The voyage back to Koshchei had been a week-long nightmare. When she
had been the pride and budget-wrecker of Transcontinent & Overseas
Airline, the _Harriet Barne_ had accommodated two hundred first-class
and five hundred lower-deck passengers, but the conversion to a
spaceship had drastically reduced her capacity. The three hundred men
and women who had been recruited for the Koshchei colony had been
crammed into her with brutal disregard for comfort, privacy or
anything else except the ability of the air-recyclers to keep them
breathing. When Captain Nichols set her down at the administration
building at Port Carpenter, a few had had to be carried off, but they
were all alive, which made the trip an unqualified success.
The dozen leaders of the expedition were congratulating themselves on
that in one of the executive offices after the first dinner at Port
Carpenter. Rodney Maxwell, in Storisende, had joined them in
screen-image; he was mostly listening, and sometimes contributing a
remark apropos of something the rest of them had said five minutes
ago.
"Our hypership," Conn was saying, "is going to have to be item
two on the agenda. The first thing we need is a ship for the
Poictesme-Koshchei run. By this time next year, we ought to have a
thousand to fifteen hundred people here at the least. We can't haul
them all on that flying sardine can."
"We'll need supplies, too. What was left here won't last forever,"
Nichols added.
"And you're going to have to run this at a profit," Luther Chen-Wong,
who had come along for first hand experience and to help with
administrative work, added. "You have a big payroll to meet, and
you'll have to keep the stockholders happy. People like Jethro
Sastraman and some of these Storisende bankers aren't going to be
satisfied with promises and long-term prospects; they'll want
dividends."
"We'll have to get claims staked on something besides Port Carpenter,
too. Those ships that are building at Storisende will be finished
before long," Jerry Rivas said. "If we don't get some more things
claimed, the first thing you know, we'll own Port Carpenter and
nothing else."
"Well, let's see what we can find in the way of a big airboat, or a
small ship," Conn said. "Jerry, you can pick a party for exploring.
Just zigzag around the planet and transmit in locations and views of
whatever you find, and we'll send it on to Storisende."
"And don't pick anybody for your exploring party that can't be spared
from anything here," Jacquemont added. "We don't want to have to chase
you halfway around the world to bring back the only specialist in
something yesterday at the latest."
"Are you going to come along, Conn?" Rivas asked.
"Oh, Lord, no! I'm going to be doing fifteen things at once here."
All the computer work. Finding materials to make astrogational
equipment and robo-pilots. Studying hyperspace theory--fortunately,
there was an excellent library here--and setting up classes, and
teaching school. And keeping in touch with his father, on Poictesme.
It was making him nervous not to know what sort of foolishness the
older and wiser heads might be getting into.
The next morning, they began organizing work-gangs and setting up
committees. Three men, two girls and about twenty robots got an
open-pit iron mine started; as soon as the steel mill was ready, ore
started coming in. Anse Dawes had a gang looking for something they
could build a 350-foot interplanetary ship out of; Jacquemont and Mack
Vibart were getting plans and specifications and making lists of
needed materials. Conn gathered a dozen men and women and started
classes in computer theory and practice; at the same time, he and
Charley Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatial
astrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into some
everythingless noplace outside normal space-time, and then pulling her
out again by her bootstraps at some other place in the normal
continuum, light-years away.
Roughly, it compared to shooting hummingbirds on the wing,
blindfolded, with a not particularly accurate pistol, from a
mile-a-minute merry-go-round.
That was something you could only do with a computer. A human, with a
slide rule, a pencil and pad, could figure it out, of course--if he
had fifty-odd thousand years to do it. A good computer did it in
thirty seconds. That was one difference between people and computers.
The other difference was that the desirability of making a hyperspace
jump would never occur to a computer, unless somebody pushed a button
and taped in instructions.
They found a three-hundred-foot globular skeleton, probably the
nucleus of a big hyperspace ship, and decided that was big enough for
what they wanted. The entire colony got to work on it. Photoprinted
plans and specifications poured out as Jacquemont and a couple of
draftsmen got them up. Steel came out of the steel mill at one end
while ore came in at the other. A swarm of big contragravity machines,
some robotic and some human-operated, clustered around the skeletal
hull like hornets building a nest.
Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines was chartered; the lawyers
reported having to overcome a little more resistance than usual from
the Government about that. And the bill to nationalize Merlin, which
had died in committee, was resuscitated and was being debated hotly on
the floor of Parliament. The Administration was now supporting it.
"Are they completely crazy?" Conn wanted to know, when he heard about
that. "They pass that bill and nobody's going to look for Merlin if
they know the Government will snatch it as soon as they find it."
"That is precisely Jake Vyckhoven's idea," his father replied. "I told
you he was afraid of Merlin. He's getting more afraid of it every
day."
He had reason to. There was a growing sentiment in favor of turning
the entire Government over to the computer as soon as it was found. To
his horror, Conn heard himself named as chairman of a committee that
should be set up to operate it. The moderates, who had merely wanted
Merlin used in an advisory capacity, were dropping out; the agitation
was coming from extremists who wanted Merlin to be the whole
Government, and now the extremists were developing an extreme wing of
their own, who called themselves Cybernarchists and started wearing
colored-shirt uniforms and greeting each other with an archaic
stiff-arm salute, and the words, "Hail Merlin!"
And the followers of the gospel-shouter on the west coast were now
cropping up all over the mainland, and on the continent of Acaire to
the north, and another cult, non-religious, was convinced that Merlin
was a living machine, with conscious intelligence of its own and
awesome psi-powers, a sort of super-Golem, which, if found and
awakened, would enslave the whole Galaxy. Fortunately, these two hated
each other as venomously as both did the Cybernarchists, and spent
most of their energies attacking each other's meetings. The
news-services were beginning to publish casualty lists, some heavy
enough for outpost fighting between a couple of regular armies.
One thing, it helped the employment situation. Everybody was hiring
mercenaries.
"But what," Conn asked, "are the sane people doing?"
"You ought to know," his father told him. "I suspect that you have all
of them on Koshchei now."
The sane people, if that was what they were, were being busy. They
were putting a set of Abbott lift-and-drive engines together, and
Conn's computer class was estimating the mass of the finished ship and
the amount of energy needed to overcome gravitation and give it
constant acceleration from Koshchei to Poictesme. They were learning,
by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudograv
engines. And they were putting together a hundred and one other
things, all of which was good training for the time they'd be ready to
start work on _Ouroboros II_.
Jerry Rivas had found a contragravity craft which seemed to have been
used by some top official for business and inspection trips, had
gathered a crew of non-specialists who weren't urgently needed at Port
Carpenter, and set out to circumnavigate the planet. It worked just
the reverse of expectation. He found a big uranium mine, with an
isotope-separation plant and a battery of plutonium-breeders; that
meant that Mohammed Matsui and half a dozen other nuclear-power people
had to get into another boat and speed after him to see what he had
really found. As soon as they landed, Rivas took off again to discover
a copper mine and a complex of smelters and processing plants. That
took a few more experts, or reasonable facsimiles, away from Port
Carpenter. And then he found a whole city that manufactured nothing
but computers and robo-controls and things like that.
Conn loaded his whole computer-theory class onto a freight-scow and
took them there. By the time he landed, his father was screening him
from Storisende.
"When are you going to get the ship finished?" he was asking. "Kurt
Fawzi's pestering the daylights out of me. He wants that equipment you
promised him."
"We're working on it. What's happened, has Carl Leibert had another
revelation?"
"I don't know about that. Kurt's sure Merlin is directly under Force
Command. And speaking about Leibert, Klem Zareff's been after me about
him. You know I've contracted for the full-time and exclusive services
of this Barton-Massarra detective agency. Well, Klem wants me to put
them to work investigating Leibert."
"Yes, I know; Leibert's a Terran Federation spy. Why do you need the
full-time services of the biggest private detective agency on
Poictesme?"
"There have been some odd things happening. People have been trying to
bribe and intimidate some of my office help. I have found microphones
and screen-pickups planted around. I caught one of our clerks trying
to make copies of voice-tapes. I think it's some of these other
Merlin-chasing companies, trying to find out how close we are to it.
Klem Zareff is recruiting more guards. But how soon are you going to
get that ship built?"
"We're working on it. That's all I know, now."
He went back to work getting a classroom ready for his students. If
he'd accepted that instructorship at Montevideo, he wouldn't be a full
professor now, but none of the rest of this would be happening,
either.
That night, he had the dream about starting the big machine and not
being able to stop it again.
There was street-fighting in Storisende between the Cybernarchists and
Government troops. There was a pitched battle in the west between the
Armageddonists (Merlin-is-Satan) and the Human Supremacy League
(Merlin-is-the-Golem), with heavy losses and claims of victory on both
sides. President Vyckhoven proclaimed planet-wide martial law, and
then discovered that he had nothing to enforce it with.
Luther Chen-Wong screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice was
almost inaudibly low at first.
"Conn, I just had a call from Jerry and Clyde. I think we can knock
off work on that ship we're building now. We won't need it."
"Have they found a ship?" If they had, it would be the first one
anybody had found. "Where?"
"They haven't found _a_ ship, Conn; they've found all of them. All the
ships in the Alpha System except the _Harriet Barne_ and the two
they're building at Storisende. The place is marked on the map as
Sickle Mountain Naval Observatory. It's just a bitty little dot, but
the map was made before the evacuation started. It's where most of the
troops in the system were embarked on hyperships, I think. Wait till I
show you the views."
Conn put on another screen; the first view was from an altitude of
five miles. He didn't need Luther's voice to identify Sickle Mountain;
a long curve, with a spur at right angles to one end, the name must
have suggested itself to whoever saw it first. The observatory had
been built where the handle of the sickle joined the blade; as the
ship from which the view had been taken had approached, the details
grew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plain
inside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like
tinsel dust on red-brown velvet.
"Great Ghu, are those all ships?"
"That's right. Look at this one, now."
The view changed. The aircraft was down, now, below the crest of the
mountain, circling slowly above the plain. Hundreds, no, over a
thousand, of them; two- and three-and five-hundred-footers, and here
and there a thousand-footer that could have been converted into a
hypership if anybody had wanted to take the trouble. The view changed
again; this time from an aircar dropped from the ship, he supposed; it
was down almost to the tops of the ships, and he could read names and
home ports: _Pixie_, Chloris; _Helen O'Loy_, Anaitis. They were from
Jurgen. _Sky-Rover_, Port Saunders; she was from Horvendile. Ships
from Storisende, and Yellowmarsh on Janicot, and....
"Now we know where they all went."
It was logical, of course. Most of the hyperships used in the
evacuation had been built here. It had been less trouble to lead the
troops and the civilian workers from Poictesme and the other planets
onto small normal-space ships and bring them here than to take the big
ships away on short interplanetary runs to the other planets.
"Have you screened my father yet?"
"Yes. This is going to knock the bottom out of the companies that are
building those ships at Storisende, I'm afraid."
"Their tough luck."
"It could be everybody's tough luck. Both those companies have been
issuing stock, and there's been a lot of speculation in it. This
market's so inflated now that a puncture at one place might blow the
whole thing out."
He knew that. He shrugged. "Father will have to think of something.
Tell him I'll screen him from Sickle Mountain."
Then he went back to his classroom.
"All right, class dismissed," he said. "You have twenty minutes to get
your bags packed. We're going to work for real, now."
Airboats and airships flocked to Sickle Mountain; some of them
hastened back to Port Carpenter for loads of food, for there was none
in the storehouses at the embarkation camp. They inspected ship after
ship, and chose two three-hundred-footers. They sent airships and
freight-scows to the dozen-odd cities and industrial centers that had
been already explored, to gather cargo, as far as possible the items
in shortest supply on Poictesme.
"Don't worry about a market smash," his father told him. "We have that
taken care of. Trisystem Investments has just bought up a lot of stock
in both of those companies, and we've set up agreements with
them--informally, of course; we'll have to get them voted on by our
own companies--to sell them ships from Koshchei. In return, the
company that's building the ship out of four air-freighters will go to
Janicot, and the company that's building a ship out of the old
Leitzenring Building will go to Jurgen, and they'll both stay off
Koshchei. Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong will probably be defending
antitrust suits till the end of time. The Planetary Government has
stopped liking us, you know."
"Then we'll have to get one that will like us. There'll be an election
about this time next year, won't there?"
His father nodded. "To use one of your expressions, we're working on
it. How soon can you get your ships in?"
"Well be loaded and ready to lift off in a week. Another week for the
trip."
"Well, don't forget that equipment you promised Kurt Fawzi."
"We'll have that on. Jerry Rivas is gathering it up now."
"How are you fixed for arms on Koshchei?"
"Arms? Why, there are some. There was a pretty big force of Space
Marines on duty here, and they left everything they couldn't carry in
their hands. Why? The Armageddonists and the Cybernarchists and Human
Supremacy bought all you had on hand?"
"They're buying, but I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking that
your crews might need something to argue their way off the ships at
Storisende with. Things are getting just slightly rugged here, now."