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?"