 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 9 Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags of bare rock jetted up, lava flows like black glaciers twisting among them. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash cones. Except for the sea birds that nestled among the cliffs and the few thin patches of green, where seeds, windblown from the mainland, had taken root, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust it up from the sea. Barathrum was a dead inferno, untenated even by the damned. By comparison, the bad land seemed lushly fertile. The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked the division of sea and land. The gun boat goblin in the lead, her sisters, vampire and dragon, to right and left and a little behind, and the Lester Dawes a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the goblin's controls. Khan, beside him, was peering ahead into the teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back again. Somebody behind him was saying that it would be a nice place to be air-wrecked. Somebody else was telling him not to joke about it. From the radio, his father was asking, Can you see it yet? Not yet. We're on the right map and compass direction. We should before long. We're picking up radiation, Fred Karski said. Way above normal count. I hope the place isn't hot. We're getting that too, Rodney Maxwell said. Looks like power radiation. Something must be on there. After forty years, that didn't seem likely. He leaned over to look at the Omni Geiger, then whistled. If that was normal leakage from inactive power units, there must be enough of them to power ten towns the size of Litchfield. Some things operating there, he said, and then realized what that meant. Somebody had beaten them to the spaceport. That would be one of the new companies formed after the opening of Force Command. He was wishing now that he hadn't let himself be talked out of coming here first. Older and wiser heads, indeed. Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. Attention everybody! General alert! Prepare for combat! Prepare to take immediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport is occupied and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will you please make ready aboard your ship? Reduce both speed and altitude, and ready your guns and missiles at once. Well, now wait a minute, young fellow, Poole began to argue. You don't know. No, I don't. And I want all of us alive after we find out, too," Karski replied. Rodney Maxwell's voice, in the background, said something indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, Well, all right, if you think so. The Lester Dawes began dropping to the rear and going down toward the ground. Conn returned to the teleview screen in time to see the truncated cone of the extinct volcano rise on the horizon, dwarfing everything around it. Fred Karski was talking to Colonel Zaraf, back at Force Command, giving him the radiation count. That's occupied, the old soldier replied. Mass energy converter going. Now, Fred, don't start any shooting unless you have to. But don't get yourself blown to MC, waiting on them to fire the first shot. The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be seven miles around the crater and a mile deep. When that thing blew out, ten or fifteen thousand years ago, it must have been something to see. Preferably from a ship a thousand miles off planet. It was so huge that it was hard to realize that the humbled foothills around it were themselves respectively lofty mountains. When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightly near the summit. An instant later, the missile man, in his turret overhead, shouted, Missile coming up! Counter-missile off! Grab on to something, everybody, Karski yelled, bracing himself in his seat. Conn, on his feet, flung his arms around an upright stanchion and hung on. Fred's hand gave a twisting jerk on the steering handle. The goblin went corkscrewing upward. In the rear view screen, Conn saw a pink fireball blossom far below. The sound and the shockwave never reached them. The goblin outran them. Dragon and Vampire were spiraling away in opposite directions. The radio was loud with voices, and a few of the words were almost printable. A gong began clanging from the command post on top of the mesa on the mainland. Be quiet, all of you, Clemseriff was bellowing. And get back from there. Back three or four miles. Close enough so they won't dare use thermonuclears. Take cover behind one of those ridges where they can't detect you. Then we can start figuring out what the guy henna to do next. That made sense. And get it settled who's in command of this Donnybrook while we're at it, Conn thought. He looked into the rear and side view screens, and taking cover immediately made even more sense. Two more fireballs blossomed, one dangerously close to the dragon. Guns were firing from the mountain top too, big ones, and the shells were bursting close to them. He saw a shell land on and another beside one of the enemy gun positions, a hundred and fifteen millimeters from the Lester Dawes he supposed. He continued to cling to the stanchion, and the goblin shot straight up, and he was expecting to see the sky blacken and the stars come out when the gunboat leveled and started circling down again. The mountain side, he saw, was sending up a lightning-crackling tower of smoke and dust that swelled into a mushroom top. Clemseriff on the radio was demanding to know who'd launched that. We did it, sir. Dragon, Steffen Jorison was replying. We had to get rid of it. We took a hit. Gun turrets smashed. Milt Hennet's dead, and Abe Samuel's probably will be before I'm done talking. And if we get this crate down in one piece, it'll do for a miracle till a real one happens. Well, be careful how you shoot those things off, his father implored from the Lester Dawes. Get one inside the crater, and we won't have any spaceport. The Lester Dawes vanished behind a mountain range a few miles from the volcano. The dragon, still airborne but in obvious difficulties, was limping after her, and the vampire was covering the withdrawal, firing rapidly but with doubtful effect with her single ninety-millimeter and tossing out counter-missiles. There was another fireball between her and the mountain. Then, when the dragon had followed the Lester Dawes to safety, she turned tail and bolted, the goblin following. As they approached the mountains, something the shape of a recon car and about half the size passed them going in the opposite direction. As they dropped into chasm on the other side, another nuclear went off at the volcano. When Khan and Fred left the goblin and boarded the ship, they found Rodney Maxwell, Captain Poole, and a couple of others on the bridge. Charlie Gatworth, the skipper of the vampire, Morgan Gatworth's son, was with them, and, imaged in a screen, so was Clemseriff. One of the other screens, from a pickup on the vampire, showed the dragon lying on her side, her turret crushed, and her gun, with the muzzle-brake gone, bent upward. A couple of lorries from the Lester Dawes were alongside. As Khan watched, a blanket-wrapped body, and then another were lowered from the disabled gunboat. Fred, how are you and Charlie fixed for counter-missiles? Zeraph was asking. Get loaded up with them off the ship, as many as you can carry. Charlie, you go up on top of the ridge above, and take cover where you can watch the mountain. Transmit what you see back to the ship. You take a position about a quarter way around from where you are now. Don't let them send anything over, but don't start anything yourselves. I'm coming out with everything I can gather up here. I'll be along myself in a couple of hours, and the rest will be stringing in after me. In the meantime, Rodney, you're in command. Well, that settled that. There was one other point, though. Colonel, Khan said, I assume that this spaceport is occupied by one of those new prospecting companies. We have no right to take it away from them, have we? They fired on us without warning, Karski said. They killed Milt, and it's ten to one A won't live either. We owe them something for that. We do, and we'll pay off. Khan, you assume wrong. This gang's been at the spaceport long enough to get the detection system working and put the defense batteries on ready. They didn't do that since this morning, and up to last evening they neglected to file claim. I'll assume they're on the wrong side of the law. They're outlaws, Khan. All the raids along the East Coast, everybody's blamed them on the Badlands gangs. I'll admit they're responsible for some of it, but I'll bet this gang at the spaceport is doing most of it. That was reasonable. Barathrum was closer to the scene of the worst outlaw depredations than the Badlands, not more than an hour at Mach 2. And nobody ever thought of Barathrum as an outlaw hangout. People rarely thought of Barathrum at all. He liked the idea. The only thing against it was that he wanted so badly to believe it. They brought the body of Milt Hennad aboard, and Abe Samuels swatched in bandages and immobilized by narcotic injections. A few more of the dragon's six-man crew had been injured. Jorison, the skipper, had one trouser leg slit to the belt, and his right thigh splinted and bandaged. He took over the Lester Dawes missile controls, which he could manage sitting in one place. Fred Karski and Charlie Gatworth went aboard their craft and lifted out. For a long time nothing happened. Con got out the plans of the volcano spaceport and the photo maps of the surrounding area. The principal entrance, the front door of the spaceport, was the crater of the extinct volcano itself. It was ringed outside with launching sites and gun positions, and according to the data he had some of the guns were as big as 250 mm. How many outlaws that were to man them was a question a lot of people would get killed trying to answer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the crater floor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far back into the mountain. There were two galleries, one above the other, extending entirely around the inside of the crater near the top. Passages from them gave access to the outside gun and missile positions. With a dozen ships the size of the Lester Dawes, and about 5,000 men, and a CO who wasn't concerned with trivialities like casualties, they could have taken the place in half an hour. With what they had, trying to fight their way in at the top was out of the question. There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning, and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. It was a tunnel, two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshops and storerooms back of the ship berths, from a big blowhole or small crater at the foot of the mountain. According to the 50-year-old plans it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it looked like a royal highway straight to the heart of the enemy stronghold. To Khan it looked like a wonderful place to commit suicide. He'd only had a short introductory course in one semester in military and protective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wanted to go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough to give him an idea of the sort of booby traps that tunnel could be filled with. He knew what he'd have put into it if he'd been defending that place. Colonel Zarath had sent one last message from Force Command when he lifted off with a flight of recon cars. After that he maintained a communication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got close enough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately the volcano began spewing out missiles. Pool hastily took the Lester Dawes ten miles down the Rift Valley in sixty seconds, while Stefan Jorson put out a nuclear warhead missile and left it circling about where the ship had been. From their respective positions Fred Karski and Charlie Gatworth filled the airspace midway to the volcano with counter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There were explosions, fireballs in the air, and rising cumulus clouds of very colored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reached the Lester Dawes' former position. When the controllers, back at the volcano, couldn't see the ship in their screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately Jorson sent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own, eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shook the ground like an earthquake and churned the air like a hurricane. Clem Zareff came on screen at once. Now what did you do? he demanded. Blew the whole place up, didn't you? Rodney Maxwell told him. Zareff laughed. They might just think they got the ship. All the pickups would be smashed before they could see what really happened. You're about ten miles south of that? Be with you in a few minutes. They got a screen on for his rear view pickup. Zareff had with him a dozen recon cars, some of them under robo-control. Six gunboats followed, and behind them, to the horizon, other craft were strung out. Airboats, troop carriers, and freight scouts. They could see enemy missiles approaching in Zareff's front screen. Counter missiles got most of them, and a couple of pilotless recon cars were sacrificed. The Lester Dawes blasted more missiles as they crossed the top of the mountain range. Then Zareff's car was circling in and entering at one of the ship's open cargo ports. Zareff and Ant's Dawes got out. Gunboats were only half an hour behind, Zareff said. Get some screens onto them, Ants. You know the combinations. Now let's see what kind of a mess we're in here. It was almost a miracle the way the tottering old man, Conn, had seen on the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra, had been rejuvenated. The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles and counter missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about the supply. The enemy didn't seem to be running short. By 1300, Conn noted the time incredulously, the battle seemed to have been going on forever, instead of just four hours. The Lester Dawes had moved halfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the eight gunboats were spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped transmitting. In the screens there was a rising fireball where she had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports. Poltergeist, Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two of them had been schoolmates of Conn's at the Academy. He knew how he'd feel about it later, but now it simply didn't register. They're launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down, he said. That's usually the beginning of the end, Zareff said. I saw it happen too often during the war. We've got to get inside that place. It's a lot of harmless fun to send contra-gravity robots out to smash each other, but it doesn't win battles. Battles are won by men, standing with their feet on the ground, using personal weapons. We'll have to win this one pretty soon, Rodney Maxwell said. The amount of nuclear energy we've been releasing will be detectable anywhere on the planet by now. The government has a ship like the Lester Dawes in commission. If this keeps on, she'll be coming out for a look. Then we'll have help, Captain Poole said. We need government help like we needed a polka-dot fever, Rodney Maxwell said. If they get in it, they'll claim the spaceport themselves, and we'll have fought a battle for nothing. Well, that was it then. The spaceport was essential to the Maxwell Plan. He'd gotten seven men killed, eight if the recon card that was taking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn't make it in time, and it was up to him to see that they hadn't died for nothing. He spread the photomap and the spaceport plans on the chart-table. Look at this, he said. Clem Zareff looked at it. He didn't like it any better than Khan had. He studied the plan for a moment, chewing his cigar. You know, it's possible they don't know that thing exists, he said, without too much conviction. You'll be betting the lies of at least 20 men. You were then that couldn't accomplish anything. I'll be putting mine on the table along with them, Khan said. I'll lead them in. He was wishing he hadn't had to say that. He did, though. It was the only thing he could say. You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel," he continued. You know them better than I do. We'll need working equipment, too. I have no idea what we may have to take out of the way inside. I won't call for volunteers, Zareff said. I'll pick home guards. They did their volunteering when they joined. Let me pick one man, Colonel," Anstah said. I'll pick me. CHAPTER X They sent a snooper in first. It picked up faint radiation leakage from inactive power units of overhead lights, and nothing else. The tunnel stretched ahead of it, empty, and dark beyond its infrared vision. After it had gone a mile without triggering anything, the jeep followed. Anstah's piloting and Khan at the snooper controls watching what it transmitted back. The two lorries followed, loaded with men and equipment, and another jeep brought up the rear. They had cut screen and radio communication with the outside. They weren't even using intervehicle communication. At length, the snooper emerged into a big cavern, swinging slowly to scan it. The walls and ceiling were rough and irregular. It was natural instead of excavated. Only the floor had been leveled smooth. There were a lot of things in it, machinery and vehicles, all battered and in poor condition. Dusty and cobwebbed. The spaceport junk heap. A passage still large enough for one of the gun boats led deeper into the mountain toward the crater. They sent the snooper in and, after a while, followed. They came to other rectangular excavated caverns. On the plans they were marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shrouded objects. Some had never been disturbed, but here and there they found evidence of recent investigation. Beyond was another passage, almost as wide as the mall in Litchfield. Even the Lester Dawes could have negotiated it. According to the plans, it ran straight out to the ship docks and the open crater beyond. Ants turned the jeep into a side passage and Khan recalled the snooper and sent it ahead. On the plan it led to another natural cavern, half its width shown as level with the entrance. The other half was a pit, marked as sixty feet deep. Above this, and just under the ceiling, several passages branched out in different directions. The snooper reported a visible light ahead, floral electric light from one of the upper passages and fire light from the pit. The air analyzer reported wood smoke and a faint odor of burning oil. He sent the snooper ahead, tilting it to look down into the pit. A small fire was burning in the center, around it, in a circle, some hundred and fifty people, including a few women and children, sat, squatted, or reclined. A low hum of voices came out of the sound box. "'Who the blazes are they?' ants whispered. "'I can't see any way they could have gotten down there.' They were in rags and they weren't armed. There wasn't so much as a knife or pistol among them. Khan motioned the lorries and the other jeep forward. "'Prisoners,' he said. I think they were hauled down there on a scow, shoved off, and left when the fighting started. "'Cover me,' he told the men in the lorries. I'm going down and talk to them.' Somebody below must have heard something. As ants took the jeep over and started floating it down, the circle around the fire began moving, the women and children being pushed to the rear and the men gathering up clubs and other chance weapons. By the time the jeep grounded, the men in the pit were standing defensively in front of the women and children. They were all dirty and ragged. The men were unshaven. There was a tall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls, another man with a black beard and an old Space Navy uniform. His head bandaged with a dirty and blood-caked rag, another in the same uniform, wearing a cap on which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced with the emblem of transcontinental and overseas ship lines and the words Chief Engineer. And beside the tall man with the gray beard was a girl in baggy trousers and a torn smock. Like the others she was dirty, but in spite of the rags and filth, Khan saw that she was beautiful. Black hair, dark eyes and impudently tilted nose. They all looked at him in hostility that gradually changed to perplexity and then hope. Who are you, the tall man with the gray beard asked? You're none of this gang here. Litchfield Exploration and Salvage. I'm Khan Maxwell. That meant nothing. None of them had been near a newspaper lately. What's going on top side? The man with the bandaged head and the four stripes on his sleeve asked. There was firing, artillery and nucleus and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloody murderers out? We're working on it, Khan said. I take it they aren't friends of yours. Foolish question of the year. They all made that evident. They took my ship. They murdered my first officer and half my crew and passengers. They burned our home and killed our servants, the girl said. They kidnapped my father and me. They've been keeping us here as slaves. It's the Blacky Peralis Gang, the tall man with the gray beard said. They've been making us work for them, converting a blasted tub of a contragravity ship into a spacecraft. I beg your pardon, Captain Nichols. She was a fine ship for her intended purpose. Your Captain Nichols, Ant's Dawes exclaimed? Of the Harriet Barn? That's right. The Harriet Barn's here. They've been making us work on her to convert her to an interplanetary craft of all idiotic things. My name's Yves Jacquesmont, the man with the gray beard said. I'm a retired hyperspace maintenance engineer. I had a little business at Waterville, buying, selling, and rebuilding agricultural machinery. This gang found out about me. They raided and burned our village and carried me and my daughter Sylvia away. We'd been working for them for the last four months, tearing Captain Nichols' ship down and armoring her with Collapsium. How many pirates are there here? That started an argument. Nobody was quite sure. 250 seemed to be the highest estimate, which Kahn decided to play safe by accepting. You get us out of here, Yves Jacquesmont was saying. All we want is a chance at them. How about arms? You can't do much with clubs and fists. Don't worry about that. We know where to get arms. The treasure house where they store their loot. There's plenty of arms and ammunition and anything else you can think of. They've used us to help stow the stuff. We know where it is. Ants, you remember those scows we saw in the big room before we came to the broad passage? Take four men in the jeep. Have them lift two of them and bring them here. Then you go to the end of the tunnel and call the Lester Dawes. Tell them what's happened. Tell them they can get gunboats all the way in and wait to guide them when they arrive. When Ants turned and climbed into the jeep, he asked Yves Jacquesmont, why does this paralysis want an interplanetary ship? He's crazy, Jacquesmont swore, paranoid megalomaniac. He talks of organizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band and making himself king. He's heard that there are Space Navy superweapons on Koshai, I suppose there are at that, and he wants to get a lot of planet busters and hell-burners and annihilators. He lowered his voice. Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that'd blow the Harriet Barn up as soon as he got her out of the atmosphere. He talked for a while to Jacquesmont and his daughter Sylvie and to Nichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vivart. There was evidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could be built, but there were foundries and rolling mills and a collapsed matter producer. The Harriet Barn was gutted, half torn down, and half armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. It might be possible to continue the work on her and take her into space. Then the two scouts floated over the top of the pit and began letting down. They got the prisoners into them, the combat-effective men in one and the women and children in the other. At the top he took over the remaining jeep, getting Jacquesmont, his daughter, and the two contra-gravity ship officers in with him. Up to the top, Jacquesmont said, take the middle passage and turn right at the next intersection. As they approached the section where the pirates stored their loot, the sound of guns and explosions grew louder, and they began picking up radio and screen signals, all of which were scrambled and incomprehensible. The pirates, in different positions, talking among themselves. With all that, it ought to be safe to use their own communication equipment. Nobody would notice it. The treasure-room looked like a giant pack-rat's nest. Cases and crates of merchandise, bales, boxes, barrels, machinery, household and industrial robots. The prisoners piled out of the two scows and began rummaging. Somebody found a case of cigarettes and smashed it open. In a moment, cartons were being tossed around and opened, and everybody was smoking. The pirates evidently hadn't issued any tobacco rations to their prisoners. And they found arms and ammunition, began ripping open cases, handing out rifles, pistols, submachine guns. The prisoners grabbed them even more hungrily than the cigarettes. Sylvie Jackmont took charge of the ammunition. She had three men opening boxes for her, while she passed out boxes of cartridges and made sure that everybody had ammunition to fit their weapons. A ragged man, who might have been a farm-trap or rich planter before his capture, had gotten a bale of cloth open and was tossing rags around, while the chief engineer inspected weapons and showed people how to clean out the cosmoline and fill their spare magazines. Khan collected a few of his own party. Let's look these robots over, he said. Find about half a dozen we can load with blasting explosive and send ahead of us on contra-gravity. They found several, an electric light servicer, a couple of wall and window washers, a serving robot that looked as if it had come from a restaurant and an all-purpose Robo-Janitor. In the passage outside they began loading the lorries with bricks of ionite and packages of cataclysmite, packing all the scrap iron and other junk around the explosives that they could. As soon as they had weapons the prisoners came swarming out, making more noise than was necessary and a good deal more than was safe. Sylvie Jackmont, with a submachine gun slung from one shoulder and a canvas bag of spare magazines from the other, came over to see what he was doing. Well, look what you're doing to him, she mock reproached. That's a dirty trick to play on a little robot. He grinned at her. You and my mother would get along. She always treats robots like people. Well, they are, sort of. They aren't alive, at least I don't think they are, but they do what you tell them and they learn tricks and they have personalities. That was true. He didn't think robots were alive either, though biophysics professors tended to become glibly evasive when pinned down to defining life. Robots could learn, if you use the term loosely enough, and any robot with more than 500-hour service picked up a definite and often exasperating personality. I've been working with them and tearing them down and fixing them ever since I was in pigtails, she added. The half-dozen natural leaders among the prisoners, Jackmont and his daughter, the two Harriet Barn officers and a couple of others, bent over the photo-printed plans Con had, located their position and told him as much as they could about what lay ahead. Sylvie Jackmont could handle robots. She would ride in the front seat of the jeep while he piloted. Weibart, the chief engineer, and Eve's Jackmont would ride behind. Nichols would ride in the scow with the fighting men. One lorry of his own party would follow the jeep, the other would bring up the rear. He snapped on the screen and punched the ship combination. Stefan Jorison appeared in it. Hi, Con, you all right? He raised his voice. Con's on screen! His father appeared at Jorison's shoulder and a moment later, Clemseriff. Well, we're in all right, he said. We just picked up an army, too. He swung the jeep to get the crowd in the pickup, explaining who they were. Did you hear from Ants? Yes, he just screamed in, Rodney Maxwell said. He said a gunboat can get in. That's right, clear into the crater. Well, we're going to put three of them inside, Zerev told him, werewolf, zombie, and dero. And a troop carrier with fifty men, flamethrowers, portable machine guns, bomb launchers, regular special weapons section. What can you do where you are? Here? Nothing. We're going to work around to the other side of the crater and then find a vertical shaft and go up topside and make as much disturbance as we can. That's it, Zerev approved. Pull them off balance. As soon as we get in, we'll go straight to the top. Look for us in about an hour. It's going to take time getting to the tunnel mouth without being spotted from above. He lifted the jeep and started off. Lori and the scous and the other Lori followed. The snooper and the bomb robots went ahead like a pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark and silent and bulking with dusty machines. Jackmott explained that the prisoners had never gotten into this section. The Harriet Barn was a mile or so to their right. Conn turned left when the noise of firing from outside became planar. A foundry. A machine shop which seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of a rush job that hadn't really been necessary. They came to a place even the snooper couldn't enter. Choked to the ceiling with dead vegetation. Hydroponic seed plants that had been left untended to grow wild and die. They emerged into outside light in vast caves a mile high and open onto the crater and looked across the floor that had been leveled and vitrified to the other side three and a half miles away. He didn't know whether to be more awed by the original eruption that had formed the crater or by the engineering feet of carving these docks and ship berths. Big enough for the hugest hyperspace ship into it. At first he had been afraid of getting into position too soon before the task force from outside could profit by the diversion. Then he began to worry about the time it was taking to get halfway around the crater. He could hear artillery thundering continuously above. Except at the very beginning of the battle there had been little gunfire. He wondered if bull sides were running out of lift and drive missiles or if the fighting had gotten too close for anybody to risk using nuclear weapons. He was also worrying about the women and children among the released prisoners. Why did the pirates bother with them? he asked Sylvie. They used the women and some of the old men to do housekeeping chores for them, she said. Mostly though they were hostages. If the men didn't work paralysis threatened to punish the women and children. I wasn't doing any housework. I'm too good a mechanic. I was helping on the ship. Well what'll I do with them when the fighting starts? I can't take them into battle. You'll have to. It'll be the safest place for them. You can't leave them anywhere and risk having them recaptured. That means we'll have to detach some men to cover them and that'll cut our striking force down. He whistled at the sound pickup of his screen and told his father about it. What do I do with these people anyhow? You're the officer in command, Conn, his father told him. Your decision. How soon can you attack? We're almost through to the crater. There's a vertical shaft right above us and a lot of noise at the top. We'll send up a couple of bomb robots to clear things at the shaft head and follow with everything we have. Non-combatants and all? He nodded. Only thing we can do. An old quotation occurred to him. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs. He wondered who'd said that in the first place. One of the old pre-atomic conquerors, maybe Hitler. No, Hitler would've said, if you want to make sauerkraut, you have to chop cabbage. Maybe it was Caesar. We'd better send Gumshoe Gus up first, so he suggested. You handle him. Take a quick look around and then pull him back. We'll need him later. It was the first time he'd ever caught himself calling a robot him instead of it. He thought for a second and added, give your father and Mr. Weibart the controls for the two window washers. You handle the snooper. He gave more instructions. Eves Jackmott to turn his bomb-robot right, Weibart to turn his left, the two lorries to follow the jeep up the shaft, the scows to follow. Then he leaned back and looked at the screens that had been rigged under the top of the jeep. A circle of light appeared in one, growing larger and brighter as the snooper approached the top of the shaft. Two more came on as the bomb-robots followed. All right, follow me, he said into the intervehicle radio and started the jeep slowly up the shaft. The snooper popped out of the shaft onto a gallery that had been cut into the solid rock, fifty feet high and a hundred and fifty across, with a low parapet on the outside and the mild-deep crater beyond. There were a few grounded air-cars and lorries in sight and a medium airboat rested a hundred or so feet on the right of the shaft opening. Fifteen or twenty men were clustered around it with a lifter loaded with ammunition. They looked like any crowd of farm-tramps. Suddenly one of them saw the snooper, gave a yell and fired at it with a rifle. Sylvie pulled it back into the shaft. Her father and the chief engineer sent the two bomb-robots up onto the gallery. The right-hand robot sped at the airboat. The last thing Khan saw in its screen was a face, bearded and villainous and contorted with fright, looking out the pilot's window of the airboat. Then it went dead and there was a roar from above. On the other side several men were firing straight at the pickup of the other robot. It went dead too and there was a second explosion. In the communication screen somebody was yelling, Give them another one for Milt Hennet! And his father was urging him to get in fast before they recovered. In peace or war screen communication was a wonderful thing. The only trouble was that it led in too many cabitzers. The gallery, when the jeep emerged onto it, was empty except for casualties, a few still alive. The side of the airboat was caved in. The lifter load of ammunition had gone up with the bomb. He moved the jeep to the right of the shaft and waited for the vehicles behind him, suffering a brief indecision. Never divide your force in the presence of the enemy. There had been generals who had done that and gotten away with it, but they'd had names like Fox Travis and Robert E. Lee and Napoleon. Napoleon. That was one who'd made that crack about the omelettes. They'd known what they were doing. He was playing this battle by ear. There was a lot of shouting ahead to the right. That meant live pirates, a deplorable situation which ought to be corrected at once. The communication screen was noisy now. His father had gotten to the top gallery with the three gun cutters and was meeting resistance. He formed his column, his jeep and one of the lorries in front, the scows next, and the second lorry behind and started around the gallery counterclockwise, the snooper and the three remaining bomb robots ahead. They began running into resistance almost at once. Bullets spattered on the armored glass in front of him, calling it and blotching it with metal until he found that he could steer better by the showback of his view pickup. He used that until the pickup was shot out. Then his father began wanting to know from the communication screen what was going on and where he was. A bomb or something went off directly under the jeep, bouncing it almost to the ceiling. He found that it was impossible to lift it again after it settled to the floor of the gallery and they all piled out to fight on foot. Somers and his gang from the number one lorry were also a foot. Their vehicle had been disabled. He saw them lifting wounded into one of the scows. They blew up the light service robot to clear a nest of pirates who had taken cover ahead of them. They sent the robo janitor up a side passage and exploded it in a missile launching position on the outside of the mountain. That produced a tremendous explosion. They began running out of cartridges and had to stop and glean more from enemy casualties. They expended their last bomb robot, the restaurant server, to break up another pirate resistance point. At length he found himself with Sylvie and her father and one of the home guardsmen from Somers lorry lying behind an air car somebody had knocked out with a bazooka, two dead pirates for company, and a dozen distressingly live ones ahead behind an improvised barricade. Behind there was frantic firing. The near guard seemed to have run into trouble, probably from some gang that had come down from the upper level. He wondered what his father was doing with the gun boats. Since abandoning the jeep, he had lost his only means of contact. Suddenly the men in front jumped up from their barricade and came running toward them. Been reinforced, now they were counterattacking. His rifle was empty. He drew his pistol and shot one of them and then he saw that they were throwing up their hands and yelling for quarter. This was something new. He looked around quickly to make sure none of the liberated prisoners except Jackmont and his daughter were around and then called to a couple of his own men to come up and help him. While they were relieving pirates of their pistol belts and cartridge vandaliers, more came up, their hands over their heads, herded by a combat car from which Tom Brangwin covered them with a pair of twelve-millimeter machine guns. Tom hadn't put in an appearance before he had taken his commando force into the tunnel. He hadn't even known the chief of company police was on Barathrum. Well, nice seeing you, he greeted. How did you get in? Over the top, Brangwin told him, everything's caved in on the other side. We have a quarter of the top gallery and half of this one. Your father's cleaning up above. Clems got some men working along the outside. Sylvie was tugging at his arm. Hey, look! Look at that! She was clamoring. Who's she belonged to? He looked. The Lester Dawes was coming over the edge of the crater. She's ours, he said. It's all over but the mopping up and counting the egg breakage. End of Chapter 10 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 11 The shooting died down to occasional rattles of small arms, usually followed by yells for a quarter. An explosion thundered from across the crater. The Lester Dawes fired her big guns a few times. A machine gun stuttered. A pistol banged far away. It took two hours before all the pirates had been hunted out of hiding and captured, or killed if found by their former captives, who were accepting no surrender, whatever. Blacky Peralis had been one of the latter. He had been found, his clothes in rags and covered with dirt and grease, hiding under a machine in one of the shops back of the dock, in which the Harriet Barn was being rebuilt. He tried to claim that he was one of the pirate's prisoners who had eluded the roundup at the beginning of the battle and had been hiding there since. As soon as the real prisoner saw and recognized him, they had fallen upon him and clubbed, kicked, and stamped him out of any resemblance to humanity. At that, what he got was probably only a fraction of what he deserved. The egg-breakage had been heavy, and not at all confined to the bad eggs. A third gunboat, the Banshee, had been destroyed with all hands during the final attack from the outside. In addition, a dozen men had been killed during the fighting in the galleries. Everybody was shocked, except Clemseriff, who had been in battles before. He was surprised that the casualties had been so light. At first glance, the spaceport looked like a handsome prize of victory. The docks and workshops were all in good condition. At worst, they only needed cleaning up. There was a collapsium plant with its own mass-energy converter. There were foundries and machine shops and forging shops and a rolling mill, almost completely robotic. At first, Kahn thought it might be possible to build a hyper-drive ship here without having to go to Koschai at all. Closer examination disabused him of this hope. There was nothing of which the framework of a ship could be built, and no way of producing heavy structural steel. The rolling mill was good enough to turn out a thin sheet material, which, when plated with a few micromicrons of collapsium, would be as good as a hundred feet of lead against space radiations, but that was the ship's skin. A ship needed a skeleton, too. The only thing to do was go on with the Harriet Barn. It was sunset before he finished his tour of inspection and let his jeep down in a vehicle-haul off the lower gallery, outside what had originally been the Spaceport Officers' Club. It was crowded, and a victory celebration seemed to be getting underway. He saw his father, with Yves Jacquesmont, Sylvie, Tom Brangwen, and Captain Nichols. Nichols had gotten clean clothes from the pirate's store of loot and had bathed and shaved. So had Jacquesmont, though he had contented himself with trimming his beard. It took him a second or so to recognize the young lady in Feminine Garb as his erstwhile battle-comrade, Sylvie. Well, our pay goes on from the day we were captured, Nichols was saying. My instructions are to resume command of the ship. Tomorrow they're sending a party out to go over. Conn stopped short. What's this about the ship? Captain Nichols was in screen contact with his company's office in Storacenda, Rodney Maxwell said. He was continuing him in command of her. But we took that ship. We lost three gun-boats and about twenty-five men. She still belongs to transcontinent and overseas, his father said, and that's been the law on stolen property as long as there's been any law. Of course he should have known that. Did know it, just didn't think it. We broke an awful lot of eggs for no omelet, a battle for nothing. Well, of course I'm prejudiced, Sylvie said, but I don't think getting us out of the hands of that bloodthirsty maniac and his cutthroats was nothing. Wiping out the paralysis gang wasn't nothing, Conn, Tom Brangwin said. You got no idea at all how bad things were in the last couple of years. I know, I'm sorry. He was ashamed of himself. But I needed a ship. No ship at all. A ship means something to you, Eve's Jackmott asked. Yes, he told him why. If we could get to Kosci, we could build a hypership of our own and get our brandy and things to markets where we could get a decent price for them. I know, I was in and out of Storsendo and these owner-captain tramps for a couple of years before I decided to retire and settle here, Jackmott said. Well, don't give up too soon, Nichols advised. You can't keep the Harriet Barn, of course, but you're entitled to prize money on her and that ought to buy you something you could build a spaceship out of. That's right, Jackmott said. Everything else besides the frame can be made here. Look, these pirates burned me out. Except for the money I have in the bank, I lost everything. Home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, home, everything. Home, business and all. As soon as I can find a place for Sylvie to stay, I'll come back and go to work for your company, building a spaceship. And a lot of the men who are working here are farm-tramps and drifters. One jobs as good as another, as long as they get paid for it. And I know a few good men in Storsendo, engineers, who'd be glad for a job, too. You think it would be all right with mother and Flora if Sylvie stayed with us? Conn asked. Of course it would. They'd be glad to have her." Rodney Maxwell turned to Yves Jackmont. Let's consider that fixed up. Now, suppose you and I go into Stora Cenda and—the transcontinent and overseas people arrived at Barathrum spaceport the next morning. A rear-ranked vice-president, a front-ranked legal eagle, and three engineers. They were horrified at what they saw. The Harriet Barn had been gutted. Bulkheads and decks had been ripped out and relocated incomprehensibly. The bridge and the control room under it were gone. She had been stripped to her framework, and the whole underside was sheathed and shimmering colapsium. Great! Goo! the vice-president almost howled. That isn't our ship! That's the Harriet Barn, her captain said. She looks a little ragged now, but— You helped these pirates do this to her? If I hadn't, they'd have cut out my throat and gotten somebody else to help them. My throat's more valuable to me than the ship is to you. I can't get anybody to build me a new one. Well, understand, one of the engineers said. They were converting her into an interplanetary ship. It wouldn't cost much to finish the job. We need an interplanetary ship like we need a hold in the head. The vice-president turned to Rodney Maxwell. Just how much prize money do you think you're entitled to for this wreck? I wouldn't know. That's up to Sturber, Flynn and Chen Wang. Up to the court, if we can't settle it any other way. You mean you'd litigate about this? The lawyer demanded, and began to laugh. If we have to? Look, if you people don't want her, sign her over to Litchfield Exploration and Salvage. But if you do want her, you'll have to pay for her. We'll give you twenty thousand sols, the lawyer said. We don't want to be tight-fisted. After all, you've fought a gang of pirates and lost some men and a couple of boats. We have some moral obligation to you. But you'll have to realize that this ship, in her present state, is practically valueless. Collapsium on her is worth twice that, and the engines are worth even more, Jackmont said. I worked on them. The discussion ended there. By mid-afternoon, Luther Chen Wang, the junior partner of the law firm, arrived from Storacenda, with a couple of engineers of his own. Reporters began arriving. Both sides were anxious to keep them away from the ship. Khan took care of them, assisted by Sylvie, who had rummaged an even more attractive costume out of what she called the loot-locker. The reporters all used up a lot of film footage on her. And the Fawzi's office gang arrived from Force Command, bitterly critical of the value of the spaceport, against its cost in lives and equipment. Brangwen and Zaref returned to Force Command with them. A planetary air patrol ship arrived and removed the captured pirates. The liberated prisoners were airlifted to Lichfield. The third day after the battle, Khan and his father and Sylvie and her father flew to Lichfield. To Khan's surprise, Flora greeted him cordially, and Wade Lucas, rather stiffly, congratulated him. Maybe it was as Tom Brangwen had said. He hadn't been on Poitem in the last four or five years and didn't know how bad things had gotten. His mother seemed to think he had won the Battle of Barathrum single-handed. He was even more surprised and gratified that Flora made friends with Sylvie immediately. His mother, however, regarded the engineer's daughter with badly concealed hostility and seemed to doubt that Sylvie was the kind of girl she wanted her son getting involved with. Outwardly, of course, she was quite gracious. Rodney Maxwell and Yves Jackmont flew to Storsenda the next morning. Both were more optimistic about finding a ship than Khan thought the circumstances warranted. Khan stayed at home for the next few days, luxuriating in idleness. He and Sylvie tore down his mother's household robots and built sound sensors into them, keying them to respond to their names and to a few simple commands, and included worded voice responses in a thick Sheshen accent. All the smart people on Tara, he explained, had Sheshen humanoid servants. His mother was delighted. Robots that would answer when she spoke to them were a lot more companionable. She didn't seem to think, however, that Sylvie's mechanical skills were ladylike accomplishments. Nice girls, Litchfield model, weren't quite so handy with a spot welder. That was what Khan liked about Sylvie. She was like the girls he'd known at the university. They were strolling after dinner down the mall. The air was sharp and worn that autumn had definitely arrived. The many brilliant stars, almost as bright as the moon of Tara, were coming out in the dusk. Khan, this thing about Merlin, she began. Do you really believe in it? Ever since Dad and I came to Poitem, I've been hearing about it, but it's just a story, isn't it? He was tempted to tell her the truth and sternly put the temptation behind him. Of course there's a Merlin, Sylvie, and it's going to do wonderful things when we find it. He looked down the starlit mall ahead of him. Somebody, maybe Lester Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardis, had gotten things finished and cleaned up. The pavement was smooth and unbroken. The litter had vanished. It's done wonderful things already, just because people started looking for it, he said. Some of these days they're going to realize that they had Merlin all along and didn't know it. There was a faint humming somewhere ahead, and he was wondering what it was. Then they came to the long escalators and saw that they were running. Why, look! They've got them fixed. They're running! Sylvie grinned at him and squeezed his arm. I get you, chum, she said. Of course there's a Merlin. Maybe he didn't have to tell her the truth. When they returned to the house his mother greeted him. Con, your father's been trying to get you ever since you went out, called him right away. Ritz Gartner Hotel in Storcenda. It's something about a ship. It took a little time to get his father on screen. He was excited and happy. Hi, Con. We have one, he said. What kind of a ship? You know her. The Harriet Barn. That he hadn't expected. Something off Mothball Row that would have to be flown to Barathrum and torn down and completely rebuilt, but not the one that was there already, partly finished. How the dickens did you wangle that? Oh, it was Eve's idea to start with. He knew about her. The TNO's been losing money on her for years. He said if they had to pay prize money on her and then either restore her to original condition or finish the job and build a spaceship they didn't want, it would almost bankrupt the company. They got up as high as 50,000 sols for prize money and we just laughed at them. So we made a proposition of our own. We proposed organizing a new company, subsidiary to both LENS and TNO, to engage in interplanetary shipping. Both companies to assign their equity in the Harriet Barn to the new company, the work of completing her to be done at our spaceport and the labor cost to be shared. This would give us our spaceship and get TNO off the hook all around. Everybody was for it except the president of TNO. Know anything about him? Con shook his head. His father continued. Names Jethro Sastriman. He could play Scrooge in Christmas Carol without any makeup at all. He hasn't had a new idea since he got out of college and that was while the war was still going on. Proposterous, utterly visionary, undempractical, his father mimicked. Fortunately, a majority of the big stockholders didn't agree. They finally bullied him into agreeing. We're calling the new company Alpha Interplanetary. We have an application for charter in and that'll go through almost automatically. Who's going to be president of this new company? You know him. Character named Rodney Maxwell. Eves is going to be vice president in charge of operations. He's flying to Barathrum tomorrow or the next day with a gang of technicians we're recruiting. TNO are giving us Clyde Nichols and Mack Vibart and a lot of men from their shipyard. I'm staying here in Storcenda. We're opening an office here. By this time next week, we're all going to wish we'd been born Quinn Tuplets. And Con Maxwell, I suppose, will be an influential, non-office-holding stockholder. That's right, just like in L.E. and S. Chapter 12 He found Jerry Rivas and Ants Dawes and a score of workmen making a survey and inventory of the spaceport. Captain Nichols and four of the original crew of the Harriet Barn, who had shared his captivity among the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And Fred Karsky, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light-air-boats, was keeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formation of Alpha Interplanetary when Con arrived. The next day, Eves Jackmont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, a gang from the TNO shipyard, and a dozen engineers and construction men whom we had recruited around Storcenda. More workers arrived in the next few days, including a number who had already worked on the ship as slaves of the Perelis gang. It didn't take Con long to appreciate the problems involved in the conversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere and gravitation, the Harriet Barn was long and narrow, like an old ocean ship. More than anything else, she had originally resembled a huge submarine. Spaceships, either interplanetary or interstellar, were always spherical with a pseudo-gravity system at the center. This, of course, the Harriet Barn lacked. Well, are we going to make the whole trip in freefall, he wanted to know? No, we'll use our acceleration for pseudo-grav halfway, and deceleration the other half, Jackmont told him. We'll be in freefall for about ten or fifteen hours. What we're going to have to do will be to lift off from Poitem in the horizontal position the ship was designed for, then make a 90-degree turn after we're off planet, with our lift and our drive working together, just like one of the old rocket ships before the Abbot Drive was developed. That meant, of course, that the after bulkheads would become decks, and explained a lot of the oddities he had noticed about the conversion job. It meant that everything would have to be mounted on gimbals. Everything stowed so as to be secure in either position, and nothing placed where it would be out of reach in either. Jackmont and Nichols took charge of the work on the ship herself. Chief Engineer Weibart, with a gang of half-taught, self-taught, and untaught helpers, went back to working the engines over, tearing out all the safety devices that were intended to keep the ship inside planetary atmosphere, and arranging the lift engine so that they could be swung into line with the drive engines. There was a lot of cybernetic and robotic equipment, and astrogational equipment that had to be made from scratch. Conn picked a couple of helpers and went to work on that. From time to time he was able to snatch a few minutes to read teleprint newspapers, or listen to audiovisual newscasts from Storacenda. He was always disappointed. There was much excitement about the new interplanetary company, but the emphasis was all wrong. People weren't interested in getting hyperships built, or opening the mines or factories on Koshai, or talking about all the things now in short supply that could be produced there. They were talking about Merlin. And they were all positive now that something found at Forced Command Duplicate had convinced Litchfield Exploration and Salvage that the giant computer was somewhere off-planet. Rodney Maxwell flew in from Storacenda. He was accompanied by Wade Lucas, who shook hands cordially with Conn. Can you spare us Jerry Rivas for a while? Rodney Maxwell asked. Well, ask Eves Jackmont. He's Vice President in Charge of Operations. As an influential non-office holding stockholder, I'd think so. He's only running around helping out here and there. We want him to take charge of opening those hospitals you are telling us about. Wade and I are forming a new company, Mainland Medical Materials Limited, going to act as broker for L.E. and S. in getting rid of medical stores. Nobody in the company knows where to sell that stuff or what we ought to get for it. Wade Lucas began to talk about how desperately some types of drug and some varieties of diagnostic equipment were needed. Conn headed on the tip of his tongue to ask Lucas whether he thought that was a racket too. Lucas must have read his mind. I really didn't understand how much good this would do, he said. I wouldn't have spoken so forcefully against it if I had. I thought it was nothing but this Merlin thing. Agh! Don't talk to me about Merlin, Conn interrupted. I have to talk to Kurt Fawzy and that crowd about Merlin till I'm sick of the whole subject. His father shot him a warning glance. Lucas was looking at him in surprise. He hastened to change the subject. I see Len made you a suit of that material, he said to his father, and I see you are not bulging the coat out behind with a hip holster. Oh, I stopped carrying a gun. I'm a city man now. Nobody carries one at Storescenda. Wouldn't even be necessary in Litchfield before long. Our new Marshal had a regular reign of terror in Traptown for a few days, and you wouldn't know the place. Wade here is acting mayor now. They went back to talking about the new company. You're going to have so many companies you won't be able to keep track of them before long, Conn said. Well, I'm doing something about that. A holding company. Tri-system investments limited. You're a non-office holding stockholder in that, too. Merlin was now a political issue. A bill had been introduced in Parliament to amend the Abandoned Property Act of 867 and nationalize Merlin, when and if discovered and regardless by whom. The support seemed to come from an extremist minority. Everybody else, including the administration, was opposed to it. There was considerable acrimony, however, on the propositions. One, that Merlin was too important to the prosperity of Quattem to become a private monopoly, and two, that Merlin was too important, etc., to become a political football and patronage plumb. It was discovered, after they were half assembled, that the controls for the Harriet Barn would only work while she was in a horizontal position. The whole thing had been torn out and rebuilt. There was also trouble with the air and water recycling system. The city of Nefertiti came in from Atan for Odin. Rodney Maxwell was almost frantic because they hadn't gotten together a cargo of medical stores from the first hospital to be opened. There's all sorts of stuff he was fuming by screen, stuff that's in short supply anywhere, and that we could get good prices for off-planet, get Federation sols for it, too. The city of Asgard will be along in six months, Khan said. You can have a real cargo assembled by then. You can make arrangements in advance to dispose of it on Terra, or Baldur, or Marduk. There are a couple of other companies interested in interplanetary ships now, is Father added. One of them has gotten four old freighters off Mothball Row, and they're tearing them down and cannibalizing them into one spaceship. That works being done here at Storesenda Spaceport. And another company has gotten title to a couple of old office buildings, and as a gang at work dismantling them for the structural steel. I think they're going to build a real spaceship. That wasn't anything to worry about, either. The Harriet Barn was better than half finished. There was a collapse plant at Storesenda Spaceport, but Eve's Jockmont said it was only half the size of the one at Barathrum. It would be three months before it could produce armor for one, let alone both ships. The crackpots were getting into the act now, too. A spirit medium on the continent of a care, to the north, had produced a communication purporting to originate from a deceased Third Force staff officer now in the spirit world. There was considerable detail, all ludicrous to Khan's professional ear. And a fanatic in one of the small towns on the west coast was quoting the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita to prove that if Merlin were ever found, divine vengeance in spectacular form would fall not only on Poitem, but on the entire galaxy. The spaceship that was building at Storesenda got into the news. On screen it appeared that the work was progressing rapidly. So was the work of demolishing a block of empty buildings to get girders for the second ship, on which work had not yet been started. The one under construction seemed to be of cruciform design, like an old-fashioned pre-contra-gravity winged airplane. The design puzzled everybody at Barathrum. Eve's Jockmont thought that perhaps there would be decks on the crossarm which would be used when the ship was running on combined lift and drive. Well, till we get a shipyard going on Koshai and build some real spaceships, there are going to be some rare-looking objects traveling around the Alpha System. I wonder what the next one's going to look like, a flying skyscraper, Khan said. What I wonder, Eve's Jockmont replied, is where all the old interplanetary ships got to. There must have been hundreds of them running back and forth from here to Genneco and Koshai and Jurgen and Horvindil during the war. They must have gone somewhere. Couldn't they all have been fitted with Dillingham hyperdrive engines and used in the evacuation? Possible, but the average interplanetary ship isn't very big, five hundred to seven fifty feet in diameter. One of those things couldn't carry more than a couple of hundred people. After you put in all the supplies and the hydroponic tanks and the karniculture vats and so on for a four to six-month voyage, I can't see the economy of altering anything that small for interstellar work. Why, the smallest of these tramp freighters that come in here will run about fifteen hundred feet. They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure. And there certainly wasn't any of them left on Poitem. He puzzled over it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things to think about. In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work, everything he could find on Koshai, with an intensity he had not given to anything since cramming for examinations at the university. There was a lot of it. The fourth planet of Alpha Gartner was older than Poitem. Geologists claim that it was the oldest thing, the sun accepted, in the system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn't been captured from either beta or gamma when the three stars had been much closer together. It had certainly been formed at a much higher temperature than Janakow or Poitem or Jurgen or Horvendil. For better than a million years it had been molten hot, and it had lost most of its lighter elements in gaseous form along with its primary atmosphere, leaving little to form a light rock crust. All that had remained had been a core of almost pure iron and a mantle that was mostly high-grade iron ore. The same process had gone on, as it cooled as on any terracized planet. After the surface had started to congeal, gases, mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, had come up to form a secondary atmosphere, the water vapor forming a cloud envelope condensing and sending down rain that returned immediately as steam. Solar radiations and electric discharges broke some of that into oxygen and hydrogen. Most of the hydrogen escaped into space. Finally the surface cooled further and the rain no longer steamed off. The whole planet started to rust. It had been rusting slowly for the billion or so years that had followed, and almost all the free oxygen had become locked in iron oxide. The air was almost pure carbon dioxide. It would have been different if life had ever appeared on Koshai, but apparently the right amino acids never assembled. Some attempts had been made to introduce vegetation after the colonization of Poitème, but they had all failed. Men went to Koshai. They worked out of doors in oxygen helmets, and lived in airtight domes and generated their own oxygen. There had been mines and smelters and blast furnaces and steel mills. And there had been shipyards, where hyperships up to three thousand feet had been built. They had all been abandoned when the war ended. They were waiting there on an empty, lifeless planet. Some of them had been built by the Third Fleet Army Force during the war. Most of them dated back almost a century before that, to the original industrial boom. All of them could be claimed under the Abandoned Property Act of 867, since all had been taken over by the Federation, and the original owners, or their heirs, compensated. And there was the matter of selecting a crew. As an influential non-office holding shareholder in all the companies involved, Con Maxwell, of course, would represent them. He would also serve as astrogator. Clyde Nichols would command the ship in atmosphere, and act as first mate in space. Mack Vibart would be Chief Engineer at all times. Eves Jackmott would be the first officer under Nichols, and Captain Outside Atmosphere. They had three real space crewmen, named Rodel, Yutsko, and O'Keeve, who had been in store ascended jail as a result of a riotous binge when their ship had lifted out six months before. The rest of the company, Jerry Rivas, Ants Dawes, Charlie Gatworth, Mohamed Matsui, and four other engineers, Ludvigson, Gomez, Garanja, and Ratif, rated as ordinary spacemen for the trip, and would do most of the exploration work after landing. They got the controls put up, they would work in either position. The engines were lifted in and placed. Con finished the robo-pilot and the astrogational computers and saw them installed. The air and water recycling system went in. The Collapsium Armor went on. In the news screen, they saw the spaceship in store ascenda still far from half finished, with swarms of heavy-duty lifters and contragravity-machiners around it. And a set of landing stands on which the second ship was to be built in the process of construction. A tramp hyperspace freighter landed at store ascenda, the Andromeda, five months from Tara, with a cargo of general merchandise. Rodney Maxwell and Wade Lucas had assembled a cargo of medicines and hospital equipment which they thought could be sold profitably. They began dickering with the owner-captain of the hypership. A farm tramp, down in the Tobacco Country in the South, evidently ignorant that the former commander of the Third Force was still alive, had proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Fox Travis and was forbidding everybody, on pain of court-marshal and firing squad, from meddling with Merlin. And an evangelist in the West was declaring that Merlin was really Satan in mechanical shape. The Harriet Barn was finished. The first test, lifting her to three hundred miles, turning her bow up and taking her another thousand miles, had been a success. They brought her back and set her down in the middle of the crater and began getting the supplies aboard. Kurt Fawzy, Clem Zareff, Judge Liddo, Franz Veltrin, and the others flew in from Force Command. Sylvie Jackmont came from Lichfield and so did Wade Lucas, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardis, and a number of others. Neither Khan's mother nor sister came. I don't know what's the matter with those two, Sylvie told him. They always seemed to be scrapping with each other now, and the only thing they can agree on is that you and your father ought to stop whatever you're doing right away. Your mother can't adjust to your father being a big-store ascendant businessman, and she says he'll lose every sentence all he has, and both of you will probably go to jail. And then she's afraid you will find Merlin, and Flora sure you and your father are swindling everybody on the planet. Sylvie, I had no idea things could be like that, he told her contritely. I wish I hadn't suggested that you stay there now. Oh, it isn't so bad so far. Your mother and I get along all right when Flora isn't there, and Flora and I get along when your mother isn't around. Mealtimes aren't much fun, though. His father came out from Storacenda, looked the ship over, and seemed relieved. I'm glad you're ready to get off, he said. You know this hyperspace freighter, the Andromeda? Some private group in Storacenda has chartered her. She's loading supplies now. I have a private detective agency, Barton Massara, trying to find out where she's going. I think you better get this ship off right away. We have everything aboard, all the supplies and everything, Jack Mont told him. We can lift off tonight. End of chapters 11 and 12.