He found Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and a score of workmen making a
survey and inventory of the spaceport. Captain Nichols and four of the
original crew of the _Harriet Barne_, who had shared his captivity
among the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And Fred
Karski, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, was
keeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formation
of Alpha-Interplanetary when Conn arrived.
The next day, Yves Jacquemont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, a
gang from the T. & O. shipyard, and a dozen engineers and construction
men whom he had recruited around Storisende. More workers arrived in
the next few days, including a number who had already worked on the
ship as slaves of the Perales gang.
It didn't take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in the
conversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere and
gravitation, the _Harriet Barne_ was long and narrow, like an old
ocean ship; more than anything else, she had originally resembled a
huge submarine. Spaceships, either interplanetary or interstellar,
were always spherical with a pseudogravity system at the center. This,
of course, the _Harriet Barne_ lacked.
"Well, are we going to make the whole trip in free fall?" he wanted to
know.
"No, we'll use our acceleration for pseudograv halfway, and
deceleration the other half," Jacquemont told him. "We'll be in free
fall about ten or fifteen hours. What we're going to have to do will
be to lift off from Poictesme in the horizontal position the ship was
designed for, and then make a ninety-degree turn after we're
off-planet, with our lift and our drive working together, just like
one of the old rocket ships before the Abbott Drive was developed."
That meant, of course, that the after bulkheads would become decks,
and explained a lot of the oddities he had noticed about the
conversion job. It meant that everything would have to be mounted on
gimbals, everything stowed so as to be secure in either position, and
nothing placed where it would be out of reach in either.
Jacquemont and Nichols took charge of the work on the ship herself.
Chief Engineer Vibart, with a gang of half-taught, self-taught and
untaught helpers, went back to working the engines over, tearing out
all the safety devices that were intended to keep the ship inside
planetary atmosphere, and arranging the lift engines so that they
could be swung into line with the drive engines. There was a lot of
cybernetic and robotic equipment, and astrogational equipment, that
had to be made from scratch. Conn picked a couple of helpers and went
to work on that.
From time to time, he was able to snatch a few minutes to read
teleprint papers or listen to audiovisual newscasts from Storisende.
He was always disappointed. There was much excitement about the new
interplanetary company, but the emphasis was all wrong. People weren't
interested in getting hyperships built, or opening the mines and
factories on Koshchei, or talking about all the things now in short
supply that could be produced there. They were talking about Merlin,
and they were all positive, now, that something found at Force Command
Duplicate had convinced Litchfield Exploration & Salvage that the
giant computer was somewhere off-planet.
Rodney Maxwell flew in from Storisende; he was accompanied by Wade
Lucas, who shook hands cordially with Conn.
"Can you spare us Jerry Rivas for a while?" Rodney Maxwell asked.
"Well, ask Yves Jacquemont; he's vice-president in charge of
operations. As an influential non-office-holding stockholder, I'd
think so. He's only running around helping out here and there."
"We want him to take charge of opening those hospitals you were
telling us about. Wade and I are forming a new company, Mainland
Medical Materials, Ltd. Going to act as broker for L. E. & S. in
getting rid of medical stores. Nobody in the company knows where to
sell that stuff or what we ought to get for it."
Wade Lucas began to talk about how desperately some types of drug and
some varieties of diagnostic equipment were needed. Conn had it on the
tip of his tongue to ask Lucas whether he thought that was a racket,
too. Lucas must have read his mind.
"I really didn't understand how much good this would do," he said. "I
wouldn't have spoken so forcefully against it if I had. I thought it
was nothing but this Merlin thing--"
"Aaagh! Don't talk to me about Merlin!" Conn interrupted. "I have to
talk to Kurt Fawzi and that crowd about Merlin till I'm sick of the
whole subject."
His father shot him a warning glance; Lucas was looking at him in
surprise. He hastened to change the subject:
"I see Len made you a suit out of that material," he said to his
father. "And I see you're not bulging the coat out behind with a
hip-holster."
"Oh, I stopped carrying a gun; I'm a city man, now. Nobody carries one
in Storisende. Won't even be necessary in Litchfield before long. Our
new marshal had a regular reign of terror in Tramptown for a few days,
and you wouldn't know the place. Wade, here, is acting mayor now."
They went back to talking about the new company. "You're going to have
so many companies you won't be able to to keep track of them before
long," Conn said.
"Well, I'm doing something about that. A holding company; Trisystem
Investments, Ltd.; you're a non-office-holding stockholder in that,
too."
Merlin was now a political issue. A bill had been introduced in
Parliament to amend the Abandoned Property Act of 867 and nationalize
Merlin, when and if discovered and regardless by whom. The support
seemed to come from an extremist minority; everybody else, including
the Administration, was opposed to it. There was considerable
acrimony, however, on the propositions: 1) that Merlin was too
important to the prosperity of Poictesme to become a private monopoly;
and 2) that Merlin was too important, etc., to become a political
football and patronage plum.
It was discovered, after they were half assembled, that the controls
for the _Harriet Barne_ would only work while she was in a horizontal
position. The whole thing had to be torn out and rebuilt. There was
also trouble with the air-and-water recycling system. The _City of
Nefertiti_ came in from Aton for Odin; Rodney Maxwell was almost
frantic because they hadn't gotten together a cargo of medical stores
from the first hospital to be opened.
"There's all sorts of stuff," he was fuming, by screen. "Stuff that's
in short supply anywhere and that we could get good prices for
off-planet. Get Federation sols for it, too."
"The _City of Asgard_ will be along in six months," Conn said. "You
can have a real cargo assembled by then. You can make arrangements in
advance to dispose of it on Terra or Baldur or Marduk."
"There are a couple of other companies interested in interplanetary
ships now," his father added. "One of them had gotten four old
freighters off Mothball Row, and they're tearing them down and
cannibalizing them into one spaceship. That work's being done here at
Storisende Spaceport. And another company has gotten title to a couple
of old office buildings and has a gang at work dismantling them for
the structural steel. I think they're going to build a real
spaceship."
That wasn't anything to worry about either. The _Harriet Barne_ was
better than half finished. There was a collapsium plant at Storisende
Spaceport, but Yves Jacquemont said it was only half the size of the
one at Barathrum; it would be three months before it could produce
armor for one, let alone both, ships.
The crackpots were getting into the act, now, too. A spirit medium on
the continent of Acaire, to the north, had produced a communication
purporting to originate with a deceased Third Force Staff officer, now
in the Spirit World. There was considerable detail, all ludicrous to
Conn's professional ear. And a fanatic in one of the small towns on
the west coast was quoting the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavadgita
to prove that if Merlin were ever found, Divine vengeance in a
spectacular form would fall not only on Poictesme but on the entire
Galaxy.
The spaceship that was building at Storisende got into the news;
on-screen, it appeared that the work was progressing rapidly. So was
the work of demolishing a block of empty buildings to get girders for
the second ship, on which work had not yet been started. The one under
construction seemed to be of cruciform design, like an old-fashioned
pre-contragravity winged airplane. The design puzzled everybody at
Barathrum. Yves Jacquemont thought that perhaps there would be decks
in the cross-arm which would be used when the ship was running on
combined lift and drive.
"Well, till we can get a shipyard going on Koshchei and build some
real spaceships, there are going to be some rare-looking objects
traveling around the Alpha System. I wonder what the next one's going
to look like--a flying sky-scraper?" Conn said.
"What I wonder," Yves Jacquemont replied, "is where all the old
interplanetary ships got to. There must have been hundreds of them
running back and forth from here to Janicot and Koshchei and Jurgen
and Horvendile during the War. They must have gone somewhere."
"Couldn't they all have been fitted with Dillingham hyperdrive
engines and used in the evacuation?"
"Possible. But the average interplanetary ship isn't very big; five
hundred to seven-fifty feet in diameter. One of those things couldn't
carry more than a couple of hundred people, after you put in all the
supplies and the hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats and so on for
a four- to six-month voyage. I can't see the economy of altering
anything that small for interstellar work. Why, the smallest of these
tramp freighters that come in here will run about fifteen hundred
feet."
They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure.
And there certainly weren't any of them left on Poictesme. He puzzled
over it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things to
think about.
In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work,
everything he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had not
given to anything since cramming for examinations at the University.
There was a lot of it.
The fourth planet of Alpha Gartner was older than Poictesme;
geologists claimed that it was the oldest thing, the sun excepted, in
the system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn't
been captured from either Beta or Gamma when the three stars had been
much closer together. It had certainly been formed at a much higher
temperature than Janicot or Poictesme or Jurgen or Horvendile. For
better than a billion years, it had been molten-hot, and it had lost
most of its lighter elements in gaseous form along with its primary
atmosphere, leaving little to form a light-rock crust. All that had
remained had been a core of almost pure iron and a mantle that was
mostly high-grade iron ore.
The same process had gone on, as it cooled, as on any Terra-size
planet. After the surface had started to congeal, gases, mostly carbon
dioxide and water vapor, had come up to form a secondary atmosphere,
the water vapor forming a cloud envelope, condensing, and sending down
rain that returned immediately as steam. Solar radiations and electric
discharges broke some of that into oxygen and hydrogen; most of the
hydrogen escaped into space. Finally, the surface cooled further and
the rain no longer steamed off.
The whole planet started to rust. It had been rusting, slowly, for the
billion or so years that had followed, and almost all the free oxygen
had become locked in iron oxide. The air was almost pure carbon
dioxide. It would have been different if life had ever appeared on
Koshchei, but apparently the right amino acids never assembled. Some
attempts had been made to introduce vegetation after the colonization
of Poictesme, but they had all failed.
Men went to Koshchei; they worked out of doors in oxygen helmets, and
lived in airtight domes and generated their own oxygen. There had been
mines, and smelters, and blast furnaces and steel mills. And there had
been shipyards, where hyperships up to three thousand feet had been
built. They had all been abandoned when the War had ended; they were
waiting there, on an empty, lifeless planet. Some of them had been
built by the Third Fleet-Army Force during the War; most of them dated
back almost a century before that, to the original industrial boom.
All of them could be claimed under the Abandoned Property Act of 867,
since all had been taken over by the Federation, and the original
owners, or their heirs, compensated.
And there was the matter of selecting a crew. As an influential
non-office-holding stockholder in all the companies involved, Conn
Maxwell, of course, would represent them. He would also serve as
astrogator. Clyde Nichols would command the ship in atmosphere, and
act as first mate in space. Mack Vibart would be chief engineer at all
times. Yves Jacquemont would be first officer under Nichols, and
captain outside atmosphere. They had three real space crewmen, named
Roddell, Youtsko and O'Keefe, who had been in Storisende jail as a
result of a riotous binge when their ship had lifted out, six months
before. The rest of the company--Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, Charley
Gatworth, Mohammed Matsui, and four other engineers, Ludvyckson,
Gomez, Karanja and Retief--rated as ordinary spacemen for the trip,
and would do most of the exploration work after landing.
They got the controls put up; they would work in either position. The
engines were lifted in and placed. Conn finished the robo-pilot and
the astrogational computers and saw them installed. The air-and-water
recycling system went in. The collapsium armor went on. In the
news-screen, they saw the spaceship at Storisende still far from half
finished, with swarms of heavy-duty lifters and contragravity
machiners around it, and a set of landing-stands, on which the second
ship was to be built, in the process of construction.
A tramp hyperspace freighter landed at Storisende, the _Andromeda_,
five months from Terra, with a cargo of general merchandise. Rodney
Maxwell and Wade Lucas had assembled a cargo of medicines and hospital
equipment which they thought could be sold profitably. They began
dickering with the owner-captain of the hypership.
A farm-tramp down in the tobacco country to the south, evidently
ignorant that the former commander of the Third Force was still alive,
had proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Foxx Travis and was
forbidding everybody, on pain of court-martial and firing squad, from
meddling with Merlin. And an evangelist in the west was declaring that
Merlin was really Satan in mechanical shape.
The _Harriet Barne_ was finished. The first test, lifting her to three
hundred miles, turning her bow-up, and taking her another thousand
miles, had been a success. They brought her back and set her down in
the middle of the crater, and began getting the supplies aboard. Kurt
Fawzi, Klem Zareff, Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin and the others flew
over from Force Command. Sylvie Jacquemont came from Litchfield, and
so did Wade Lucas, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardes and
a number of others. Neither Conn's mother nor sister came.
"I don't know what's the matter with those two," Sylvie told him.
"They always seem to be scrapping with each other now, and the only
thing they can agree on is that you and your father ought to stop
whatever you're doing, right away. Your mother can't adjust to your
father being a big Storisende businessman, and she says he'll lose
every centisol he has and both of you will probably go to jail, and
then she's afraid you will find Merlin, and Flora's sure you and your
father are swindling everybody on the planet."
"Sylvie, I had no idea things would be like that," he told her
contritely. "I wish I hadn't suggested that you stay there, now."
"Oh, it isn't so bad, so far. Your mother and I get along all right
when Flora isn't there, and Flora and I get along when your mother
isn't around. Mealtimes aren't much fun, though."
His father came out from Storisende, looked the ship over, and seemed
relieved.
"I'm glad you're ready to get off," he said. "You know this hyperspace
freighter, the _Andromeda_? Some private group in Storisende has
chartered her. She's loading supplies now. I have a private detective
agency, Barton-Massarra, trying to find out where's she's going. I
think you'd better get this ship off, right away."
"We have everything aboard, all the supplies and everything,"
Jacquemont told him. "We can lift off tonight."