 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mark Nelson. The Cosmic Computer by H. B. Piper CHAPTER XIII. The ship lurched slightly. In the outside screens, the lights around, the crowd that was waving goodbye, and the floor of the crater began receding. The sound pickups were full of cheering, and the boom of a big gun at one of the top batteries, and the amplified music of a band playing the traditional spaceman's hymn. It's been a long time since I heard that played in earnest, Jack Mott said. Well, we're off to see the wizard. The lights dwindled and merged into a tiny circle in the darkness of the crater. The music died away, the cannon shots became a faint throbbing. Finally there was silence, and only the stars above and the dark land and the starlet sea below. After a long while a sunset glow, six hours passed on Barathrum, appeared in the west, behind the now appreciable curvature of the planet. Stand by for shift to vertical, Captain Nichols called, his voice echoing from PA outlets throughout the ship. Ready for shift, Captain Nichols, Jack Mott reported from the duplicate control panel. Khan went to the after bulkhead, leaning his back against it. Ready here, Captain, he said. Other voices took it up. Lights winked on the control panels. Shifting over, Nichols said. Your ship now, Captain Jack Mott. Thank you, Mr. Nichols. The deck began to tilt, and then he was lying on his back, his feet against the side of the control room, which had altered its shape and dimensions. There was a jar as the drive went on, in line with the new direction of the lift, and the ship began accelerating. He got to his feet, and he and Charlie Gatworth went to the astrogational computer, and began checking the data and setting the course for the point in space at which Koshai would be in a hundred and sixty hours. Course set, Captain, he reported to Jack Mott after a while. A couple of lights winked on the control panel. There was nothing more to do but watch Poitem dwindle behind and listen to newscasts and take turns talking to friends on the planet. They approached the halfway point. The acceleration rate decreased, and the gravity indicator dropped little by little. Everybody was enjoying the new sense of lightness, romping and sky-larking like newly landed tourists on Luna. It was fun, as long as they landed on their feet at each jump, and the food and liquid stayed on plates and in glasses and cups. Eve's Jack Mott began posting signs in conspicuous places. Weight is what you lift, mass is what hurts when it hits you, weight depends on gravity, mass is always constant. His father came on screen from his office in Storacenda. By then there was a thirty-second time lag in communication between the ship and Poitem. My private detectives found out about the Andromeda, he said. She's going to Penurge, in the gamma system. They have a couple of computer men with them, one they hired from the stock exchange, and one they practically shanghied away from the government. And some of the people who chartered the ship are members of a family that were interested in a positronic equipment plant on Penurge at the time of the war. That's all right then, we don't need to worry about that anymore, they're just hunting for Merlin. Some of his companions were looking at him curiously. A little later, Piet Ludwijksen, the electromagnetic engineer, said, I thought you were looking for Merlin, Conn. Not on Koshai, we're looking for something to build a hypership out of. If I had Merlin in my hip pocket right now, I'd trade it for one good ship like the city of Asgard, or the city of Nefertiti, and give it a keg of brandy in a box of cigars to boot. If we had a ship of our own, we'd be selling lots of both, and not for store-send to spaceport prices either. But don't you think Merlin's important, Charlie Gatworth, who had overheard him, asked? Sure, if we find Merlin, we can run it for President. It would make a better one than Jake Weichhoven. He let it go at that. Plenty of opportunities later to expand the theme. The gravitation gauge dropped to zero. Now they were in freefall, and it lasted twice as long as Eve's Jackmont had predicted. There were a few misadventures, none serious, and most of them comic. For example, when Jerry Rivas opened a bottle of beer, everybody was chasing the amber globules and catching them in cups, and those who were splashed were glad it hadn't been hot coffee. They made their second 180-degree turnover while weightless. Then they began decelerating and approached Koshai's stern on, and the gravity gauge began climbing slowly up again, and things began staying put, and they were walking instead of floating. Koshai grew larger and larger ahead. The polar ice caps and the faint dappling of clouds and the dark wiggling lines on the otherwise uniform red-brown surface, which were mountain ranges, became visible. Finally they began to see, first with the telescopic screens and then without magnification the little dots and specs that were cities and industrial centers. Then they were in the atmosphere, and Jackmont made the final shift to horizontal position and turned the ship over to Nichols. For a moment the scout boat tumbled away and the ship and con were back in freefall. Then he got on the lift and drive and steadied it and pressed the trigger button, firing a green smoke bomb. Beside him Eve's Jackmont put on the radio and screen pickups. He could see the ship circling far above and the manipulator boat with its claw arms and grapples breaking away from it. Then he looked down on the endless desert of iron oxide that stretched in all directions to the horizon until he saw a spot, optically the size of a five-centus-all piece, that was the ship-building city of Port Carpenter. He turned the boat toward it, firing four more green smokes at three second intervals. The manipulator boat started to follow and the Harriet Barn, now a distant speck in the sky, began coming closer. Below, as he cut speed and altitude, he could see the pock marks of open pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal and armor glass roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces, and the twisted slag flows like the ancient lava flows of Barathrum. And he reflected, he was an influential non-office holding stockholder in every bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storsenda and get claims filed. A high tower rose out of the middle of Port Carpenter with a glass-domed mushroom top. That would be the telecast station. The administrative buildings were directly below it and around its base. He came in slowly over the city, above a spaceport with its empty landing pits in a double circle around a traffic control building, and airship docks and warehouses beyond, more steel mills, factories, either hemispherical domes, or long buildings with rounded tops. The ship construction yards and docks, for the most part, these were empty, but on some of them the landing stands of spaceships, like eight and ten-legged spiders, waited for forty years for hulls to be built on them. A few spherical skeletons of ships. A few with some of the outer skin on. It wasn't until he was passing close to them that he realized how huge they were. And stacks of material, sheet steel, deck plate, girders, and contra-gravity lifters and construction machines, all left on jobs that were never finished. The bright, rustless metal dulled by forty years of rain and wind-blown red dust. They must have been working here right to the very last, and then, when the evacuation elsewhere was completed, they had dropped whatever they were doing, piled into such ships as were completed, and lifted away. The mushroom-top tower rose from the middle of a circular building piled level on level, almost half a mile across. He circled over it, saw an airship dock, and called a Harriet Barn while Jackmott talked to Jerry Rivas, piloting the manipulator boat. Rivas came in and joined them in the air. They hovered over the dock and helped the ship down when she came in, nudging her into place. By the time Kahn, and Jackmott, and Rivas, and Ann's Dawes, and Rodel, and Yutzko, and Karanja were out on the dock in oxygen helmets, the ship's airlock was opening, and Nichols and Weibart and the others were coming out, towing a couple of small lifters loaded with equipment. The airlock door into the building, at the end of the dock, was closed. When somebody pulled the handle, it refused to open. That meant it was powered from the central power unit, wherever that was. There was a plug socket beside it, and the required voltage marked over it. They used an extension line from a power unit on one of the lifters to get it open, and did the same with the inner door. When it was open, they passed into a dim room that stretched away ahead of them and on either side. It looked like a freight shipping room. There were a few piles of boxes and cases here and there, and a litter of packing material everywhere. A long counter desk and a bank of robo-clerks behind it. According to the air analyzer, the oxygen content inside was safely high. They all pulled off their fishbowl helmets and slung them. Well, we can bunk inside here tonight, somebody said. It won't be so crowded here. We'll bunk here after we find the power plant and get the ventilator fans going, Jackmott said. Ant's Dawes held up the cigarette he had lighted. That was all the air analyzer he needed. That looks like enough oxygen, he said. Yes, it makes its own ventilation, convection, Jackmott said. But you go to sleep in here and you'll smother in a big puddle of your own exhaled CO2. Just watch what the smoke from that cigarette's doing. The smoke was hanging motionless a few inches from the hot ash on the end of the cigarette. We'll have to find the power plant then, Matsui, the power engineer said. Down at the bottom and in the middle, I suppose, and anybody's guess how deep this place goes. We'll find plans of the building, Jerry Rivas said. Any big dig I've ever been on, you could always find plans. The troubleshooters always had them. Security officer and maintenance engineer. There were inside-use vehicles in the big room. They loaded what they had with them onto a couple of freight skids and piled on, starting down a passage toward the center of the building. The passageways were well marked with direction signs and they found the administrative area at the top and center around the base of the telecast tower. The security offices, from which police, military guard, fire protection, and other emergency services were handled, had a fine set of plans and maps, not only for the building itself but for everything else in Port Carpenter. The power plant, as Matsui had surmised, was at the very bottom, directly below. The only trouble, after they found it, was that it was completely dead. The reactors wouldn't react. The converters wouldn't convert, and no matter how many switches they shoved in, there was no power output. The inside telemetered equipment, of course, was self-powered. Some of them were dead too, but from those which still worked, Mohammed Matsui got a uniformly disheartening story. You know what happened, he said? When this gang bugged out, back in 854, they left the power on. Now the conversion mass is all gone, and the plutoniums all spent. We'll have to find more plutonium and tear this whole thing down and refuel it, and repack the mass conversion chambers, provided nothing's eaten holes in itself after the mass inside was all converted. How long will it take, Khan asked? If we can find plutonium, and if we can find robots to do the work inside, and if there's no structural damage, and if we keep it up a couple of days. All right, let's get at it. I don't know where we'll find shipyards like these anywhere else, and if we do, things will probably be as bad there. We came here to fix things up, and start them, didn't we? Chapter 14 It didn't take as long as Mohammed Matsui expected. They found the Fissionables magazine, and in it plenty of plutonium, each subcritical slug in a 500-pound-collapsium canister. There were repair robots, and they only had to replace the cartridges in the power units of three of them. They sent them inside the Collapsium-Shielded Death-to-People area, transmitter robots to relay what the others picked up through receptors wire-connected with the outside, foreman robots, globes a yard in diameter covered with horns and spikes, like old-fashioned ocean navy mines, worker robots in a variety of shapes, but mostly looking like many clawed crabs. Neither the converter nor the reactor had sustained any damage while the Fissionables were burning out. So the robots began tearing out reactor elements, and removing plutonium slugs no longer capable of sustaining chain reaction, but still dangerously radioactive. Nuclear reactors had become simple and easier to service since the first day of the year zero, when Enrico Fermi put the first one into operation, but the principles remained the same. Work was less backbreaking and muscle straining, but it called for intense concentration on screens and meters and buttons that was no less exhausting. The air around them began to grow foul. Finally the air analyzer squawked and flashed red lights to signal that the oxygen had dropped below the safety margin. They had no mobile fan equipment or time to hunt any. They put on their fishbowl helmets and went back to work. After twelve hours, with a few short breaks, they had the reactors going. Jerry Rivas and a couple of others took a heavy-duty lifter and went looking for conversion mass. They brought back a couple of tons of scrap iron and fed it to the converters. A few seconds after it was in, the pilot lights began coming on all over the panels. They took two more hours to get the oxygen separator and the ventilator fans going, and for good measure they started the water pumps and the heating system. Then they all went outside to the ship to sleep. The sun was just coming up. It was sunset when they rose and returned to the building. The air locks opened at a touch on the operating handles. Inside the air was fresh and sweet. The temperature was a pleasantly uniform 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The fans were humming softly and there was running hot and cold water everywhere. Jerry Rivas, Ant's Dawes, and the three tramp freighter folksal hands, took lifters and equipment and went off foraging. The rest of them went to the communication center to get the telecast station, the radio beacon, and the inside screen system into operation. There were a good many things that had to be turned on manually and more things that had been left on 40 years ago and now had to be repowered or replaced. They worked at it most of the night. Before morning almost everything was working and they were sending a signal across 28 million miles to Storsenda on Poitem. It was late evening, Storsenda time, but Rodney Maxwell, who must have been camping beside his own screen, came on at once, which is to say five and a half minutes later. Well, I see you got in somewhere. Where are you and how is everything? Then he picked up a cigar out of an ashtray in front of him and lit it, waiting. Ports Carpenter, we're in the main administration building, Khan told him. He talked for a while about what they had found and done since their arrival. Have you an extra view screen fitted for recording? He asked. Five and a half minutes later his father nodded. Yes, right here. He leaned forward and away from the communication screen in front of him. I have it on. He gave the wavelength combination. Ready to receive. This is about all we have now. Views we took coming in from the ship and a scout boat. He started transmitting them. We haven't sent in any claims yet. I wasn't sure whether I should make them for Alpha Interplanetary or Litchfield Exploration and Salvage. Don't bother sending in anything to the claims office, his father said. Send anything you want to claim in here to me, and I'll have Sturber, Flynn and Chen Wang file them. They'll be made for a new company we're organizing. What? Another one? His father nodded, grinning. Koshai Exploitation and Development. We've made application already. We can't claim exclusive rights to the whole planet, like the old interstellar exploration companies did before the war, but since you're the only people on the planet, we can come pretty close to it by detail. He was looking to one side at the other screen. Great, goo, Khan. This place of yours altogether beats anything I ever dug. Force Command and Barathrum Spaceport included. How big would you say it is? More than ten miles in radius? About five or six. Ten or twelve miles across. That's all right then. We'll just claim the building you're in now and the usual ten mile radius, the same as at Force Command. We'll claim the place as soon as the company's chartered. In the meantime, send in everything else you can get views of. They set up a regular radio and screen watch after that. Charlie Gatworth and Piet Ludwijksen, both of whom were studying astrogation in hopes of qualifying as space officers after they had a real spaceship, elected themselves to that duty. It gave them plenty of time for study. Jerry Rivas and Ants Dawes, with whomever they could find to help them, were making a systematic search. They looked, first of all, for foodstuffs, and found enough in the storerooms of three restaurants on the executive level to feed their own party in gourmet style for a year, and enough in the main storerooms to provision an army. They even found refrigerators and freeze bins full of meat and vegetables fresh after forty years. That surprised everybody, for the power units had gone dead long ago. Then it was noticed that they were covered with colapsium. Anything that would stop cosmic rays was a hundred percent efficient as a heat insulator. Coming in the first day, Kahn had seen an almost completed hypership bulking above the domes and roofs of Port Carpenter in the distance. He saw it again on screen from a pickup atop the central tower. As soon as the party was comfortably settled in the executive apartments on the upper levels, he and Eves Jackmont and Mac Vibert and Chakratif, the construction engineer, found an air-car in one of the hangars and went to have a closer look at her. She had all her colapsium on except for a hundred foot circle at the top and a number of rectangular openings around the sides. Eves Jackmont said that that would be where the airlocks would go. They always put them on last. But don't be surprised at anything you find or don't find inside. As soon as the skeletons up, they put the armor on and then build the rest of the ship out from the middle. It might be slower getting material in through the airlock openings, but it holds things together while they're working. They put on the car's lights, lifted to the top, and let down through the upper opening. It was like entering a huge globular spider's web, globe within globe of interlaced girders and struts and braces extending from the center to the outer shell. Even the spider was home, a three hundred foot ball of colapsium, looking tiny at the very middle. Why, this isn't a ship, Vibert cried and discussed. This is just the outside of a ship. They haven't done a thing inside. Oh yes they have, Jackmont contradicted, aiming a spotlight toward the shimmering ball in the middle. They have all the engines in. Abbott-Lifton Drive, Dillingham Hyper-Drives, Pseudograph, Power Reactors, Converters, everything. They wouldn't have put on the shielding if they hadn't. They did that as soon as they had the outside armor on. Wonder why they didn't finish her if they got that far, Retif said. They didn't need her. They'd had it. They wanted to go home. Well, we're not going to finish her. Not with any fifteen men, Retif said. One man has only two hands, two feet, and one brain. He can only handle so much robo-equipment at a time. I never expected we'd build a ship ourselves, Conn said. We came to look the place over and get a few claims staked. When we've done that, we'll go back and get a real gang together. I don't know where you'll find them, Jackmont commented. We'll need a couple of hundred, and they ought all to be graduate engineers. We can't do this job with farm-tramps. You made some good shipyard men out of farm-tramps on Barathrum. And what'll you do for supervisors? You're one general superintendent, Mac, you, and Shock are a couple of others. You just keep a day ahead of your men in learning the job. You'll do all right. Weibart turned to Jackmont. You know Eves. He'll do it, he said. He doesn't know how impossible this is. And when we try to tell him, he won't believe us. You can't stop a guy like that. All right, Conn, deal me in. I won't let anybody be any crazier than I am, Jackmont declared, and then looked around the vastness of the empty ship with its lacework of steel. All you need is about ten million square feet of decks and bulkheads and air and water system, hydroponic tanks and karniculture vats, astrogation and robo-pilot equipment, about which I know very little, a hyperspace pilot system, about which I know nothing at all. Conn, why don't you just build a new Merlin? It would be simpler. I don't want a new Merlin. I'm not even interested in the original Merlin. This is what I want right here. He told his father, by screen, about the ship. I believe we can finish her, but not with the gang that's here. We'll need a couple of hundred men. Now, with the supplies we've found, we can stay here indefinitely. Should we do more exploring and claim some more of these places, or should we come home right away and start recruiting, and then come back with a large party, start work on the ship, and explore and make further claims as we have time, he asked. Better come back as soon as possible. Just explore Port Carpenter, find out what's going to be needed to finish the ship, and what facilities you have to produce it, and get things cleaned up a little so that you can start work as soon as you have people to do it. I'm organizing another company. Don't laugh now. I've only started promotioneering, which I think we will call Trisystem and Interstellar Spacelines. Get me all the views you can of the ship herself, and of the steel mills and that sort of thing that will produce material for finishing her. I want to use them in promotion. By the way, has she a name? Only a shipyard construction number. Then suppose you call her Auroboros, after Genji Gartner's old ship, the one that discovered the Trisystem. Or Auroboros too. That's fine. We'll do. Good. I'll have Sturber, Flynn, and Chen Wang make application for a charter right away. We'll have to make Alpha Interplanetary one of the stock holding companies, and also Koshai Exploitation and Development, and of course Litchfield Exploration and Salvage. It was a pity there really wasn't a Merlin. If this kept on, nothing else would be able to figure out who owned how much stock in what. They found the on-the-job engineering office for the ship in a small dome half a mile from the construction dock. Eves Jackmont and Mack Weibart and Shock Ratief moved in and buried themselves to the ears in specifications and blueprints. The others formed into parties of three or four and began looking about production facilities for material. There was a steel mill a mile from the construction site. It was almost fully robotic. Iron ore went in at one end and finished sheet steel and girders and deck plates came out at the other. And a dozen men could handle the whole thing. There was a Collapsium Plant. There were machine shops and forging shops. Every time they finished inspecting one, Eves Jackmont would have a list of half a dozen more plants that he wanted found and examined yesterday morning at the latest. Some of them were in a frightful mess. Work had been suspended and everybody had gone away, leaving everything as it was. Some were in perfect order, ready to go into operation again as soon as power was put on. It had depended, apparently, upon the personal character of whoever had been in charge in the end. The Nuclear Electric Power Unit Plant was in the latter class. The man in charge of it evidently hadn't believed in leaving messes behind, even if he didn't expect to come back. It was built in the shape of a T. One side of the cross-stroke contained the cartridge case plant, where presses form sheet steel cylinders, some as small as a round of pistol ammunition, and some the size of 10-gallon kegs. They moved toward the center on a production line, finally reaching a matter-collapser where they were plated with Collapsium. From the other side, radioactive isotopes, mostly reactor waste, came in through evacuated and Collapsium shield and chambers, were assorted, and finally, where the cross-arm of the T joined the downstroke, packed in Collapsium cases. The production line continued at right angles down the long building in which the apparatus which converted nuclear energy to electric current was assembled and packed. At the end the finished power cartridges came off, big ones for heavy machines and tiny ones for things like hand tools and pocket lighters and razors. There were stacks of them, in all sizes, loaded on skids and ready to move out. Except for the minute and unavoidable leakage of current, they were as good as the day they were assembled and would be for another century. Like almost everything else, the power cartridge plant was airtight and had its own oxygen generator. The air analyzer reported the oxygen insufficient to support life. That was understandable. There were a lot of furnaces which had evidently been hot when the power was cut off. They had burned up the oxygen before cooling. They put on their oxygen equipment when they got out of the car. I'll go back and have a look at the power plant, Matsui said. If it's like the rest of this place, it'll be ready to go as soon as the reactors are started. I wish everybody here had left things like this. Well, we'll have to check everything to make sure nothing was left on when the main power was cut, Khan said. Don't do anything back there till we give you the go-ahead. Matsui nodded and set off on foot along the broad aisle in the middle. Khan looked around in the dim light that filtered through the dusty glass overhead. On either side of the central aisle were two production lines. Between each pair, at intervals, stood massive machines which evidently fabricated parts for the power cartridges. Over them and over the machines directly involved in production were receptor aerials, all oriented toward a stubby tower, twenty feet thick and fifty in height, topped by a hemispherical dome. That'll be the control tower for all the machinery in here, he decided. Ants, suppose you and I go take a look at it. We'll take a look at the machines, Rivas said. Clyde, you and I can work back on the right and then come back down on the other side. You know anything about this stuff? Me, Niflheim know, Nichol said. I know a robo-control when I see one, and I know whether it's set to receive or not. There was a self-powered lift inside the control tower. Khan and Ants rode it to the top and got out. Ants snapping on his flashlight. It was dark in the dome at the top. Instead of windows there were view screens all around it. Five men had worked here. At least there were four chairs at four intricate control panels, one for each of the four production lines, and a fifth chair in front of a number of communication screens. There was a heavy-duty power unit turned off. Khan threw the switch. Lights came on inside and the outside view screens lit. They were examining the control panels when Khan's belt radio buzzed. He plugged it in on his helmet. It was Mohammed Matsui. There's a big power plant back here, the engineer said, right in the middle. It only powers what's in front of it. There must be another one in either wing for the isotope plant and the cartridge case plant. I'll go look at them. But the power's been cut off from the machines in the main building. That's four big switches, one for each production line. He was interrupted by a shout, almost a shriek from somewhere. It sounded like Jerry Rivas. A moment later Rivas was clamoring. Khan, what did you turn on? Turn it off right away! Ants jumped to the switch, pulling it with one hand and getting on his flashlight with the other. The lights went out and the screens went dark. It's off. The dickens it is, Rivas disputed. There are a couple of big supervisor robots circling around and a flock of workers. At the same time Clyde Nichols began cursing, or maybe he was praying. It was hard to be certain. But we pulled the switch. It was only the lights and view screens in here anyhow. It didn't do any good. Pull another one. Matsui, back at the power plant, was wanting to know what was wrong. Captain Nichols stopped cursing, or praying, and said, Mutiny, that's what? The robots have turned on us! He knew what had happened, or was almost sure he did. A radio impulse had gone out somehow from the control tower. Something they hadn't checked that had been left on. There was just enough current leakage from the units and the robots to keep the receptors active for forty years. The supervisor robots had gone active, and they had activated the rest. Once on, cutting the current from the control tower wouldn't turn them off again. Put the switch in again, Ants. The damage is done, and you won't make it any worse. When the screens came on, he looked around from one to another. The two supervisors, big Ovoid things, like the small round ones they had used in repairing the power reactors the first day, were circling aimlessly near the roof, one clockwise, and the other counterclockwise, dodging obstructions, and getting politely out of each other's way. At lower altitude, a dozen assorted worker robots were moving about, and more were emerging from cells at the end of the building. Capers with rotary brooms and rakes, crab-like all-purpose handling robots, a couple of vacuum cleaning robots, each with a flexible funnel-tipped proboscis and a bulging dust sack. One thing, a sort of special job designed to get into otherwise inaccessible places, had a twenty-foot, many-jointed claw-tipped arm in front. It passed by and slightly over the tower, saw Clyde Nichols and swooped toward him. With a howl, Nichols dived under one of the large machines between two production lines. A pistol went off a couple of times. That would be Jerry Revis. Nobody else bothered with a gun on Koshai, but he carried one as some people carry umbrellas, whether he expected to need it or not, and because he would feel lost without it. That he took in at one glance. Then he was looking at the control panels. The switches and buttons were all marked for machine control in different steps of power unit production. That was all for the big stuff powered centrally. There weren't any controls for lifters or conveyors or other mobile equipment. Evidently they were handled out in the shop, from mobile control vehicles. He did find, on the communication screen panel, a lot of things that had been left on. He snapped them off, one after another, snapping them on when a screen went dark. There were fifteen or twenty robots, some rather large, in the air or moving on the floor by now. We can't do anything here, he told Ants. These are the shop cleaning robots. They were the last things used here when the place closed down and the two supervisors were probably controlled from a vehicle and it's anybody's guess where that is now. When you threw that switch, it sent out an impulse that activated them. They're running their instruction tapes and putting the others through all their tricks. Three more shots went off. Jerry Rivas was shouting, Hey, what do you know? I killed one of the buggers. There were any number of ways in which a work robot was shot out of commission with a pistol. All of them would be by the purest of pure luck. The next time we go into a place like this, con thought, we take a couple of bazookas along. Turn everything off and let's go. See what we can do outside. Ants put on his flashlight and pulled the switch. They got into the lift and rode down, going outside. As soon as they emerged, they saw a rectangular object fifteen feet long settle over their air-car, let down a half dozen clawed arms, and pick it up, flying away with it. It had taped instructions to remove anything that didn't belong in the Isleway. It probably asked the supervisor about the air-car and the supervisor didn't return an inhibitory signal, so it went ahead. Con and Ants both shouted at it, knowing perfectly well that shouting was futile. Then they were running for their lives with one of the crab-like all-purpose jobs after them. They dived under the slightly raised bed of a long belt conveyor and crawled. Jerry Rivas fired another shot somewhere. The robot themselves were having troubles. They had done all the work they were supposed to do. Now the supervisors were insisting that they do it all over again. Uncomplaningly, they swept and raked and vacuum-cleaned where they had vacuum-cleaned and raked and swept 40 years ago. The scrap pickers, having picked up all the scrap, were going over the same places and finding nothing, and then getting deflected and gathering a lot of things not to find a scrap, and then circling around, darting away from one another in obedience to their radar-operated evasion systems, and trying to get to the outside scrap pile, and finding that the doors wouldn't open because the door-openers weren't turned on, and finally dumping what they were carrying when the supervisors gave them no instructions. One of them seemed to have dumped something close to where Clyde Nichols was hiding. If his language had been a little stronger, it would have burned out Khan's radio. Their own immediate vicinity being for the moment clear of flying robots, Khan and Ants rolled from under the conveyor and legged it between the two production lines. Immediately three of the crab-like all-purpose handling robots saw them. If that was the word for it, and came dashing for them, followed by a thing that was mostly dump-lifter. It was banging its bin lid up and down angrily. About fifty yards ahead, Jerry Reva stepped from behind a machine and fired. One of the handling robots flashed green from underneath, went off contra-gravity, and came down with a crash. Immediately, like wolves on a wounded companion, the other two pounced upon it, dragging and pulling against each other. That was a hunk of junk. Their orders were to remove it. The mobile trash bin went zooming up to the ceiling, reversed within twenty feet of it, and came circling back to the ground, to go zooming up again. It had gone crazy, literally. It had been getting too many contradictory orders from its supervisor, and its circuits were overloaded and its relays jammed. Rats and mazes, and human-type people in financial difficulties, go psychotic in very much the same way. The two surviving all-purpose robots were also headed for a padded repair shop. They had come close enough to each other to activate their anti-collision safeties. Immediately, they flew apart. Then, their order to pick up that big piece of junk took over, and they started forward again, to be bounced apart as soon as they were within five feet of one another. If left alone, their power units would run down in a year or so. Until then, they would keep on trying. Solus intelligences indeed. Then it occurred to him that for the past, however long it had been, he hadn't heard from Mohamed Matsui. He jiggled his radio. Ham, where are you? Are you still alive? I am back at the power plant," Matsui said, exasperatedly. There's a big thing circling around here. Every time I stick my head out, he makes a dive at me. I didn't know robots would attack people. They don't. He just thinks you are some more trash he's been told to gather up. Matsui was indignant. Khan laughed. On the level, Ham, he has photoelectric vision and a picture of what that aisle is supposed to look like. When you get out in it, he knows you don't belong there and tries to grab you. Hey, there's a lot of junk in here and a couple of baskets at the converter. Say I chuck one out to him. What would he do? Grab it and take it away, like he's taped to do. OK, wait a minute. They couldn't see the archway to the power plant or even the robot that had Matsui pinned up. But after a few minutes they saw it soaring away, clutching a big wire basket full of broken boxes and other rubbish. It headed for the mutually repelling swarm of robots around the door that wouldn't open for them. Khan and Anse and Jerry ran toward the rear, joined by Clyde Nichols who popped up from behind a pile of spools and electric wire. They made it just before the coffin-shaped thing that had carried off the air-car came over to investigate. You want to be careful back there, Matsui told them, as they started toward the temporary safety of the power plant, all the reactor repair robots are there. Don't get them on the warpath next. Of course, there were always repair robots at a power plant to go into places no human could enter and live. But they wouldn't have been activated. Let's have a look at them. What kind? Standard reactor servicers? The same we used at the administration center. Matsui opened the door and they went into the power plant. Khan and Matsui put on the service power and activated the two supervisors. They, in turn, activated their workers. It was tricky work getting them all outside of the power plant area. Each worker had to be passed through by the supervisor inside, under Matsui's control. Because of the close quarters at which they worked inside the reactor and the converter, they weren't fitted with anti-collision repulsors. And, working under close human supervision, they all had audio-visual pickups. It took some time to get adequate screen set up outside the collapse. Finally, they were ready. Their two supervisors went up to the ceiling, one controlled by Khan and the other by Matsui. The larger, egg-shaped shop labor supervisors were still moving in irregular orbits. Those of the workers still able to receive signals were trying to obey them and the rest were jamming in a swarm at the other end. First one and then the other of the labor-boss robots were captured. They were by now at the end of what might loosely be called their wits. They weren't used to operating without orders and had been sending out commands largely at random. Now they came to a stop and then began moving in tight, guided circles. One by one the worker robots still able to heed them were brought to ground and turned off. That left the swarm at the door. The worker robots under the direct control of the power plant supervisors went after them, grappling them and hauling them down to where ants and Jerry Revis and Captain Nichols could turn them off manually. The air-car was a hopeless wreck. But its radio was still functioning. Khan called Charlie Gatworth, who called a gang under Gomez working not far away. They came with another car. It took all the next day for a gang of six of them to get the place straightened up. Neither Khan nor Gomez, who was a roboticist himself would trust any of the workers or the two supervisors. Their experiences out of control had rendered them unreliable. They took out their power units and left them to be torn down and repaired later. Other robots were brought in to replace them. When they were through, the power unit cartridge plant was ready for operation. Jerry Revis wanted to start production immediately. We'll have to go back to Poitem pretty soon, he said. We don't want to go back empty. Well, I know that no matter what we dug up and what we could sell or couldn't sell, there's always a market for power unit cartridges. Electric light units, household appliance units, air-car and airboat units, any size at all. We have that plant at full capacity for a few days and we can load the Harriet Barn full and I'll bet the whole cargo will be sold in a week after we get in. End of chapters 13 and 14. Chapter 15 The Harriet Barn settled comfortably at the dock, the bunting swath tugs lifting away from her. They had the outside sound pickups turned as low as possible and still the noise was deafening. The spaceport was jammed, people on the ground and contra-gravity vehicles swarming above with police cars vainly trying to keep them in order. The fans in Storsenda seemed to have been combined. They were blaring the planetary hymn. Genji Gartner's body lies a mould ring in the tomb, but his soul goes marching on. When they opened the airlock there was a hastily improvised ceremonial barge, actually a farm-scow completely draped in red and white the planetary colors. They all stopped, briefly, as they came out to enjoy the novelty of outdoor air which could actually be breathed. Kahn saw his father in the scow and beside him, Sylvie Jackmont, trying, almost successfully, to keep from jumping up and down in excitement. Morgan Gatworth to meet his son and Lester Dawes to meet his. Kurt Fawzy, Dolph Kelton and Colonel Zareff, Tom Brangwin. He didn't see his mother or his sister. Flora he had hardly counted on, but he was disappointed that his mother wasn't there to meet him. Sylvie was embracing her father as he shook hands with his. Then she threw her arms around his neck. Oh, Kahn, I'm so happy! I was watching everything I could on screen, everything you saw and all the places you were and everything you were doing. The scow, pardon, and the barge gave a slight lurch, throwing them together. Over her shoulder he saw his father and Eve's Jackmont exchanging grins. Then they had to break it up while he shook hands with Fawzy and Judge Ledoux and the others and by the time that was over the barge was letting down in front of the stand at the end of the dock and the band was still deafening heaven with Genji Gartner's body and they all started up the stairs to be greeted by planetary president Weichhofen. He looked like an elderly bear who had been too well fed for too long in a zoo and by Minister General Merchison who represented the Terran Federation on Poitème. He was thin and balding and he looked as though he had just mistaken the vinegar crew at for the wine decanter. Genji Gartner's soul stopped marching on, and that was worse. And after the speeches there was the parade. Everybody riding in transparent-bodied air-cars and the Lester Dawes and the two ships of the new Planetary Air Navy and a swarm of gun boats in column 500 feet above all firing salutes. In spite of what wasn't but might just as well have been a concerted conspiracy to keep them apart they managed to get a few words privately with Sylvie. My mother didn't get here. Is anything wrong? Is anything, anything else? I've been in the middle of it ever since you went away. Your mother's still moaning about all these companies your father's promoting. He never used to do anything like that and it's all too big and it's going to end in a big smash. And then she gets on to Merlin. You know, she won't say Merlin. She always calls it that thing. I've noticed that. Then she begins talking about all the horrible things that'll happen when it's found and that sets Flora off. Flora says Merlin's a big fake and you and your father are using it to rob thousands of widows and orphans of their life savings and that sets your mother off again. Self-sustaining, cyclic reaction like the Betasolar Phoenix and every time I try to pour a little oil on the troubled waters I find I've gotten it on the fire instead. And then Flora had this fight with Wade Lucas and of course she blames you for that. Good heavens, why? Well, she couldn't blame it on herself, could she? Oh, you mean, why the fight? Lucas is in business with your father now and she can't convince him that you and your father are a pair of quadruple-died villains, I suppose. Anyhow, the engagement is tht. Khan, is my father going back to Koshai? As soon as we can round up some people to help us on the ship then I'm going along. I've had it, Khan. I'm a combat fatigue case. But Sylvie, that isn't any place for a girl. Oh, poo! This is Sylvie. We're old war buddies. We soldier together on Barathrum, remember? Well, you'd be the only girl and... that's what you think. If you expect to get any kind of a gang together at least a third of them will be girls. A thousand girl technicians are girls and when work gets slack they're always the first ones to get shoved out of jobs. I'll bet there are a thousand girl technicians out of work here. Any line of work you want to name. I know what I'll do. I'll make a telecast appearance. I still have some news value from the Barathrum business. Want to bet that I won't be the working girl's Joan of Arc by this time next week? Sheard him. A girl can punch any kind of a button a man can and a lot of them knew what buttons to punch and why. Say, she could find fifty girls. He had a slightly better chance to talk to his father before the banquet at the Executive Palace that evening. They shared the same suite at the Ritz Gartner and even welcoming committees seldom chased their victims from bedroom to bath. You know all about it, Rodney Maxwell said bitterly. I was home a couple of weeks ago. Flora simply will not speak to me and your mother begged me in tears to quit everything we're doing here. I tried to give her some idea of what would happen if I dropped this even supposing I could she wouldn't listen to me. He finished putting the studs in his shirt. You still think this is worth what it's costing us? You saw the views we sent back. There's work on Koshai for a million people, at least. Why, even these two makeshift ships they're putting together here at Storacenda are giving work one way or another to almost a thousand. Think what things will be like a year from now if this keeps on. Rodney Maxwell gave a rye laugh. Didn't know I had a real Simon pure altruist for a son. Partner, when you call me that, smile. I am smiling with some slight difficulty. He didn't think well of the banquet. Back in Litchfield Senta would have fired half her human help and taken a sledgehammer to a robo-chef for a meal like that. Even his father's camp-cook would have been ashamed of it. And there were more speeches. President Vaikovin managed to get hold of him and Eve's Jackmont afterward and steered them into his private study. Have you any real reason for thinking that Merlin might be on Koshai? the planetary president asked. Great goon-o! We weren't looking for Merlin, Mr. President. We were looking for a hypership. We have one, too. Calling her an Ouroboros II. 2,500 footer. We expect to have her in space in a few months. I surely don't need to tell you what that will do toward restoring planetary prosperity. No, of course not. A hypership of our own. But he looked from one to the other of them. But I understand that this Mr. Kurt Fawzy was saying. Mr. Fawzy is looking for Merlin here on Poitem. If anybody finds it, that's where it'll be found. I'm interested in getting business started again. If this found, it would help, of course. He shrugged, Don't look at me, Jack Mott said. Mr. Maxwell, both of them, father and son, want some spaceships. They hired me to help build them. That's all I have in it. Then he relit the cigar the president had given him and leaned back in his chair, staring at the stuffed alcozoid head with the 7 foot horn spread above the fireplace. He described the interview to his father after they were back at the hotel. I hope you convinced him. You know, he's afraid of Merlin. A lot of people have been saying that if Merlin's found, it should be used to determine government policy. A few extremists are beginning to say that Merlin ought to be the government and Jake Weichhoven and his cronies ought to be dumped. Into the handiest mass energy converter, preferably. You know, if anybody found Merlin and started it auditing the planetary treasury, Jake Weichhoven would be the one who'd be wanting a hypership. Tom Brangwyn ran him down the next morning in the dining room. Con, I wish you'd come along with me, he said. Some of us are up in Kurt's suite. We'd all like to talk to you. Somehow he was acting as though he were making an arrest. That might have been nothing but a professional habit. Con went up to Fawzi's suite and found Fawzi and Judge Ledoux and Dolph Kelton and close to a dozen others there. I'm glad you could come, Con. The judge greeted him. Now that the defendant had arrived, the trial could begin. I wish your father could have gotten here. I asked him to come, but he had a prior engagement. A meeting with some of the financial people about some company he's interested in. That's right. Trisystem and interstellar space lines. Interstellar! Kurt Fawzi almost howled. Great goo! Now it isn't enough to go out to Kosci. He wants to go clear out of the trisystem. That's what we wanted to talk about. All this nonsense you and your father are in. Merlin's right here on Poitem. Right at force command. And if your father hadn't robbed us of all our best men, like Jerry Rivas and Lance Dawes, we'd have found it by now. I don't think you and your father care a hoot if we ever find Merlin or not. Kurt, that's a dreadful thing to say, Dolph Kelton objected in a shocked voice. It's a dreadful thing to have to say, Fawzi replied. But you tell me what Maxwell or Rodney Maxwell are doing to help find it. Who showed you where the force command was, Clemserif asked. Nobody could think of any good, quick comeback to that. Khan took advantage of the pause to ask, why do you want to find Merlin? Why do we—Fawzi sputtered indignity. If you don't know, I know why I do. You do, do you? Merlin would answer so many questions," Dolph Kelton told him gently, questions I can't answer for myself. With Merlin we could set up a legal code and a system of jurisprudence that would give everybody absolute justice, Judge Ledoux said. As if absolute justice wasn't the last thing anybody in his right senses would want, a robot judge would have the whole side a month. We have a man who joined us after you went off to Kosci, Khan, Franz Veltrin said. A Mr. Carl Liebert. He's some kind of a clergyman from over Morvenway. He says that Merlin could formulate an entirely new religion, which would regenerate humanity. Well, I don't have such lofty ideas," Fawzi said. I just want Merlin to show us what he can do here, bring things back to what they were before Poitem went broke. And that's what father and I are trying to do. You're going into the woods with a book on how to chop down a tree and no axe. Fawzi looked at him in surprise, started to say something and thought better of it. If we want prosperity we need tools. Our problem is loss of markets. Merlin, and tape it with everything that's happened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tell us where to find new markets. But the markets won't come to us. We'll have to do our own exporting and we'll need ships. Now you men have been studying about Merlin and hunting for Merlin all your lives. I can't add anything to what you know and neither can my father. You find Merlin and you'll have the ships ready when you do find it. Kurt, I think he has a point somebody said. You're blasted well right he has, Clemser put in. If it wasn't for Con Maxwell you know where we'd be back in Litchfield, sitting around in Kurt's office talking about how wonderful things will be when we find Merlin and doing nothing to find it. Kurt, I believe Con is entitled to an apology, Judge Ladoe ruled. How close we are to finding Merlin I don't know. But it is due to him that we have any hope of finding it at all. Con, I'm sorry, Fawzi said. I oughtn't to have said some of the things I did. But we're all on edge. We've been having so much trouble. Con, it's right there at Force Command. I know it is. We've been all over the place. We have shafts sunk at each of the corners. We view scanners and we put off echo shots. Nothing. We looked for additional passages out of the headquarters but there aren't any. But it has to be somewhere around it just has to be. Maybe if I go out to Force Command with you, I might see something you've overlooked. And if I can't, I'll try to scrape up some stuff on Koshai for you. Deep vein scanners, that sort of thing from the mines. They took the Lester Dawes out at a little past noon and turned south and east. Everybody aboard was happy, except Con Maxwell. He was thinking of the years and years ahead of these trusting, hopeful old men, each year the grave of another expectation. Two hundred miles from Force Command, the goblin met them, her side still spalled and dented looking in Barathrum spaceport. When they came inside of it the mesa-top was deserted. Fawzi began wondering where in Niflheim all the drilling rigs and the seismotrucks were. Somebody with a pair of binoculars called attention to activity on the side of the high butte on top of which the relay station was located. Fawzi began swearing exasperatedly. Might be something Mr. Lieber thought of, Franz Veltrin suggested. Then why in blazes didn't he screen us about it? Who is this Liebert? Con asked. Somebody mentioned him this morning, I think. He joined us after you left, Con. Dolph Kelton said. He's a clergyman from Morven. No regular denomination. He has a sect of his own. Yeah, he would, Clemseriff rumbled. Pious fraud. Really a good man, Con. Clems prejudiced. He says we ought to use Merlin to show us the true nature of God and how to live in accordance with the Divine Will. He says Merlin can teach us a new religion. A new religion based on Merlin. That would be good. And then the fanatics who thought Merlin was the devil would start a holy war to wipe out the servants of Satan and with all of the combat equipment that was lying around on this planet for the first time since his business started he began to feel really frightened. An air-car came bulleting away from the beaut and landed on the mesa as the Lester Dawes sat down. The man who met them at the head of the vertical shaft wore federation fatigues. Baggy trousers, ankle boots and a long smock died black. He was bare-headed and his white hair was almost shoulder long. He had a white beard. Welcome, brothers! He greeted. A hand raised in benediction. And who is this with you? His voice was high and quavery. Not a good pulpit voice, Conn thought. Kurt Fawzy introduced Conn and Liebert grasped his hand with a grip that was considerably stronger than his voice. Bless you, young man! It is to you alone that we owe our thanks for being able to find the great computer. Every sapient being in the galaxy will honor your name for a thousand years. Well, I hadn't counted on quite that much, Mr. Liebert. If it'll only help a few of these people make a decent living, I'll be satisfied. Liebert shook his head, sadly. You think entirely in material terms, young man, you reproved. Forget these things. The higher spiritual values the great computer must not be degraded to such uses. We should let it show us how to lift ourselves to a high spiritual plane. It went on like that after they went down to Fox Travis' now Fawzy's office where there were silver stopper decanters instead of the old green glass pitcher and gold-plated ashtrays and thick carpets on the floor. A man was a lunatic. He made Fawzy's office gang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no idea what a computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build a computer of the sort he thought Merlin was would need it. He would be God. As he talks, Khan began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition. He'd seen this Carl Liebert before, somewhere, and somehow he was sure that the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren't part of the picture. That puzzled him. He doubted if he'd have remembered Liebert from six years ago, almost seven now, though a lot of itinerant evangelists showed up in Litchfield. That might have been it. I tell you, the great computer is there in the heart of the butte, Liebert was insisting now. It has been revealed to me in a dream. It is completely buried. After it was made, no human touched it. The men who were here and used it in the war communicated with it only by radio. That could be so. There were fully robotic computers, intended for use in places where no human could go to live. There was a big one on Niflheim, armored against the fluorine atmosphere and the hydrophoric acid rains. But there was no point in that here. The things were enormously complicated and military engineering of any sort emphasized simplicity. A hug! Was he beginning to believe his Balderdash himself? Clem Zara fell in with him as they were going to dinner. Revealed in a dream, the old rebel snorted. One thing you can always get away with lying about is what you dream. You think he's lying? I think he's just crazy. That's what he wants you to think. Look, Con, he knows Merlin is here. He's trying to keep us from it. That's why he shifted all that equipment over on the butte. He's working for Sam Grayson. I thought your theory was that the Federation had lost Merlin. It was, at first, it doesn't look that way to me now. It's right here at Force Command somewhere. They don't want it found and they're going to do everything they can to stop us. I ought to have left this fellow Liburd here alone. Well, I won't do that again. Get Tom Brangwin to help me. I'll be right back. I'll be right back. Thank you. I'll be right back. God bless dinner at Port Carpenter. Rodney Maxwell, in Storesunda, 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, Con was saying, is going to have to be item two on the agenda. The first thing we need is a ship for the Poitem Koschei Run. 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,' Nicholl said. "'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 Sastriman and some of these Storacenda 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 Storacenda 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,' Khan said. "'Jerry, you can pick a party for exploring. Just zig-zag around the planet and transmit in locations and views of whatever you find, and we'll send it on to Storacenda.'" "'And don't pick anybody for your exploring party that can't be spared from anything here,' Jackmott 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, Khan?' 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 Poitem. 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-pid iron mine started. As soon as the steel mill was ready or started coming in. Ants Dawes had a gang looking for something they could build a 350-foot interplanetary ship out of. Jackmott and Mack Vibert were setting plans and specifications and making lists of needed materials. Khan gathered a dozen men and women and started classes in computer theory and practice. At the same time he and Charlie Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatial astrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into some everythingless non-space outside normal spacetime, 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 humming birds 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 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 300-foot globular skeleton, probably the nucleus of a big hyperspace ship, and decided that it was big enough for what they wanted. The entire colony got to work on it. Photo-printed plans and specifications poured out as Jackmont 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 contra-gravity machines, some robotic and some human operated, clustered around the skeleton hull like hornets building a nest. Tri-system and interstellar space lines 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 the parliament. The administration was now supporting it. Are they completely crazy, Khan wanted to know when he heard about that? They passed 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 Weichhoven'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, Khan 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 cyber-narcists, 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 a care to the north. And another cult, non-religious, was convinced that Merlin was a living machine, with conscious intelligence of its own, and awesome side-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 cyber-narcists, and spent most of their energies attacking each other's meetings. The new 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, Khan asked, are the sane people doing? You ought to know, as Father told him, I suspect that you have all of them on Koshai now. The sane people, if that was what they were, were being busy. They were putting a set of Abbot lift-and-drive engines together, and Khan'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 Koshai to Poitaine. They were learning, by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudo-grave 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 contra-gravity 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 a half dozen other nuclear power people had to get into another boat and speed after them 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. He then found a whole city that manufactured nothing but computers and robo-controlls and things like that. Khan loaded his whole computer theory class onto a freight scowl and took them there. By the time he landed, his father was screening him from Storsenda. 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 Liebert had another revelation? I don't know about that. Kurt's sure Merlin is directly under force command. And speaking about Liebert, Clem Zareff's been after me about him. You know I have contracted for the full-time and exclusive services of this Barton Massara detective agency. Well, Clem wants me to put them to work investigating Liebert. Yes, I know. Liebert's a Terran Federation spy. Why do you need the full-time services of the biggest private detective agency on Poitem? 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. Clem 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 meetings. 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 Storsenda between the cyber-narcists and government troops. There was a pitched battle in the west between the Armageddonists, the Merlinists Satan, and the Human Supremacy League, the Merlin is the Gollum. With heavy losses and claims of victory on both sides. President Weichhoven proclaimed planet-wide martial law, and then discovered he had nothing to enforce it with. Luther Chen Wang screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice was almost inaudibly low at first. Con, I just got 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, Con. They've found all of them. All the ships in the Alpha System except the Harriet Barn and the two we're building at Storsenda. 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. Con put on another screen. The first view is from an altitude of five miles. He didn't need Luther's voice to identify Sickle Mountains, 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 planer. At the same time, it became evident that the plane inside the curve of the Sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like tinsel dust on a red-brown velvet. Great goo! 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 plane. 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 air-car dropped from the ship, he supposed. It was down almost to the tops of the ships, and he could read names and home ports. Pixy, Chloris, Helen O'Loy, Anitis. They were from Jurgen. Sky Rover, Port Saunders. She was from Horvindale. Ships from Storesenda, and Yellow Marsh on Jannico, 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 Poitam and the other planets onto small normal spaceships 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 Storesenda, I'm afraid. They're tough luck. It could be everybody's tough luck. Both these 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 flock to Sickle Mountain. Some of them hastened back to pour 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 have been already explored to gather cargo, as far as possible, the items in shortest supply on Poitem. Don't worry about a market smash, his father told him. We have that taken care of. Tri-system investments has just bought up a lot of stock in both of those companies and we've set up agreements with them. Finally, of course, we'll have to get them voted on by our own companies to sell them ships from Koshai. In return, the company that's building the ship out of four air freighters will go to Janneko. And the company that's building a ship out of the old lights and ring building will go to Jurgen and they'll both stay off Koshai. Sturber, Flynn, and Chen Wang will probably be defending antitrust suits to the end of time. The military 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? We'll 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 Koshai? 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 cyber-narcists 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 Storsunda with. Things are getting just slightly rugged here now. End of chapters 15 and 16.