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crooks, and J. Fitzwilliam Sterber was declaring that anybody who called him a
crook could continue the discussion through seconds.
Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal on Poictesme. He
wondered how many duels this meeting was going to hatch.
The next afternoon the Helen O'Loy was unloaded, all but the mining equipment;
Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley Gatworth and a few others took her out to
Force Command. They were met by Klem Zareff's armed airboats two hundred and
fifty miles from the mesa, and they found the place in more of a state of
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er.txt siege than when the Badlands had been full of
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outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have been moved in from Barathrum
Spaceport, and Zareff had more men and firepower than he had ever commanded
during the System States War. If MinisterGeneral Murchison was convinced that
the Merlin excitement was a cover for some seditious plot against the
Federation, this ought to give him food for thought.
There was still work, mostly boring lateral shafts for echo shots, going on at
the butte, under the relay station. That was Leibert, who was still insisting
that that was where Merlin was buried. There was also some work on top of the
mesa, by those who were convinced that that was where Merlin was to be found.
Kurt Fawzi was taking the lead in that. Franz Veltrin and Dolf Kellton sided
with Leibert, and Fawzi's office clique had split into two factions. Judge
Ledue was maintaining strict impartiality, as befitted his judicial position.
"Why hasn't your father gotten those detectives of his to work on this fake
preacher?" Zareff wanted to know, when he and Tom Brangwyn were able to talk
to Conn alone.
"Well, they've been busy," Conn said. "Trying to keep him alive, for one
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thing. You heard about the robobomb somebody launched at us the day we brought
the ships in, didn't you?"
"Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl, too," Brangwyn said. "But hasn't it
ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that calls himself Leibert
might be mixed up with the gang that did that?"
"You suspect him, too?"
Brangwyn nodded. "I took a few audiovisuals of him, when he didn't know it; I
sent them to some
193
different law-enforcement people over in Morven, where he says he comes from.
They never saw him before, and couldn't find anybody who did."
"Well? He just doesn't have a police record, then."
"He says he's a preacher. Preachers don't go off in the woods by themselves to
preach; they get up in pulpits, in front of a lot of people. Those towns over
in Morven are small enough for everybody to have known something about him.
He's a fake, I tell you."
"Let me have copies of those audiovisuals, Tom. I'll see what can be found out
about him. I'm beginning to wonder about him myself. I'm sure I've seen him,
somewhere . . ."
When he got back to Storisende, he found that the marathon conference on the
sixth floor down at the Interplanetary Building had finally come to an end.
Everybody seemed satisfied, and apparently nobody was going to have pistols
and coffee with anybody else about it.
"We have things fixed up," his father told him. "The gang who are building the
ship out of four airfreighters are chartered as Janicot Industries, Ltd.;
they're going to specialize in chemical products. The other company has a
charter now, too. They're going to operate on Jurgen and Horvendile. We'll
sell them ships, and Alpha-Interplanetary will put on scheduled trips to all
three planets and also Koshchei. We're getting along very nicely with them,
except that everybody's competing for technicians and skilled labor. We have
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file:///F|/rah/H.%20Beam%20Piper/Beam,%20Piper%20H%20-%20The%20Cosmic%20Comput
er.txt two hundred more people signed up for Koshchei. What you want to do is
train as many of them as you can for ship-operation. Alpha-Interplanetary is
going to start a training program here at Storisende;
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you'd better leave one of your ships for them to work on, and send back as
many ships as you can find officers and crews for."
"We're getting things really started."
"Yes. The only trouble is . . ." His father frowned. "I don't understand these
people, Conn. Everybody ought to be making millions out of this by this time
next year, but all any of them, even these Storisende bankers, can talk about
is how soon we're going to find Merlin."
"I wish we could stop that, somehow. Listen; I have it. Merlin never was on
Poictesme; Merlin was a space-station a few thousand miles off-planet; there
was a crew of operators aboard, and they communicated with Force Command by
radio. When the War ended, they took it outside the system and shot off a
planetbuster inside her. No more Merlin. How would that be?"
His father shook his head. "Wouldn't do. If anybody believed it, which I
doubt, they'd just quit. The market would collapse, everybody would be broke,
it would just be the end of the War all over again. Conn, we can't let it stop
now. We're going too fast to stop; if we tried it, we'd smash up and break our
necks."
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XVIII
JERRY RIVAS, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping things running
on Koshchei. Work on the interplanetary ship at Port Carpenter had stopped
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when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found; it had never been resumed. When
Conn returned, he found work started on the Ouroboros II. Some of the two
hundred newcomers who came in on the Helen O'Loy had special skills needed on
the hypership; most of them went with Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to
Sickle Mountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. Some of them,
it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. Sylvie, who had been
one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping him with the
long lists of needed materials, some of which had to be brought from other
places as much as a thousand miles away. Jerry Rivas went back to exploring;
Nichols had to drop his space-training work temporarily to organize a fleet of
air-freighters; usually, the men best able to operate them were urgently
needed on some job at the construction dock.
Ships lifted out almost daily from Sickle Mountain. They tried to get some
kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselves of what they
needed for themselves. Some of the ships came back loaded with provisions and
bringing new recruits-for instance, the teaching of physics and mathematics
almost
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stopped at Storisende College because the professors had been virtually
shanghaied.
Conn found himself losing touch with affairs on Poictesme. Ships had landed on
both Janicot and Horvendile and were sending back claims to abandoned
factories. By that time they had all the decks into the Ouroboros Il, and he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]