_City of Asgard_ coming in--a lot of old Army Transport craft, covered
with muslin and sprayed with protectoplast. The Planetary Government
had taken them over after the War and forgotten them.
"Well, Lester's getting one of them for us under the old 878
Commercial Enterprise Encouragement Act. She's an Army combat
freighter, regimental ammunition ship. Of course, she still has
armament; we'll have to pay to get that off."
"Why?"
Fawzi looked at him in surprise. "It would only be in the way and add
weight. We want her for a cargo ship, don't we?"
"That's what she was built for. What kind of armament?"
Fawzi didn't know. Klem Zareff did.
"Four 115-mm rifles, two fore and two aft. A pair of lift-and-drive
missile launchers amidships. And a secondary gun battery of 70-mm's
and 50-mm auto-cannon. I know the class; we captured a few of them.
Good ships."
Fawzi was horrified. "Why, that's more firepower than the whole Air
Patrol. Look, the Government won't like our having anything like
that."
"They're giving her to us, aren't they?" Menardes asked.
"Gehenna with what the Government likes!" the old Rebel swore. "If
they'd put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe out
these outlaws and a private company wouldn't need an armed ship."
"May I use your screen, Kurt?" Conn asked.
When Fawzi nodded, he punched out the combination of the operating
office at Tenth Army, and finally got his father on. He told him about
the ship.
"There's talk about tearing the armament out," he added.
"Is that so, now? Well, I'll call Lester Dawes before he can get
started on it. I think I'll go in to Storisende tomorrow and see the
ship for myself. See what I can do about ammunition for those guns,
too."
"But, Rod," Fawzi protested, joining the conversation, "we don't want
to start a war."
"No. We want to stay out of one. You don't do that by disarming. We're
taking that ship down into the Badlands. Remember?" Rodney Maxwell
said. "Ever hear the name Blackie Perales?"
Fawzi had. He stopped arguing about armament. Instead, he began
worrying about how much the civic clean-up campaign was costing
Litchfield.
"You think we really need that, Rod?"
"Of course we do. You'd be surprised how much labor we're going to
need, and how hard up we're going to be for capable supervisors. This
thing's a training program, Kurt, and we'll need every man we train on
it."
"But it's costing like Nifflheim, Rod. We're going to bankrupt the
city."
"Worse than it is now, you mean? Oh, don't worry, Kurt. As soon as we
find Merlin, everything'll be all right."
Franz Veltrin came in, shortly after Rodney Maxwell was off the
screen. He dropped his audiovisual camera and sound recorder on the
table, laid his pistol-belt on top of them and took a drink of brandy,
downing it with the audible satisfaction of a thirsty horse at a
trough. Then he looked around accusingly.
"Somebody's been talking!" he declared. "I've had all the news
services on the planet on my screen today; they all want the story
about what's happening here. They've heard we know where Merlin is;
that Conn Maxwell found out on Terra."
"They just put two and two together and threw seven," Conn said. "A
_Herald-Guardian_ ship-news reporter interviewed me when I got in, and
found out I'd been studying cybernetics and computer theory on Terra.
What did you tell them?"
"Complete denial. We don't know a thing about Merlin. Naturally, they
didn't believe me. A bunch of them are coming out here tomorrow. What
are we going to tell them? We'll all have to have the same story."
"I," said Judge Ledue, "am not going to be interviewed, I am leaving
town till they're gone."
"Why don't you steer them onto Wade Lucas?" Conn asked. "If you want
anything denied, he'll do it for you."
Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, except Klem Zareff, and
he waited until Conn was ready to go and rode up to the landing stage
with him.
"Conn, I know this Lucas is going to marry your sister," he began,
"but how much do you know about him?"
"Not much. He seems like a nice chap. I don't hold what he said at the
meeting against him. I suppose if I'd come from off-planet, I wouldn't
believe in Merlin either."
"Hah! But doesn't he believe in Merlin?"
"He makes noises like it."
"You know what I think?" Klem Zareff lowered his voice to a whisper.
"I think he's a Federation spy! I think the Federation's lost Merlin.
That's why they haven't come back to get it long ago."
"Pretty big thing to mislay."
"It could happen. There'd only be a few scientists and some high staff
officers who'd know where it was. Well, say they all went back to
Terra on the same ship, and the ship was lost at space. Sabotage, one
of our commerce raiders that hadn't heard the War was over, maybe just
an ordinary accident. But the ship's lost, and the location of
Merlin's lost with her."
"That could happen," Conn agreed seriously.
"All right. So ever since, they've had people here, listening,
watching, spying. This Lucas; he showed up here about a year after you
went to Terra. And who does he get engaged to? Your sister. And what
does he do here? Goes around arguing that there is no Merlin, getting
people to argue with him, getting them mad, so they'll blurt out
anything they know. I'm an old field officer; I know all the
prisoner-interrogation tricks in the book, and that's always been one
of the best."
"Then why did he act the way he did at the meeting? All he did there
was cut himself off from learning anything more from any of us. In his
place, would you have done that? No; you'd have tried to take the lead
in hunting for Merlin yourself. Now wouldn't you?"
Zareff was silent, first puzzled, and then hurt. Now he would have to
tear the whole idea down and build it over.
Flora was quite friendly when she came home from school. She'd found
out, somewhere, that Conn had been the originator of the municipal
face-lifting project. He was tempted, briefly, to tell her a little,
if not all, of the truth about the Maxwell Plan, then decided against
it. The way to keep a secret was to confide it to nobody; every time
you did, you doubled, maybe even squared, the chances of exposure.
He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, about
his talk with Klem Zareff.
"How long's he been like that, anyhow?" he asked.
"As long as I've known him. When it comes to melons and wine and
bossing tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out of
the rain, Klem Zareff's as sane as I am. But on the subject of the
Terran Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"
"They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have places
like Tramptown on Terra, too."
"Uhuh. I suppose, in Klem's boots, I'd be just as crazy as he is,"
Rodney Maxwell said. "One minute, he had a wife and two children in
Kindelburg, on Ashmodai, and the next minute Kindelburg was a puddle
of radioactive slag."
"That was in '51, wasn't it? I read about it," Conn said. "It was a
famous victory."
That was from a poem, too.
Rodney Maxwell flew to Storisende early the next morning. Conn rode
back to Tenth Army on an empty scow and pitched into the job of
getting the stores and equipment out of the underground shelters. More
farm-tramps arrived, and had to be pounded into obedience and taught
the work. At the same time, Litchfield was getting a steady influx of
job-seekers, and a secondary swarm of thugs, grifters and gangsters
who followed them. Klem Zareff, having gotten all his melons pressed,
came out to Tenth Army, where he selected fifty of the best men from
the work-gangs and began drilling them as soldiers to guard the next
operation. The manual of arms, drill and salute he taught them was, of
course, System States Alliance.
A week later, the ship arrived from Storisende; a hundred and sixty
feet, three thousand tons, small enough to be berthed inside a
hyperspace transport, and fast enough to get a load of ammunition to
troops at the front, unload, and get out again before the enemy could
zero in on her, and armed to fight off any Army Air Force combat
craft. The delay had been in recruiting officers and crew. The captain
and chief engineer were out-of-work shipline officers, the gunner was
a former Federation artillery officer, and the crew looked more like
pirates than most pirates did.
They christened her the _Lester Dawes_, because Dawes had secured her
and because the name began with the initials of Litchfield Exploration &
Salvage. From then on, it was a race to see whether the Tenth Army
attack-shelters would be emptied before the wine was all pressed, or
vice versa.