jacquemont said. "Mr. Maxwell--both of them, father and son--want some spaceships. They hired me to help buildthem. That's all I have in it. " Then he relit the cigar the Presidenthad given him and leaned back in his chair, staring at the stuffedalcesoid head with the seven-foot hornspread above the fireplace. 

Conn described the interview to his father after they were back at thehotel. 

"I hope you convinced him. You know, he's afraid of Merlin. A lot ofpeople have been saying that if Merlin's found, it should be used todetermine Government policy. A few extremists are beginning to saythat Merlin ought to _be_ the Government, and Jake Vyckhoven and hiscronies ought to be dumped. Into the handiest mass-energy converter, preferably. You know, if anybody found Merlin and started it auditingthe Planetary Treasury, Jake Vyckhoven'd be the one who'd be wanting ahypership. "

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 upin Kurt's suite; we'd all like to talk to you. "

Somehow, he was acting as though he were making an arrest. That mighthave been nothing but professional habit. Conn went up to Fawzi'ssuite, and found Fawzi and Judge Ledue and Dolf Kellton and close to adozen others there. 

"I'm glad you could come, Conn, " the Judge greeted him. Now that thedefendant had arrived, the trial could begin. "I wish your fathercould have gotten here. I asked him to come, but he had a priorengagement. A meeting with some of the financial people here, aboutsome company he's interested in. "

"That's right; Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines. "

"Interstellar!" Kurt Fawzi almost howled. "Great Ghu! Now it isn'tenough to go out to Koshchei; he wants to go clear out of theTrisystem. That's what we wanted to talk about; all this nonsense youand your father are in. Merlin's right here on Poictesme. It's rightat Force Command, and if your father hadn't robbed us of all our bestmen, like Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, we'd have found it by now. Idon't think you and your father care a hoot if we ever find Merlin ornot!"

"Kurt, that's a dreadful thing to say, " Dolf Kellton objected in ashocked voice. 

"It's a dreadful thing to have to say, " Fawzi replied, "but you tellme 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 findMerlin?"

"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 ofjurisprudence that would give everybody absolute justice, " Judge Leduesaid. 

As if absolute justice wasn't the last thing anybody in his rightsenses would want; a robot-judge would have the whole planet in jailinside 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 aclergyman, from over Morven way. He says that Merlin could formulatean entirely new religion, which would regenerate humanity. "

"Well, I don't have any such lofty ideas, " Fawzi said. "I just wantMerlin to show us how to get some prosperity here; bring things backto what they were before Poictesme went broke. "

"And that's what Father and I are trying to do. You're going into thewoods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax. " Fawzi lookedat him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better ofit. "If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss ofmarkets. If we find Merlin, and tape it with everything that'shappened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tellus where to find new markets. But the markets won't come to us. We'llhave to do our own exporting, and we'll need ships. Now, you men havebeen studying about Merlin, and hunting for Merlin, all your lives. Ican't add anything to what you know, and neither can my father. Youfind 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'tfor Conn Maxwell, you know where we'd be? Back in Litchfield, sittingaround in Kurt's office, talking about how wonderful things'll be whenwe 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 himthat we have any hope of finding it at all. "

"Conn, I'm sorry, " Fawzi said. "I oughtn't to have said some of thethings I did. But we're all on edge; we've been having so muchtrouble. .. . 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 thecorners; we've used scanners, and put off echo shots. Nothing. Welooked for additional passages out of the headquarters; there aren'tany. But it has to be somewhere around. It just _has_ to be!"

"Maybe if I go out to Force Command with you, I might see somethingyou've overlooked. And if I can't, I'll try to scrape up some stuff onKoshchei for you. Deep-vein scanners, that sort of thing, from themines. "

They took the _Lester Dawes_ out at a little past noon and turnedsouth and east. Everybody aboard was happy--except Conn Maxwell. Hewas thinking of the years and years ahead of these trusting, hopefulold men, each year the grave of another expectation. Two hundred milesfrom Force Command, the _Goblin_ met them, her sides still spalled anddented from the hits she had taken in Barathrum Spaceport. When theycame in sight of it, the mesa-top was deserted. Fawzi began wonderingwhere in Nifflheim all the drilling rigs, and the seismo-trucks, were. Somebody with a pair of binoculars called attention to activity on theside of the high butte 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 thismorning, I think. "

"He joined us after you left, Conn, " Dolf Kellton said. "He's aclergyman from Morven. No regular denomination; he has a sect of hisown. "

"Yah, he would!" Klem Zareff rumbled. "Pious fraud!"

"He's really a good man, Conn; Klem's prejudiced. He says we ought touse Merlin to show us the true nature of God, and how to live inaccordance with the Divine Will. He says Merlin can teach us a newreligion. "

A new religion, based on Merlin; that would be good. And then thefanatics who thought Merlin was the Devil would start a holy war towipe out the servants of Satan, and with all the combat equipment thatwas lying around on this planet. .. . For the first time since thisbusiness started, he began to feel really frightened. 

An aircar came bulleting away from the butte and landed on the mesa asthe _Lester Dawes_ set down. The man who met them at the head of thevertical shaft wore Federation fatigues--baggy trousers, ankle bootsand long smock, dyed black. He was bareheaded, and his white hair wasalmost shoulder-long. He had a white beard. 

"Welcome, Brothers, " he greeted, a hand raised in benediction. "Andwho 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 gripthat was considerably stronger than his voice. 

"Bless you, young man! It is to you alone that we owe our thanks thatwe are about to find the Great Computer. Every sapient being in theGalaxy will honor your name for a thousand years. "

"Well, I hadn't counted on quite that much, Mr. Leibert. If it'll onlyhelp 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 higherspiritual values. The Great Computer must not be degraded to suchuses; we should let it show us how to lift ourselves to a highspiritual plane. .. . "

It went on like that, after they went down to Foxx Travis's--nowFawzi's--office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters insteadof the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thickcarpets on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi's officegang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had noidea what a computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build acomputer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn't need it, he_would_ be 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 surethat the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren't part of thepicture. That puzzled him. He doubted if he'd have remembered Leibertfrom six years ago, almost seven, now, though a lot of itinerantevangelists 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. Itis completely buried. After it was made, no human touched it. The menwho were here and used it in the War communicated with it only byradio. "

That could be so. There were fully robotic computers, intended for usein places where no human could go and live. There was a big one onNifflheim, armored against the fluorine atmosphere and thehydrofluoric-acid rains. But there was no point in that here, thethings were enormously complicated, and military engineering of anysort emphasized simplicity--_Aaaagh!_ Was he beginning to believe thisbalderdash himself?

Klem Zareff fell in with him as they were going to dinner. "Revealedin a dream!" the old Rebel snorted. "One thing you can always getaway 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 ishere; he's trying to keep us from it. That's why he shifted all thatequipment 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 hereat Force Command, somewhere. They don't want it found, and they'regoing to do everything they can to stop us. I oughtn't to have leftthis fellow Leibert here alone; well, I won't do that again. Get TomBrangwyn to help me. "

XVI

The voyage back to Koshchei had been a week-long nightmare. When shehad been the pride and budget-wrecker of Transcontinent & OverseasAirline, the _Harriet Barne_ had accommodated two hundred first-classand five hundred lower-deck passengers, but the conversion to aspaceship had drastically reduced her capacity. The three hundred menand women who had been recruited for the Koshchei colony had beencrammed into her with brutal disregard for comfort, privacy oranything else except the ability of the air-recyclers to keep thembreathing. When Captain Nichols set her down at the administrationbuilding at Port Carpenter, a few had had to be carried off, but theywere all alive, which made the trip an unqualified success. 

The dozen leaders of the expedition were congratulating themselves onthat in one of the executive offices after the first dinner at PortCarpenter. Rodney Maxwell, in Storisende, had joined them inscreen-image; he was mostly listening, and sometimes contributing aremark apropos of something the rest of them had said five minutesago. 

"Our hypership, " Conn was saying, "is going to have to be itemtwo on the agenda. The first thing we need is a ship for thePoictesme-Koshchei run. By this time next year, we ought to have athousand to fifteen hundred people here at the least. We can't haulthem 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 withadministrative work, added. "You have a big payroll to meet, andyou'll have to keep the stockholders happy. People like JethroSastraman and some of these Storisende bankers aren't going to besatisfied with promises and long-term prospects; they'll wantdividends. "

"We'll have to get claims staked on something besides Port Carpenter, too. Those ships that are building at Storisende will be finishedbefore long, " Jerry Rivas said. "If we don't get some more thingsclaimed, the first thing you know, we'll own Port Carpenter andnothing else. "

"Well, let's see what we can find in the way of a big airboat, or asmall ship, " Conn said. "Jerry, you can pick a party for exploring. Just zigzag around the planet and transmit in locations and views ofwhatever you find, and we'll send it on to Storisende. "

"And don't pick anybody for your exploring party that can't be sparedfrom anything here, " Jacquemont added. "We don't want to have to chaseyou halfway around the world to bring back the only specialist insomething 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 astrogationalequipment and robo-pilots. Studying hyperspace theory--fortunately, there was an excellent library here--and setting up classes, andteaching school. And keeping in touch with his father, on Poictesme. It was making him nervous not to know what sort of foolishness theolder and wiser heads might be getting into. 

The next morning, they began organizing work-gangs and setting upcommittees. Three men, two girls and about twenty robots got anopen-pit iron mine started; as soon as the steel mill was ready, orestarted coming in. Anse Dawes had a gang looking for something theycould build a 350-foot interplanetary ship out of; Jacquemont and MackVibart were getting plans and specifications and making lists ofneeded materials. Conn gathered a dozen men and women and startedclasses in computer theory and practice; at the same time, he andCharley Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatialastrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into someeverythingless noplace outside normal space-time, and then pulling herout again by her bootstraps at some other place in the normalcontinuum, light-years away. 

Roughly, it compared to shooting hummingbirds on the wing, blindfolded, with a not particularly accurate pistol, from amile-a-minute merry-go-round. 

That was something you could only do with a computer. A human, with aslide rule, a pencil and pad, could figure it out, of course--if hehad fifty-odd thousand years to do it. A good computer did it inthirty seconds. That was one difference between people and computers. The other difference was that the desirability of making a hyperspacejump would never occur to a computer, unless somebody pushed a buttonand taped in instructions. 

They found a three-hundred-foot globular skeleton, probably thenucleus of a big hyperspace ship, and decided that was big enough forwhat they wanted. The entire colony got to work on it. Photoprintedplans and specifications poured out as Jacquemont and a couple ofdraftsmen got them up. Steel came out of the steel mill at one endwhile ore came in at the other. A swarm of big contragravity machines, some robotic and some human-operated, clustered around the skeletalhull like hornets building a nest. 

Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines was chartered; the lawyersreported having to overcome a little more resistance than usual fromthe Government about that. And the bill to nationalize Merlin, whichhad died in committee, was resuscitated and was being debated hotly onthe floor of Parliament. The Administration was now supporting it. 

"Are they completely crazy?" Conn wanted to know, when he heard aboutthat. "They pass that bill and nobody's going to look for Merlin ifthey know the Government will snatch it as soon as they find it. "

"That is precisely Jake Vyckhoven's idea, " his father replied. "I toldyou he was afraid of Merlin. He's getting more afraid of it everyday. "

He had reason to. There was a growing sentiment in favor of turningthe entire Government over to the computer as soon as it was found. Tohis horror, Conn heard himself named as chairman of a committee thatshould be set up to operate it. The moderates, who had merely wantedMerlin used in an advisory capacity, were dropping out; the agitationwas coming from extremists who wanted Merlin to be the wholeGovernment, and now the extremists were developing an extreme wing oftheir own, who called themselves Cybernarchists and started wearingcolored-shirt uniforms and greeting each other with an archaicstiff-arm salute, and the words, "Hail Merlin!"

And the followers of the gospel-shouter on the west coast were nowcropping up all over the mainland, and on the continent of Acaire tothe north, and another cult, non-religious, was convinced that Merlinwas a living machine, with conscious intelligence of its own andawesome psi-powers, a sort of super-Golem, which, if found andawakened, would enslave the whole Galaxy. Fortunately, these two hatedeach other as venomously as both did the Cybernarchists, and spentmost of their energies attacking each other's meetings. Thenews-services were beginning to publish casualty lists, some heavyenough for outpost fighting between a couple of regular armies. 

One thing, it helped the employment situation. Everybody was hiringmercenaries. 

"But what, " Conn asked, "are the sane people doing?"

"You ought to know, " his father told him. "I suspect that you have allof them on Koshchei now. "

The sane people, if that was what they were, were being busy. Theywere putting a set of Abbott lift-and-drive engines together, andConn's computer class was estimating the mass of the finished ship andthe amount of energy needed to overcome gravitation and give itconstant acceleration from Koshchei to Poictesme. They were learning, by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudogravengines. And they were putting together a hundred and one otherthings, all of which was good training for the time they'd be ready tostart work on _Ouroboros II_. 

Jerry Rivas had found a contragravity craft which seemed to have beenused by some top official for business and inspection trips, hadgathered a crew of non-specialists who weren't urgently needed at PortCarpenter, and set out to circumnavigate the planet. It worked justthe reverse of expectation. He found a big uranium mine, with anisotope-separation plant and a battery of plutonium-breeders; thatmeant that Mohammed Matsui and half a dozen other nuclear-power peoplehad to get into another boat and speed after him to see what he hadreally found. As soon as they landed, Rivas took off again to discovera copper mine and a complex of smelters and processing plants. Thattook a few more experts, or reasonable facsimiles, away from PortCarpenter. And then he found a whole city that manufactured nothingbut computers and robo-controls and things like that. 

Conn loaded his whole computer-theory class onto a freight-scow andtook them there. By the time he landed, his father was screening himfrom Storisende. 

"When are you going to get the ship finished?" he was asking. "KurtFawzi's pestering the daylights out of me. He wants that equipment youpromised him. "

"We're working on it. What's happened, has Carl Leibert had anotherrevelation?"

"I don't know about that. Kurt's sure Merlin is directly under ForceCommand. And speaking about Leibert, Klem Zareff's been after me abouthim. You know I've contracted for the full-time and exclusive servicesof this Barton-Massarra detective agency. Well, Klem wants me to putthem to work investigating Leibert. "

"Yes, I know; Leibert's a Terran Federation spy. Why do you need thefull-time services of the biggest private detective agency onPoictesme?"

"There have been some odd things happening. People have been trying tobribe and intimidate some of my office help. I have found microphonesand screen-pickups planted around. I caught one of our clerks tryingto make copies of voice-tapes. I think it's some of these otherMerlin-chasing companies, trying to find out how close we are to it. Klem Zareff is recruiting more guards. But how soon are you going toget 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. Ifhe'd accepted that instructorship at Montevideo, he wouldn't be a fullprofessor now, but none of the rest of this would be happening, either. 

That night, he had the dream about starting the big machine and notbeing able to stop it again. 

There was street-fighting in Storisende between the Cybernarchists andGovernment troops. There was a pitched battle in the west between theArmageddonists (Merlin-is-Satan) and the Human Supremacy League(Merlin-is-the-Golem), with heavy losses and claims of victory on bothsides. President Vyckhoven proclaimed planet-wide martial law, andthen discovered that he had nothing to enforce it with. 

Luther Chen-Wong screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice wasalmost inaudibly low at first. 

"Conn, I just had a call from Jerry and Clyde. I think we can knockoff 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 oneanybody had found. "Where?"

"They haven't found _a_ ship, Conn; they've found all of them. All theships in the Alpha System except the _Harriet Barne_ and the twothey're building at Storisende. The place is marked on the map asSickle Mountain Naval Observatory. It's just a bitty little dot, butthe map was made before the evacuation started. It's where most of thetroops in the system were embarked on hyperships, I think. Wait till Ishow you the views. "

Conn put on another screen; the first view was from an altitude offive 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 musthave suggested itself to whoever saw it first. The observatory hadbeen built where the handle of the sickle joined the blade; as theship from which the view had been taken had approached, the detailsgrew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plaininside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, liketinsel 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 themountain, circling slowly above the plain. Hundreds, no, over athousand, of them; two- and three-and five-hundred-footers, and hereand there a thousand-footer that could have been converted into ahypership if anybody had wanted to take the trouble. The view changedagain; this time from an aircar dropped from the ship, he supposed; itwas down almost to the tops of the ships, and he could read names andhome ports: _Pixie_, Chloris; _Helen O'Loy_, Anaitis. They were fromJurgen. _Sky-Rover_, Port Saunders; she was from Horvendile. Shipsfrom Storisende, and Yellowmarsh on Janicot, and. .. . 

"Now we know where they all went. "

It was logical, of course. Most of the hyperships used in theevacuation had been built here. It had been less trouble to lead thetroops and the civilian workers from Poictesme and the other planetsonto small normal-space ships and bring them here than to take the bigships 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 arebuilding those ships at Storisende, I'm afraid. "

"Their tough luck. "

"It could be everybody's tough luck. Both those companies have beenissuing stock, and there's been a lot of speculation in it. Thismarket's so inflated now that a puncture at one place might blow thewhole 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 getyour bags packed. We're going to work for real, now. "

Airboats and airships flocked to Sickle Mountain; some of themhastened back to Port Carpenter for loads of food, for there was nonein the storehouses at the embarkation camp. They inspected ship aftership, and chose two three-hundred-footers. They sent airships andfreight-scows to the dozen-odd cities and industrial centers that hadbeen already explored, to gather cargo, as far as possible the itemsin shortest supply on Poictesme. 

"Don't worry about a market smash, " his father told him. "We have thattaken care of. Trisystem Investments has just bought up a lot of stockin both of those companies, and we've set up agreements withthem--informally, of course; we'll have to get them voted on by ourown companies--to sell them ships from Koshchei. In return, thecompany that's building the ship out of four air-freighters will go toJanicot, and the company that's building a ship out of the oldLeitzenring Building will go to Jurgen, and they'll both stay offKoshchei. Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong will probably be defendingantitrust suits till the end of time. The Planetary Government hasstopped liking us, you know. "

"Then we'll have to get one that will like us. There'll be an electionabout this time next year, won't there?"

His father nodded. "To use one of your expressions, we're working onit. How soon can you get your ships in?"

"Well be loaded and ready to lift off in a week. Another week for thetrip. "

"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 SpaceMarines on duty here, and they left everything they couldn't carry intheir hands. Why? The Armageddonists and the Cybernarchists and HumanSupremacy bought all you had on hand?"

"They're buying, but I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking thatyour crews might need something to argue their way off the ships atStorisende with. Things are getting just slightly rugged here, now. "

XVII

There were no bands or speeches when they came in this time. A lot ofcontragravity vehicles circled widely around the spaceport, but exceptfor a few news-service cars, the police were keeping them back of atwo-mile radius around the landing-pits. A couple of gunboats weremaking tight circles above, and on the dock were more vehicles and ahorde of police and guards. 

When Rodney Maxwell came across the bridge from the dock after theyopened the airlocks, he was followed by a dozen Barton-Massarraprivate police, as villainous-looking a collection of ruffians as Connhad ever seen. He was wearing a new suit, with a waist-length jacketinstead of the long coat he usually wore, and there was a holsteredautomatic on each hip. In Litchfield, he never carried more than onepistol, and Storisende was supposed to be an orderly place wherenobody needed to go armed. More than anything else, that told Connapproximately what had been going on while he had been on Koshchei. 

"Ship-guard, " his father told Yves Jacquemont. "All your crew can comeoff; they'll take care of things. Get your people in that troopcarrier over there. Everybody will stay at Interplanetary Building. None of the hotels are safe, not even the Ritz-Gartner. And be sureeverybody's well armed when they come off the ship. "

Jacquemont nodded. "I know the drill; I've been in Port Oberth onVenus 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 heasked his father as they crossed onto the dock, there was a brieftwinge 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 onthe dock. The private police were scattering for cover, and anauto-cannon began pom-pomming. Conn took one quick look in thedirection in which it was firing, saw an aircar that had brokenthrough the police line and was rushing toward them, and dived underthe lifter after his father. As he did, he saw a missile flash outfrom one of the gunboats like a thrown knife. Then he huddled besidehis 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 hehad counted fifteen seconds, he stuck his head out and looked up. Thegunboat was struggling to regain her equilibrium, and the aircar hadvanished in a fireball. They both emerged, straightening. His fatherwas brushing himself with his hands and saying something about alwayshaving to duck under something when he had a new suit on. 

"Robot control, probably; could have been launched from anywhere intown. Why, no; your mother and Flora aren't speaking to either of us, any more. Pity, of course, but I'm glad they're in Litchfield. It's alittle healthier there. "

They walked to the slim recon-car and climbed in, pulling the doorshut after them. Wade Lucas was waiting for them at the controls. 

"There, you see!" he began, as soon as he had the car lifting. "WhatI've been telling you. We'll have to stop this. "

"Conn, meet our new partner. I told him everything you told me, out onthe Mall, the day you came home. I had to, " his father hastened toadd. "He'd figured most of it out for himself. The only thing to dowas admit him to the lodge and give him the oath. "

"I didn't know about General Travis; I didn't even know he was stillalive, " Lucas said. "But the rest of it was pretty obvious, once Istopped jumping to conclusions and did a little thinking. You know, ever since I came here I've been preaching to these people to stoplooking for Merlin and do something to help themselves. You're smarterthan 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 acrook as you two. " He had the car up to fifty thousand; putting itinto a wide circle around the city, he locked the controls and got outhis cigarettes. "Rod, we've got to stop this. You were just lucky thistime. Some of these days your luck's going to run out. "

"How can we stop?" Conn demanded. "Tell them the truth? They'd lynchus, and then go on hunting for Merlin. "

"Worse than that; it'd be a smash worse than the one when the Warended. I was only ten then, but I can remember that very plainly. Wecan'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 beentoo busy to keep in touch. I know there's been rioting, and thesecrackpot sects, but. .. . "

"I think this is personal to us. There have been some ugly thingshappening. There were four attempts to burglarize our offices. I toldyou about some of the other stuff, the microphones we found, and soon. The worst thing was Lucy Nocero, my secretary. She just vanished, a couple of weeks ago. Three days later, the police found herwandering in a park, a complete imbecile. Somebody who either didn'tknow how to use one or didn't care what happened had used a mind-probeon her. It's twenty to one she'll never recover. "

"It's this Storisende financial crowd, " Wade Lucas said. "They hadthings all their own way till Alpha-Interplanetary was organized. Nowthey'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 SamMurchison. "

"Murchison!" Lucas hooted. "Why, he's nobody! FederationMinister-General; all the authority of the Terran Federation, andnothing to enforce it with. He doesn't have a position, here; he has adisease. 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'sopposite number. He thinks this whole thing's a plot against theFederation. It's a good thing Klem didn't get around to repainting hiscombat vehicles black and green, the way he did the Home Guard stuffat Litchfield. "

"I'd be more likely to think it was Vyckhoven. "

"Could be. Or it could be the Armageddonists, or Human Supremacy; I amashamed to say that this heil-Merlin Cybernarchist gang are friendlyto us. Or it could be some of the banking crowd, or some of theserival space-companies. Barton-Massarra is trying to find out. Well, wehave some of Wade's pet suspects at Interplanetary Building now. There's been a meeting going for the last week to partition the AlphaGartner System. "

The Interplanetary Building had been a medium-class residence hotel atthe time of the War. Junior staff officers and civilian techniciansand their families had lived there. It had been vacant ever since thedisastrous outbreak of peace. Now it had a big new fluorolite sign, and housed the offices of all the Maxwell companies. There was atruculent display of anti-vehicle weapons on the top landing stage, and more Barton-Massarra private police. They looked even morevillainous then the ones at the spaceport. Conn recalled having heardthat most of the Blackie Perales gang had been discharged for lack ofevidence; he wondered how many of them had hired with Barton-Massarra. 

The meeting was in a big conference room six floors down; it had beengoing on uninterrupted for days, with all the interested companies'representatives standing watch-and-watch around the clock. LesterDawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes were there for L. E. &S. ; Transcontinent & Overseas was represented; there were people fromAlpha-Interplanetary, and bankers and financiers, and people from thecompanies building the two ships at the spaceport. And J. FitzwilliamSterber, the lawyer. 

And reporters, phoning stories in and getting audiovisual interviewsof anybody who would hold still long enough. They converged in a rushas Conn and his father and Lucas came in. 

"No statement, gentlemen!" Rodney Maxwell shouted, above the babble oftheir questions. "When we have anything to release, it will bereleased to all of you. "

Jacquemont and Nichols had already arrived; Lucas went to them andbegan talking about stevedores and lifters to get off the cargoes fromthe ships. Conn hastened to join them. 

"The scanning and mining equipment aboard the _Helen O'Loy_, " he said. "That shouldn't be unloaded here; we'll take the ship out to ForceCommand and unload it there. "

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw, a lurking reporter snatch thehandphone off his radio and begin talking; it would be statedauthoritatively that Merlin was at Force Command and would beuncovered as soon as special equipment from Koshchei arrived. 

Everybody at the long table was shouting at everybody else. The Jurgenand Janicot Companies wanted to buy ships from Koshchei Exploitation &Development. The Alpha-Interplanetary director, who was also avice-president of Transcontinent & Overseas, opposed that; anotherdirector of A-I, who was also board chairman of Koshchei Exploitation& Development, wanted to sell ships to anybody who had the price, theTranscontinent & Overseas man was calling him a traitor to thecompany, and one of the stockbrokers, who was also a vice-president ofTrisystem Investments and a director of Trisystem & InterstellarSpacelines, was wanting to know which company. And a banker who wasstockholder in all the companies was shouting that they were all agang of crooks, and J. Fitzwilliam Sterber was declaring that anybodywho called him a crook could continue the discussion through seconds. 

Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal onPoictesme. He wondered how many duels this meeting was going to hatch. 

The next afternoon the _Helen O'Loy_ was unloaded, all but the miningequipment; Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley Gatworth and a fewothers took her out to Force Command. They were met by Klem Zareff'sarmed airboats two hundred and fifty miles from the mesa, and theyfound the place in more of a state of siege than when the Badlands hadbeen full of outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have beenmoved in from Barathrum Spaceport, and Zareff had more men andfirepower than he had ever commanded during the System States War. IfMinister-General Murchison was convinced that the Merlin excitementwas a cover for some seditious plot against the Federation, this oughtto 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, whowas still insisting that that was where Merlin was buried. There wasalso some work on top of the mesa, by those who were convinced thatthat was where Merlin was to be found. Kurt Fawzi was taking the leadin that. Franz Veltrin and Dolf Kellton sided with Leibert, andFawzi's office clique had split into two factions. Judge Ledue wasmaintaining strict impartiality, as befitted his judicial position. 

"Why hasn't your father gotten those detectives of his to work on thisfake preacher?" Zareff wanted to know, when he and Tom Brangwyn wereable to talk to Conn alone. 

"Well, they've been busy, " Conn said. "Trying to keep him alive, forone thing. You heard about the robo-bomb somebody launched at us theday we brought the ships in, didn't you?"

"Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl, too, " Brangwyn said. "Buthasn't it ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that callshimself 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'tknow it; I sent them to some different law-enforcement people over inMorven, where he says he comes from. They never saw him before, andcouldn'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 bythemselves to preach; they get up in pulpits, in front of a lot ofpeople. Those towns over in Morven are small enough for everybody tohave known something about him. He's a fake, I tell you. "

"Let me have copies of those audiovisuals, Tom. I'll see what can befound out about him. I'm beginning to wonder about him myself. I'msure I've seen him, somewhere. .. . "

When he got back to Storisende, he found that the marathon conferenceon the sixth floor down at the Interplanetary Building had finallycome to an end. Everybody seemed satisfied, and apparently nobody wasgoing to have pistols and coffee with anybody else about it. 

"We have things fixed up, " his father told him. "The gang who arebuilding the ship out of four air-freighters are chartered as JanicotIndustries, Ltd. ; they're going to specialize in chemical products. The other company has a charter now, too. They're going to operate onJurgen and Horvendile. We'll sell them ships, and Alpha-Interplanetarywill put on scheduled trips to all three planets and also Koshchei. We're getting along very nicely with them, except that everybody'scompeting for technicians and skilled labor. We have two hundred morepeople signed up for Koshchei. What you want to do is train as many ofthem as you can for ship-operation. Alpha-Interplanetary is going tostart a training program here at Storisende; you'd better leave one ofyour ships for them to work on, and send back as many ships as you canfind officers and crews for. "

"We're getting things really started. "

"Yes. The only trouble is. .. . " His father frowned. "I don't understandthese people, Conn. Everybody ought to be making millions out of thisby this time next year, but all any of them, even these Storisendebankers, can talk about is how soon we're going to find Merlin. "

"I wish we could stop that, somehow. Listen; I have it. Merlin neverwas on Poictesme; Merlin was a space-station a few thousand milesoff-planet; there was a crew of operators aboard, and theycommunicated with Force Command by radio. When the War ended, theytook it outside the system and shot off a planetbuster inside her. Nomore Merlin. How would that be?"

His father shook his head. "Wouldn't do. If anybody believed it, whichI doubt, they'd just quit. The market would collapse, everybody wouldbe broke, it would just be the end of the War all over again. Conn, wecan't let it stop now. We're going too fast to stop; if we tried it, we'd smash up and break our necks. "

XVIII

Jerry Rivas, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping thingsrunning on Koshchei. Work on the interplanetary ship at PortCarpenter, had stopped when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found;it had never been resumed. When Conn returned, he found work startedon the _Ouroboros II_. Some of the two hundred newcomers who came inon the _Helen O'Loy_ had special skills needed on the hypership; mostof them went with Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to SickleMountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. Some of them, it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. Sylvie, who hadbeen one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping himwith the long lists of needed materials, some of which had to bebrought from other places as much as a thousand miles away. JerryRivas went back to exploring; Nichols had to drop his space-trainingwork temporarily to organize a fleet of air-freighters; usually, themen best able to operate them were urgently needed on some job at theconstruction dock. 

Ships lifted out almost daily from Sickle Mountain. They tried to getsome kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselvesof what they needed for themselves. Some of the ships came back loadedwith provisions and bringing new recruits--for instance, the teachingof physics and mathematics almost stopped at Storisende Collegebecause the professors had been virtually shanghaied. 

Conn found himself losing touch with affairs on Poictesme. Ships hadlanded on both Janicot and Horvendile and were sending back claims toabandoned factories. By that time they had all the decks into the_Ouroboros II_, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogationaland hyperspace instruments put in place. The hypership _Andromeda_ wasback from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what theexpedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures aboutMerlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral. Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, andcombat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as itcame 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 fatherasked. "Things have turned serious. I don't like to talk about it byscreen--too many people know our scrambler combinations. But I wishyou 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 beaboard. "

The voyage back to Poictesme was a needed rest. He felt refreshed whenhe got off at Storisende Spaceport and was met by his father and WadeLucas in one of the slim recon-cars. They greeted him briefly and tookthe 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 therereally is a Merlin, after all. "

"Oh, come off it! I know it's contagious, but I thought you'd beenvaccinated. "

"I'm beginning to think so, too, " Lucas said. "I don't like it atall. "

"You know what that gang who took the _Andromeda_ to Panurge found?"

"They were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements forMerlin, weren't they?"

"Yes. They found it. My Barton-Massarra operatives got to some of thecrew. This place had been turning out material for a computer ofabsolutely unconventional design; the two computermen they had withthem couldn't make head or tail of half of it. And every blueprint, every diagram, every scrap of writing or recording, had beendestroyed. But they found one thing, a big empty fiber folder that hadfallen under something and been overlooked. It was marked: TOPSECRET. 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 somereferences to Project Merlin, too. For instance, there was a routinedivision court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a verytrivial charge. Force Command ordered the court-martial stopped, andthe two officers simply dropped out of the Third Force records, it wasstated 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 mesaalmost to the top of the underground headquarters. They foundsomething on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped mass, fifty feetthick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium. It's directly overwhat used to be Foxx Travis's office. "

"That's not a tenth big enough for anything that could even resembleMerlin. "

"Well, it's something. I was out there day before yesterday. They'redown to the collapsium on top of this thing; I rode down the shaft ina jeep and looked at it. Look, Conn, we don't know what this ProjectMerlin was; all this lore about Merlin that's grown up since the Waris pure supposition. "

"But Foxx Travis told me, categorically, that there was no MerlinProject, " Conn said. "The War's been over forty years; it's not amilitary secret any longer. Why would he lie to me?"

"Why did you lie to Kurt Fawzi and the others and tell them there wasa Merlin? You lied because telling the truth would hurt them. MaybeTravis had the same reason for lying to you. Maybe Merlin's toodangerous for anybody to be allowed to find. "

"Great Ghu, are you beginning to think Merlin is the Devil, orFrankenstein's Monster?"

"It might be something just as bad. Maybe worse. I don't think a manlike Foxx Travis would lie if he didn't have some overriding moralobligation to. "

"And we know who's been making most of the trouble for us, too, " Lucasadded. 

"Yes, " Rodney Maxwell said, "we do. And sometime I'm going to inviteKlem Zareff to kick my pants-seat. Sam Murchison, the TerranFederation Minister-General. "

"How'd you get that?"

"Barton-Massarra got some of it; they have an operative planted inMurchison's office. And some of our banking friends got the rest. ThisHuman Supremacy League is being financed by somebody. Every so often, their treasurer makes a big deposit at one of the banks here, allFederation currency, big denomination notes. When I asked them to, they started keeping a record of the serial numbers and checkingwithdrawals. The money was paid out, at the First Planetary Bank, toMr. Samuel S. Murchison, in person. The Armegeddonists are gettingmoney, too, but they're too foxy to put theirs through the banks. Ibelieve they're the ones who mind-probed Lucy Nocero. Barton-Massarrabelieve, but they can't prove, that Human Supremacy launched thatrobo-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 youwant me to do?"

"Go out to Force Command and take charge. We have to assume that theremay be a Merlin, we have to assume that it may be dangerous, and wehave to assume that Kurt Fawzi and his covey of Merlinolators are justbefore digging it up. Your job is to see that whatever it is doesn'tget loose. "

The trouble was, if he started giving orders around Force Command he'dstop being a brilliant young man and become a half-baked kid, and oneword from him and the older and wiser heads would do just what theypleased. He wondered if the pro-Leibert and anti-Leibert factions werestill squabbling; maybe if he went out of his way to antagonize oneside, he'd make allies of the other. He took the precaution ofscreening in, first; Kurt Fawzi, with whom he talked, was almostincoherent with excitement. At least, he was reasonably sure that noneof Klem Zareff's trigger-happy mercenaries would shoot him down comingin. 

The well, fifty feet in diameter, went straight down from the top ofthe mesa; as the headquarters had been buried under loose rubble, they'd had to vitrify the sides going down. He let down into the holein a jeep, and stood on the collapsium roof of whatever it was theyhad found. It wasn't the top of the headquarters itself; the microrayscannings showed that. It was a drum-shaped superstructure, a sort ofunderground penthouse. And there they were stopped. You didn't cutcollapsium with a cold chisel, or even an atomic torch. He began tosee how he was going to be able to take charge here. 

"You haven't found any passage leading into it?" he asked, when theywere 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 findanything 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'tpenetrate; it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like agrinding-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. Withthem, you produce negamatter--atoms with negatively charged protonsand positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them intocontact with normal positive-matte--That's done in a chamber the sizeof a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about ahundred tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impartrotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door thatwould lift ten ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_. Then you needanother fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield yourcutting-head. The cutting-head alone weighs three tons. The rotarybeam that does the cutting, " he mentioned as an afterthought, "isabout the size of a silver five-centisol piece. "

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated thatDivine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert'sstock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in thebutte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of ForceCommand. 

"Means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down towhere that thing is, " Zareff said. "That'll take a year. "

"Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started, " Conn toldthem. "It'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauledhere than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened. "

He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines onKoshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was goingto take charge here. He had just been unanimously electedIndispensable Man. 

"Bless you, young man!" Carl Leibert cried. "At last, the GreatComputer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of theAge of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks inprayer. "

"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. Alwayskeeps 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 toldJacquemont what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was apity screens couldn't be fitted with olfactory sensors, so that hecould smell Conn's breath. 

"I am not drunk. I am not crazy. And I am not exercising my sense ofhumor. I don't know what Fawzi and his gang have here, but if it isn'tMerlin it's something just as hot. We want at it, soonest, and we'llhave to dig a couple of hundred feet of rock off it and open acollapsium 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 itlast? Can you find engines for it? And is there anything about thosemining machines or the cutter that would be damaged by space-radiationor re-entry heat?"

Yves Jacquemont was silent for a good deal longer than theinterplanetary time-lag warranted. Finally he nodded. 

"I get it, Conn. We won't put the things in a ship; we'll build a shiparound them. No; that stuff can all be hauled open to space. They usethings like that at space stations and on asteroids and all sorts ofplaces. We'll have to stop work on _Ouroboros_, though. "

"Let _Ouroboros_ wait. We are going to dig up Merlin, and theneverybody is going to be rich and happy, and live happily foreverafter. "

Jacquemont looked at him, silent again for longer than the usual fiveand a half minutes. 

"You almost said that with a straight face. " After all, Jacquemonthadn't been cleared yet for the Awful Truth About Merlin, but, likehis daughter, he'd been doing some guessing. "I wish I knew how muchof 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 thearrival of the equipment at three weeks. A week later, he wason-screen to report that the skeleton ship--they had christened her_The Thing_, and when Conn saw screen views of her he understoodwhy--was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big miningmachines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshchei had done a strokeof work on anything else. 

"Sylvie's coming along with her; so are Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes andHam Matsui and Gomez and Karanja and four or five others. They'll beready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads, " Jacquemontadded. 

That was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any ofthe 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 mayneed them here. "

Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened thatcollapsium can on top of Force Command, and how the people therereacted to it. 

_The Thing_ took a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip;conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabinwere apparently worse than on the _Harriet Barne_ on her second tripto Koschchei. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. CarlLeibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had topray the ship across space. 

At the same time, reports of the near completion of _Ouroboros II_were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention fromwhat was happening at Force Command. Cargo was being collected forher; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people wouldbe drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses ofeverything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up anddown the Gordon Valley. Melon and tobacco planters were talking aboutbreaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for thenext year. Agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing highprices. So were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery. It began tolook 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, torecruit scientific and technical graduates from his alma mater, theUniversity of Paris-on-Baldur, and from the other schools there. Connwas enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers onKoshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and atextbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed todo while they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long onthe leavings of wartime production; too few people had botheredlearning how to produce anything. 

_The Thing_ finally settled onto the mesa-top. It looked likesomething from an old picture of the construction work on one of theTerran space-stations in the First Century. Immediately, every pieceof contragravity equipment in the place converged on her; men dangledon safety lines hundreds of feet above the ground, cutting away beamsand braces with torches. The two giant mining machines, one after theother, floated free on their own contragravity and settled into place. _The Thing_ lifted, still carrying the collapsium-cutting equipment, and came to rest on the brush-grown flat beyond, out of the way. 

If Yves Jacquemont had overestimated the time required to get theequipment loaded and lifted off from Koshchei, Conn had beenoveroptimistic about the speed with which the top of the mesa could bestripped off. Digging away the rubble with which the pit had beenfilled, and even the solid rock around it, was easier than getting thestuff out of the way. Farm-scows came in from all over, as fast asthey and pilots for them could be found; the rush to get brandy andtobacco to Storisende had caused an acute shortage of vehicles. 

One by one, the members of the old Fawzi's Office gang came driftingin--Lorenzo Menardes, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes. None of them hadany skills to contribute, but they brought plenty of enthusiasm. Rodney Maxwell came whizzing out from Storisende now and then to watchthe progress of the work. Of all the crowd, he and Conn watched thetwo steel giants strip away the tableland with apprehension instead ofhope. No, there was a third. Carl Leibert had stopped secludinghimself in his quarters; he still talked rapturously about themiracles Merlin would work, but now and then Conn saw him when hethought he was unobserved. His face was the face of a condemned man. 

The _Ouroboros II_ was finished. The whole planet saw, byscreen, the ship lift out; watched from the ship the dwindling awayof Koshchei and saw Poictesme grow ahead of her. Twelve hours beforeshe landed, work at Force Command stopped. Everybody was going toStorisende--Sylvie, whose father would command her on her voyage toBaldur, Morgan Gatworth, whose son would be first officer andastrogator, everybody. Except Carl Leibert. 

"Then I'm not going either, " Klem Zareff decided. "Somebody's got tostay here and keep an eye on that snake. "

"No, nor me, " Tom Brangwyn said. "And if he starts praying again, I'mgoing to go and pray along with him. "

Conn stayed, too, and so did Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes. They watchedthe newscast of the lift-out, a week later. It was peaceful andharmonious; everybody, regardless of their attitudes on Merlin, seemedagreed that this was the beginning of a new prosperity for the planet. There were speeches. The bands played "Genji Gartner's Body, " and the"Spaceman's Hymn. "

And, at the last, when the officers and crew were going aboard, Connsaw his sister Flora clinging to Wade Lucas's arm. She was one of thesmall party who went aboard for a final farewell. When she came off, along with Sylvie, she was wiping her eyes, and Sylvie was comfortingher. Seeing that made Conn feel better even than watching the shipitself lift away from Storisende. 

XIX

When Sylvie returned from Storisende, she had Flora with her. Conn'ssister greeted him embarrassedly; Sylvie led both of them out of thecrowd and over to the edge of the excavation. 

"Go ahead, Flora, " she urged. "Make up with Conn. It won't be anyharder than making up with Wade was. "

"How did that happen, by the way?" Conn asked. 

"Your girlfriend, " Flora said. "She came to the house and practicallyforced me into a car and flew me into Storisende, and then made mekeep quiet and listen while Wade told me the truth. "

"I wasn't completely sure what the truth was myself till Wade openedup, " Sylvie admitted. "I had a pretty good idea, though. "

"I always hated that Merlin thing, " Flora burst out. "All those oldmen in Fawzi's office, dreaming about the wonderful things Merlin wasgoing to do, with everything crumbling around them and everybodygetting poorer every year, and doing nothing, nothing! And when youwere coming home, I was expecting you to tell them there was no Merlinand to go to work and do something for themselves. But you didn't, andI couldn't see what you were trying to do. And then when Wade joinedyou and Father, I thought he was either helping you put over some kindof a swindle or else he'd started believing in Merlin himself. Ishould have seen what you were trying to do from the beginning. Atleast, from when you talked them into cleaning the town up and fixingthe escalators and getting the fountains going again. "

So the fountains weren't dusty any more. 

"How's Mother taking things now?"

Flora looked distressed. "She goes around wringing her hands. Honestly. I never saw anybody doing that outside a soap opera. Halfthe time she thinks you and Father are a pair of unprincipledscoundrels, and the other half she thinks you're going to let Merlindestroy the world. "

"I'm beginning to be afraid of something like that myself. "

"Huh? But Merlin's just a big fake, isn't it? You're using it to makethese people do something they wouldn't do for themselves, aren'tyou?"

"It started that way. What do you think all this is about?" he asked, gesturing toward the excavation and the two giant mining machinesdigging and blasting and pounding away at the rock. 

"Well, to keep Kurt Fawzi and that crowd happy, I suppose. It seemslike an awful waste of time, though. "

"I'm afraid it isn't. I'm afraid Merlin, or something just as bad, isdown there. That's why I'm here, instead of on Koshchei. I want tokeep people like Fawzi from doing anything foolish with it when theyfind it. "

"But there _can't_ be a Merlin!"

"I'm afraid there is. Not the sort of a Merlin Fawzi expects to find;that thing's too small for that. But there's something down there. .. . "

The question of size bothered him. That drum-shaped superstructurecouldn't even hold the personnel-record machine they had found here, or the computers at the Storisende Stock Exchange. It could have beenan intelligence-evaluator, or an enemy-intentions predictor, but itseemed small even for that. It would be something _like_ a computer;that was as far as he was able to go. And it could be somethingcompletely outside the reach of his imagination. 

At the back of his mind, the suspicion grew that Carl Leibert knewexactly what it was. And he became more and more convinced that he hadseen the self-styled preacher before. 

Finally, the whole top of the hundred-foot collapsium-coveredstructure was uncovered, and the excavation had been leveled out wideenough to accommodate all the massive paraphernalia of thecollapsium-cutter. They put _The Thing_ onto contragravity again, andbrought her down in place; the work of lifting off the reactor and theconverter and the rest of it, piece by piece, began. Finally, everything was set up. 

A dozen and a half of them were gathered in the room that had becometheir meeting-place, after dinner. They were all too tired to startthe cutting that night, and at the same time excited and anxious. Theytalked in disconnected snatches, and then somebody put on one of thetelecast screens. A music program was just ending; there was a briefsilence, and then a commentator appeared, identifying hisnews-service. He spoke rapidly and breathlessly, his professionalgravity cracking all over. 

"The hypership _City of Asgard_, from Aton, has just come intotelecast range, " he began. "We have received an exclusive InterworldNews Service story, recently brought to Aton on the Pan-FederationSpacelines ship _Magellanic_, from Terra. 

"News of revived interest in the Third Force computer, Merlin, havingreached Terra by way of Odin, representatives of Interworld News, towhich this service subscribes, interviewed retired Force-General FoxxTravis, now living, at the advanced age of a hundred and fourteen, onLuna. General Travis, who commanded the Third Fleet-Army Force hereduring the War, categorically denied that there had ever existed anysuper-computer of the sort. 

"We bring you, now, a recorded interview with General Travis, made onLuna. .. . "

For an instant, Conn felt the room around him whirling dizzily, andthen he caught hold of himself. Everybody else was shouting in suddenconsternation, and then everybody was hushing everybody else andmaking twice as much noise. The screen flickered; the commentatorvanished, and instead, seated in the deep-cushioned chair, was thethin and frail old man with whom Conn had talked two years before, andthrough an open segment of the dome-roof behind him the full Earthshone, the continents of the Western Hemisphere plainlydistinguishable. A young woman in starchy nurse's white bent forwardsolicitously from beside the chair, handing him a small beaker fromwhich he sipped some stimulant. He looked much as he had when Conn hadtalked to him. But there was something missing. .. . 

Oh, yes. The comparative youngster of seventy-some--"Mike Shanlee . .. My _aide-de-camp_ on Poictesme . .. Now he thinks he's my keeper. .. . "He wasn't in evidence, and he should be. Then Conn knew where and whenhe had seen the man who claimed to be a preacher named Carl Leibert. 

"There is absolutely no truth in it, gentlemen, " Travis was saying. "There never was any such computer. I only wish there had been; itwould have shortened the War by years. We did, of course, usecomputers of all sorts, but they were all the conventional types usedby business organizations. .. . "

The rest was lost in a new outburst of shouting: General Travis, inthe screen, continued in dumb-show. The only thing Conn coulddistinguish was Leibert's--Shanlee's--voice, screaming: "Can it be alie? Is there no Great Computer?" Then Kurt Fawzi was pounding on thetop of the desk and bellowing, "Shut up! Listen!"

"Frankly, I'm surprised, " Travis was continuing. "Young Maxwell talkedto me, here in this room, a couple of years ago; I told him then thatnothing of the sort existed. If he's back on Poictesme telling peoplethere is, he's lying to them and taking advantage of their credulity. There never was anything called Project Merlin. .. . "

"Hah, who's a liar now?" Klem Zareff shouted. "Dolf, what did yourpeople find in the Library?"

"Why, that's right!" Professor Kellton exclaimed. "My students didfind a dozen references to Project Merlin. He couldn't be ignorant ofanything like that. "

"This youth has been lying to us all along!" the old man with thebeard cried, pointing an accusing finger at Conn. "He has createdfalse hopes; he has given us faith in a delusion. Why, he is thewickedest monster in human history!"

"Well, thank you, General Travis, " another voice, from thescreen-speaker, was saying. The only calm voice in the room. "That wasa most excellent statement, sir. It should. .. . "

"Conn, you didn't tell us you'd talked to General Travis, " MorganGatworth was saying. "Why didn't you?"

"Because I never believed anything he told me. You were in KurtFawzi's office the day I came home; you know how shocked everybody waswhen I told you I hadn't been able to learn anything positive. Whyshould I repeat his lies and discourage everybody that much more? Why, he'd deny there was a Merlin if he was sitting on top of it, " Conndeclared. "He wants the credit for winning the War, not for lettingMerlin win it for him. "

"I don't blame Conn, " Klem Zareff said. "If he'd told us that then, some of us might have believed it. "

"And look what we found, " Kurt Fawzi added, pointing at the ceiling. "Is that Merlin up there, or isn't it?"

"That little thing!" Shanlee cried scornfully. "How could that beMerlin? I am going to my chamber, to pray for forgiveness for thiswretch. "

He turned and started for the door. 

"Stop him, Tom!" Conn said, and Tom Brangwyn put himself in front ofthe older man, gripping his right arm. Shanlee tried, briefly, toresist. 

"Seems to me you lost faith in Merlin awfully quick, " the former townmarshal of Litchfield said. "You knew there was a Merlin all along, and you never wanted us to find it. "

Franz Veltrin, who had been "Leibert's" most enthusiastic adherent, had also lost faith suddenly; he was shouting vituperation at theProphet of Merlin. 

"Knock it off, Franz; he was only doing his duty, " Conn said. "Weren'tyou, General Shanlee?"

It took almost a minute before they stopped yelling for an explanationand allowed him to make one. He caught Klem Zareff's comment: "Must bepretty hot, if they have to send a general to handle it. "

"I talked to Travis, yes. He gave me the same story he just repeatedon that interview, " Conn said, picking his way carefully between factand fiction. "After I went back to Montevideo, he and this aide of hismust have been afraid I didn't believe it, which I didn't. When I wasready to graduate, I got this offer of an instructorship; that was abribe to keep me on Terra and off Poictesme. When I turned it down andtook the _Mizar_ home, Travis sent Shanlee after me. He must havegrown that beard and that pageboy bob on the way out. I suppose hecontacted Murchison as soon as he landed. Wait a minute. "

He went to the communication screen and punched out a combination. Agirl appeared and singsonged: "Barton-Massarra, Investigation andProtection. "

"Conn Maxwell here. We gave you some audiovisuals of a man with awhite beard, alias Carl Leibert, " he began. 

"Just a sec, Mr. Maxwell. " She spoke quickly into a handphone. Thescreen flickered, and she was replaced by a hard-faced young man indark clothes. 

"Hello, Mr. Maxwell; Joe Massarra. We haven't anything on Leibertyet. "

"Are any of the officers of the _Andromeda_ where you can contactthem? Let them see those audiovisual. I'll bet that beard was grownaboard ship coming out from Terra. "

Bedlam broke out suddenly. Shanlee, who had been standing passively, his right arm loosely grasped by Tom Brangwyn, came down on Brangwyn'sinstep with the heel of his left foot and hit Brangwyn under the chinwith the heel of his left palm. Wrenching his arm free, he started forthe door. Sylvie Jacquemont snatched a chair and threw it along thefloor; it hit the fleeing man's ankles and brought him down. Half adozen men piled on top of him, and Brangwyn was yelling to them not tochoke him to death till he could answer some questions. 

"Hey, what's going on?" the detective-agency man in the screen wasasking. "Need help? We'll start a car right away. "

"Everything's under control, thank you. "

Massarra hesitated for a moment. "What's the dope on this statementthat was on telecast a few minutes ago?" he asked. 

"Travis doesn't want us to find Merlin. What you just heard was one ofhis people, planted here at Force Command. We're going to question himwhen we have time. But there isn't a word of truth in that statementyou just heard on the _Herald-Guardian_ newscast. Merlin exists, andwe've found it. We'll have it opened inside of thirty hours at most. "

That was the line he was going to take with everybody. As soon as hehad Massarra off the screen, he was punching the combination of hisfather's private screen at Interplanetary Building. It took fiveinterminable minutes before Rodney Maxwell came on. He could hear KlemZareff shouting orders into one of the inside communicationscreens--general turnout, everything on combat-ready; guards to comeat once to the office. 

"How close are you to digging that thing out?" his father asked assoon as he appeared. 

"We're down to it; we can start cutting the collapsium any time now. "

"Start cutting it ten minutes ago, " his father told him. "And don'tleave Force Command till you have it open. How many men and vehiclesdoes Klem have for defense? You'll need all of them in a couple ofhours. Everybody here is stunned, now; they'll come out of it insidean hour, and they'll come out fighting. "

"You'd better come out here. " He turned, saw Jerry Rivas helping holdShanlee in a chair, and shouted to him: "Jerry! Turn out the workmen. Start cutting the can open right away. " He turned back to his father. "Klem's just ordered all his force out. Are you coming here?"

"I can't. In about an hour, everything's going up with a bang. I haveto be here to grab a few of the pieces. "

"You'll do a lot of good in jail, or on the end of a rope. "

"Chance I have to take, " his father replied. "I think I'll have acouple of hours. If anybody from the press calls you, what are yougoing to tell them?"

Conn repeated the line he had taken already. His father nodded. 

"All right. I'll call you later. If I can. Just keep things going atyour end. "

A dozen of Klem Zareff's men were crowding into the room. 

"This man's under close arrest, " the old soldier was telling them. "Heis very important and very dangerous. Take him out somewhere, searchhim to the skin, take his clothes away from him and give him a robe. He's to be watched every second; make sure he hasn't poison or othersuicide means. He's to be questioned later. "

As soon as Rodney Maxwell was off the screen, there was a call-signal. It was one of the news-services, wanting a statement. 

"I'll take it, " Gatworth said, and then began talking:

"This statement of General Travis's is completely false. There is aMerlin, and we've found it. .. . "

They found something that might be good-enough Merlin for the nextthirty hours. That superstructure was just big enough for the manuallyoperated parts of a computer like Merlin; the input and output, andthe programming machines. 

XX

Klem Zareff's guardsmen were mercenaries. A little over a year agothey had, at best, been homeless drifters, and not a few had beenoutlaws. Now they were soldiers, well fed, clothed, quartered andequipped, and well and regularly paid. They had a good thing; theywere willing to fight to keep it, Merlin or no Merlin. Conn left themto their commander. He did gather the workmen for a short harangue, but that wasn't really necessary. They had a good thing, too, and mostof them realized that they were working toward a better thing. Theycould be depended upon, too. 

They came crowding out and manned lifters; they got the heavycollapsium-cutter maneuvered into place and the shielding down aroundthe cutting-head. After that, there were only four men who could work, each in his own heavily shielded cabin. In spite of the shielding thatcovered the actual work, there was an awesome display of multicoloredlight; it was like being in the middle of an aurora borealis. What wasgoing on where that tiny rotating beam of cosmic rays was grinding atthe collapsium simply couldn't have been imagined. 

Conn would have liked to stay outside; he could not. Too many thingswere happening in too many places, and it was all coming in by screen. Rioting had broken out in Storisende and in a dozen other places. Hesaw, on a news-screen, a mob raging in front of the Executive Palace;yellow-shirted Cybernarchists were battling with city police andPlanetary troops, Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers werefighting both and one another. Above all the confused noise ofshouting and shooting, an amplifier was braying: "_It's a lie! It's alie! Merlin has been found!_" Newsmen began arriving--Zareff's menhad orders to pass them through the cordon that had been put up aroundForce Command--and they took up his time. It was worth it, though. They could tell him what was going on. 

J. Fitzwilliam Sterber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested, on afarrago of fraud charges--"I don't know who he's supposed to havedefrauded; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"--and bailwas being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged, buthe was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We'regoing to start a false-arrest suit--"

"If you're alive to. " Apparently Sterber hadn't thought of that. "Whatdo you think's going to happen when the Stock Exchange opens?"

"It's going to be bad. But don't worry; your father must have foreseensomething like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a fewmore people. " He named some of the Trisystem Investments people andsome of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace the market as longas we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in thelong run. "

Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and ClydeNichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte hadbeen running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemonthad gone to space in the _Ouroboros II_. 

"Well, they caught up with you, " he said. Evidently he had figured outwhat, the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do aboutit?"

"Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find itbefore things get too bad. " He told Luther the situation of themoment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?"

"We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to sendany more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure thisthing you've found is Merlin?"

"I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatusthey'd need to operate a thing like Merlin--Yes, Luther. I am sure wehave found Merlin. "

Chen-Wong looked at him curiously. "I hope so. I can't think ofanything else that can stop this business. "

Tom Brangwyn was in the room when he turned from the screen. 

"We searched Leibert's--Shanlee's--rooms, " he said. "We found a bomb. "

"What kind of a bomb?"

"Vest-pocket thermonuclear. He seems to have gotten the fissionablesby taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing'spacked inside a hundred-pound power-cartridge case. It was in atraveling-bag under his bed. And you know how it was to be fired? Witha regular 40-mm flare-pistol, welded into the end of the bomb. Theflare-powder had been taken out of the cartridge, and it had beenreloaded with a big charge of rifle-powder. I suppose it would blowone subcritical mass into another. But the only way he could havefired the bomb would have been by pulling the trigger. "

And blowing himself up along with it. He must have wanted Merlindestroyed pretty badly. 

"Have you questioned him yet?"

"Not yet. I wanted to tell you about it first. "

He looked at his watch. Only four hours had passed since the newscast;why, that seemed like months, ago, now. 

"All right, Tom; we'll go talk to him. Where's the Colonel?"

Zareff was surrounded by a dozen screens, keeping in touch with the_Lester Dawes_ and the gunboats and combat cars, and the gun positionswith which he had ringed Force Command. It was only a little army, maybe, but he was a busy commander-in-chief. 

"You take care of it. Tell me what you get from him. I can't leavenow. There's a report of a number of aircraft approaching from thewest now. .. . "

They found Judge Ledue, and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton, who were justsitting around wishing there was something to do to help. They gaveFranz Veltrin and Sylvie Jacquemont the job of keeping therepresentatives of the press amused. Then they went down to the roomin which General Mike Shanlee was held under guard. 

Shanlee, wearing a bathrobe and nothing else, was lying on a cot, sleeping peacefully; three of Zareff's men were sitting on chairs, watching him narrowly. 

"All right; you can go, " Conn told them. "We'll take care of him. "

Shanlee woke instantly; he sat up and swung his legs over the edge ofthe cot. 

"You have my name and rank, " he said, and his voice no longerquavered. "My serial number is--" He recited a string of figures. "Andthat's all you're getting out of me. "

"We'll get anything we want out of you, " Conn told him. "You know whata mind-probe is? You should; your accomplices used one on my father'ssecretary. She's a hopeless imbecile now. You'll be, too, when we'rethrough with you. But before then, you'll have given us everything youknow. "

Kellton began to protest. "Conn, you can't do a thing like that!"

"A mind-probe is utterly illegal; why, it's a capital offense!" Ledueexclaimed. "Conn I forbid you. .. . "

"Judge, don't make me call those guards and have you removed, " Connsaid. 

"You can stop bluffing, " Shanlee told him. "Where would you get amind-probe?"

"Out of the Chief of Intelligence's office, here in his headquarters. I should imagine it was to be used in interrogating Allianceprisoners, during the War. I think Colonel Zareff would enjoy helpingto use it on you. He used to be an Alliance officer. "

Shanlee was silent. Conn sat down in one of the chairs, at the smalltable. 

"General Shanlee, would you describe General Foxx Travis as a man ofhonor and integrity? And would you so describe yourself?" Shanlee saidnothing. "Yet both of you have lied, deliberately and repeatedly, toconceal the existence of Merlin. And we found that bomb in your room. You were willing to blow up this headquarters and everybody, yourselfincluded, in it, to keep us from getting at Merlin. Well, you knowthat we can make you tell us the truth, maybe when it's too late, andyou know that we are going to get Merlin. We're cutting the collapsiumoff that thing above now. "

Shanlee laughed. "You're supposed to be a computerman. You think thatlittle thing could be Merlin?"

"The controls and programming machine for Merlin. " He turned to KurtFawzi. "You always claimed that Merlin was here in Force Command. Youhad it backward. Force Command is inside Merlin. "

"What do you mean, Conn?"

"The walls; the fifty-foot walls, shielded inside and out. Merlin--thecircuitry, the memory-bank, the relays, everything--was installedinside them. What's up above is only what was needed to operate thecomputer. Isn't that true, General?"

Shanlee had stopped his derisive laughter. He sat on the edge of thecot, tensing as though for a leap at Conn's throat. 

"That won't help, either. If you try it, we won't shoot you. We'lljust overpower you and start mind-probing right away. Now; you feelthat suppressing Merlin was worth any sacrifice. We're notunreasonable. If you can convince us that Merlin ought not to bebrought to light. .. . Well, you can't do any harm by talking, and youmay do some good. You may even accomplish your mission. "

"He can't talk us out of it, " Kurt Fawzi seemed determined to spoilthings by saying. "Conn, I'm coming around to Klem's way of thinking. They just don't want anybody else to have it. "

"No, we don't, " Shanlee said. "We don't want the whole Federationbreaking up into bloody anarchy, and that's what'll happen if you digthat thing up and put it into operation. "

Nobody said anything except Fawzi, who began an indignantcontradiction and then subsided. Tom Brangwyn lit a cigarette. 

"Would you mind letting me have one of those?" Shanlee said. "Ihaven't had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn't have been incharacter. "

Brangwyn took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, andgave it to Shanlee with his left hand, his right ready to strike. Shanlee laughed in real amusement. 

"Oh, Brother!" he reproved, in his former pious tones. "You distrustyour fellow man; that is a sin. "

He rose slowly, the bathrobe flapping at his bare shins, and sat downacross the table from Conn. 

"All right, " he said. "I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you thetruth, which will be something of a novelty all around. "

Shanlee puffed for a moment at the cigarette; it must really havetasted good after his long abstinence. 

"You know, we were really caught off balance when the War ended. Iteven caught Merlin short; information lag, of course. The wholeAlliance caved in all at once. Well, we fed Merlin all the dataavailable, and analyzed the situation. Then we did something we reallyweren't called upon to do, because that was policy-planning and wasn'tour province, but we were going to move an occupation army into SystemStates planets, and we didn't want to do anything that would embarrassthe Federation Government later. We fed Merlin every scrap ofavailable information on political and economic conditions everywherein the Federation, and set up a long-term computation of the generaleffects of the War. 

"The extrapolation was supposed to run five hundred years in thefuture. It didn't. It stopped, at a point a trifle over two hundredyears from now, with a statement that no computation could be madefurther because at that point the Terran Federation would no longerexist. "

The others, who had taken chairs facing him, looked at him blankly. 

"No more Federation?" Judge Ledue asked incredulously. "Why, theFederation, the Federation. .. . "

The Federation would last forever. Anybody knew that. There justcouldn't be no more Federation. 

"That's right, " Shanlee said. "We had trouble believing it, too. Remember, we were Federation officers. The Federation was ourreligion. Just like patriotism used to be, back in the days ofnationalism. We checked for error. We made detail analyses. We ran itall over again. It was no use. 

"In two hundred years, there won't be any Terran Federation. TheGovernment will collapse, slowly. The Space Navy will disintegrate. Planets and systems will lose touch with Terra and with one another. You know what it was like here, just before the War? It will be likethat on every planet, even on Terra. Just a slow crumbling, tilleverything is gone; then every planet will start sliding back, inisolation, into barbarism. "

"Merlin predicted that?" Kurt Fawzi asked, shocked. 

If Merlin said so, it had to be true. 

Shanlee nodded. "So we ran another computation; we added the data ofpublication of this prognosis. You know, Merlin can't predict what youor I would do under given circumstances, but Merlin can handlelarge-group behavior with absolute accuracy. If we made publicMerlin's prognosis, the end would come, not in two centuries but inless than one, and it wouldn't be a slow, peaceful decay; it would bea bomb-type reaction. Rebellions. Overthrow of Federation authority, and then revolt and counterrevolt against planetary authority. Division along sectional or class lines on individual planets. Interplanetary wars; what we fought the Alliance to prevent. Left inignorance of the future, people would go on trying to make do withwhat they had. But if they found out that the Federation was doomed, everybody would be trying to snatch what they could, and end bysmashing everything. Left in ignorance, there might be a planet hereand there that would keep enough of the old civilization to serve, infive or so centuries, as a nucleus for a new one. Informed in advanceof the doom of the Federation, they would all go down together in thesame bloody shambles, and there would be a Galactic night of barbarismfor no one knows how many thousand years. "

"We don't want anything like that to happen!" Tom Brangwyn said, in afrightened voice. 

"Then pull everybody out of here and blow the place up, Merlin alongwith it, " Shanlee said. 

"No! We'll not do that!" Fawzi shouted. "I'll shoot the man dead whotries it!"

"Why didn't you people blow Merlin up?" Conn asked. 

"We'd built it; we'd worked with it. It was part of us, and we werepart of it. We couldn't. Besides, there was a chance that it mightsurvive the Federation; when a new civilization arose, it would beuseful. We just sealed it. There were fewer than a hundred of us whoknew about it. We all took an oath of secrecy. We spent the rest ofour lives trying to suppress any mention of Merlin or the MerlinProject. You have no idea how shocked both General Travis and I werewhen you told us that the story was still current here on Poictesme. And when we found that you'd been getting into the records of theThird Force, I took the next ship I could, a miserable littlefreighter, and when I landed and found out what was happening, Icontacted Murchison and scared the life out of him with stories abouta secessionist conspiracy. All this Armageddonist, Human Supremacy, Merlin-is-the-Devil, stuff that's been going on was started byMurchison. And he succeeded in scaring Vyckhoven with theCybernarchists, too. "

"This computation on the future of the Federation is still in theback-work file?" Conn asked. 

Shanlee nodded. "We were criminally reckless; I can see that, now. Letme beg, again, that you destroy the whole thing. "

"We'll have to talk it over among ourselves, " Judge Ledue said. "Thefive of us, here, cannot presume to speak for everybody. We will, ofcourse, have to keep you confined; I hope you will understand that wecannot accept your parole. "

"Is there anything you want in the meantime?" Conn asked. 

"I would like something to smoke, and some clothes, " General Shanleesaid. "And a shave and a haircut. "

XXI

All through the night, a shifting blaze of many-colored light rose anddimmed the stars above the mesa. They stared in awe, marveling at theenergy that was pouring out of the converters into a tiny spot thatinched its way around the collapsium shielding. It must have beenvisible for hundreds of miles; it was, for there was a new flood ofrumors circulating in Storisende and repeated and denied by thenewscasts, now running continuously. Merlin had been found. Merlin hadbeen blown up by Government troops. Merlin was being transported toStorisende to be installed as arbiter of the Government. Merlin theMonster was destroying the planet. Merlin the Devil was unchained. 

Conn and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and Judge Ledue and Tom Brangwynclustered together, talking in whispers. They had told nobody, yet, ofthe interview with Shanlee. 

"You think it would make all that trouble?" Kellton was askinganxiously, hoping that the others would convince him that it wouldn't. 

"Maybe we had better destroy it, " Judge Ledue faltered. "You see whatit's done already; the whole planet's in anarchy. If we let this goon. .. . "

"We can't decide anything like that, just the five of us, " Brangwynwas insisting. "We'll have to get the others together and see whatthey think. We have no right to make any decision like this for them. "

"They're no more able to make the decision than we are, " Conn said. 

"But we've got to; they have a right to know. .. . "

"If you decide to destroy Merlin, you'll have to decide to kill me, first, " Kurt Fawzi said, his voice deadly calm. "You won't do it whileI'm alive. "

"But, Kurt, " Ledue expostulated. "You know why these people here atStorisende are rioting? It's because they've lost hope, becausethey're afraid and desperate. The Terran Federation is somethingeverybody feels they have to have, for peace and order and welfare. Ifpeople thought it was breaking up, they'd be desperate, too. They'd dothe same insane things these people here on this planet are doing. General Shanlee was right. Don't destroy the hope that keeps themsane. "

"We don't need to do that, " Kurt Fawzi argued. "We can use Merlin tosolve our own problems; we don't need to tell the whole Federationwhat's going to happen in two hundred years. "

"It would get out; it couldn't help getting out, " Ledue said. 

"Let's not try to decide it ourselves, " Conn said. "Let's get Merlininto operation, and run a computation on it. "

"You mean, ask Merlin to tell us whether it ought to be destroyed ornot?" Ledue asked incredulously. "Let Merlin put itself on trial, andsentence itself to destruction?"

"Merlin is a computer; computers deal only in facts. Computers aremachines; they have no sense of self-preservation. If Merlin ought tobe destroyed, Merlin will tell us so. "

"You willing to leave it up to Merlin, Kurt?" Tom Brangwyn asked. 

Fawzi gulped. "Yes. If Merlin says we ought to, we'll have to do it. "

Toward noon, a telecast went out from Koshchei, on a dozen differentwave-lengths. Conn, half asleep in a chair in the commander-in-chief'soffice, saw Simon Macquarte, the young mathematics professor fromStorisende College who had become one of the leaders of the colony, appear in the screen. The next moment, he was fully awake, shocked byMacquarte's words:

"This is not a threat; this is a solemn, even a prayerful, warning. Wedo not want to use genocidal weapons of mass destruction against theworld of our birth. But whether we do or not rests solely with you. 

"We came here with a dream of a better world, a world of happiness andplenty for all. We have been working, on Koshchei, to build such aworld on Poictesme. Now you are smashing that dream. When it is gone, we will have nothing to live for--except revenge. And we will takethat revenge, make no mistake. 

"We have the weapons with which to take it. Remember, this was aFederation naval base and naval arsenal during the War. Here theFederation Navy built their super-missiles, the missiles whichdevastated Ashmodai, and Belphegor, and Baphomet, and hundreds ofthese weapons are here. We have them, ready for launching. Once theyare launched, with the robo-pilots set for targets on Poictesme, youwill have a hundred and sixty hours, at the most, to live. 

"We will launch them immediately if there is another attack made uponForce Command Duplicate HQ, or upon Interplanetary Building inStorisende, or if Rodney Maxwell is killed, no matter by whom or underwhat circumstances. 

"We beg you, earnestly and prayerfully, not to force us to do thisdreadful thing. We speak to each one of you, for each one of you holdsthe fate of the planet in his own hands. "

The image faded from the screen. As it did, Conn was looking from oneto another of the people in the room with him. All were dumbfounded, most of them frightened. 

"They wouldn't do it, would they?" Lorenzo Menardes was asking. "Conn, you know those people. They wouldn't really?"

"Don't depend on it, Lorenzo, " Klem Zareff said. "It's hard for a lotof people to shoot somebody ten feet away with a pistol. But justsending off a missile; that's nothing but setting a lot of dials andthen pushing a button. "

"I'm not worrying about whether they'd do it or not, " Conn said. "WhatI'm worrying about is how many people will believe they will. "

Apparently a good many people did. Zareff's combat vehicles beganreporting a cessation of fighting. The newscasts, repeating theultimatum from Koshchei, told of fewer and fewer disorders in the cityor elsewhere; by midafternoon, the rioting had stopped. 

By that time, too, Rodney Maxwell was on-screen. He was, Conn noticed, wearing his pistols again. 

"What happened?" he asked. "They let you out on bail?"

Maxwell shook his head. "Charges dismissed; they didn't have anythingto charge me with in the first place. But they haven't let me outyet. "

"You're wearing your guns. "

"Yes, but they still have me penned up here at the Executive Palace;they're practically keeping me in the safe. I wish our people onKoshchei hadn't mentioned me in their ultimatum; Jake Vyckhoven'safraid to let me run around loose for fear some lunatic shoots me andstarts the planetbusters coming in. Jake did one good thing, though. He ordered the Stock Exchange closed, and declared a five-day bankholiday. By that time, you ought to have Merlin opened and working, and then the market'll be safe. "

Conn simply replied, "I hope so. " There was no telling what kind oftaps there might be on the screen his father was using; he couldn'trisk telling him about Shanlee, or about the last computation whichMerlin had made. "If we send the _Lester Dawes_ in, do you think youmight talk them into letting you come out here?"

"I can try. "

Flora arrived at Force Command that afternoon. 

"I would have come sooner, " she said, "but Mother's had a completecollapse. It happened last evening; she's in the hospital. I was withher until just an hour and a half ago. She's still unconscious. "

"You mean she's in danger?"

"I don't know. They think she's all right, except for the shock. Itwas the Travis statement that did it. "

"Think I ought to go to her?"

Flora shook her head. "Just keep on with what you're doing here. Thereisn't anything you can do for her now. "

"The best thing you can do for her, Conn, is prove that you weren'tlying about Merlin, " Sylvie told him. 

The _Lester Dawes_ didn't make it from Force Command to Storisende andback until after dark, and the green and white and red and orangelights were rising in folds and waves. Rodney Maxwell had heard abouthis wife's condition; it was the first thing he spoke of when Connand Flora and Sylvie met him as he got off the ship. 

"There isn't anything we can do, Father, " Flora said. "They'll call uswhen there's any change. "

He said the same thing Sylvie had said. "The only thing we can do isget that infernal thing uncovered. Once we do this, everything'll beall right. We'll show your mother that it isn't a fake and it isn'tanything dangerous; we'll put a stop to all these horror-stories aboutmechanical devils and living machines. .. . "

Conn drew his father off where the girls couldn't overhear. 

"This is something worse, " he said. "This is a bomb that could blow upthe whole Federation. "

"Are you going nuts, too?" his father demanded. 

Conn told him about Shanlee; he repeated, almost word for word, thestory Shanlee had told. 

"Do you believe that?" his father asked. 

"Don't you? You were in Storisende when the Travis statement came out;you saw how people acted. If this story gets out, people will beacting the same way on every planet in the Federation. Not just placeslike Poictesme; planets like Terra and Baldur and Marduk and Odin andOsiris. It would be the end of everything civilized, everywhere. "

"Why didn't they use Merlin to save the Federation?"

"It's past saving. It's been past saving since before the War. The Warwas what gave it the final shove. If they could have used Merlin toreverse the process, they wouldn't have sealed it away. "

"But you know, Conn, we can't destroy Merlin. If we did, the samepeople who went crazy over the Travis statement would go crazy allover again, worse than ever. We'd be destroying everything we plannedfor, and we'd be destroying ourselves. That bluff young Macquarte andLuther Chen-Wong and Bill Nichols made wouldn't work twice. And ifthey weren't bluffing. .. . "

His father shuddered. 

"And if we don't, how long do you think civilization will last here, if it blows up all over the rest of the Federation?"

The big machine cut on, a little spot of raw energy grinding away thecollapsium, inch by inch; the undulating curtains of colored lightilluminated the Badlands for miles around. Then, when the first hintof dawn came into the east, they went out. The steady roar of thegenerators that had battered every ear for over twenty-four hoursstopped. There was unbelieving silence, and then shouts. 

The workmen swarmed out to man lifters. Slowly the heavyapparatus--the reactor and the converters, the cutting machine, andthe shielding around it--was lifted away. Finally, a lone lifter camein and men in radiation-suits went down to hook on grapples, and itlifted away, carrying with it a ten-foot-square sheet of thin steelthat weighed almost thirty tons. 

When they had battered a hole in the vitrified rock underneath, guardsbrought up General Shanlee. Somebody almost up to professionalstandards had given him a haircut; the beard was gone, too. AFederation Army officer's uniform had been found reasonably close tohis size, and somebody had even provided him with the four stars ofhis retirement rank. He was, again, the man Conn had seen in thedome-house on Luna. 

"Well, you got it open, " he said, climbing down from the airjeep thathad brought him. "Now, what are you going to do with it?"

"We can't make up our minds, " Conn said. "We're going to let thecomputer tell us what to do with it. "

Shanlee looked at him, startled. "You mean, you're going to haveMerlin judge itself and decide its own fate?" he asked. "You'll getthe same result we did. "

They let a ladder down the hole and descended--Conn and his father, Kurt Fawzi, Jerry Rivas, then Shanlee and his two guards, thenothers--until a score of them were crowded in the room at the bottom, their flashlights illuminating the circular chamber, revealingceiling-high metal cabinets, banks of button- and dial-studded controlpanels, big keyboards. It was Shanlee who found the lights and putthem on. 

"Powered from the central plant, down below, " he said. "The maincables are disguised as the grounding-outlet. If this thing had beenon when you put on the power, you'd have had an awful lot of powergoing nowhere, apparently. "

Rodney Maxwell was disappointed. "I know this stuff looks awfullycomplex, but I'd have expected there to be more of it. "

"Oh, I didn't get a chance to tell you about that. This is only theoperating end, " Conn said, and then asked Shanlee if there wereinspection-screens. When Shanlee indicated them, he began putting themon. "This is the real computer. "

They all gave the same view, with minor differences--long corridors, ten feet wide, between solid banks of steel cabinets on either side. Conn explained where they were, and added:

"Kurt and the rest of them were sitting here, all this time, wonderingwhere Merlin was; it was all around them. "

"Well, how did you get up here?" Fawzi asked. "We couldn't findanything from below. "

"No, you couldn't. " Shanlee was amused. "Watch this. "

It was so simple that nobody had ever guessed it. Below, back of theCommander-in-chief's office, there was a closet, fifteen feet bytwenty. They had found it empty except for some bits of discardedoffice-gear, and had used it as a catch-all for everything they wantedout of the way. Shanlee went to where four thick steel columns rosefrom floor to ceiling in a rectangle around a heavy-duty lifter, pressing a button on a control-box on one of them. The lifter, and thefloor under it, rose, with a thick mass of vitrified rock underneath. The closet, full of the junk that had been thrown into it, followed. 

"That's it, " he said. "We just tore out the controls inside that andpatched it up a little. There's a sheet of collapsium-plate under thefloor. Your scanners simply couldn't detect anything from below. "

Confident that Merlin would decree its own destruction, Shanlee gavehis parole; the others accepted it. The newsmen were admitted to thecircular operating room and encouraged to send out views anddescriptions of everything. Then the lift controls were reinstalled, the lid was put back on top, and the only access to the room wasthrough the office below. The entrance to this was always guarded byZarel's soldiers or Brangwyn's police. 

There were only a score of them who could be let in on the actualfacts. For the most part, they were the same men who had been inFawzi's office on the afternoon of Conn's return, a year and a halfago. A few others--Anse Dawes, Jerry Rivas, and five computermen Connhad trained on Koshchei--had to be trusted. Conn insisted on lettingSylvie Jacquemont in on the revised Awful Truth About Merlin. Theyspent a lot of their time together, in Travis's office, for the mostpart sunk in dejection. 

They had finally found Merlin; now they must lose it. They were tryingto reconcile themselves and take comfort from the achievement, emptyas it was. They could see no way out. If Merlin said that Merlin hadto be destroyed, that was it. Merlin was infallible. Conn hated thethought of destroying that machine with his whole being, not becauseit was an infallible oracle, but because it was the climacticmasterpiece of the science he had spent years studying. To destroy itwas an even worse sacrilege to him than it was to the Merlinolators. And Rodney Maxwell was thinking of the public effects. What the Travisstatement had started would be nothing by comparison. 

"You know, we can keep the destruction of Merlin a secret, " Conn said. "It'll take some work down at the power plant, but we can overload allthe circuits and burn everything out at once. " He turned to Shanlee. "I don't know why you people didn't think of that. "

Shanlee looked at him in surprise. "Why, now that you mention it, neither do I, " he admitted. "We just didn't. "

"Then, " Conn continued, "we can tinker up something in the operatingroom that'll turn out what will look like computation results. As faras anybody outside ourselves will know, Merlin will still be solvingeverybody's problems. We'll do like any fortuneteller; tell thecustomer what he wants to believe and keep him happy. "

More lies; lies without end. And now he'd have a machine to do hislying for him, a dummy computer that wouldn't compute anything. Andall he'd wanted, to begin with, had been a ship to haul some brandy towhere they could get a fair price for it. 

Peace had returned. At first, it had been a frightened and uneasypeace. The bluff--he hoped that was what it had been--by the Koshcheicolonists had shocked everybody into momentary inaction. In thetwenty-four hours that had followed, the forces of sanity and orderhad gotten control again. Merlin existed and had been found. As forTravis's statement, the old general had been bound by a wartime oathof secrecy to deny Merlin's existence. The majority relaxed, ashamedof their hysterical reaction. As for the Cybernarchists andArmageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers, government and privatepolice, vastly augmented by volunteers, speedily rounded up theleaders; their followers dispersed, realizing that Merlin was nothingbut a lot of dials and buttons, and interestedly watching thebroadcast views of it. 

The banks were still closed, but discreet back-door withdrawals werepermitted to keep business going; so was the Stock Exchange, but wordwas going around the brokerage offices that Trisystem Investments wasin the market for a long list of securities. Nobody was willing to doanything that might upset the precarious balance; everybody wastalking about the bright future, when Merlin would guide Poictesme toever greater and more splendid prosperity. 

Conn's father and sister flew to Litchfield; Flora stayed with hermother, and Rodney Maxwell returned to Force Command, shaking his headgravely. 

"She's still unconscious, Conn, " he said. "She just lies there, barelybreathing. The doctors don't know. .. . I wish Wade hadn't gone on theship. "

The price of what he had wanted to do was becoming unendurably highfor Conn. 

They ran off the computations Merlin had made forty years before, andrechecked them. There had been no error. The Terran Federation, overextended, had been cracking for a century before the War; thestrain of that conflict had started an irreversible breakup. Twocenturies for the Federation as such; at most, another century ofirregular trade and occasional war between independent planets, Galaxyfull of human-populated planets as poor as Poictesme at its worst. Or, aware of the future, sudden outbursts of desperate violence, thenanarchy and barbarism. 

It took a long time to set up the new computation. Forty yearsof history for almost five hundred planets had to be abstractedand summarized and translated from verbal symbols to theelectro-mathematical language of computers and fed in. Conn and Sylvieand General Shanlee and the three men and two women Conn had taught onKoshchei worked and rested briefly and worked again. Finally, it wasfinished. 

"General; you're the oldest Merlin hand, " Conn said, gesturing to thered button at the main control panel, "You do it. "

"You do it, Conn. None of us would be here except for you. "

"Thank you, General. "

He pressed the button. They all stood silently watching the outputslot. 

Even a positronic computer does not work instantaneously. Nothingdoes. Conn took his eyes from the slot from which the tape would come, and watched the second-hand of the clock above it. The wait didn'tseem like hours to him; it only seemed like seventy-five seconds, thatway. Then the bell rang, and the tape began coming out. 

It took another hour and a half of button-punching; the Braille-likesymbols on the tape had to be retranslated, and even Merlin couldn'tdo that for itself. Merlin didn't think in human terms. 

It was the same as before. In ignorance, the peoples of the Federationworlds would go on, striving to keep things running until they woreout, and then sinking into apathetic acceptance. Deprived of hope, they would turn to frantic violence and smash everything they mostwanted to preserve. Conn pushed another button. 

The second information-request went in: _What is the best course to befollowed under these conditions by the people of Poictesme?_ It hadtaken some time to phrase that in symbols a computer would findcomprehensible; the answer, at great length, emerged in two minuteseight seconds. Retranslating it took five hours. 

In the beginning and for the first ten years, it was, almost item foritem, the Maxwell Plan. Export trade, specialized in luxury goods. Brandies and wines, tobacco; a long list of other exportablecommodities, and optimum markets. Reopening of industrial plants;establishment of new industries. Attainment of economicself-sufficiency. Cultural self-sufficiency; establishment ofuniversities, institutes of technology, research laboratories. Thenthe Maxwell Plan became the Merlin Plan; the breakup of the Federationwas a fact that entered into the computation. Build-up of militarystrength to resist aggression by other planetary governments. Defenseof the Gartner Trisystem. Lists of possible aggressor planets. Revivalof interstellar communications and trade; expeditions, conquest andre-education of natives. .. . 

"We can't begin to handle this without Merlin, " Conn said. "If thatmeans blowing up the Federation, let it blow. We'll start a new onehere. "

"No; if there's a general, violent collapse of the Federation, it'llspread to Poictesme, " Shanlee told him. "Let's ask Merlin the bigquestion. "

Merlin took a good five minutes to work that one out. The question hadto include a full description of Merlin, and a statement of theinformation which must be kept secret. The answer was even morelengthy, but it was summed up in the first word: _Falsification_. 

"So Merlin's got to be a liar, too, along with the rest of us!" Sylviecried. "Conn, you've corrupted his morals!"

The rest of it was false data which must be taped in, and lists ofcorrections which must be made in evaluating any computation intowhich such data might enter. There was also a statement that, afterfifty years, suppression of the truth and circulation of falselyoptimistic statements about the Federation would no longer have anyimportance. 

"Well, that's it, " Conn said. "Merlin thought himself out of a deathsentence. "

They crowded into the lift and went down to the office below. Everybody who knew what had been going on upstairs was there. Most ofthem were nursing drinks; almost everybody was smoking. All of themwere silent, until Judge Ledue took his cigar from his mouth. 

"Has the jury reached a verdict?" he asked, clinging with courtroomformality to his self-control. 

"Yes, your Honor. We find the defendant, Merlin, not guilty ascharged. "

In the uproar his words released, Rodney Maxwell got to his feet andcame quickly to Conn. 

"Flora called just a while ago. Your mother is conscious; she's askingfor us. Flora says she seems perfectly normal. "

"We'll go right away; take a recon-car. General, will you explainthings till I get back? Sylvie, do you want to come with us?"

XXII

It was autumn again, the second autumn since he had landed from the_City of Asgard_ at Storisende and taken the _Countess Dorothy_ hometo Litchfield. Again the fields were bare and brown; all up and downthe Gordon Valley the melons were harvested, and the wine-pressing wasready to start. 

The house was crowded today. All top-level Litchfield seemed to haveturned out, and there were guests from Storisende, and even a few whohad made the trip from Koshchei to be there, Simon Macquarte, thepresident of Koshchei Tech; Conn would always remember him in thescreen threatening a whole planet with devastation. Luther Chen-Wong, the chief executive of Koshchei Colony. Clyde Nichols, the presidentof Koshchei Airlines. 

He almost bumped into Yves Jacquemont, coming in from the hall. Jacquemont's beard had been trimmed down to a small imperial, and hewas wearing the uniform of Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines, nothing at all like a Federation Space Navy uniform. He was laughingabout something; he threw an arm over Conn's shoulder, and they wentinto the front parlor together. 

"Oh, Gehenna of a big crop!" he heard Klem Zareff's voice, chucklinghappily, above the babble in the room. "You wouldn't believe it. Why, we had to build six new vats. .. . "

The thin-faced, white-haired man in the chair beside him saidsomething. Mike Shanlee and Klem Zareff, old enemies, were now fastfriends. Shanlee had come in from Force Command with Conn thatmorning. He had stayed on Poictesme as nominal head of Project Merlin, and intended to remain there for the rest of his life. 

"Oh, there aren't any more farm-tramps, " Zareff replied. "Everybody'sgetting factory jobs off-planet. I have an awful time getting help, and what I can get won't work for less than ten sols a day. Why, they're even organizing a union. .. . "

There were feminine shrieks from across the room, and a stampede. Thehousecleaning-robot had come in, running its vacuum-cleaning hosearound and brandishing its mops. He saw his mother break away from agroup of older ladies and shout:

"_Oscar!_"

The robot stopped dead. "Yash'm?" a voice came out of it, Sheshan-accented. 

"Go out!" his mother commanded. "Go to kitchen. Stay there. "

"Yash'm. " The robot floated out the door to the hall. 

His mother rejoined her friends. Probably telling them, for thethousandth time, that her boy Conn fixed up the sound receptors andvoice for Oscar. Or harping on how Conn had been telling everybody thetruth, all along, and people wouldn't believe him. 

Sylvie came up to him and caught his arm. "Come on, Conn; they'regoing to start the rehearsal, " she said. 

"They've been going to start it for an hour, " her father told her. 

"Well, they're really going to start it now. "

"All right. You two run along, " Yves Jacquemont said. "And you'dbetter start rehearsing for your own wedding before long. The _Genji_will be ready to hyper out in another month, and I don't want to be atspace when my only daughter gets married. "

They pushed through the crowd, dragging Conn's mother with them towardthe big living room beyond. On the way, Mrs. Maxwell stopped to try todrag Judge Ledue out of a chair. 

"Judge, the rehearsal is starting; they can't do it without you. "

Ledue clung to his chair. "They daren't do it with me, Mrs. Maxwell. If I get into it, it won't be a rehearsal; they'll be really married, and then there won't be any point in having a wedding tomorrow. "

"Oh, Morgan!" Conn called across the room to Gatworth. "You've justbeen appointed temporary judge for the wedding rehearsal!"

There was a big crowd around Wade Lucas, in the next room; he wastelling them about the voyage to Baldur, from which he had returned, and the one to Irminsul, with a cargo of arms, machine tools andcontragravity vehicles, on which he and his bride would go for theirhoneymoon. There was another crowd around Flora; she was telling themabout the new fashions on Baldur, which had been brought back on the_Ouroboros II_. 

"Where's your father?" his mother was asking him. "He has to rehearsegiving the bride away. "

"Probably in his office. I'll go get him. "

"You'll get into an argument with somebody and forget to come back, "his mother said. "Sylvie, you go with him, and bring both of themback. "

"When'll we have our wedding, Sylvie?" he asked as they went offtogether. 

"Well, before Dad goes to Aditya with the _Genji_. That'll have to bein a month. "

"Two weeks? That ought to be plenty of time to get ready, and letpeople recover from this one. "

"Everybody's here now. Let's make it a double wedding tomorrow, " shesuggested. 

He hadn't been prepared for that. "Well, I hadn't expected. .. . Sure!Good idea!" he agreed. 

There was a crowd in Rodney Maxwell's little office--Fawzi and someothers, and some Storisende people. One of the latter wasvociferating:

"Jake Vyckhoven's no good, and he never was any good!"

"Well, you have to admit, if he hadn't ordered the banks and the StockExchange closed that time, we'd have had a horrible panic--"

"Admit nothing of the kind! Jethro, you were there, you'll bear meout. About a dozen of us were at Executive Palace for hours, bullyinghim into that. Why, we almost had to twist one of his arms while hewas signing the order with the other. And now he has the gall to runfor re-election on the strength of his heroic actions at the time ofthe Travis Hoax!"

"I know who we want for President!" another Storisende man exclaimed. "He's right here in this room!"

"Yes!" Rodney Maxwell almost bellowed, before the other man could sayanything else. "Here he is!" He grabbed Kurt Fawzi by the arm andyanked him to his feet. "Here's the man most responsible for findingMerlin; the man who first suggested sending my son Conn to Terra toschool, the man who, more than anyone else, devoted his life to thesearch for Merlin, the man whose inextinguishable faith andindomitable courage kept that search alive through its darkest hours. Everybody, get a drink; a toast to our next President, Kurt Fawzi!"

Conn was sure he heard his father add: "Ghu, what a narrow escape!"

Then he and Sylvie began chanting, in unison, "_We want Fawzi! We wantFawzi!_"

If you enjoyed this novel, you will also want to read:

SPACE VIKINGbyH. BEAM PIPER

After a galaxy-wide war had left the planetary federation in ruins, every surviving civilized world was on its own. And that was a perfectsetup for the marauders from the far-out rim. 

Trask was one of those dreaded Space Vikings, a warrior spaceman witha crew and a ship that struck terror to a thousand worlds. But Traskhad a special personal interest In scourging the stars--he wanted todraw upon himself the fire of a certain enemy--a renegadeplanet-wrecker with a yen for galactic empire building. 

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"Is there really a Merlin?"

Everybody on the war-torn planet Poictesme believed it existed. Andthey all believed that when this super-gigantic computer was locatedamid the mountains of surplus equipment that was the planet's solesource of revenue, it would mean Utopia for everyone. 

Conn Maxwell knew different. He had studied the records on Earth andhe thought he knew the true facts about this cosmic computer. To tellthem would be to panic Poictesme, so instead he set about a new searchin his own way--with startling results. 

H. Beam Piper, author of SPACE VIKING, has again produced an originaland unusual novel of the space future.