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The Cosmic Computer

by H. Beam Piper · English · Gutenberg #20727 · 392,183 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Cosmic Computer

Author: H. Beam Piper


        
Release date: March 3, 2007 [eBook #20727]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

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        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


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Produced by Greg Weeks, Bethanne M. Simms, Jason Isbell, and the
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THE COSMIC COMPUTER
by
H BEAM PIPER


"There are incredible things still
undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in
duplicate as a precaution against space attack. I know where all of
them are.

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


Nevertheless the leading men of the planet didn't believe him. They
couldn't, for the search for Merlin had become their abiding
obsession. Merlin meant everything to them: power, pleasures, and
profits unlimited.

Conn had known they'd never believe him, and so he had a trick or two
up his space-trained sleeve that might outwit even their fabled Cosmic
Computer ... if they dared accept his challenge.

_H. BEAM PIPER_ is rather enigmatic where his personal statistics are
concerned. It may be stated that he lives in Williamsport,
Pennsylvania, that he is an expert on the history and use of hand
weapons, that he has been writing and selling science-fiction for many
years to the leading magazines, and that he is highly rated among
readers for his skill and imagination. He has had several novels
published, including mysteries and juveniles.

His previous appearances in Ace Books include two novels written in
collaboration with John J. McGuire: CRISIS IN 2140 (D-227) and A
PLANET FOR TEXANS (D-299), and a longer entirely self-authored novel
SPACE 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 the
ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass must
feel with the sand slowly draining out.

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

Thirty minutes to Litchfield.

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

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

"Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir," the first officer repeated, and
gave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two;
trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flicker
of anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the whole
infernal 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 on
the lower deck." He dismissed them as mere cargo. "Litchfield's the
end 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 lot
of 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 having
labor trouble now?"

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

"Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to the
lower 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, dressed
like farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns in
their 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 crew
and passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the mate
said. "You heard about the _Harriet Barne_, didn't you?"

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

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

The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There was
just a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the Air
Patrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody's ever
seen 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. And
there hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city limits of
Storisende," 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, the
fields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They had
been green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and the
wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the crop
in early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were still
harvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was
going to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lot
of cask staves going aboard at Storisende.

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

That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Seventh
Century, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told that--Surromanticist
Movement, when they were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old Genji
Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical space-rover whose ship had
been the first to enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to the
romantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets
of the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of
course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one had
been called Storisende.

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

Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; the
manufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer find
a profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei,
on Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruel
closed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the offices
emptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wild
game came back.

Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert of
crumbling concrete--landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracks
and toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements and
missile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated from
Poictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem had
been the advance base for the Third Fleet-Army Force, during the
System States War.

It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on or
routed through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened for war
production. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piled
up mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the world
cluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System States
Alliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fell
on Poictesme.

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

The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, taking
their riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remained
had been living on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that
his father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one who
searched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit of
uranium, 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. Twenty
minutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn't know what he was going to
tell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; he
just didn't know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearing
through thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glistening
redly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside its
curve. Six. Four. The _Countess Dorothy_ was losing speed and
altitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. The
Airlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. The
yellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. High
Garden Terrace; the Mall.

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

The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could see
cracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals,
waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, but
what 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 the
University.

_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. The
Terran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated a
score, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System States
Alliance from seceding. It hadn't been a victory. It had only been a
lesser defeat.

There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody in
topside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair
and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and
bulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi, the mayor, well to the
front. Then he saw his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and
waved to them. They waved back, and then everybody was waving. The
gangway-port opened, and the Academy band struck up, enthusiastically
if inexpertly, as he descended to the dock.

His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut to the same
pattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout curtain cloth.
It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to acquire a permanent
wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol butt. His mother's dress
was new, and so was Flora's, made for the occasion. He couldn't be
sure just which of the Federation Armed Forces had provided the
material, 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 very
few, gray threads in his father's mustache; a few more squint-wrinkles
around the eyes. His mother's hair was all gray, now, and she was
heavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he'd grown a
few inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised that
Flora 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 left
hand 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 to
practice medicine until the year after he'd gone to Terra.

"Oh, emergency," Flora said. "Obstetrical case; that won't wait on
anything. 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 glad
we all are to see him back.... Now, Franz, put away the recorder; save
the 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 Professor
Dolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he wondered, because he
was Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how much
because of what they hoped he'd tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging him
aside, was the first to speak of it.

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

He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareff
approaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and the
younger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born on
Poictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he came
from, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble on
Hathor twenty years ago; the losers had had to get off-planet in a
hurry to dodge firing squads. Klem Zareff never was reticent about his
past. He came from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he
had commanded a regiment, and finally a division that had been blasted
down to less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He always
wore 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've
arranged a little celebration for you. We'll start it with a dinner at
Senta's."

"You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'd
have 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, and
have a little drink and a talk together."

"You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked. There was an odd
undernote 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 was
speaking to his wife, interrupting himself to shout instructions to
some laborers who were bringing up a contragravity skid. Conn turned
to Colonel Zareff.

"Good melon crop this year?" he asked.

The old Rebel cursed. "Gehenna of a big crop; we're up to our necks in
melons. 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 a
drink of Poictesme brandy on Terra."

"This isn't Terra, and we aren't selling it by the drink," Colonel
Zareff said. "We're selling it at Storisende Spaceport, for what the
freighter captains pay us. You've been away too long, Conn. You've
forgotten 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 the
wide 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 the
yellow trefoil of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red
star of Ordnance. Cases of rifles; square boxes of ammunition; crated
auto-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 was
cleaned out years ago. Well, always take a second look at these
things everybody knows. Ten to one they're not so. It always bothered
me that nobody found any underground attack-shelters. I took a second
look, and sure enough, I found them, right underneath, mined out of
the solid rock. Conn, you'd be surprised at what I found there."

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

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

The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504
submachine guns. Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing for
packing weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less than
a 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 his
father; he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality
and rambling conversation. None of the lights were bright, and the
walls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they entered, Tom
Brangwyn went to the long table and took off his belt and holster,
laying it down. One by one, the others unbuckled their weapons and
added them to the pile. Klem Zareff's cane went on the table with his
pistol; there was a sword inside it.

That was something else he was seeing with new eyes. He hadn't started
carrying 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 year
in Litchfield, if you didn't count the Tramptowners, and they stayed
south of the docks and off the top level.

Or perhaps that was just it. Litchfield was peaceful because
everybody was prepared to keep it that way. It certainly wasn't
because of anything the Planetary Government did to maintain order.

Now Brangwyn was setting out glasses, filling a pitcher from a keg in
the corner of the room. The last time Conn had been here, they'd given
him a glass of wine, and he'd felt very grown-up because they didn't
water it for him.

"Well, gentlemen," Kurt Fawzi was saying, "let's have a toast to our
returned friend and new associate. Conn, we're all anxious to hear
what you've found out, but even if you didn't learn anything, we're
still happy to have you back with us. Gentlemen; to our friend and
neighbor. 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 have
anything 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 pressed
and fermented...."

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

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

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

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

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

That set them all off. He was still holding his drink; he downed it in
one gulp, barely tasting it, and handed the glass to Tom Brangwyn for
a refill, and caught a frown on his father's face. One did not gulp
drinks 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 to
blurt out the one quick sentence and get it over with, but the words
wouldn'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 his
stomach. Have to go easy, though. He wasn't used to this kind of
drinking, and he wanted to stay sober enough to talk sense until he'd
told them what he had to.

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

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

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

"Most of you gentlemen," he said, "contributed to sending me to school
on Terra, to study cybernetics and computer theory. It wouldn't do us
any good to find Merlin if none of us could operate it. Well, I've
done that. I can use any known type of computer, and train assistants.
After I graduated, I was offered a junior instructorship to computer
physics 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't
think it was very important."

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

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

All right; now tell them the truth.

"I was also to find out anything I could about a secret giant computer
used during the War by the Third Fleet-Army Force, code-named Merlin.
I went over all the records available to the public; I used your
letter, Professor, and the head of our Modern History department
secured me access to non-public material, some of it still classified.
For one thing, I have locations and maps and plans of every Federation
installation built here between 842 and 854, the whole period of the
War." He turned to his father. "There are incredible things still
undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in
duplicate, 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 we
could have attacked Poictesme. Even if we'd had the ships, we were
fighting a purely defensive war. Aggression was no part of our
policy--"

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

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

"Nothing, Conn?"

Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue's hand shook as though palsied
as he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at the
drink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The others
found 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. "You
should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on
Mephistopheles ..."

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

And if you'd asked such a computer, "Is there a God?" it would have
simply 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 would
Merlin have to be?" old Professor Kellton asked.

"Well, the astrophysics computer at the University occupied a volume
of 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," Lester
Dawes, the banker, said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Then," he said, "we will build a hypership. On Koshchei there are
shipyards and hyperdrive engines and everything we will need. We only
need one normal-space interplanetary ship to get out there, and we're
in business."

"Well, I don't know we need one," Judge Ledue said. "That was only an
idea 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 need
a ship. Merlin may be on Koshchei; that's where the components would
be fabricated, and the Armed Forces weren't hauling anything any
farther than they had to. Koshchei's only two and a half minutes away
by radio; that's practically in the next room. Look; here's how they
could have done it."

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

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

"I have no doubt," Judge Ledue began, "that the Planetary Government
at Storisende would give assistance. I have some slight influence with
President Vyckhoven ..."

"Huh-_uh_!" That was one of Klem Zareff's fellow planters. "We don't
want Jake Vyckhoven or any of this First-Families-of-Storisende
oligarchy in this at all. That's the gang that bankrupted the
Government with doles and work relief, and everybody else with
worthless printing-press money after the War, and they've been
squatting in a circle deploring things ever since. Some of these days
Blackie Perales and his pirates'll sack Storisende, for all they'd be
able to do to stop him."

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

Rodney Maxwell finished the brandy in his glass and set it on the
table, then went to the pile of belts and holsters and began rummaging
for 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 Conn
and I ought to have a little fresh air. Besides, you know, we haven't
seen each other for six years." He buckled on the heavy automatic and
settled 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 the
little plaza to the east of the Airlines Building that his father
broke the silence.

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

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

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

"There is no Merlin. Is that it?"

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

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

"You're sure of it?"

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

"Foxx Travis!" His father's voice was soft with wonder. "I saw him
once, 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 that
keeps him alive."

"And you talked to him?"

"Yes."

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

"What did he tell you?"

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

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

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

They had started walking again, and were out on the Mall; the sky was
flaming red and orange from high cirrus clouds in the sunset light.
They stopped by a dry fountain, perhaps the one from which he had seen
the dust blowing. Rodney Maxwell sat down on the edge of the basin and
got 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 find
Merlin, everybody will be rich and happy, the Government bonds will be
redeemed at face value plus interest, the paper money'll be worth a
hundred Federation centisols to the sol, and the leaves and wastepaper
will be raked off the Mall, all by magic." He muttered an
unprintability and laughed bitterly.

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

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

Flora was a teacher; now she was assistant principal of the grade
schools. Professor Kellton was also school superintendent. He could
see 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-planet
as soon as he'd gotten his M.D. Evidently the professional situation
there was the same as on Terra; plenty of opportunities, and fifty
competitors 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, he
just couldn't believe in it. I don't blame him. I've heard about it
all my life, and I can't."

"Why not?"

"To begin with, I suppose, because it's just another of these things
everybody believes. Then, I've had to do some studying on the Third
Force occupation of Poictesme to know where to go and dig, and I never
found any official, or even reliably unofficial, mention of anything
of 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 to
get 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 for
themselves."

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

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

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

"That's what I've been trying to tell her. Conn, I noticed that after
Kurt Fawzi started talking about how long it would take to get to the
Gamma 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 their
minds off Merlin?"

"That gang up in Fawzi's office? Nifflheim, no! They'll go on hunting
Merlin till they die. But I was serious about the ship. An idea hit
me. 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 about
selling arms and ammunition at a profit of two hundred sols a ton, and
Klem was talking as though a bumper crop was worse than a Green Death
epidemic. If we had a hypership, look what we could do. How much do
you think a settler on Hoth or Malebolge or Irminsul would pay for a
good rifle and a thousand rounds? How much would he pay for his
life?--that's what it would come to. And do you know what a fifteen-cc
liqueur glass of Poictesme brandy sells for on Terra? One sol;
Federation money. I'll admit it costs like Nifflheim to run a
hypership, but look at the difference between what these tramp
freighter captains pay at Storisende and what they get."

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

Conn puffed slowly at the cigar. Why couldn't they grow tobacco like
this 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't
lift a finger to build a hypership. They've completely lost hope in
everything 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 with
you, make no mistake about that. But you and I will be the only two
people on Poictesme who can be trusted with the truth. We'll have to
lie to everybody else, with every word we speak. We'll have to lie to
Flora, and we'll have to lie to your mother. Your mother most of all.
She believes in absolutes. Lying is absolutely wrong, no matter whom
it helps; telling the truth is absolutely right, no matter how much
damage it does or how many hearts it breaks. You think this is going
to be worth a price like that?"

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

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

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

"Well, convince them that I can find Merlin and that they can't find
it without me. I think I've done that already. Then convince them that
we'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 gang
has."

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

His father, he could see, appreciated what he had brought home from
Terra. 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 a
company organized, a regular limited-liability company, with a
charter. 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 twist
out of them into it, so we'll be sure they won't say, 'Aw, Nifflheim
with it!' and walk out on us as soon as the going gets a little
tough." Rodney Maxwell got to his feet, hitching his gun-belt. "I'll
pass 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 to
know, this is just a war-material prospecting company. I'll impress on
them that Merlin is to be kept a secret. That way, we'll have to
engage in regular prospecting and salvage work as a front. I'll see to
it that the front is also the main objective." He nodded down the
Mall, 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-home
party."

They walked slowly, still talking, until they came to the end of the
Mall. The escalators to the level below weren't working. Now that he
thought 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. For
a moment they stood in the sunset light, looking down on the lower
terrace as they finished their cigars.

Senta's was mostly outdoors, the tables under the open sky. The people
gathered below were looking at the sunset, too; Litchfielders loved to
watch sunsets, maybe because a sunset was one of the few things
economic conditions couldn't affect. There was Kurt Fawzi, the center
of a group to whom he was declaiming earnestly; there was his mother,
and Flora, and Flora's fiance, who was the uncomfortable lone man in
an excited feminine flock. And there was Senta herself, short and
dumpy, in one of her preposterous red and purple dresses, bubbling
happily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter the
next.

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

And an occasional muted Bronx cheer.




IV


The alarm chimed softly beside his bed; he reached out and silenced
it, and lay looking at the early sunlight in the windows, and found
that 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 knowing
everything he knew now, and he began mapping a campaign to establish
himself as Litchfield's Juvenile Delinquent Number One, to the end
that Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and the rest of them would never
dream 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's
office and tell them the truth. All he could do was go ahead. It had
seemed 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 the
shipyards 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, threw
his 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 excitement
of opening the presents he had brought back from Terra. Nobody had had
a chance to talk about Merlin, or about what he was going to do, now
that he was home. That, and his career of mendacity, would start at
breakfast. He wanted to let his father get to the table first, to run
interference for him; he took his time with his toilet and dressed
carefully and slowly. Finally, he zipped up the short waist-length
jacket and went out.

His father and mother and Flora were at the table, and the
serving-robot was floating around a few inches off the floor, steam
trailing from its coffee urn and its tray lid up to offer food. He
greeted everybody and sat down at his place, and the robot came around
to him. His mother had selected all the things he'd been most fond of
six years ago: shovel-snout bacon, hotcakes, starberry jam, things he
hadn't tasted since he had gone away. He filled his plate and poured a
cup 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, and
we'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 depots
and things like that. An amazing list of things that haven't been
discovered 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, for
one 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 Lester
Dawes. All that crowd."

"The Fawzis' Office Gang," Flora said disparagingly. "I suppose
they'll want Conn to take them right to where Merlin is, the first
thing."

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

"I'll bet you couldn't!"

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

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

"Sure. How do you think they fought a war around a perimeter of close
to a thousand light-years? They couldn't do all that out of their
heads. They'd have to have computers, and the one they'd use to
correlate everything and work out grand-strategy plans would have to
be a dilly. Why, I'd give anything just to look at the operating
panels 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 for
something that doesn't exist, just like all these old cranks that sit
around drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin's going to do
for 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 that
stuff you've been bringing in from Tenth Army, and then you'll go
looping off chasing Merlin, like the rest of them. Well, maybe that'll
be a little better than just sitting in Kurt Fawzi's office talking
about it, but not much."

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

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

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

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

Somehow the breakfast wasn't quite as good as he'd thought it was at
first. He wondered how many more breakfasts like that he was going to
have 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 have
gotten Flora started like that."

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

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

"Why, of course." He was mildly surprised at how sincerely and
straightforwardly he said it. "I don't know where it is, but it's
somewhere 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't
share his father's attitude about things everybody knew. She hadn't
any business questioning a fundamental postulate like that.

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

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

"But this is different. A machine that can think. Conn, people weren't
meant 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 the
sort. It doesn't think; the people who make computers and use them do
the thinking. A computer's a tool, like a screwdriver; it has to have
a man to use it."

"Well, but...."

"And please, don't talk about what people are _meant_ to do. People
aren't _meant_ to do things; they _mean_ to do things, and nine times
out of ten, they end by doing them. It may take a hundred thousand
years from a Stone Age savage in a cave to the captain of a hyperspace
ship, but sooner or later they get there."

His mother was silent. The soulless machine that had been clearing the
table floated out of the room, the dishwasher in its rectangular belly
gurgling. Maybe what he had told her was logical, but women aren't
impressed 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. He
just 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, looking
for an opening to start a practice, and he heard about some medical
equipment your father had found somewhere and came out to see if he
could buy it. Your father and Judge Ledue and Mr. Fawzi talked him
into 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 Wade
Lucas might be a good thing for Flora. "I'll drop in on him, sometime
this morning."

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

Now, why didn't they export this tobacco? It was better than anything
they grew on Terra; well, at least it was different, just as Poictesme
brandy was different from Terran bourbon or Baldur honey-rum. That was
the sort of thing that could be sold in interstellar trade anytime and
anywhere; the luxury goods that were unique. Staple foodstuffs,
utility textiles, metal products, could be produced anywhere, and
sooner 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 take
some economics at the University.

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

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

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

"Ah, nice," he complimented. "Made on Terra? We don't see cloth like
that 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 have
a suit made," he said. "For Ghu's sake, either talk him into having a
short 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 of
the street. It was green, with black trimmings, and lettered in black,
GORDON VALLEY HOME GUARD. Tom Brangwyn was standing beside
it, talking to a young man in a green uniform.

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

Yes, now that Tom mentioned it, he did. He and Fred had gone to school
together at the Litchfield Academy. But the six years since they'd
seen each other last had made a lot of difference in both of them. He
was beginning to think that the only strangers in Litchfield were his
own contemporaries. They shook hands, and Conn looked at the combat
car and Fred Karski's uniform.

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

Karski laughed. "Oh, that's the Colonel's idea. Green and black were
his 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 army
platoon, but we have to call it a regiment so he can keep his old
Rebel Army rank."

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

"Who is this Blackie Perales? I heard the name mentioned in connection
with 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 to
be a planter, down in the south. The banks foreclosed on him when he
couldn't pay his notes, and he turned outlaw. That's the way it's
going, all around. Every time a planter loses his plantation or a
farmer loses his farm, or a mechanic loses his job, he turns outlaw.
Take Tramptown, here. We used to plant nothing but melons. Then, when
the sale for wine and brandy dropped, the melon-planters began cutting
their melon crops and raising produce, instead of buying it from up
north, and turning land into pasture for cattle. The people we used to
buy foodstuffs from couldn't sell all they raised, and that threw a
lot of farmhands out of work. So they got the idea there was work
here, and they came flocking in, and when they couldn't get jobs, they
just stayed in Tramptown, stealing anything they could. We don't even
try to police Tramptown any more; we just see to it they don't come up
here."

"Well, where do these outlaws and pirates who are looting whole towns
come 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 around
that Gordon Valley wasn't any outlaws' health resort."

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

"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 still
classified 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 a
hundred and seventy men on the active list, but they had a reserve of
over eight hundred, and combat vehicles and weapons on all the
plantations and in all the towns along the river. The reserve had only
been turned out twice; both times, outlaw attacks had been stopped
dead--literally. The Home Guard, it appeared, was not given to making
arrests or taking prisoners. Finally, he parted from them, strolling
on along the row of stores and business places, many vacant, under the
south edge of the Mall, until he saw a fluorolite sign, WADE
LUCAS, M. D. He entered.

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

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

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

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

He felt his good opinion of Wade Lucas start to slip. The Liberals on
Terra had been full of that kind of talk, which was why only four out
of ten of last year's graduating class at Armed Forces Academy had
been 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 worse
disaster.

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

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

"That's right. You're going to be at the meeting at the Academy this
afternoon, 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 undiscovered
equipment and stores that the Third Force left behind...." He talked
on for some time, keeping to safe generalities. "It's too big for my
father and me to handle alone, even if we didn't feel morally
obligated to take in the people who contributed toward sending me to
school on Terra. You ought to be interested in it. I know of six fully
supplied hospitals, intended to take care of the casualties in case of
a System States space-attack. You can imagine, better than I can, what
would be in them."

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

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

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

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

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

"So I was. I studied computer theory and practice. I have some doubts
about Merlin being able to do some of the things these laymen like
Kellton and Fawzi and Judge Ledue think it could. Those sorts of
misconceptions and exaggerations have to be allowed for. But I have no
doubt whatever that the master computer with which they did their
strategic planning is probably the greatest mechanism of its sort ever
built, and I have no doubt whatever that it still exists somewhere in
the Alpha System."

He almost convinced himself of it. He did not, however, convince Wade
Lucas, 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 that
Merlin exists."

Maybe he was telling the truth. Merlin existed in the beliefs and
hopes of people like Dolf Kellton and Klem Zareff and Judge Ledue and
Kurt Fawzi. Merlin was a god to them. Well, take Ghu, the Thoran
Grandfather-God. Ghu was as preposterous, theologically, as Merlin was
technologically; Ghu, except to Thorans, was a Federation-wide joke.
But he'd known a couple of Thorans at the University, funny little
fellows, with faces like terriers, their bodies covered with matted
black hair. They believed in Ghu the way he believed in the Second Law
of Thermodynamics. Ghu was with them every moment of their lives. Take
away 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 their
belief in Merlin. He started to say something like that, and then
thought better of it.

Yes, Virginia, there _is_ a Santa Claus.




V


The meeting was at the Academy; when Conn and his father arrived, they
found the central hall under the topside landing stage crowded. Kurt
Fawzi and Professor Kellton had constituted themselves a reception
committee. Franz Veltrin was in evidence with his audiovisual
recorder, and Colonel Zareff was leaning on his silver-headed sword
cane. Tom Brangwyn, in an unaccustomed best-suit. Wade Lucas, among a
group of merchants, arguing heatedly. Lorenzo Menardes, the
distiller, and Lester Dawes, the banker, and Morgan Gatworth, the
lawyer, talking to Judge Ledue. About four times as many as had been
in 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 and
Kellton conducted them to this. Both of them were trying to preside,
Kellton because it was his Academy, and Fawzi ex officio as mayor and
professional leading citizen, and because he had come to regard Merlin
as his own private project. After everybody else was seated, the two
rival chairmen-presumptive remained on their feet. Fawzi was saying,
"Let's come to order; we must conduct this meeting regularly," and
Kellton was saying, "Gentlemen, please; let me have your attention."

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

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

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

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

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

"Young Mr. Conn Maxwell, who has just returned from Terra, needs no
introduction to any of you," he began. Then, having established that,
he took the next ten minutes to introduce Conn. When people began
fidgeting, he wound up with: "Now, only about a dozen of us were at
the informal meeting in Mr. Fawzi's office, yesterday. Conn, would you
please repeat what you told us? Elaborate as you see fit."

Conn rose. He talked briefly about his studies on Terra to qualify
himself as an expert. Then he began describing the wealth of abandoned
and still undiscovered Federation war material and the many
installations of which he had learned, careful to avoid giving clues
to exact locations. The spaceport; the underground duplicate Force
Command Headquarters; the vast underground arsenals and shops and
supply depots. Everybody was awed, even his father; he hadn't had time
to 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 with
the blasphemer!_" but that was the general idea. Judge Ledue was
rapping loudly for order.

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

Cheers. He waited for the hubbub to subside. Lucas was trying to yell
above 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't
to me."

"Well, take all these elaborate preparations against space attack you
were telling us about. I think Colonel Zareff, here, who served in the
Alliance Army, will bear me out that such an attack was plainly
impossible."

Zareff started to agree, then realized that he was aiding and
comforting the enemy. "Intelligence lag," he said. "What do you
expect, 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 as
often as possible. "I suppose Merlin classified an Alliance attack on
Poictesme as a low-order probability, but war is the province of
chance; Clausewitz said that a thousand years ago. Foxx Travis wasn't
the sort of commander to let himself get caught, even by a very
low-order probability."

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

"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 the
Third Force, even to the enemy. Say the stories were unfounded; say
Merlin never existed. Yet the belief in Merlin was an important
historical fact, and no history of the War gives it so much as a
footnote." He paused for effect, then continued: "That can mean only
one thing. Systematic suppression, backed by the whole force of the
Terran Federation. A gigantic conspiracy of silence!"

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

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 chair
toppling behind him. He shoved it aside with his foot. "I'm not going
to argue with you. Conn Maxwell gave you a thousand-year-old
quotation; I'll give you another, from Thomas Paine: 'To argue with
those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile
as to administer medicine to the dead.' I'll add this. Conn Maxwell
knows better than this balderdash he's been spouting to you. I don't
know 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 would
have 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 to
argue about the existence of Merlin; we know that. Let's discuss the
question of finding it."

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

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

"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 that
over."

"Well, wherever it is, finding it is going to be expensive," Rodney
Maxwell said. "Now, to finance the search, I propose we use this
information my son brought back from Terra. Doctor Lucas was right
about 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 will
contribute this information as our share in the capitalization of the
company. The work of opening these Federation installations can go on
concurrently with the search for Merlin, and the profits can finance
it."

Silence for a moment, then a bedlam of cheering.

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

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

"It is of the first importance," he said, "that we keep our real
objective--Merlin--as close a secret as possible. The Planetary
Government would like to get hold of it--and I leave you to ask
yourselves how far Jake Vyckhoven and his cronies are to be trusted
with anything like that--and I have no doubt the Federation might try
to take it away from us."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unanimously carried. They had a name, now, anyhow. Everybody began
suggesting other topics for consideration--capitalization, application
for charter, election of officers, stock issues. Conn paid less and
less attention. Industrial finance and organization wasn't his
subject, either. His father was plunging happily into it as though he
had been promoting companies all his life. Conn sat and doodled with
his 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 be
appointed...."

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 a
meeting day after tomorrow evening; the committees should have
everything set up, and we should be able to organize ourselves and
elect permanent officers. Is there anything else to discuss, or do I
hear a motion to adjourn?"

Somebody thought they ought to have some idea of what the first
operation 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 here
on Poictesme."

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

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

That made sense. If he'd been Foxx Travis, and if there had been a
Merlin, that was exactly where he'd have put it himself. But there was
no Merlin, and he wanted a ship. He argued mulishly for a little, then
saw that it was hopeless and gave in.

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

Somebody asked where, approximately, this underground Force Command
headquarters was.

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

"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 Perales
and all."

"Then we'll get an army together," Klem Zareff said happily. "Might
make 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 the
surface; from the plans, I'd say they just dug a big pit, built the
headquarters in it, and filled it in. There are two entrances, a
vertical shaft and a horizontal tunnel."

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

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

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

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

"Well, we need something like that," Fawzi said. "We've needed it for
a long time. I guess it took Conn, coming home from Terra, to see how
badly we've let the town get run down. Franz, suppose you and Tom
Brangwyn and Lorenzo form a committee on that. Look around, see what
needs 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 appointed
his successor."

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

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

"Conn, I was kind of worried, down there. You were being a little too
positive. You know, you're only twenty-three. As long as you agree
with those people, you're a brilliant young man; you start getting
ideas of your own, and you're just a half-baked kid. You let the older
and wiser heads run things. You can't begin to hope to foul things up
the 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 and
the rest of them have this duplicate Force Command thing first,
though. Keep them happy. As soon as we have that opened, you can take
a gang and run over to Barathrum and grab your spaceport. Wait till
they find out that Merlin isn't at Force Command Duplicate. Then you
can convince them it's really on Koshchei."




VI


The car Rodney Maxwell got out of the hangar the next morning wasn't
the one he and Conn had gone to the meeting in; it was the one he had
flown in from Tenth Army HQ at noon of the previous day. An Army
reconnaissance job, slim and needlelike, completely enclosed, looking
more like a missile than a vehicle, and armored in dazzling,
iridescent collapsium. There was something to living on Poictesme, at
that; 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 airspeed
gauge is marked up to four. And she has everything: all kinds of
detection instruments, cameras, audiovisual pickups, armament. And
the armor; you can take her through any kind of radiation."

The armor was only a couple of micromicrons thick, but it would stop
anything. It was collapsed matter, the electron shells of the atoms
collapsed upon the nuclei, the atoms in actual contact. That plating
made eighth-inch sheet steel as heavy as twelve-inch armor plate, and
in texture and shielding properties, lead was like sponge by
comparison.

They climbed in, and Rodney Maxwell snapped on the screens that served
as windows. Conn leaned back and looked at the underside view in a
screen 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 had
paid so far was only the down payment. Dinner last evening. Flora, who
had evidently been talking to Wade Lucas, shouting accusations at
them; his mother fleeing from the table in tears. As the car rose, he
reached out and turned on and adjusted the telescreen for the
under-view.

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

A distillery, bigger than the Menardes plant, long closed and now half
roofless and crumbling. Rows of warehouses, empty after the War until
taken over by homeless vagrants. Jerry-built shanties with rattletrap
aircars grounded around them. Tramptown, a festering sore on the south
side of Litchfield.

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

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

Sudden acceleration pushed them back in their seats. The calibrations
on the gauge rose swiftly; the pink-lighted peak grew swiftly in the
teleview screen. The gauge hadn't been bragging, it had been
understating; the car had more speed than the instrument could
register. Two and a half minutes from Litchfield, they were
decelerating and swinging slowly around Snagtooth, looking down on a
tilted plateau that ended on the western side in a sheer drop of
almost a thousand feet.

There were ruinous buildings on it: barracks and storehouses and
offices, an airship dock and an air-traffic control tower from which
all the glass had long ago vanished, a great steel telecast tower that
had fallen, crushing a couple of buildings. Young trees had already
grown among the wreckage.

"Look over there, on the slope below it; there's one entrance to the
shelters." There was a clearing among the evergreens, half a mile from
the 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 below
the edge of the plateau. They blasted rock down over that. The main
entrance is a vertical shaft under that pre-stressed concrete dome.
That was chapel, auditorium, or something. They just covered it with
sheet metal and poured a foot of concrete on top."

They floated down above the broken roofs and crumbling walls, and
grounded in the area between the main administration building and the
offices, back of the ship docks. Once, he supposed, it had been a
lawn. Then it had been a jungle. Now it was a scuffed, littered,
bare-trodden work-yard. Men were straggling out of the administration
building, lighting pipes and cigarettes; they all wore new but
work-soiled infantry battle dress. All of them waved and shouted
greetings; one, about Conn's own age, approached. As he got out, Conn
saw the resemblance to Lester Dawes, the banker, before he recognized
Anse 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 begin
to believe it pretty soon. "Sorry I couldn't make the party, but
somebody had to sit on the lid here, and Jerry Rivas and I cut cards
for 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: "For
the birds; I'd as soon count sheets of toilet paper as this stuff
we'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're
digging 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 Planetary
Government sol was worth about ten centisols, Federation, and aside
from deposit boxes, woolen socks under the mattress, and tin cans
buried in the corner of the cellar, Federation currency was
nonexistent.

"Had breakfast yet?" Rodney Maxwell asked.

"Oh, hours ago. I was out and shot another spikenose; it's hanging up
back 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 around
and show him the sights. And don't worry about him bumping you out of
a job. Worry about the six or eight extra jobs you'll have to do
besides your own, from now on."

Conn and Anse crossed the yard and entered one of the office
buildings, through a big breach in the wall. Anse said: "I did that
myself; 90-mm tank gun. When we want a wall out of the way, we get it
out of the way." Inside were a lot of lifters and skids and power
shovels 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 an
airjeep and floated out over the edge of the plateau, letting down
past the sheer cliff to where the lower lateral shaft had been opened.
A great deal of rock had been shoveled and bulldozed away to expose
it; it was twenty feet high and forty wide. Anse simply steered the
jeep inside and up the tunnel.

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

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

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

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

More storerooms on the level above, reached by returning to the
vehicle hangar and lifting to an upper entrance. By this time, gangs
were at work there, too, moving contragravity skids in empty and out
loaded.

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

"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 a
hand grenade, too."

Anse Dawes simply didn't believe that.

When they got back to the Administration Building on top, they found
Rodney Maxwell, Jerry Rivas, the general foremen, and half a dozen
gang foremen, in consultation.

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

"Yes. I think we ought to leave a lot of that here--the shovels and
bulldozers and manipulators and so on. We can move it direct to Force
Command. 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, a
freighter; first, to move this stuff out of here, and then to move the
stuff out of Force Command. And we want it mounted with heavy
armament, 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 of
outlaws; there must be hundreds of them holing up over there. That's
where all the trouble on the east coast comes from. Now, outlaws are
sure-thing players. They want to be alive to spend their loot, and
they won't tackle anything that's too tough for them. A lot of guards
and combat equipment may look like a loss on the books, but the books
won'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 outlaws
on the planet to tackle."

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

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

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

"No, you stay here; help keep things moving. Remember what I told you
about the older and wiser heads? Let me handle them. I've been around
them, heaven pity me, longer than you have. Just give me an
audiovisual 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, at
twenty centisols a share. But watch where it goes after we open Force
Command."

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

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

"What are you?"

"Vice-president in charge of operations. That's what I spent all
yesterday 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-holding
stockholder. The only other one is Judge Ledue; as a member of the
judiciary, he did not feel it proper to accept official position in a
private corporation. Tom Brangwyn's Chief of Company Police; Klem
Fawzi is Commander of the Company Guards. And we have a law firm in
Storisende lined up to handle our charter application. Sterber, Flynn
& Chen-Wong. Sterber's married to Jake Vyckhoven's sister, Flynn's son
is married to the daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, and
Chen-Wong is a nephew of the Chief Justice. All of them are directly
descended 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 us
a contragravity ship. There are about a dozen in the hands of
receivers for bankrupt shipping companies; he might find one that's
still airworthy. Oh; you remember how I insisted on absolute secrecy
about our Merlin objective? That's working out better than my fondest
expectations. It's leaking like a machine-gunned water tank, and
everybody it leaks to is positive that we know exactly where Merlin is
or 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 Garden
Terrace, and a gang of men at work. There were more men at work on the
Mall and along the streets on either side. He went up from the yard
below the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found his
mother in the living room watching a screen play with one eye and
keeping the other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravity
tank, which was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and taking
swipes at the furniture with a rotary dustmop. She was glad to see
him, 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 it
to, "No; I won't argue with her at all," and then quoted Wade Lucas
quoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple of
times that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that it
wouldn't get loose and hurt anybody if he did find it.

In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, the
housecleaning-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 use
her control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like an
old-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got the
robot stopped.

No wonder she was afraid of Merlin.

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

He landed on the top of the Airlines Building and rode a lift down to
the office where Kurt Fawzi neglected the affairs of his shipline
agency, his brokerage business, and the city of Litchfield. The
afternoon habitues had begun to gather--Raymond Fitch, the
used-vehicles dealer, Lorenzo Menardes, Judge Ledue, Tom Brangwyn,
Klem Zareff. Fawzi was on the screen, talking to somebody with sandy
hair and a suit that didn't seem to be made of any sort of Federation
Armed Forces material, about warehouse facilities. The addresses they
were 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 me
what sort of stuff. You know what a salvage operation's like; you just
haul 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 in
on the _Countess_ this morning, and Ghu only knows how many in their
own vehicles, and they all seem to think if there's work for some
there 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 Thursday
are doing all right, once they found out we weren't taking any
foolishness."

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

"How much will it cost us?"

Fawzi began to laugh. "Conn, this'll slay you! She isn't costing us a
centisol. You know those old ships on Mothball Row, back of the old
West 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, covered
with muslin and sprayed with protectoplast. The Planetary Government
had taken them over after the War and forgotten them.

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

"Why?"

Fawzi looked at him in surprise. "It would only be in the way and add
weight. 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-drive
missile launchers amidships. And a secondary gun battery of 70-mm's
and 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 Air
Patrol. Look, the Government won't like our having anything like
that."

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

"Gehenna with what the Government likes!" the old Rebel swore. "If
they'd put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe out
these 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 operating
office at Tenth Army, and finally got his father on. He told him about
the ship.

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

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

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

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

Fawzi had. He stopped arguing about armament. Instead, he began
worrying about how much the civic clean-up campaign was costing
Litchfield.

"You think we really need that, Rod?"

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

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

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

Franz Veltrin came in, shortly after Rodney Maxwell was off the
screen. He dropped his audiovisual camera and sound recorder on the
table, 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 a
trough. Then he looked around accusingly.

"Somebody's been talking!" he declared. "I've had all the news
services on the planet on my screen today; they all want the story
about 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, and
found 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, they
didn't believe me. A bunch of them are coming out here tomorrow. What
are 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 leaving
town till they're gone."

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

Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, except Klem Zareff, and
he waited until Conn was ready to go and rode up to the landing stage
with 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 the
meeting against him. I suppose if I'd come from off-planet, I wouldn't
believe 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 staff
officers who'd know where it was. Well, say they all went back to
Terra on the same ship, and the ship was lost at space. Sabotage, one
of our commerce raiders that hadn't heard the War was over, maybe just
an ordinary accident. But the ship's lost, and the location of
Merlin'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 you
went to Terra. And who does he get engaged to? Your sister. And what
does he do here? Goes around arguing that there is no Merlin, getting
people to argue with him, getting them mad, so they'll blurt out
anything they know. I'm an old field officer; I know all the
prisoner-interrogation tricks in the book, and that's always been one
of the best."

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

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

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

He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, about
his 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 and
bossing tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out of
the rain, Klem Zareff's as sane as I am. But on the subject of the
Terran Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"

"They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have places
like 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 in
Kindelburg, on Ashmodai, and the next minute Kindelburg was a puddle
of radioactive slag."

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

That was from a poem, too.

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

A week later, the ship arrived from Storisende; a hundred and sixty
feet, three thousand tons, small enough to be berthed inside a
hyperspace transport, and fast enough to get a load of ammunition to
troops at the front, unload, and get out again before the enemy could
zero in on her, and armed to fight off any Army Air Force combat
craft. The delay had been in recruiting officers and crew. The captain
and chief engineer were out-of-work shipline officers, the gunner was
a former Federation artillery officer, and the crew looked more like
pirates than most pirates did.

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




VII


Fifty-two years before, they had come to the mesa in the Badlands and
dug a pit on top of it, a thousand feet in diameter and more than five
hundred deep, and in it they built a duplicate of the headquarters for
Third Fleet-Army Force Command. They built a shaft a hundred feet in
diameter like a chimney at one side, and they ran a tunnel out through
solid rock to the head of a canyon half a mile away. Then they buried
the whole thing. Twelve years later, when the War was over, they
sealed 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. Wiregrass
sprouted, and thornbush grew; Nature, the master-camoufleur, completed
the work of hiding the forgotten headquarters. Little things not
unlike rabbits scampered over it, and bigger things, vaguely foxlike,
hunted them. Hunted men came, too, their aircars skimming low. None of
them had the least idea what was underneath.

The mesa-top came suddenly to life, just as the sun edged up out of
the east. Conn and his father and Anse Dawes came in first, in the
recon-car with which they had scouted and photographed the site a few
days before. They circled at a thousand feet, fired a smoke bomb, and
then let down near where Conn's map showed the head of the vertical
shaft. The rest followed, first a couple of combat cars that circled
slowly, scanning the ground, and then the _Lester Dawes_ with her big
guns and her load of equipment, and behind a queue of boats and scows
and heavy engineering equipment on contragravity and troop carriers
full of workmen and guards, flanked by air cavalry, which circled
above while everything else landed, then scattered out over a
fifty-mile radius. Occasionally there was a hammering of machine guns,
either because somebody saw something on the ground that might need
shooting at or simply because it was a beautiful morning to make a
noise.

The ship settled quickly and daintily, while Conn and Anse and Rodney
Maxwell sat in the car and watched. Immediately, she began opening
like a beetle bursting from its shell, large sections of armor
swinging outward. Except for the bridge and the gun turrets, almost
the whole ship could be opened; she had been designed to land in the
middle of a battle and deliver ammunition when seconds could mean the
difference between life and death. Jeeps and lifters and manipulators
and things floated out of her. Scows began landing and unloading
prefab-hut elements. A water tank landed, and the cook-shed began
going up beside it; a lorry came in with scanning and probing
equipment, and a couple of men jumped off and huddled over a
photoprint copy of one of Conn's maps.

Conn lifted the car again and coasted it half a mile to where the
cleft in the mesa started. There were half a dozen claw-armed
manipulators already there, and two giant power shovels. Jerry Rivas
and one of the engineers Kurt Fawzi had hired had gotten out of a jeep
and were looking at another photoprint of the map. Rivas pointed to
the 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. The
manipulators began moving in, wrestling with the larger chunks of
rock and dragging or carrying them away. Power shovels began grunting
and clanking and rumbling; dust rose in a thick column. Toward
midmorning, the troop carriers which served as school buses in
Litchfield arrived, loaded with more workmen. A lorry lettered
STORISENDE HERALD-GUARDIAN came in, hovered over the canyon, and
began 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 dug
harder. More aircars arrived, getting in each other's and everybody
else's way. Raymond Fitch, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardes and Morgan
Gatworth. Dolf Kellton, playing hookey from school. Kurt Fawzi; he
landed in the canyon and watched every shovelful of rock lifted, as
though trying to help with mental force. Tom Brangwyn, with a score of
the Home Guard to reinforce the Company Police. Klem Zareff called in
his air cavalry to help control the sightseers. Nobody was making
trouble; they were just getting in the way.

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

Toward midafternoon, the tunnel in the canyon was cleared. It had been
vitrified solid; the scanners reported that it was plugged for ten
feet. A contragravity tank let down in front of it, with a solenoid
jackhammer mounted where the gun should have been, and began pounding,
running a hole in for a blast shot. There were more explosions
topside; when Conn took a jeep up to observe progress there, he found
the vitrified rock blown completely off the vertical shaft, exposing
the rubble that had been dumped into it. The gang on the mesa-top had
discovered something else; a grid of auro-copper bussbars buried four
feet underground. Ten to one, radio and telescreen signals would be
transmitted to that from below, and then probably picked up and
rebroadcast from a relay station on one or another of the high buttes
in the neighborhood. Time enough to look for that later. He returned
to the canyon, where the lateral tunnel was now almost completely
open.

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 three
feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went
slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no
harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there
should be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred feet
wide by a hundred on either side of the tunnel entrance. The robot
entered this, and in its headlight they could see reconnaissance-cars,
and contragravity tanks with 90-mm guns. It swerved slightly to the
left, and then the screen stopped receiving, the telemetered
instruments went dead and the robot's signal stopped.

"Tom," Rodney Maxwell said, "you keep the crowd back. Klem, stay with
the 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 Terra
to study robotics for?"

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

Half a mile ahead, at the other end of the tunnel, they could see a
flicker of light that grew brighter as they advanced. The snooper
still had its light on and was moving about. Once they caught a
momentary signal from it. As Rodney Maxwell piloted the jeep, Conn
kept talking to Klem Zareff, outside. Then they were at the end of the
tunnel and entering the room ahead; it was full of vehicles, like the
one 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 been
shot out.

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

The snooper was drifting aimlessly about, avoiding the parked
vehicles. Conn used the manual control to set it down and deactivate
it, 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 getting
me; I'm getting him. What's the matter with the radio in here? The
snooper's all right, isn't it?"

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

"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. Conn
could hear the old soldier, in the radio, make a similar remark. They
should have all expected that, in the first place. If the Third Force
High Command was expecting to sit out a nuclear bombardment in this
place, they'd armor it against anything.

"Bring the gang in; it's safe as far as we've gotten," his father
said. "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 word
for gold-leaf circuits cemented to the walls and covered with
insulating paint. For the heavy stuff, like the ventilator fans,
they'd have to find the central power plant. He looked around the big
room, poking into some of the closets that lined it. Radiation-proof
clothing. Tools. Arms and ammunition. First-aid kits. Emergency
rations. All the vehicles were plated in shimmering collapsium.

The crowd started coming in: the work-gangs selected for the first
exploration work, most of them old hands of Rodney Maxwell's; the
engineers they had recruited; Mohammed Matsui--he had a gang of his
own, the same one he had been using in tearing down the converter at
Tenth Army; the stockholders and officials; the press. And everybody
else Tom Brangwyn's police hadn't been able to keep out.

The power plant was at the extreme bottom; Matsui began looking it over
at once. Above it they found the service facilities--air-and-water
plant; 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 very
top, I suppose. Let's go up and work down; I can't wait till we've
found it."

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

The place was built in concentric circles, level above level. Combat
equipment nearest the tunnel exit and nearest the vertical shaft, and
ambulances and decontamination units and equipment for relief and
rebuilding next. Storerooms, mile on circular mile of them. Not the
hasty packrat cramming he'd seen at Tenth Army; everything had been
brought in in order, carefully piled or racked, and then left. More
stores for the next three levels up; then living quarters. Enlisted
men's and women's quarters, no signs of occupancy. Enlisted kitchens
and mess halls, untouched.

Most of the officers' quarters were similarly unused, but here and
there some had been occupied. A sloppily made bed. A used cake of soap
in the bathroom. An empty bottle in a closet. Officers' commissary
stores had been used from and replaced; the officers' mess hall and
kitchen had been in constant use, and the officers' club had a
comfortably scuffed and lived-in look. There had been a few people
there all the time of the War.

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

And above, offices. General Staff. War Planning, with an incredibly
complex 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 and
Judge Ledue, but they were only special-purpose machines, the sort to
be found in any big business office. The Storisende Stock Exchange
probably had much bigger ones.

Then they found big ones, rank on rank of cabinets, long consoles
studded 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 radio
handphone from his belt and jabbered, then, realizing that the
collapsium shielding kept him from getting out with it, he replaced it
and bolted away.

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

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

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

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

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

The next level up was much smaller. Here were the offices of the top
echelons of the Force Command Staff. They, unlike the ones below, had
been used; from them, too, every scrap of writing or film or
record-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 of
the forty-year-old cigarette ends lipstick tinted. Chairs shoved
around at random. Three bottles on the desk, with Terran bourbon
labels; two empty and one with about an inch of whisky left in it. But
no glasses.

That bothered Conn. Somehow, he couldn't quite picture the commander
and staff of the Third Fleet-Army Force passing bottles around and
drinking from the neck. Then he noticed that the wall across the room
was strangely scarred and scratched. Dropping his eye to the floor
under it, he caught the twinkle of broken glass. They had gathered
here, and talked for a long time. Then they had risen, for a final
toast, and when it was drunk, they had hurled their glasses against
the wall and smashed them.

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




VIII


Before they returned to the lower level into which the lateral tunnel
entered, Matsui and his gang had the power plant going; the ventilator
fans were humming softly, and whenever they pressed a starting button,
the escalators began to move. They got the pumps going, and the
oxygen-generators, and the sewage disposal system. Until the
communication center could be checked and the relay station found,
they ran a cable out to the _Lester Dawes_, landed in the canyon, and
used her screen-and-radio equipment. Before the Claims Office in
Storisende closed, Rodney Maxwell had transmitted in recorded views of
the interior, and enough of a description for a final claim. They also
received 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 bolted
off 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 biggest
abandoned-property discovery since the Third Force left the
Trisystem.

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

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

They moved into the staff headquarters at the top; Foxx Travis's
office, tidied up, became the headquarters for the company officials
and chief supervisors. The workmen quartered themselves in the
enlisted barracks, helping themselves liberally to anything they
found. The crowds of sightseers kept swarming in, giving Tom
Brangwyn's police plenty to do. Tom himself turned the marshal's
office in Litchfield over to his chief deputy. Klem Zareff insisted on
more men for his guard force. A dozen gunboats, eighty-foot craft
mounting one 90-mm gun, several smaller auto-cannon and one
missile-launcher, had been found; he took them over immediately,
naming them for capital ships of the old System States Navy. It took
some argument to dissuade him from repainting all of them black and
green. He kept them all in the air, with a swarm of smaller airboats
and combat-cars, circling the underground headquarters at a radius of
a hundred miles. These patrols reported a general exodus from the
region. At least a dozen outlaw bands, all with fast contragravity,
had been camped inside the zone. Some fled at once; the rest needed
only a few warning shots to send them away. Other bands, looking like
legitimate prospecting parties, began to filter into the Badlands.
Zareff came to Rodney Maxwell--instead of Kurt Fawzi, the titular head
of the company, which was significant--to find out what policy
regarding them would be.

"Well, we have no right to keep them out, as long as they stay outside
our ten-mile radius," Conn's father said. "And as we're the only
thing that even looks like law around here, I'd say we have an
obligation to give them protection. Have your boats investigate them;
if they're legitimate, tell them they can call on us for help if they
need 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 work
slacks off here, we could pick that stuff up."

"Conn, there's an old stock-market maxim: 'A bear can make money
sometimes, and a bull can make money sometimes, but in the long run, a
hog always loses.' Let the other people find some of this; it'll all
help the Plan. Fact is, I've been thinking of leaking some
information, 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 on
Acaire, or on the west coast? Big enough to be important, and to start
a 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 joining
us. A lot of medical stores would be a good bait for him. I'm afraid
he's going to make trouble if we don't do something about him."

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

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

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

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

Some of the L. E. & S. stockholders who had come out on the first day
began drifting back to Litchfield. Lester Dawes was the first to
defect; there was nothing he could do at Force Command, and a great
deal that needed his personal attention at the bank. Morgan Gatworth
and 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. Neither
were Franz Veltrin or Dolf Kellton or Judge Ledue. Tom Brangwyn
resigned as town marshal; Klem Zareff was too busy even to think of
Merlin; he had almost as many men under his command, and twice as much
contragravity, as he had had when the System States Alliance Army had
surrendered.

Conn flew to Litchfield, and found that the public works project had
come to a stop at noon of the day when Force Command was entered, and
that nothing had been done on it since. The cold vitrifier was still
standing in the middle of the Mall, and topside Litchfield was
littered in a dozen places with forsaken equipment and half-completed
paving. There was no one in Kurt Fawzi's office in the Airlines
Building, and the employment office was jammed with migratory workers
vainly seeking jobs.

He hunted up Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer.

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

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

"Well, you're here. Lester Dawes and Lorenzo Menardes are here. Why
don'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 a
Litchfield."

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

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

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

"He was blaming you and your father for what's been going on here in
the 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 had
gotten 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 whole
world Merlin-crazy. Look at the stock market...."

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

"Well, it's your fault!"

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

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

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

Klem Zareff's patrols were encountering larger outlaw bands, the
result of gang mergers. They were fighting with prospecting parties,
and prospecting parties were fighting one another. Much of this was
making the newscasts. One battle, between two regularly chartered
prospecting companies, lasted three days, with an impressive casualty
list.

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

And, of course, the market boom was still on. The newscasts were full
of that, too. He had started worrying about _if_ a bust came; now he
was worrying about what would happen _when_ it did. Another good
reason 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 for
Barathrum Spaceport. Quite a few of the new companies had large
contragravity craft, and the nascent Planetary Air Navy was
approaching a state of being. He wanted to get out there before
anybody else did.

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

He talked to Klem Zareff about borrowing a couple of the eighty-foot
gunboats. 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. They
fired on one of our gunboats, the _Werewolf_, yesterday."

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

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

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

"These other prospecting companies are doing a lot of our
outlaw-fighting for us, and as long as the country's full of small
independent 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 both
are Federation agents; they're waiting till we find Merlin, and then
they'll all jump us."

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

"Yes. It might. Defense armament, and stored ships' weapons. Say, if
we grab that place and move all the heavy guns and missiles here, we
could stand off anybody." The thought of a fight with minions of the
Terran Federation seemed to have shaved ten years off his age in a
twinkling. "You take the _Lester Dawes_, and, let's say, three of
these 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 from
here; no telling what might happen. But you keep in constant
screen-contact; if you get into any trouble, I'll come with everything
I can put into the air."




IX


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

The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked
the division of sea and land; the gunboat _Goblin_ in the lead, her
sisters, _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 the
teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back
again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. "Attention
everybody! General alert. Prepare for combat; prepare to take
immediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport is
occupied, and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will you
please 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. "You
don'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 something
indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, "Well, all right, if you
think so...."

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

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

The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be seven
miles 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 huge
that it was hard to realize that the jumbled foothills around it were
themselves respectably lofty mountains.

When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightly
near the summit. An instant later, the missileman, in his turret
overhead, shouted:

"Missile coming up; counter-missile off!"

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

Conn, on his feet, flung his arms around an upright stanchion and hung
on. Fred's hand gave a twisting jerk on the steering handle; the
_Goblin_ went corkscrewing upward. In the rearview screen, Conn saw a
pink fireball blossom far below. The sound and the shock-wave never
reached them; the _Goblin_ outran them. _Dragon_ and _Vampire_ were
spiraling away in opposite directions. The radio was loud with voices,
and a few of the words were almost printable. A gong began clanging
from the command post on top of the mesa on the mainland.

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

That made sense. And get it settled who's in command of this
Donnybrook, while we're at it, Conn thought. He looked into the rear
and sideview screens, and taking cover immediately made even more
sense. 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 and
another beside one of the enemy gun positions--115-mm's from the
_Lester Dawes_, he supposed. He continued to cling to the
stanchion, and the _Goblin_ shot straight up, and he was expecting
to see the sky blacken and the stars come out when the gunboat leveled
and started circling down again. The mountainside, he saw, was sending
up a lightning-crackling tower of smoke and dust that swelled into a
mushroom 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 get
rid 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 we
get this crate down in one piece, it'll do for a miracle till a real
one happens."

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

The _Lester Dawes_ vanished behind a mountain range a few miles from
the 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 and
tossing out counter-missiles. There was another fireball between her
and the mountain. Then, when the _Dragon_ had followed the _Lester
Dawes_ to safety, she turned tail and bolted, the _Goblin_ following.
As they approached the mountains, something the shape of a recon-car
and about half the size passed them going in the opposite direction.
As they dropped into the chasm on the other side, another nuclear went
off at the volcano.

When Conn and Fred left the _Goblin_ and boarded the ship, they found
Rodney 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 the
other screens, from a pickup on the _Vampire_, showed the _Dragon_
lying on her side, her turret crushed and her gun, with the
muzzle-brake gone, bent upward. A couple of lorries from the _Lester
Dawes_ were alongside; as Conn watched, a blanket-wrapped body, and
then another, were lowered from the disabled gunboat.

"Fred, how are you and Charley fixed for counter-missiles?" Zareff was
asking. "Get loaded up with them off the ship, as many as you can
carry. Charley, you go up on top of this ridge above, and take cover
where you can watch the mountain. Transmit what you see back to the
ship. Fred, you take a position about a quarter way around from where
you are now. Don't let them send anything over, but don't start
anything yourselves. I'm coming out with everything I can gather up
here; I'll be along myself in a couple of hours, and the rest will be
stringing 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 one
of these new prospecting companies. We have no right to take it away
from 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 for
that."

"We do, and we'll pay off. Conn, you assume wrong. This gang's been at
the spaceport long enough to get the detection system working and put
the defense batteries on ready. They didn't do that since this
morning, and up to last evening they neglected to file claim. I'll
assume 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 the
Badlands gangs. I'll admit they're responsible for some of it, but
I'll bet this gang at the spaceport is doing most of it."

That was reasonable. Barathrum was closer to the scene of the worst
outlaw depredations than the Badlands, not more than an hour at Mach
Two. And nobody ever thought of Barathrum as an outlaw hangout. People
rarely thought of Barathrum at all. He liked the idea. The only thing
against it was that he wanted so badly to believe it.

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

For a long time, nothing happened. Conn got out the plans of the
volcano spaceport and the photomaps of the surrounding area. The
principal entrance, the front door of the spaceport, was the crater of
the extinct volcano itself. It was ringed, outside, with
launching-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 to
man them was a question a lot of people could get killed trying to
answer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the crater
floor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far back
into 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 missile
positions.

With a dozen ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_, about five thousand
men, 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. It
was a tunnel two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshops
and storerooms back of the ship berths from a big blowhole or small
crater at the foot of the mountain. According to the fifty-year-old
plans, it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it looked
like 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 only
had a short introductory course, in one semester, in military and
protective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wanted
to go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough to
give him an idea of the sort of booby-traps that tunnel could be
filled with. He knew what he'd have put into it if he'd been defending
that place.

Colonel Zareff had sent one last message from Force Command when he
lifted off with a flight of recon-cars. After that, he maintained a
communication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got close
enough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately, the
volcano began spewing out missiles. Poole hastily took the _Lester
Dawes_ ten miles down the rift-valley in sixty seconds, while Stefan
Jorisson put out a nuclear-warhead missile and left it circling about
where the ship had been. From their respective positions, Fred Karski
and Charley Gatworth filled the airspace midway to the volcano with
counter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There were
explosions, fireballs in the air and rising cumulus clouds of
varicolored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reached
the _Lester Dawes'_ former position.

When their controllers, back at the volcano, couldn't see the ship in
their screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately, Jorisson
sent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own,
eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shook
the 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't
you?"

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

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

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

It was almost a miracle, the way the tottering old man Conn had seen
on the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra had been
rejuvenated.

The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles and
counter-missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about the
supply; the enemy didn't seem to be running short. By 1300--Conn noted
the time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going on
forever, instead of just four hours--the _Lester Dawes_ had moved
halfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the
eight gunboats were spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped
transmitting; in the other screens, there was a rising fireball where
she had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports.

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

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

"That's usually the beginning of the end," Zareff said. "I saw it
happen 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 smash
each 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. "The
amount of nuclear energy we've been releasing will be detectable
anywhere on the planet by now. The Government has a ship like the
_Lester Dawes_ in commission; if this keeps on, she'll be coming out
for a look."

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

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

Well, that was it, then. The spaceport was essential to the Maxwell
Plan. He'd gotten seven men killed--eight, if the recon-car that was
taking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn't make it in
time--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 least
twenty men; fewer than that couldn't accomplish anything."

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

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

"You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel," he continued. "You
know them better than I do. We'll need working equipment, too; I have
no 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 leakage
from inactive power units of overhead lights, and nothing else. The
tunnel stretched ahead of it, empty, and dark beyond its infrared
vision. After it had gone a mile without triggering anything, the jeep
followed, Anse Dawes piloting and Conn at the snooper controls
watching what it transmitted back. The two lorries followed, loaded
with men and equipment, and another jeep brought up the rear. They had
cut screen-and-radio communication with the outside; they weren't even
using inter-vehicle communication.

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

They came to other rectangular, excavated caverns. On the plans, they
were marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shrouded
objects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they found
evidence 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 the
plans, it ran straight out to the ship docks and the open crater
beyond. Anse turned the jeep into a side passage, and Conn recalled
the snooper and sent it ahead. On the plan, it led to another natural
cavern, half its width shown as level with the entrance. The other
half was a pit, marked as sixty feet deep; above this and just under
the ceiling, several passages branched out in different directions.

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

A small fire was burning in the center; around it, in a circle, some
hundred 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 they
could have gotten down there."

They were in rags, and they weren't armed; there wasn't so much as a
knife or a pistol among them. Conn motioned the lorries and the other
jeep 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 the
men in the lorries. "I'm going down and talk to them."

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

They were all dirty and ragged; the men were unshaven. There was a
tall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls; another man with
a black beard and an old Space Navy uniform, his head bandaged with a
dirty and blood-caked rag; another in the same uniform, wearing a cap
on which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced by the
emblem of Transcontinent & Overseas Shiplines and the words CHIEF.
And beside the tall man with the gray beard, was a girl
in 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 to
perplexity and then hope.

"Who are you?" the tall man with the gray beard asked. "You're none of
this 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 four
stripes on his sleeve asked. "There was firing, artillery and
nuclears, and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloody
murderers out?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How many pirates are there here?"

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

"You get us out of here," Yves Jacquemont was saying. "All we want is
a 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 treasure
house, where they store their loot. There's plenty of arms and
ammunition, and anything else you can think of. They've used us to
help stow the stuff; we know where it is."

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

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 of
organizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band and
making himself king. He's heard that there are Space Navy superweapons
on Koshchei--I suppose there are, at that--and he wants to get a lot
of planetbusters and hellburners and annihilators." He lowered his
voice. "Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that'd
blow 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 to
Nichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vibart. There was
evidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could be
built, but there were foundries and rolling-mills and a
collapsed-matter producer. The _Harriet Barne_ was gutted, half torn
down, and half armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. It
might 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 letting
down. They got the prisoners into them, the combat-effective men in
one and the women and children in the other. At the top, he took over
the remaining jeep, getting Jacquemont, his daughter, and the two
contragravityship officers in with him.

"Up to the top," Jacquemont said. "Take the middle passage, and turn
right 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 picking
up radio and screen signals, all of which were scrambled and
incomprehensible. The pirates, in different positions, talking among
themselves. With all that, it ought to be safe to use their own
communication equipment; nobody would notice it.

The treasure room looked like a giant pack rat's nest. Cases and
crates of merchandise, bales, boxes, barrels. Machinery. Household and
industrial robots. The prisoners piled out of the two scows and began
rummaging. Somebody found a case of cigarettes and smashed it open; in
a moment, cartons were being tossed around and opened, and everybody
was smoking. The pirates evidently hadn't issued any tobacco rations
to their prisoners.

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

Conn collected a few of his own party.

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

They found several--an electric-light servicer, a couple of
wall-and-window washers, a serving-robot that looked as if it had come
from a restaurant, and an all-purpose robo-janitor. In the passage
outside, they began loading the lorries with bricks of ionite and
packages of cataclysmite, packing all the scrap-iron and other junk
around the explosives that they could. As soon as they had weapons,
the prisoners came swarming out, making more noise than was necessary
and a good deal more than was safe. Sylvie Jacquemont, with a
submachine gun slung from one shoulder and a canvas bag of spare
magazines from the other, came over to see what he was doing.

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

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

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

That was true. He didn't think robots were alive, either, though
biophysics professors tended to become glibly evasive when pinned down
to defining life. Robots could learn, if you used the term loosely
enough. And any robot with more than five hundred hours service picked
up 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 his
daughter, the two _Harriet Barne_ officers, and a couple of
others--bent over the photoprinted plans Conn had, located their
position, and told him as much as they could about what lay ahead.
Sylvie Jacquemont could handle robots; she would ride in the front
seat of the jeep while he piloted. Vibart, the chief engineer, and
Yves Jacquemont would ride behind. Nichols would ride in the scow with
the 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. Stefan
Jorisson 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, Klem
Zareff.

"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 who
they were. "Did you hear from Anse?"

"Yes, he just screened in," Rodney Maxwell said. "He said a gunboat
can 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; regular
special-weapons section. What can you do where you are?"

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

"That's it!" Zareff approved. "Pull them off balance; as soon as we
get 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 being
spotted from above."

He lifted the jeep and started off; the lorry, and the scows and the
other lorry, followed; the snooper and the bomb-robots went ahead like
a pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark and
silent and bulking with dusty machines. Jacquemont explained that the
prisoners had never gotten into this section; the _Harriet Barne_ was
a mile or so to their right. Conn turned left, when the noise of
firing from outside became plainer. A foundry. A machine-shop which
seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of some rush job that
hadn't really been necessary. They came to a place even the snooper
couldn't enter, choked to the ceiling with dead vegetation, hydroponic
seed-plants that had been left untended to grow wild and die. They
emerged into outside light, in vast caves a mile high and open onto
the crater, and looked across the floor that had been leveled and
vitrified to the other side, three and a half miles away.

He didn't know whether to be more awed by the original eruption that
had formed the crater or by the engineering feat of carving these
docks and ship-berths, big enough for the hugest hyperspaceship, into
it.

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

He was also worrying about the women and children among the released
prisoners.

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

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

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

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

"That means we'll have to detach some men to cover them, and that'll
cut our striking force down." He whistled at the sound-pickup of his
screen 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. "Your
decision. How soon can you attack? We're almost through to the
crater."

"There's a vertical shaft right above us, and a lot of noise at the
top. We'll send up a couple of bomb-robots to clear things at the
shaft-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 old
Pre-Atomic conquerors; maybe Hitler. No, Hitler would have said, "If
you want to make sauerkraut, you have to chop cabbage." Maybe it was
Caesar.

"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 himself
calling a robot "him," instead of "it." He thought for a second, and
added: "Give your father and Mr. Vibart the controls for the two
window-washers; you handle the snooper."

He gave more instructions: Yves Jacquemont to turn his bomb-robot
right, Vibart to turn his left; the two lorries to follow the jeep up
the shaft, the scows to follow. Then he leaned back and looked at the
screens that had been rigged under the top of the jeep. A circle of
light appeared in one, growing larger and brighter as the snooper
approached the top of the shaft; two more came on as the bomb-robots
followed.

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

The snooper popped out of the shaft, onto a gallery that had been cut
into 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 medium
airboat rested a hundred or so feet on the right of the shaft-opening.
Fifteen or twenty men were clustered around it, with a lifter loaded
with ammunition. They looked like any crowd of farm-tramps. Suddenly,
one of them saw the snooper, gave a yell, and fired at it with a
rifle. Sylvie pulled it back into the shaft; her father and the chief
engineer sent the two bomb-robots up onto the gallery. The right-hand
robot sped at the airboat; the last thing Conn saw in its screen was a
face, bearded and villainous and contorted with fright, looking out
the pilot's window of the airboat. Then it went dead, and there was a
roar from above. On the other side, several men were firing straight
at the pickup of the other robot; it went dead, too, and there was a
second explosion.

In the communication screen, somebody was yelling, "Give them another
one 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 only
trouble was that it let in too many kibitzers.

The gallery, when the jeep emerged onto it, was empty except for
casualties, 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 the
jeep 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, but
they'd had names like Foxx Travis and Robert E. Lee and
Napoleon--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 live
pirates, a deplorable situation which ought to be corrected at once.
The communication screen was noisy, now; his father had gotten to the
top gallery with the three gun cutters, and was meeting resistance. He
formed his column, his jeep and one of the lorries in front, the scows
next, and the second lorry behind, and started around the gallery
counterclockwise, the snoopers and the three remaining bomb-robots
ahead. They began running into resistance almost at once.

Bullets spatted on the armor glass in front of him, spalling it and
blotching it with metal until he found that he could steer better by
the show-back of his view-pickup. He used that until the pickup was
shot out. Then his father began wanting to know, from the
communication screen, what was going on and where he was. A bomb or
something went off directly under the jeep, bouncing it almost to the
ceiling; he found that it was impossible to lift it again after it
settled to the floor of the gallery, and they all piled out to fight
on foot. Sommers and his gang from the number one lorry were also
afoot; their vehicle had been disabled. He saw them lifting wounded
into one of the scows.

They blew up the light-service robot to clear a nest of pirates who
had taken cover ahead of them. They sent the robo-janitor up a side
passage and exploded it in a missile-launching position on the outside
of the mountain; that produced a tremendous explosion. They began
running out of cartridges, and had to stop and glean more from enemy
casualties. They expended their last bomb-robot, the restaurant
server, to break up another pirate resistance point.

At length he found himself, with Sylvie and her father and one of the
Home Guardsmen from Sommers' lorry, lying behind an aircar somebody
had knocked out with a bazooka, with two dead pirates for company and
a dozen distressingly live ones ahead behind an improvised barricade.
Behind, there was frantic firing; the rear-guard seemed to have run
into trouble, probably from some gang that had come down from the
upper 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 came
running toward him. Been reinforced, now they're counterattacking. His
rifle was empty; he drew his pistol and shot one of them, and then he
saw 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 prisoners
except Jacquemont and his daughter were around, and then called to a
couple of his own men to come up and help him. While they were
relieving the pirates of their pistol belts and cartridge bandoliers,
more came up, their hands over their heads, herded by a combat car
from which Tom Brangwyn covered them with a pair of 12-mm machine
guns. Tom hadn't put in an appearance before he had taken his commando
force into the tunnel; he hadn't even known the chief of Company
Police 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 other
side. We have a quarter of the top gallery, and half of this one. Your
father's cleaning up above. Klem's got some men working along the
outside."

Sylvie was tugging at his arm. "Hey, look! Look at that!" she was
clamoring. "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 counting
the egg breakage."




XI


The shooting died down to occasional rattles of small arms, usually
followed by yells for quarter. An explosion thundered from across the
crater. The _Lester Dawes_ fired her big guns a few times. A machine
gun stuttered. A pistol banged, far away. It took two hours before all
the pirates had been hunted out of hiding and captured, or killed if
found by their former captives, who were accepting no surrender
whatever.

Blackie Perales had been one of the latter; he had been found, his
clothes in rags and covered with dirt and grease, hiding under a
machine in one of the shops back of the dock in which the _Harriet
Barne_ was being rebuilt. He had tried to claim that he was one of the
pirates' prisoners who had eluded the roundup at the beginning of the
battle and had been hiding there since. As soon as the real prisoners
saw and recognized him, they had fallen upon him and clubbed, kicked
and stamped him out of any resemblance to humanity. At that, what he
got was probably only a fraction of what he deserved.

The egg breakage had been heavy, and not at all confined to the bad
eggs. A third gunboat, the _Banshee_, had been destroyed with all
hands during the final attack from outside; in addition, a dozen men
had been killed during the fighting in the galleries. Everybody was
shocked, except Klem Zareff, who had been in battles before. He was
surprised that the casualties had been so light.

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

Closer examination disabused him of this hope. There was nothing of
which the framework of a ship could be built, and no way of producing
heavy structural steel. The rolling-mill was good enough to turn out
eighth-inch sheet material which when plated with a few micromicrons
of collapsium would be as good as a hundred feet of lead against
space-radiations, but that was the ship's skin. A ship needed a
skeleton, too. The only thing to do was go on with the _Harriet
Barne_.

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

"Well, our pay goes on from the day we were captured," Nichols was
saying. "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 in
Storisende," Rodney Maxwell said. "They're continuing him in command
of her."

"But ... but we took that ship! We lost three gunboats and about
twenty-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 any
law."

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 for
nothing."

"Well, of course, I'm prejudiced," Sylvie said, "but I don't think
getting us out of the hands of that bloodthirsty maniac and his
cutthroats 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 of
years."

"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 a
hypership of our own, and get our brandy and things to markets where
we could get a decent price for them."

"I know. I was in and out of Storisende on these owner-captain tramps
for a couple of years before I decided to retire and settle here,"
Jacquemont said. "The profit on a cargo of Poictesme brandy on Terra
or 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 out
of."

"That's right," Jacquemont said. "Everything else besides the frame
can be made here. Look, these pirates burned me out; except for the
money 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 and
go to work for your company building a spaceship. And a lot of the men
who were working here are farm-tramps and drifters, one job's as good
as another as long as they get paid for it. And I know a few good men
in Storisende--engineers--who'd be glad for a job, too."

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

"Of course it would; they'd be glad to have her." Rodney Maxwell
turned 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 Spaceport
the next morning; a rear-rank vice-president, a front-rank
legal-eagle, and three engineers. They were horrified at what they
saw. The _Harriet Barne_ had been gutted. Bulkheads and decks had
been ripped out and relocated incomprehensibly; the bridge and the
control 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 little
ragged now, but--"

"You helped these pirates do this to her?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We'll give you twenty thousand sols," the lawyer said. "We don't want
to be tightfisted. After all, you fought a gang of pirates and lost
some 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, is
practically valueless."

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

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

The third day after the battle, Conn and his father and Sylvie and her
father flew to Litchfield. To Conn's surprise, Flora greeted him
cordially, and Wade Lucas, rather stiffly, congratulated him. Maybe it
was as Tom Brangwyn had said; he hadn't been on Poictesme in the last
four or five years and didn't know how bad things had gotten. His
mother seemed to think he had won the Battle of Barathrum
single-handed.

He was even more surprised and gratified that Flora made friends with
Sylvie immediately. His mother, however, regarded the engineer's
daughter with badly concealed hostility, and seemed to doubt that
Sylvie 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 next
morning, both more optimistic about finding a ship than Conn thought
the circumstances warranted. Conn stayed at home for the next few
days, luxuriating in idleness. He and Sylvie tore down his mother's
household robots and built sound-sensors into them, keying them to
respond to their names and to a few simple commands, and including
recorded-voice responses in a thick Sheshan accent. All the smart
people on Terra, he explained, had Sheshan humanoid servants.

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

They were strolling after dinner, down the Mall. The air was sharp and
warned 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 in
it? Ever since Dad and I came to Poictesme, I've been hearing about
it, but it's just a story, isn't it?"

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

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

He looked down the starlit Mall ahead of him. Somebody, maybe Lester
Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes, had gotten things
finished and cleaned up. The pavement was smooth and unbroken; the
litter had vanished.

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

There was a faint humming from somewhere ahead, and he was wondering
what it was. Then they came to the long escalators, and he saw that
they 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's
something about a ship."

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

"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 to
be flown to Barathrum and torn down and completely rebuilt, but not
the 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 pay
prize-money on her and then either restore her to original condition
or finish the job and build a spaceship they didn't want, it would
almost bankrupt the company. They got up as high as fifty thousand
sols for prize-money and we just laughed at them. So we made a
proposition 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 to
assign their equity in the _Harriet Barne_ to the new company, the
work of completing her to be done at our spaceport and the labor cost
to be shared. This would give us our spaceship, and get T. & O. off
the 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 out
of college, and that was while the War was still going on.
'Preposterous; utterly visionary and impractical,'" his father
mimicked. "Fortunately, a majority of the big stockholders didn't
agree; they finally bullied him into agreeing. We're calling the new
company 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 be
vice-president in charge of operations; he's flying to Barathrum
tomorrow 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 men
from their shipyard. I'm staying here in Storisende; we're opening an
office here. By this time next week, we're all going to wish we'd been
born quintuplets."

"And Conn Maxwell, I suppose, will be an influential
non-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 a
survey and inventory of the spaceport. Captain Nichols and four of the
original crew of the _Harriet Barne_, who had shared his captivity
among the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And Fred
Karski, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, was
keeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formation
of Alpha-Interplanetary when Conn arrived.

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

It didn't take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in the
conversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere and
gravitation, the _Harriet Barne_ was long and narrow, like an old
ocean ship; more than anything else, she had originally resembled a
huge 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 to
know.

"No, we'll use our acceleration for pseudograv halfway, and
deceleration the other half," Jacquemont told him. "We'll be in free
fall about ten or fifteen hours. What we're going to have to do will
be to lift off from Poictesme in the horizontal position the ship was
designed for, and then make a ninety-degree turn after we're
off-planet, with our lift and our drive working together, just like
one 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 the
conversion job. It meant that everything would have to be mounted on
gimbals, everything stowed so as to be secure in either position, and
nothing 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 and
untaught helpers, went back to working the engines over, tearing out
all the safety devices that were intended to keep the ship inside
planetary atmosphere, and arranging the lift engines so that they
could be swung into line with the drive engines. There was a lot of
cybernetic and robotic equipment, and astrogational equipment, that
had to be made from scratch. Conn picked a couple of helpers and went
to work on that.

From time to time, he was able to snatch a few minutes to read
teleprint papers or listen to audiovisual newscasts from Storisende.
He was always disappointed. There was much excitement about the new
interplanetary company, but the emphasis was all wrong. People weren't
interested in getting hyperships built, or opening the mines and
factories on Koshchei, or talking about all the things now in short
supply that could be produced there. They were talking about Merlin,
and they were all positive, now, that something found at Force Command
Duplicate had convinced Litchfield Exploration & Salvage that the
giant computer was somewhere off-planet.

Rodney Maxwell flew in from Storisende; he was accompanied by Wade
Lucas, 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 of
operations. As an influential non-office-holding stockholder, I'd
think so. He's only running around helping out here and there."

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

Wade Lucas began to talk about how desperately some types of drug and
some varieties of diagnostic equipment were needed. Conn had it on the
tip 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. "I
wouldn't have spoken so forcefully against it if I had. I thought it
was nothing but this Merlin thing--"

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

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

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

"Oh, I stopped carrying a gun; I'm a city man, now. Nobody carries one
in Storisende. Won't even be necessary in Litchfield before long. Our
new 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 have
so many companies you won't be able to to keep track of them before
long," Conn said.

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

Merlin was now a political issue. A bill had been introduced in
Parliament to amend the Abandoned Property Act of 867 and nationalize
Merlin, when and if discovered and regardless by whom. The support
seemed to come from an extremist minority; everybody else, including
the Administration, was opposed to it. There was considerable
acrimony, however, on the propositions: 1) that Merlin was too
important to the prosperity of Poictesme to become a private monopoly;
and 2) that Merlin was too important, etc., to become a political
football and patronage plum.

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

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

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

"There are a couple of other companies interested in interplanetary
ships now," his father added. "One of them had gotten four old
freighters off Mothball Row, and they're tearing them down and
cannibalizing them into one spaceship. That work's being done here at
Storisende Spaceport. And another company has gotten title to a couple
of old office buildings and has a gang at work dismantling them for
the structural steel. I think they're going to build a real
spaceship."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 puzzled
over it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things to
think about.

In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work,
everything he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had not
given 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, in
the system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn't
been captured from either Beta or Gamma when the three stars had been
much closer together. It had certainly been formed at a much higher
temperature than Janicot or Poictesme or Jurgen or Horvendile. For
better than a billion years, it had been molten-hot, and it had lost
most of its lighter elements in gaseous form along with its primary
atmosphere, leaving little to form a light-rock crust. All that had
remained had been a core of almost pure iron and a mantle that was
mostly high-grade iron ore.

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

The whole planet started to rust. It had been rusting, slowly, for the
billion or so years that had followed, and almost all the free oxygen
had become locked in iron oxide. The air was almost pure carbon
dioxide. It would have been different if life had ever appeared on
Koshchei, but apparently the right amino acids never assembled. Some
attempts had been made to introduce vegetation after the colonization
of Poictesme, but they had all failed.

Men went to Koshchei; they worked out of doors in oxygen helmets, and
lived in airtight domes and generated their own oxygen. There had been
mines, and smelters, and blast furnaces and steel mills. And there had
been shipyards, where hyperships up to three thousand feet had been
built. They had all been abandoned when the War had ended; they were
waiting there, on an empty, lifeless planet. Some of them had been
built by the Third Fleet-Army Force during the War; most of them dated
back 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 original
owners, or their heirs, compensated.

And there was the matter of selecting a crew. As an influential
non-office-holding stockholder in all the companies involved, Conn
Maxwell, of course, would represent them. He would also serve as
astrogator. Clyde Nichols would command the ship in atmosphere, and
act as first mate in space. Mack Vibart would be chief engineer at all
times. Yves Jacquemont would be first officer under Nichols, and
captain outside atmosphere. They had three real space crewmen, named
Roddell, Youtsko and O'Keefe, who had been in Storisende jail as a
result of a riotous binge when their ship had lifted out, six months
before. The rest of the company--Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, Charley
Gatworth, Mohammed Matsui,

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