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THE COSMIC COMPUTER by
H. BEAM PIPER
Chapter 1
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 ***
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 *** 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.
End of Chapter VI �