The cosmic computer epub

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. The old Rebel cursed. This time next year we'll be washing our feet in brandy. 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. Rodney Maxwell laughed. Everybody knows that was cleaned out years ago. Well, always [Pg 13] 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.

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 M submachine guns.

Even used, one was worth fifty sols. 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 [Pg 14] 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. 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! And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, if we don't have anything else. Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he was worrying about what he'd be able to get for brandy.

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 [Pg 15] 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. All the eyes around him began to look troubled. Most of them had been expecting precisely that. His father was watching him anxiously. 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. Besides, I didn't think it was very important.

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 and , the whole period [Pg 16] of the War. 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.

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. 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. I remember, once, on Mephistopheles 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 For all Merlin was supposed to do, I'd say something of the order of three million to five million.

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. I think Merlin's right here on Poictesme. 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 [Pg 18] believe anything he told them about Merlin—except the truth. I have some slight influence with President Vyckhoven 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. 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. 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.

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. They believed [Pg 19] every word of it. I even caught myself starting to believe it once or twice. Conn stopped short; his father halted beside him. The question, which he had been throwing at himself, angered him.

He realized, suddenly, that his father had known, or suspected that all along. He started to say something, then checked himself and began again:. I'm quoting the one man in the Galaxy who ought to know. The man who commanded the Third Force here during the War. I thought he'd died long ago. Why, he must be over a hundred. 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. 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 [Pg 20] gone out. 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 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. 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.

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. Rodney Maxwell shook his head. You know about him. Just from letters. Wade Lucas was from Baldur; he'd [Pg 21] gone off-planet as soon as he'd gotten his M. 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.

I don't blame him. I've heard about it all my life, and I can't. 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. 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? 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.

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 [Pg 22] 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? And do you know what a fifteen-cc liqueur glass of Poictesme brandy sells for on Terra? One sol; Federation money. I'll admit it costs like Nifflheim to run a hypership, but look at the difference between what these tramp freighter captains pay at Storisende and what they get. 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. This gang wouldn't lift a finger to build a hypership.

They've completely lost hope in everything but Merlin. I'll even convince them that Merlin's a space-station, in orbit off Koshchei. I think I could do that. 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? 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. Yes, Conn. This is a cause worth lying for.

How are you going to get it started? I think I've done that already. Then convince them that we'll have to have a ship to get to Koshchei, and—". Father, you have no idea what all there is. 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. 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! We keep Merlin out of it. As far as the public is supposed [Pg 24] 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. 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. 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. 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 [Pg 25] 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. 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. Forty years, and they still have the security lid welded shut on that.

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. 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 [Pg 27] what Merlin's going to do for them, and never doing anything for themselves.

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. 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.

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?

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. A soulless intelligence; it seems evil to me. It's a machine, isn't it? An aircar's soulless, but you're not afraid to ride in one. A machine that can think. Conn, people weren't meant to make machines like that, wiser than they are.

You're talking to a computerman now. 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.

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. He just wants to size up his future brother-in-law. He was in Storisende, looking for an opening to start a practice, and he heard about some medical equipment your father had found [Pg 29] 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 I think I'll like him. 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 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.

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. Tom Brangwyn was standing beside it, talking to a young man in a green uniform. 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. Karski laughed. Green and black were his colors in the War, and he's in command of the regiment. About four months ago, they sacked Waterville; burned the whole town and killed close to a hundred people. That was Blackie Perales' gang.

I heard the name mentioned in connection with the Harriet Barne. 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. 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. 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. 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'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.

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. 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. And do-it-yourself justice. This company your father's talking about organizing? 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.

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? In the long run, I'd say, more valuable than everything else together. We certainly aren't going to ignore it. You aren't like these people here; you were educated at the University of Montevideo. 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 [Pg 34] 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. Maybe he was telling the truth. 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.

He started to say something like that, and then thought better of it. 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. 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. That stopped it. Neither of them wanted to contest the honor with the president-judge of the Gordon Valley court. Judge, will you preside? Fawzi threw one quick look around, estimated the situation, and got with it.

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.

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 [Pg 36] 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. There was an angry outcry. Nobody actually shouted " To the stake with the blasphemer! Judge Ledue was rapping loudly for order. 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. 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. 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. Foxx Travis wasn't the sort of commander to let himself get caught, even by a very low-order probability. How do you get around that?

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. Systematic suppression, backed by the whole force of the Terran Federation. A gigantic conspiracy of silence! He shoved it aside with his foot.

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. 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.

Let's discuss the question of finding it. 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 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.

A number of voices shouted suggestions. Rodney Maxwell managed to get recognition and partial silence. 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. We have a Federation Supreme Court ruling—" [Pg 39].

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. 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. Is there anything else to discuss, or do I hear a motion to adjourn? I think we ought to have a look at that, first of all.

I think it's right here on Poictesme. 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.

Merlin was the only thing I was trained for. We'll look there first. We'll need an army to go in there! Well need excavation equipment, and labor. Lots of labor," Conn said. There are two entrances, a vertical shaft and a horizontal tunnel. Another idea hit him. 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. That's going to be one of our worst headaches; getting capable supervisors. And another thing; this municipal housecleaning would mask our real preparations. 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? 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. 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 [Pg 42] 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.

We'll get a ship. 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.

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.

I've never had her above 2. 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.

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. 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. We can have a park there, with fountains that'll work.

Maybe even Flora and Mother will think we've done something worth doing. 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. A true sci-fi fan would obviously enjoy it. But apart from that there is an amazing adventure molded storyline which goes along.

All the characters are well distinct with their own behaviour and nature ; Conn,Rodney, kart, flora, lucas, klem etc all of them are so beautifully pictured. I just loved it. 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. 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. 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. About forty farm laborers on the lower deck. Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble. Not just pistols, either. Usually kill all the crew and passengers.

The mate nodded. 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. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive. 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.