The Cosmic Computer E-Book

H. Beam Piper

• Herausgeber: Endymion Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 319

Beschreibung

Conn Maxwell told them: "There are incredible things still undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in duplicate as a precaution against space attack. I know where all of them are. "But I could find nothing, not one single word, about any giant strategic planning computer called Merlin!" Nevertheless the leading men of the planet didn't believe him. They couldn't, for the search for Merlin had become their abiding obsession. Merlin meant everything to them: power, pleasures, and profits unlimited. Conn had known they'd never believe him, and so he had a trick or two up his space-trained sleeve that might outwit even their fabled Cosmic Computer ... if they dared accept his challenge.

Leseprobe

THE COSMIC COMPUTER

..................

H. Beam Piper

ENDYMION PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by H. Beam Piper

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

I

..................

Thirty minutes to Litchfield.

Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck, watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath the ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass must feel with the sand slowly draining out.

It had been six months to Litchfield when the Mizar lifted out of La Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been two months to Litchfield when he boarded the City of Asgard at the port of the same name on Odin. It had been two hours to Litchfield when the Countess Dorothy rose from the airship dock at Storisende. He had had all that time, and now it was gone, and he was still unprepared for what he must face at home.

Thirty minutes to Litchfield.

The words echoed in his mind as though he had spoken them aloud, and then, realizing that he never addressed himself as sir, he turned. It was the first mate.

He had a clipboard in his hand, and he was wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about a dozen regulation-changes, ago. Once Conn had taken that sort of thing for granted. Now it was obtruding upon him everywhere.

“Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir,” the first officer repeated, and gave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two; trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flicker of anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the whole infernal situation. He nodded.

“That’s everything. Not many passengers left aboard, are there?”

“You’re the only one, first class, sir. About forty farm laborers on the lower deck.” He dismissed them as mere cargo. “Litchfield’s the end of the run.”

“I know. I was born there.”

The mate looked again at his name on the list and grinned.

“Sure; you’re Rodney Maxwell’s son. Your father’s been giving us a lot of freight lately. I guess I don’t have to tell you about Litchfield.”

“Maybe you do. I’ve been away for six years. Tell me, are they having labor trouble now?”

“Labor trouble?” The mate was surprised. “You mean with the farm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble.”

“Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to the lower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just pistols, either.”

“Oh. That’s on account of pirates.”

“Pirates?” Conn echoed.

“Well, I guess you’d call them that. A gang’ll come aboard, dressed like farm-tramps; they’ll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns in their bindles. When the ship’s airborne and out of reach of help, they’ll break out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crew and passengers. They don’t like to leave live witnesses,” the mate said. “You heard about the Harriet Barne, didn’t you?”

She was Transcontinent & Overseas, the biggest contragravity ship on the planet.

“They didn’t pirate her, did they?”

The mate nodded. “Six months ago; Blackie Perales’ gang. There was just a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the Air Patrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody’s ever seen ship, officers, crew or passengers since.”

“Well, great Ghu; isn’t the Government doing anything about it?”

“Sure. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive. And there hasn’t been a single case of piracy inside the city limits of Storisende,” he added solemnly.

The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon ahead, and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks. Below, the fields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They had been green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the crop in early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were still harvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was going to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he’d seen a lot of cask staves going aboard at Storisende.

Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six years ago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that had been melon fields recently, among the new forests that had grown up in the past forty years. The few stands of original timber towered above the second growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planet had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name “Poictesme” told that—Surromanticist Movement, when they were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical space-rover whose ship had been the first to enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to the romantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets of the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one had been called Storisende.

Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republic in the Terran Federation. The other planets were uninhabitable except in airtight dome cities, but they were rich in minerals. Companies had been formed to exploit them. No food could be produced on any of them except by carniculture and hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper to produce it naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century.

Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; the manufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer find a profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei, on Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruel closed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the offices emptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wild game came back.

Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert of crumbling concrete—landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracks and toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements and missile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated from Poictesme’s second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem had been the advance base for the Third Fleet-Army Force, during the System States War.

It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on or routed through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened for war production. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piled up mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the world cluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System States Alliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fell on Poictesme.

The Federation armies departed. They took the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons, and a few souvenirs. Everything else was abandoned. Even the most expensive equipment had been worth less than the cost of removal.

The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, taking their riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remained had been living on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one who searched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.

Now he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; ahead the misty Gordon Valley sloped and widened to the north. Twenty minutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn’t know what he was going to tell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; he just didn’t know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearing through thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glistening redly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside its curve. Six. Four. The Countess Dorothy was losing speed and altitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. The Airlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. The yellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. High Garden Terrace; the Mall.

Moment by moment, the stigmata of decay became more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; blank-staring windows, walls splotched with lichens. At first, he was horrified at what had happened to Litchfield in six years. Then he realized that the change had been in himself. He was seeing it with new eyes, as it really was.

The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could see cracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals, waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, but what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was a thing about dusty fountains, some poem he’d read at the University.

The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;

The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams.

Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire. The Terran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated a score, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System States Alliance from seceding. It hadn’t been a victory. It had only been a lesser defeat.

There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody in topside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi, the mayor, well to the front. Then he saw his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and waved to them. They waved back, and then everybody was waving. The gangway-port opened, and the Academy band struck up, enthusiastically if inexpertly, as he descended to the dock.

His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut to the same pattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout curtain cloth. It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to acquire a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol butt. His mother’s dress was new, and so was Flora’s, made for the occasion. He couldn’t be sure just which of the Federation Armed Forces had provided the material, but his father’s shirt was Med Service sterilon.

Ashamed to be noticing things like that, he clasped his father’s hand, kissed his mother, embraced his sister. There were a few, but very few, gray threads in his father’s mustache; a few more squint-wrinkles around the eyes. His mother’s hair was all gray, now, and she was heavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he’d grown a few inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised that Flora actually looked younger. Then he realized that to seventeen, twenty-three is practically middle age, but to twenty-three, twenty-nine is almost contemporary. He noticed the glint on her left hand and caught it to look at the ring.

“Hey! Zarathustra sunstone! Nice,” he said. “Where is he, Sis?”

He’d never met her fiancé; Wade Lucas hadn’t come to Litchfield to practice medicine until the year after he’d gone to Terra.

“Oh, emergency,” Flora said. “Obstetrical case; that won’t wait on anything. In Tramptown, of course. But he’ll be at the party.... Oops, I shouldn’t have said that; that’s supposed to be a surprise.”

“Don’t worry; I’ll be surprised,” he promised.

Then Kurt Fawzi was pushing forward, holding out his hand. Thinner, and grayer, but just as effusive as ever.

“Welcome home, Conn. Judge, shake hands with him and tell him how glad we all are to see him back.... Now, Franz, put away the recorder; save the interview for the Chronicle till later. Ah, Professor Kellton; one pupil Litchfield Academy can be proud of!”

He shook hands with them: Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin, old Professor Dolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he wondered, because he was Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell’s son, home from Terra, and how much because of what they hoped he’d tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging him aside, was the first to speak of it.

“Conn, what did you find out?” he whispered. “Do you know where it is?”

He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareff approaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and the younger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born on Poictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he came from, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble on Hathor twenty years ago; the losers had had to get off-planet in a hurry to dodge firing squads. Klem Zareff never was reticent about his past. He came from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he had commanded a regiment, and finally a division that had been blasted down to less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He always wore a little rosette of System States black and green on his coat.

“Hello, boy,” he croaked, extending a hand. “Good to see you again.”

“It sure is, Conn,” the town marshal agreed, then lowered his voice. “Find out anything definite?”

“We didn’t have much time, Conn,” Kurt Fawzi said, “but we’ve arranged a little celebration for you. We’ll start it with a dinner at Senta’s.”

“You couldn’t have done anything I’d have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I’d have to have a meal at Senta’s before I’d really feel at home.”

“Well, it’ll be a couple of hours. Suppose we all go up to my office, in the meantime. Give the ladies a chance to fix up for the party, and have a little drink and a talk together.”

“You want to do that, Conn?” his father asked. There was an odd undernote of anxiety, or reluctance, in his voice.

“Yes, of course. I’d like that.”

His father turned to speak to his mother and Flora. Kurt Fawzi was speaking to his wife, interrupting himself to shout instructions to some laborers who were bringing up a contragravity skid. Conn turned to Colonel Zareff.

“Good melon crop this year?” he asked.

The old Rebel cursed. “Gehenna of a big crop; we’re up to our necks in melons. This time next year we’ll be washing our feet in brandy.”

“Hold onto it and age it; you ought to see what they charge for a drink of Poictesme brandy on Terra.”

“This isn’t Terra, and we aren’t selling it by the drink,” Colonel Zareff said. “We’re selling it at Storisende Spaceport, for what the freighter captains pay us. You’ve been away too long, Conn. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a poor-house.”

The cargo was coming off, now. Cask staves, and more cask staves. Zareff swore bitterly at the sight, and then they started toward the wide doors of the shipping floor, inside the Airlines Building. Outgoing cargo was beginning to come out; casks of brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates, painted light blue and bearing the yellow trefoil of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance. Cases of rifles; square boxes of ammunition; crated auto-cannon. Conn turned to his father.

“This our stuff?” he asked. “Where did you dig it?”

Rodney Maxwell laughed. “You know the old Tenth Army Headquarters, over back of Snagtooth, in the Calders? Everybody knows that was cleaned out years ago. Well, always take a second look at these things everybody knows. Ten to one they’re not so. It always bothered me that nobody found any underground attack-shelters. I took a second look, and sure enough, I found them, right underneath, mined out of the solid rock. Conn, you’d be surprised at what I found there.”

“Where are you going to sell that stuff?” he asked, pointing at a passing skid. “There’s enough combat equipment around now to outfit a private army for every man, woman and child in Poictesme.”

“Storisende Spaceport. The freighter captains buy it, and sell it on some of the planets that were colonized right before the War and haven’t gotten industrialized yet. I’m clearing about two hundred sols a ton on it.”

The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504 submachine guns. Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing for packing weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less than a good café on Terra got for one drink of Poictesme brandy.

II

..................

HE HAD BEEN IN KURT Fawzi’s office before, once or twice, with his father; he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and rambling conversation. None of the lights were bright, and the walls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they entered, Tom Brangwyn went to the long table and took off his belt and holster, laying it down. One by one, the others unbuckled their weapons and added them to the pile. Klem Zareff’s cane went on the table with his pistol; there was a sword inside it.

That was something else he was seeing with new eyes. He hadn’t started carrying a gun when he had left for Terra, and he was wondering, now, why any of them bothered to. Why, there wouldn’t be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn’t count the Tramptowners, and they stayed south of the docks and off the top level.

Or perhaps that was just it. Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was prepared to keep it that way. It certainly wasn’t because of anything the Planetary Government did to maintain order.

Now Brangwyn was setting out glasses, filling a pitcher from a keg in the corner of the room. The last time Conn had been here, they’d given him a glass of wine, and he’d felt very grown-up because they didn’t water it for him.

“Well, gentlemen,” Kurt Fawzi was saying, “let’s have a toast to our returned friend and new associate. Conn, we’re all anxious to hear what you’ve found out, but even if you didn’t learn anything, we’re still happy to have you back with us. Gentlemen; to our friend and neighbor. Welcome home, Conn!”

“Well, it’s wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi,” he began.

“Here, none of this mister foolishness; you’re one of us, now, Conn. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, if we don’t have anything else.”

“You can say that again, Kurt.” That was one of the distillery people; he’d remember the name in a moment. “When this new crop gets pressed and fermented....”

“I don’t know where in Gehenna I’m going to vat mine till it ferments,” Klem Zareff said.

“Or why,” another planter added. “Lorenzo, what are you going to be paying for wine?”

Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he was worrying about what he’d be able to get for brandy.

“Oh, please,” Fawzi interrupted. “Not today; not when our boy’s home and is going to tell us how we can solve all our problems.”

“Yes, Conn.” That was Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer. “You did find out where Merlin is, didn’t you?”

That set them all off. He was still holding his drink; he downed it in one gulp, barely tasting it, and handed the glass to Tom Brangwyn for a refill, and caught a frown on his father’s face. One did not gulp drinks in Kurt Fawzi’s office.

Well, neither did one blast everybody’s hopes with half a dozen words, and that was what he was trying to force himself to do. He wanted to blurt out the one quick sentence and get it over with, but the words wouldn’t come out of his throat. He lowered the second drink by half; the brandy was beginning to warm him and dissolve the cold lump in his stomach. Have to go easy, though. He wasn’t used to this kind of drinking, and he wanted to stay sober enough to talk sense until he’d told them what he had to.

“I hope,” he said, “that you don’t expect me to show you the cross on the map, where the computer is buried.”

All the eyes around him began to look troubled. Most of them had been expecting precisely that. His father was watching him anxiously.

“But it’s still here on Poictesme, isn’t it?” one of the melon planters asked. “They didn’t take it away with them?”

“Most of you gentlemen,” he said, “contributed to sending me to school on Terra, to study cybernetics and computer theory. It wouldn’t do us any good to find Merlin if none of us could operate it. Well, I’ve done that. I can use any known type of computer, and train assistants. After I graduated, I was offered a junior instructorship to computer physics at the University.”

“You didn’t mention that, son,” his father said.

“The letter would have come on the same ship I did. Besides, I didn’t think it was very important.”

“I think it is.” There was a catch in old Dolf Kellton’s voice. “One of my boys from the Academy offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo, on Terra!” He finished his drink and held out his glass for more, something he almost never did.

“Conn means,” Kurt Fawzi explained, “that it had nothing to do with Merlin.”

All right; now tell them the truth.

“I was also to find out anything I could about a secret giant computer used during the War by the Third Fleet-Army Force, code-named Merlin. I went over all the records available to the public; I used your letter, Professor, and the head of our Modern History department secured me access to non-public material, some of it still classified. For one thing, I have locations and maps and plans of every Federation installation built here between 842 and 854, the whole periodof the War.” He turned to his father. “There are incredible things still undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in duplicate, sometimes triplicate, as a precaution against space attack. I know where all of them are.”

“Space attack!” Klem Zareff was indignant. “There never was a time we could have attacked Poictesme. Even if we’d had the ships, we were fighting a purely defensive war. Aggression was no part of our policy—”

He interrupted: “Excuse me, Colonel. The point I was trying to make is that, with all I was able to learn, I could find nothing, not one single word, about any giant strategic planning computer called Merlin, or any Merlin Project.”

There! He’d gotten that out. Now go on and tell them about the old man in the dome-house on Luna. The room was silent, except for the small insectile hum of the electric clock. Then somebody set a glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer blow.

“Nothing, Conn?”

Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue’s hand shook as though palsied as he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at the drink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The others found their voices, one by one.

“Of course, it was the most closely guarded secret ...”

“But after forty years ...”

“Hah, don’t tell me about security!” Colonel Zareff barked. “You should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on Mephistopheles ...”

“But there was a computer code-named Merlin,” Judge Ledue was insisting, to convince himself more than anybody else. “Its memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning all its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations, and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce new facts, and predicting future events, and ...”

And if you’d asked such a computer, “Is there a God?” it would have simply answered, “Present.”

“We’d have won the War, except for Merlin,” Zareff was declaring.

“Conn, from what you’ve learned of computers generally, how big would Merlin have to be?” old Professor Kellton asked.

“Well, the astrophysics computer at the University occupied a volume of a hundred thousand cubic feet. For all Merlin was supposed to do, I’d say something of the order of three million to five million.

“Well, it’s a cinch they didn’t haul that away with them,” Lester Dawes, the banker, said.

“Oh, lots of places on Poictesme where they could have hid a thing like that,” Tom Brangwyn said. “You know, a planet’s a mighty big place.”

“It doesn’t have to be on Poictesme, even,” Morgan Gatworth pointed out. “It could be anywhere in the Trisystem.”

“You know where I’d have put it?” Lorenzo Menardes asked. “On one of the moons of Pantagruel.”

“But that’s in the Gamma System, three light years away,” Kurt Fawzi objected. “There isn’t a hypership on this planet, and it would take half a lifetime to get there on normal-space drive.”

Conn was lifting his glass to his lips. He set it down again and rose to his feet.

“Then,” he said, “we will build a hypership. On Koshchei there are shipyards and hyperdrive engines and everything we will need. We only need one normal-space interplanetary ship to get out there, and we’re in business.”

“Well, I don’t know we need one,” Judge Ledue said. “That was only an idea of Lorenzo’s. I think Merlin’s right here on Poictesme.”

“We don’t know it is,” Conn replied. “And we don’t know we won’t need a ship. Merlin may be on Koshchei; that’s where the components would be fabricated, and the Armed Forces weren’t hauling anything any farther than they had to. Koshchei’s only two and a half minutes away by radio; that’s practically in the next room. Look; here’s how they could have done it.”

He went on talking, about remote controls and radio transmission and positronic brains and neutrino-circuits. They believed it all, even the little they understood. They would believe anything he told them about Merlin—except the truth.

“But this will take money,” Lester Dawes said. “And after that infernal deluge of unsecured paper currency thirty years ago ...”

“I have no doubt,” Judge Ledue began, “that the Planetary Government at Storisende would give assistance. I have some slight influence with President Vyckhoven ...”

“Huh-uh!” That was one of Klem Zareff’s fellow planters. “We don’t want Jake Vyckhoven or any of this First-Families-of-Storisende oligarchy in this at all. That’s the gang that bankrupted the Government with doles and work relief, and everybody else with worthless printing-press money after the War, and they’ve been squatting in a circle deploring things ever since. Some of these days Blackie Perales and his pirates’ll sack Storisende, for all they’d be able to do to stop him.”

“We get a ship out to Koshchei, and the next thing you know we’ll be the Planetary Government,” Tom Brangwyn said.

Rodney Maxwell finished the brandy in his glass and set it on the table, then went to the pile of belts and holsters and began rummaging for his own. Kurt Fawzi looked up in surprise.

“Rod, you’re not leaving are you?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s only half an hour till time for dinner, and I think Conn and I ought to have a little fresh air. Besides, you know, we haven’t seen each other for six years.” He buckled on the heavy automatic and settled the belt over his hips. “You didn’t have a gun, did you, Conn?” he asked. “Well, let’s go.”

III

..................

IT WASN’T UNTIL THEY WERE down to the main level and outside in the little plaza to the east of the Airlines Building that his father broke the silence.

“That was quite a talk you gave them, Conn. They believed every word of it. I even caught myself starting to believe it once or twice.”

Conn stopped short; his father halted beside him. “Why didn’t you tell them the truth, son?” Rodney Maxwell asked.

The question, which he had been throwing at himself, angered him. “Why didn’t I just grab a couple of pistols and shoot the lot of them?” he retorted. “It wouldn’t have killed them any deader, and it wouldn’t have hurt as much.”

“There is no Merlin. Is that it?”

He realized, suddenly, that his father had known, or suspected that all along. He started to say something, then checked himself and began again:

“There never was one. I was going to tell them, but you saw them. I couldn’t.”

“You’re sure of it?”

“The whole thing’s a myth. I’m quoting the one man in the Galaxy who ought to know. The man who commanded the Third Force here during the War.”

“Foxx Travis!” His father’s voice was soft with wonder. “I saw him once, when I was eight years old. I thought he’d died long ago. Why, he must be over a hundred.”

“A hundred and twelve. He’s living on Luna; low gravity’s all that keeps him alive.”

“And you talked to him?”

“Yes.”

There’d been a girl in his third-year biophysics class; he’d found out that she was a great-granddaughter of Force General Travis. It had taken him until his senior midterm vacation to wangle an invitation to the dome-house on Luna. After that, it had been easy. As soon as Foxx Travis had learned that one of his great-granddaughter’s guests was from Poictesme, he had insisted on talking to him.

“What did he tell you?”

The old man had been incredibly thin and frail. Under normal gravitation, his life would have gone out like a blown match. Even at one-sixth G, it had cost him effort to rise and greet the guest. There had been a younger man, a mere stripling of seventy-odd; he had been worried, and excused himself at once. Travis had laughed after he had gone out.

“Mike Shanlee; my aide-de-camp on Poictesme. Now he thinks he’s my keeper. He’ll have a squad of doctors and a platoon of nurses in here as soon as you’re gone, so take your time. Now, tell me how things are on Poictesme....”

“Just about that,” he told his father. “I finally mentioned Merlin, as an old legend people still talked about. I was ashamed to admit anybody really believed in it. He laughed, and said, ‘Great Ghu, is that thing still around? Well, I suppose so; it was all through the Third Force during the War. Lord only knows how these rumors start among troops. We never contradicted it; it was good for morale.’”

They had started walking again, and were out on the Mall; the sky was flaming red and orange from high cirrus clouds in the sunset light. They stopped by a dry fountain, perhaps the one from which he had seen the dust blowing. Rodney Maxwell sat down on the edge of the basin and got out two cigars, handing one to Conn, who produced his lighter.

“Conn, they wouldn’t have believed you and Foxx Travis,” he said. “Merlin’s a religion with those people. Merlin’s a robot god, something they can shove all their problems onto. As soon as they find Merlin, everybody will be rich and happy, the Government bonds will be redeemed at face value plus interest, the paper money’ll be worth a hundred Federation centisols to the sol, and the leaves and wastepaper will be raked off the Mall, all by magic.” He muttered an unprintability and laughed bitterly.

“I didn’t know you were the village atheist, Father.”

“In a religious community, the village atheist keeps his doubts to himself. I have to do business with these Merlinolators. It’s all I can do to keep Flora from antagonizing them at school.”

Flora was a teacher; now she was assistant principal of the grade schools. Professor Kellton was also school superintendent. He could see how that would be.

“Flora’s not a True Believer, then?”

Rodney Maxwell shook his head. “That’s largely Wade Lucas’s influence, I’d say. You know about him.”

Just from letters. Wade Lucas was from Baldur; he’d gone off-planet as soon as he’d gotten his M.D. Evidently the professional situation there was the same as on Terra; plenty of opportunities, and fifty competitors for each one. On Poictesme, there were few opportunities, but nobody competed for anything, not even to find Merlin.

“He’d never heard of Merlin till he came here, and when he did, he just couldn’t believe in it. I don’t blame him. I’ve heard about it all my life, and I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“To begin with, I suppose, because it’s just another of these things everybody believes. Then, I’ve had to do some studying on the Third Force occupation of Poictesme to know where to go and dig, and I never found any official, or even reliably unofficial, mention of anything of the sort. Forty years is a long time to keep a secret, you know. And I can’t see why they didn’t come back for it after the pressure to get the troops home was off, or why they didn’t build a dozen Merlins. This isn’t the only planet that has problems they can’t solve for themselves.”

“What’s Mother’s attitude on Merlin?”

“She’s against it. She thinks it isn’t right to make machines that are smarter than people.”

“I’ll agree. It’s scientifically impossible.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell her. Conn, I noticed that after Kurt Fawzi started talking about how long it would take to get to the Gamma System, you jumped right into it and began talking up a ship. Did you think that if you got them started on that it would take their minds off Merlin?”

“That gang up in Fawzi’s office? Nifflheim, no! They’ll go on hunting Merlin till they die. But I was serious about the ship. An idea hit me. You gave it to me; you and Klem Zareff.”

“Why, I didn’t say a word ...”

“Down on the shipping floor, before we went up. You were talking about selling arms and ammunition at a profit of two hundred sols a ton, and Klem was talking as though a bumper crop was worse than a Green Death epidemic. If we had a hypership, look what we could do. How much do you think a settler on Hoth or Malebolge or Irminsul would pay for a good rifle and a thousand rounds? How much would he pay for his life?—that’s what it would come to. And do you know what a fifteen-cc liqueur glass of Poictesme brandy sells for on Terra? One sol; Federation money. I’ll admit it costs like Nifflheim to run a hypership, but look at the difference between what these tramp freighter captains pay at Storisende and what they get.”

“I’ve been looking at it for a long time. Maybe if we had a few ships of our own, these planters would be breaking new ground instead of cutting their plantings, and maybe we’d get some money on this planet that was worth something. You have a good idea there, son. But maybe there’s an angle to it you haven’t thought of.”

Conn puffed slowly at the cigar. Why couldn’t they grow tobacco like this on Terra? Soil chemicals, he supposed; that wasn’t his subject.

“You can’t put this scheme over on its own merits. This gang wouldn’t lift a finger to build a hypership. They’ve completely lost hope in everything but Merlin.”

“Well, can do. I’ll even convince them that Merlin’s a space-station, in orbit off Koshchei. I think I could do that.”

“You know what it’ll cost? If you go ahead with it, I’m in it with you, make no mistake about that. But you and I will be the only two people on Poictesme who can be trusted with the truth. We’ll have to lie to everybody else, with every word we speak. We’ll have to lie to Flora, and we’ll have to lie to your mother. Your mother most of all. She believes in absolutes. Lying is absolutely wrong, no matter whom it helps; telling the truth is absolutely right, no matter how much damage it does or how many hearts it breaks. You think this is going to be worth a price like that?”

“Don’t you?” he demanded, and then pointed along the crumbling and littered Mall. “Look at that. Pretend you never saw it before and are looking at it for the first time. And then tell me whether it’ll be worth it or not.”

His father took a cigar from his mouth. For a moment, he sat staring silently.

“Great Ghu!” Rodney Maxwell turned. “I wonder how that sneaked up on me; I honestly never realized.... Yes, Conn. This is a cause worth lying for.” He looked at his watch. “We ought to be starting for Senta’s, but let’s take a few minutes and talk this over. How are you going to get it started?”

“Well, convince them that I can find Merlin and that they can’t find it without me. I think I’ve done that already. Then convince them that we’ll have to have a ship to get to Koshchei, and—”

“Won’t do. That’ll take money, and money’s something none of this gang has.”