"Captain Nichols was in screen contact with his company's office in
Storisende," Rodney Maxwell said. "They're continuing him in command
of her."
"But ... but we took that ship! We lost three gunboats and about
twenty-five men...."
"She still belongs to Transcontinent & Overseas," his father said.
"That's been the law on stolen property as long as there's been any
law."
Of course; he should have known that. Did know it; just didn't think.
"We broke an awful lot of eggs for no omelet; fought a battle for
nothing."
"Well, of course, I'm prejudiced," Sylvie said, "but I don't think
getting us out of the hands of that bloodthirsty maniac and his
cutthroats was nothing."
"Wiping out the Perales gang wasn't nothing, Conn," Tom Brangwyn said.
"You got no idea at all how bad things were, the last couple of
years."
"I know. I'm sorry." He was ashamed of himself. "But I needed a ship,
and now we have no ship at all."
"A ship means something to you?" Yves Jacquemont asked.
"Yes." He told him why. "If we could get to Koshchei, we could build a
hypership of our own, and get our brandy and things to markets where
we could get a decent price for them."
"I know. I was in and out of Storisende on these owner-captain tramps
for a couple of years before I decided to retire and settle here,"
Jacquemont said. "The profit on a cargo of Poictesme brandy on Terra
or Baldur is over a thousand percent."
"Well, don't give up too soon," Nichols advised. "You can't keep the
_Harriet Barne_, of course, but you're entitled to prize-money on her,
and that ought to buy you something you could build a spaceship out
of."
"That's right," Jacquemont said. "Everything else besides the frame
can be made here. Look, these pirates burned me out; except for the
money I have in the bank, I lost everything, home, business and all.
As soon as I can find a place for Sylvie to stay, I'll come back and
go to work for your company building a spaceship. And a lot of the men
who were working here are farm-tramps and drifters, one job's as good
as another as long as they get paid for it. And I know a few good men
in Storisende--engineers--who'd be glad for a job, too."
"You think it would be all right with Mother and Flora if Sylvie
stayed with us?" Conn asked.
"Of course it would; they'd be glad to have her." Rodney Maxwell
turned to Yves Jacquemont. "Let's consider that fixed up. Now,
suppose you and I go into Storisende, and...."
The Transcontinent & Overseas people arrived at Barathrum Spaceport
the next morning; a rear-rank vice-president, a front-rank
legal-eagle, and three engineers. They were horrified at what they
saw. The _Harriet Barne_ had been gutted. Bulkheads and decks had
been ripped out and relocated incomprehensibly; the bridge and the
control room under it were gone; she had been stripped to her framework,
and the whole underside was sheathed in shimmering collapsium.
"Great Ghu!" the vice-president almost howled. "That isn't _our_
ship!"
"That's the _Harriet Barne_," her captain said. "She looks a little
ragged now, but--"
"You helped these pirates do this to her?"
"If I hadn't, they'd have cut my throat and gotten somebody else to
help them. My throat's more valuable to me than the ship is to you; I
can't get anybody to build me a new one."
"Well, understand," one of the engineers said, "they were converting
her into an interplanetary ship. It wouldn't cost much to finish the
job."
"We need an interplanetary ship like we need a hole in the head!" The
vice-president turned to Rodney Maxwell. "Just how much prize-money do
you think you're entitled to for this wreck?"
"I wouldn't know; that's up to Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong. Up to the
court, if we can settle it any other way."
"You mean you'd litigate about this?" the lawyer demanded, and began
to laugh.
"If we have to. Look, if you people don't want her, sign her over to
Litchfield Exploration & Salvage. But if you do want her, you'll have
to pay for her."
"We'll give you twenty thousand sols," the lawyer said. "We don't want
to be tightfisted. After all, you fought a gang of pirates and lost
some men and a couple of boats; we have some moral obligation to you.
But you'll have to realize that this ship, in her present state, is
practically valueless."
"The collapsium on her is worth twice that, and the engines are worth
even more," Jacquemont said. "I worked on them."
The discussion ended there. By midafternoon, Luther Chen-Wong, the
junior partner of the law firm, arrived from Storisende with a couple
of engineers of his own. Reporters began arriving; both sides were
anxious to keep them away from the ship. Conn took care of them,
assisted by Sylvie, who had rummaged an even more attractive costume
out of what she called the loot-cellar. The reporters all used up a
lot of film footage on her. And the Fawzis' Office Gang arrived from
Force Command, bitterly critical of the value of the spaceport against
its cost in lives and equipment. Brangwyn and Zareff returned to Force
Command with them. A Planetary Air Patrol ship arrived and removed the
captured pirates. The liberated prisoners were airlifted to
Litchfield.
The third day after the battle, Conn and his father and Sylvie and her
father flew to Litchfield. To Conn's surprise, Flora greeted him
cordially, and Wade Lucas, rather stiffly, congratulated him. Maybe it
was as Tom Brangwyn had said; he hadn't been on Poictesme in the last
four or five years and didn't know how bad things had gotten. His
mother seemed to think he had won the Battle of Barathrum
single-handed.
He was even more surprised and gratified that Flora made friends with
Sylvie immediately. His mother, however, regarded the engineer's
daughter with badly concealed hostility, and seemed to doubt that
Sylvie was the kind of girl she wanted her son getting involved with.
Outwardly, of course, she was quite gracious.
Rodney Maxwell and Yves Jacquemont flew to Storisende the next
morning, both more optimistic about finding a ship than Conn thought
the circumstances warranted. Conn stayed at home for the next few
days, luxuriating in idleness. He and Sylvie tore down his mother's
household robots and built sound-sensors into them, keying them to
respond to their names and to a few simple commands, and including
recorded-voice responses in a thick Sheshan accent. All the smart
people on Terra, he explained, had Sheshan humanoid servants.
His mother was delighted. Robots that would answer when she spoke to
them were a lot more companionable. She didn't seem to think, however,
that Sylvie's mechanical skills were ladylike accomplishments. Nice
girls, Litchfield model, weren't quite so handy with a spot-welder.
That was what Conn liked about Sylvie; she was like the girls he'd
known at the University.
They were strolling after dinner, down the Mall. The air was sharp and
warned that autumn had definitely arrived; the many brilliant stars,
almost as bright as the moon of Terra, were coming out in the dusk.
"Conn, this thing about Merlin," she began. "Do you really believe in
it? Ever since Dad and I came to Poictesme, I've been hearing about
it, but it's just a story, isn't it?"
He was tempted to tell her the truth, and sternly put the temptation
behind him.
"Of course there's a Merlin, Sylvie, and it's going to do wonderful
things when we find it."
He looked down the starlit Mall ahead of him. Somebody, maybe Lester
Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes, had gotten things
finished and cleaned up. The pavement was smooth and unbroken; the
litter had vanished.
"It's done wonderful things already, just because people started
looking for it," he said. "Some of these days, they're going to
realize that they had Merlin all along and didn't know it."
There was a faint humming from somewhere ahead, and he was wondering
what it was. Then they came to the long escalators, and he saw that
they were running.
"Why, look! They got them fixed! They're running!"
Sylvie grinned at him and squeezed his arm.
"I get you, chum," she said. "Of course there's a Merlin."
Maybe he didn't have to tell her the truth.
When they returned to the house, his mother greeted him:
"Conn, your father's been trying to get you ever since you went out.
Call him, right away; Ritz-Gartner Hotel, in Storisende. It's
something about a ship."
It look a little time to get his father on-screen. He was excited and
happy.
"Hi, Conn; we have one," he said.
"What kind of a ship?"
"You know her. The _Harriet Barne_."
That he hadn't expected. Something off Mothball Row that would have to
be flown to Barathrum and torn down and completely rebuilt, but not
the one that was there already, partly finished.
"How the dickens did you wangle that?"
"Oh, it was Yves' idea, to start with. He knew about her; the T. &
O.'s been losing money on her for years. He said if they had to pay
prize-money on her and then either restore her to original condition
or finish the job and build a spaceship they didn't want, it would
almost bankrupt the company. They got up as high as fifty thousand
sols for prize-money and we just laughed at them. So we made a
proposition of our own.
"We proposed organizing a new company, subsidiary to both L. E. & S.
and T. & O., to engage in interplanetary shipping; both companies to
assign their equity in the _Harriet Barne_ to the new company, the
work of completing her to be done at our spaceport and the labor cost
to be shared. This would give us our spaceship, and get T. & O. off
the hook all around. Everybody was for it except the president of T. &
O. Know anything about him?"
Conn shook his head. His father continued:
"Name's Jethro Sastraman. He could play Scrooge in _Christmas Carol_
without any makeup at all. He hasn't had a new idea since he got out
of college, and that was while the War was still going on.
'Preposterous; utterly visionary and impractical,'" his father
mimicked. "Fortunately, a majority of the big stockholders didn't
agree; they finally bullied him into agreeing. We're calling the new
company Alpha-Interplanetary, we have an application for charter in,
and that'll go through almost automatically."
"Who's going to be the president of this new company?"
"You know him. Character named Rodney Maxwell. Yves is going to be
vice-president in charge of operations; he's flying to Barathrum
tomorrow or the next day with a gang of technicians we're recruiting.
T. & O. are giving us Clyde Nichols and Mack Vibart, and a lot of men
from their shipyard. I'm staying here in Storisende; we're opening an
office here. By this time next week, we're all going to wish we'd been
born quintuplets."
"And Conn Maxwell, I suppose, will be an influential
non-office-holding stockholder?"
"That's right. Just like in L. E. & S."