Klem Zareff's guardsmen were mercenaries. A little over a year ago
they had, at best, been homeless drifters, and not a few had been
outlaws. Now they were soldiers, well fed, clothed, quartered and
equipped, and well and regularly paid. They had a good thing; they
were willing to fight to keep it, Merlin or no Merlin. Conn left them
to their commander. He did gather the workmen for a short harangue,
but that wasn't really necessary. They had a good thing, too, and most
of them realized that they were working toward a better thing. They
could be depended upon, too.
They came crowding out and manned lifters; they got the heavy
collapsium-cutter maneuvered into place and the shielding down around
the cutting-head. After that, there were only four men who could work,
each in his own heavily shielded cabin. In spite of the shielding that
covered the actual work, there was an awesome display of multicolored
light; it was like being in the middle of an aurora borealis. What was
going on where that tiny rotating beam of cosmic rays was grinding at
the collapsium simply couldn't have been imagined.
Conn would have liked to stay outside; he could not. Too many things
were happening in too many places, and it was all coming in by screen.
Rioting had broken out in Storisende and in a dozen other places. He
saw, on a news-screen, a mob raging in front of the Executive Palace;
yellow-shirted Cybernarchists were battling with city police and
Planetary troops, Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers were
fighting both and one another. Above all the confused noise of
shouting and shooting, an amplifier was braying: "_It's a lie! It's a
lie! Merlin has been found!_" Newsmen began arriving--Zareff's men
had orders to pass them through the cordon that had been put up around
Force Command--and they took up his time. It was worth it, though.
They could tell him what was going on.
J. Fitzwilliam Sterber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested, on a
farrago of fraud charges--"I don't know who he's supposed to have
defrauded; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"--and bail
was being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged, but
he was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We're
going to start a false-arrest suit--"
"If you're alive to." Apparently Sterber hadn't thought of that. "What
do you think's going to happen when the Stock Exchange opens?"
"It's going to be bad. But don't worry; your father must have foreseen
something like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a few
more people." He named some of the Trisystem Investments people and
some of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace the market as long
as we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in the
long run."
Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and Clyde
Nichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte had
been running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemont
had gone to space in the _Ouroboros II_.
"Well, they caught up with you," he said. Evidently he had figured out
what the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do about
it?"
"Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find it
before things get too bad." He told Luther the situation of the
moment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?"
"We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to send
any more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure this
thing you've found is Merlin?"
"I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatus
they'd need to operate a thing like Merlin--Yes, Luther. I am sure we
have found Merlin."
Chen-Wong looked at him curiously. "I hope so. I can't think of
anything else that can stop this business."
Tom Brangwyn was in the room when he turned from the screen.
"We searched Leibert's--Shanlee's--rooms," he said. "We found a bomb."
"What kind of a bomb?"
"Vest-pocket thermonuclear. He seems to have gotten the fissionables
by taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing's
packed inside a hundred-pound power-cartridge case. It was in a
traveling-bag under his bed. And you know how it was to be fired? With
a regular 40-mm flare-pistol, welded into the end of the bomb. The
flare-powder had been taken out of the cartridge, and it had been
reloaded with a big charge of rifle-powder. I suppose it would blow
one subcritical mass into another. But the only way he could have
fired the bomb would have been by pulling the trigger."
And blowing himself up along with it. He must have wanted Merlin
destroyed pretty badly.
"Have you questioned him yet?"
"Not yet. I wanted to tell you about it first."
He looked at his watch. Only four hours had passed since the newscast;
why, that seemed like months, ago, now.
"All right, Tom; we'll go talk to him. Where's the Colonel?"
Zareff was surrounded by a dozen screens, keeping in touch with the
_Lester Dawes_ and the gunboats and combat cars, and the gun positions
with which he had ringed Force Command. It was only a little army,
maybe, but he was a busy commander-in-chief.
"You take care of it. Tell me what you get from him. I can't leave
now. There's a report of a number of aircraft approaching from the
west now...."
They found Judge Ledue, and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton, who were just
sitting around wishing there was something to do to help. They gave
Franz Veltrin and Sylvie Jacquemont the job of keeping the
representatives of the press amused. Then they went down to the room
in which General Mike Shanlee was held under guard.
Shanlee, wearing a bathrobe and nothing else, was lying on a cot,
sleeping peacefully; three of Zareff's men were sitting on chairs,
watching him narrowly.
"All right; you can go," Conn told them. "We'll take care of him."
Shanlee woke instantly; he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of
the cot.
"You have my name and rank," he said, and his voice no longer
quavered. "My serial number is--" He recited a string of figures. "And
that's all you're getting out of me."
"We'll get anything we want out of you," Conn told him. "You know what
a mind-probe is? You should; your accomplices used one on my father's
secretary. She's a hopeless imbecile now. You'll be, too, when we're
through with you. But before then, you'll have given us everything you
know."