Jerry Rivas, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping things
running on Koshchei. Work on the interplanetary ship at Port
Carpenter had stopped when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found;
it had never been resumed. When Conn returned, he found work started
on the _Ouroboros II_. Some of the two hundred newcomers who came in
on the _Helen O'Loy_ had special skills needed on the hypership; most
of them went with Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to Sickle
Mountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. Some of them,
it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. Sylvie, who had
been one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping him
with the long lists of needed materials, some of which had to be
brought from other places as much as a thousand miles away. Jerry
Rivas went back to exploring; Nichols had to drop his space-training
work temporarily to organize a fleet of air-freighters; usually, the
men best able to operate them were urgently needed on some job at the
construction dock.
Ships lifted out almost daily from Sickle Mountain. They tried to get
some kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselves
of what they needed for themselves. Some of the ships came back loaded
with provisions and bringing new recruits--for instance, the teaching
of physics and mathematics almost stopped at Storisende College
because the professors had been virtually shanghaied.
Conn found himself losing touch with affairs on Poictesme. Ships had
landed on both Janicot and Horvendile and were sending back claims to
abandoned factories. By that time they had all the decks into the
_Ouroboros II_, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogational
and hyperspace instruments put in place. The hypership _Andromeda_ was
back from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what the
expedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures about
Merlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral.
Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, and
combat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as it
came out. The Government was buying some, but by no means all of it.
"Conn, can you come back here to Poictesme for a while?" his father
asked. "Things have turned serious. I don't like to talk about it by
screen--too many people know our scrambler combinations. But I wish
you were here."
He started to object; there were millions, well, a couple of hundred,
things he had to attend to. The look on his father's face stopped him.
"Ship leaving Sickle Mountain tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll be
aboard."
The voyage back to Poictesme was a needed rest. He felt refreshed when
he got off at Storisende Spaceport and was met by his father and Wade
Lucas in one of the slim recon-cars. They greeted him briefly and took
the car up and away from the city, where it was safe to talk.
"Conn, I'm scared," his father said. "I'm beginning to think there
really is a Merlin, after all."
"Oh, come off it! I know it's contagious, but I thought you'd been
vaccinated."
"I'm beginning to think so, too," Lucas said. "I don't like it at
all."
"You know what that gang who took the _Andromeda_ to Panurge found?"
"They were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements for
Merlin, weren't they?"
"Yes. They found it. My Barton-Massarra operatives got to some of the
crew. This place had been turning out material for a computer of
absolutely unconventional design; the two computermen they had with
them couldn't make head or tail of half of it. And every blueprint,
every diagram, every scrap of writing or recording, had been
destroyed. But they found one thing, a big empty fiber folder that had
fallen under something and been overlooked. It was marked: TOP
SECRET. PROJECT MERLIN."
"Project Merlin could have been anything," Conn started to say. No.
Project Merlin was something they made computer parts for.
"Dolf Kellton's research crew, at the Library here, came across some
references to Project Merlin, too. For instance, there was a routine
division court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a very
trivial charge. Force Command ordered the court-martial stopped, and
the two officers simply dropped out of the Third Force records, it was
stated that they were engaged in work connected with Project Merlin.
That's an example; there were half a dozen things like that."
"Tell him what Kurt Fawzi and his crew found," Wade Lucas said.
"Yes. They have a fifty-foot shaft down from the top of the mesa
almost to the top of the underground headquarters. They found
something on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped mass, fifty feet
thick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium. It's directly over
what used to be Foxx Travis's office."
"That's not a tenth big enough for anything that could even resemble
Merlin."
"Well, it's something. I was out there day before yesterday. They're
down to the collapsium on top of this thing; I rode down the shaft in
a jeep and looked at it. Look, Conn, we don't know what this Project
Merlin was; all this lore about Merlin that's grown up since the War
is pure supposition."
"But Foxx Travis told me, categorically, that there was no Merlin
Project," Conn said. "The War's been over forty years; it's not a
military secret any longer. Why would he lie to me?"
"Why did you lie to Kurt Fawzi and the others and tell them there was
a Merlin? You lied because telling the truth would hurt them. Maybe
Travis had the same reason for lying to you. Maybe Merlin's too
dangerous for anybody to be allowed to find."
"Great Ghu, are you beginning to think Merlin is the Devil, or
Frankenstein's Monster?"
"It might be something just as bad. Maybe worse. I don't think a man
like Foxx Travis would lie if he didn't have some overriding moral
obligation to."
"And we know who's been making most of the trouble for us, too," Lucas
added.
"Yes," Rodney Maxwell said, "we do. And sometime I'm going to invite
Klem Zareff to kick my pants-seat. Sam Murchison, the Terran
Federation Minister-General."
"How'd you get that?"
"Barton-Massarra got some of it; they have an operative planted in
Murchison's office. And some of our banking friends got the rest. This
Human Supremacy League is being financed by somebody. Every so often,
their treasurer makes a big deposit at one of the banks here, all
Federation currency, big denomination notes. When I asked them to,
they started keeping a record of the serial numbers and checking
withdrawals. The money was paid out, at the First Planetary Bank, to
Mr. Samuel S. Murchison, in person. The Armegeddonists are getting
money, too, but they're too foxy to put theirs through the banks. I
believe they're the ones who mind-probed Lucy Nocero. Barton-Massarra
believe, but they can't prove, that Human Supremacy launched that
robo-bomb at us, that time at the spaceport."
"Have you done anything with those audiovisuals of Leibert?"
"Gave them to Barton-Massarra. They haven't gotten anything, yet."
"So we have to admit that Klem wasn't crazy after all. What do you
want me to do?"
"Go out to Force Command and take charge. We have to assume that there
may be a Merlin, we have to assume that it may be dangerous, and we
have to assume that Kurt Fawzi and his covey of Merlinolators are just
before digging it up. Your job is to see that whatever it is doesn't
get loose."
The trouble was, if he started giving orders around Force Command he'd
stop being a brilliant young man and become a half-baked kid, and one
word from him and the older and wiser heads would do just what they
pleased. He wondered if the pro-Leibert and anti-Leibert factions were
still squabbling; maybe if he went out of his way to antagonize one
side, he'd make allies of the other. He took the precaution of
screening in, first; Kurt Fawzi, with whom he talked, was almost
incoherent with excitement. At least, he was reasonably sure that none
of Klem Zareff's trigger-happy mercenaries would shoot him down coming
in.
The well, fifty feet in diameter, went straight down from the top of
the mesa; as the headquarters had been buried under loose rubble,
they'd had to vitrify the sides going down. He let down into the hole
in a jeep, and stood on the collapsium roof of whatever it was they
had found. It wasn't the top of the headquarters itself; the microray
scannings showed that. It was a drum-shaped superstructure, a sort of
underground penthouse. And there they were stopped. You didn't cut
collapsium with a cold chisel, or even an atomic torch. He began to
see how he was going to be able to take charge here.
"You haven't found any passage leading into it?" he asked, when they
were gathered in Fawzi's--formerly Foxx Travis's--office.
"Nifflheim, no! If we had, we'd be inside now." Tom Brangwyn swore.
"And we've been all over the ceiling in here, and we can't find
anything but vitrified rock and then the collapsium shielding."
"Sure. There are collapsium-cutters, at Port Carpenter, on Koshchei.
They do it with cosmic rays."
"But collapsium will stop cosmic rays," Zareff objected.
"Stop them from penetrating, yes. A collapsium-cutter doesn't
penetrate; it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like a
grinding-wheel, or a buzz-saw."
"Well, could you get one down that hole?" Judge Ledue asked.
He laughed. "No. The thing is rather too large. In the first place,
there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. With
them, you produce negamatter--atoms with negatively charged protons
and positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them into
contact with normal positive-matte--That's done in a chamber the size
of a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about a
hundred tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impart
rotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door that
would lift ten ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_. Then you need
another fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield your
cutting-head. The cutting-head alone weighs three tons. The rotary
beam that does the cutting," he mentioned as an afterthought, "is
about the size of a silver five-centisol piece."
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated that
Divine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert's
stock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in the
butte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of Force
Command.
"Means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down to
where that thing is," Zareff said. "That'll take a year."
"Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started," Conn told
them. "It'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauled
here than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened."
He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on
Koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going
to take charge here. He had just been unanimously elected
Indispensable Man.
"Bless you, young man!" Carl Leibert cried. "At last, the Great
Computer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of the
Age of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks in
prayer."
"He's been doing a lot of praying lately," Tom Brangwyn remarked,
after Leibert had gone out. "He's moved into the chaplain's quarters,
back of the pandenominational chapel on the fourth level down. Always
keeps his door locked, too."
"Well, if he wants privacy for his devotions, that's his business.
Maybe we could all do with a little prayer," Veltrin said.
"Probably praying to Sam Murchison by radio," Klem Zareff retorted.
"I'd like to see inside those rooms of his."
He called Yves Jacquemont at Port Carpenter after dinner. When he told
Jacquemont what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was a
pity screens couldn't be fitted with olfactory sensors, so that he
could smell Conn's breath.
"I am not drunk. I am not crazy. And I am not exercising my sense of
humor. I don't know what Fawzi and his gang have here, but if it isn't
Merlin it's something just as hot. We want at it, soonest, and we'll
have to dig a couple of hundred feet of rock off it and open a
collapsium can."
"How are we going to get that stuff on a ship?"
"Anything been done to that normal-space job we started since I saw it
last? Can you find engines for it? And is there anything about those
mining machines or the cutter that would be damaged by space-radiation
or re-entry heat?"
Yves Jacquemont was silent for a good deal longer than the
interplanetary time-lag warranted. Finally he nodded.
"I get it, Conn. We won't put the things in a ship; we'll build a ship
around them. No; that stuff can all be hauled open to space. They use
things like that at space stations and on asteroids and all sorts of
places. We'll have to stop work on _Ouroboros_, though."
"Let _Ouroboros_ wait. We are going to dig up Merlin, and then
everybody is going to be rich and happy, and live happily forever
after."
Jacquemont looked at him, silent again for longer than the usual five
and a half minutes.
"You almost said that with a straight face." After all, Jacquemont
hadn't been cleared yet for the Awful Truth About Merlin, but, like
his daughter, he'd been doing some guessing. "I wish I knew how much
of this Merlin stuff you believe."
"So do I, Yves. Maybe after we get this thing open, I'll know."
To give himself a margin of safety, Jacquemont had estimated the
arrival of the equipment at three weeks. A week later, he was
on-screen to report that the skeleton ship--they had christened her
_The Thing_, and when Conn saw screen views of her he understood
why--was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big mining
machines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshchei had done a stroke
of work on anything else.
"Sylvie's coming along with her; so are Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and
Ham Matsui and Gomez and Karanja and four or five others. They'll be
ready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads," Jacquemont
added.
That was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any of
the Merlin-hunting factions at Force Command. In case trouble started,
he could rely on them.
"Well, dig out some shootin'-irons for them," he advised. "They may
need them here."
Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened that
collapsium can on top of Force Command, and how the people there
reacted to it.
_The Thing_ took a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip;
conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabin
were apparently worse than on the _Harriet Barne_ on her second trip
to Koschchei. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. Carl
Leibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had to
pray the ship across space.
At the same time, reports of the near completion of _Ouroboros II_
were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention from
what was happening at Force Command. Cargo was being collected for
her; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people would
be drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses of
everything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up and
down the Gordon Valley. Melon and tobacco planters were talking about
breaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for the
next year. Agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing high
prices. So were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery. It began to
look as though the Maxwell Plan was really getting started.
It was decided to send the hypership to Baldur on her first voyage;
that was Wade Lucas's suggestion. He was going with her himself, to
recruit scientific and technical graduates from his alma mater, the
University of Paris-on-Baldur, and from the other schools there. Conn
was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on
Koshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and a
textbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to
do while they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long on
the leavings of wartime production; too few people had bothered
learning how to produce anything.
_The Thing_ finally settled onto the mesa-top. It looked like
something from an old picture of the construction work on one of the
Terran space-stations in the First Century. Immediately, every piece
of contragravity equipment in the place converged on her; men dangled
on safety lines hundreds of feet above the ground, cutting away beams
and braces with torches. The two giant mining machines, one after the
other, floated free on their own contragravity and settled into place.
_The Thing_ lifted, still carrying the collapsium-cutting equipment,
and came to rest on the brush-grown flat beyond, out of the way.
If Yves Jacquemont had overestimated the time required to get the
equipment loaded and lifted off from Koshchei, Conn had been
overoptimistic about the speed with which the top of the mesa could be
stripped off. Digging away the rubble with which the pit had been
filled, and even the solid rock around it, was easier than getting the
stuff out of the way. Farm-scows came in from all over, as fast as
they and pilots for them could be found; the rush to get brandy and
tobacco to Storisende had caused an acute shortage of vehicles.
One by one, the members of the old Fawzi's Office gang came drifting
in--Lorenzo Menardes, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes. None of them had
any skills to contribute, but they brought plenty of enthusiasm.
Rodney Maxwell came whizzing out from Storisende now and then to watch
the progress of the work. Of all the crowd, he and Conn watched the
two steel giants strip away the tableland with apprehension instead of
hope. No, there was a third. Carl Leibert had stopped secluding
himself in his quarters; he still talked rapturously about the
miracles Merlin would work, but now and then Conn saw him when he
thought he was unobserved. His face was the face of a condemned man.
The _Ouroboros II_ was finished. The whole planet saw, by
screen, the ship lift out; watched from the ship the dwindling away
of Koshchei and saw Poictesme grow ahead of her. Twelve hours before
she landed, work at Force Command stopped. Everybody was going to
Storisende--Sylvie, whose father would command her on her voyage to
Baldur, Morgan Gatworth, whose son would be first officer and
astrogator, everybody. Except Carl Leibert.
"Then I'm not going either," Klem Zareff decided. "Somebody's got to
stay here and keep an eye on that snake."
"No, nor me," Tom Brangwyn said. "And if he starts praying again, I'm
going to go and pray along with him."
Conn stayed, too, and so did Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes. They watched
the newscast of the lift-out, a week later. It was peaceful and
harmonious; everybody, regardless of their attitudes on Merlin, seemed
agreed that this was the beginning of a new prosperity for the planet.
There were speeches. The bands played "Genji Gartner's Body," and the
"Spaceman's Hymn."
And, at the last, when the officers and crew were going aboard, Conn
saw his sister Flora clinging to Wade Lucas's arm. She was one of the
small party who went aboard for a final farewell. When she came off,
along with Sylvie, she was wiping her eyes, and Sylvie was comforting
her. Seeing that made Conn feel better even than watching the ship
itself lift away from Storisende.