Tom Brangwyn went to the table, taking off his belt and holster and laying his pistol aside. The others, crowding into the room, added their weapons to his.

That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been five years since he had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of them bothered. A gun was what a boy put on to show that he had reached manhood, and a man carried for the rest of his life out of habit.

Why, there wouldn"t be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn"t count the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level or camped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it; maybe Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was armed. It certainly wasn"t because of anything the Planetary Government at Storisende did to maintain order.

After divesting himself of his gun, Tom Brangwyn took over the bartending, getting out gla.s.ses and filling a pitcher of brandy from a keg in the corner.

"Everybody supplied?" Fawzi was asking. "Well, let"s drink to our returned emissary. We"re all anxious to hear what you found out, Conn.

Gentlemen, here"s to our friend Conn Maxwell. Welcome home, Conn!"

"Well, it"s wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi--"

"No, let"s not have any of this mister foolishness! You"re one of the gang now. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, even if we don"t have anything else."

"You telling us, Kurt?" somebody demanded. One of the distillery company; the name would come back to Conn in a moment. "When this crop gets pressed and fermented--"

"When I start pressing, I don"t know where in Gehenna I"m going to vat the stuff till it ferments," Colonel Zareff said. "Or why. You won"t be able to handle all of it."

"Now, now!" Fawzi reproved. "Let"s not start moaning about our troubles.

Not the day Conn"s come home. Not when he"s going to tell us how to find the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain."

"You _did_ find out where the Brain is, didn"t you, Conn?" Brangwyn asked anxiously.

That set half a dozen of them off at once. They had all sat down after the toast; now they were fidgeting in their chairs, leaning forward, looking at Conn fixedly.

"What did you find out, Conn?"

"It"s still here on Poictesme, isn"t it?"

"Did you find out where it is?"

He wanted to tell them in one quick sentence and get it over with. He couldn"t, any more than he could force himself to squeeze the trigger of a pistol he knew would blow up in his hand.

"Wait a minute, gentlemen." He finished the brandy, and held out the gla.s.s to Tom Brangwyn, nodding toward the pitcher. Even the first drink had warmed him and he could feel the constriction easing in his throat and the lump at the pit of his stomach dissolving. "I hope none of you expect me to spread out a map and show you the cross on it, where the Brain is. I can"t. I can"t even give the approximate location of the thing."

Much of the happy eagerness drained out of the faces around him. Some of them were looking troubled; Colonel Zareff was gnawing the bottom of his mustache, and Judge Ledue"s hand shook as he tried to relight his cigar.

Conn stole a quick side-glance at his father; Rodney Maxwell was watching him curiously, as though wondering what he was going to say next.

"But it is still here on Poictesme?" Fawzi questioned. "They didn"t take it away when they evacuated, did they?"

Conn finished his second drink. This time he picked up the pitcher and refilled for himself.

"I"m going to have to do a lot of talking," he said, "and it"s going to be thirsty work. I"ll have to tell you the whole thing from the beginning, and if you start asking questions at random, you"ll get me mixed up and I"ll miss the important points."

"By all means!" Judge Ledue told him. "Give it in your own words, in what you think is the proper order."

"Thank you, Judge."

Conn drank some more brandy, hoping he could get his courage up without getting drunk. After all, they had a right to a full report; all of them had contributed something toward sending him to Terra.

"The main purpose in my going to the University was to learn computer theory and practice. It wouldn"t do any good for us to find the Brain if none of us are able to use it. Well, I learned enough to be able to operate, program and service any computer in existence, and train a.s.sistants. During my last year at the University, I had a part-time paid job programming the big positron-neutrino-photon computer in the astrophysics department. When I graduated, I was offered a position as instructor in positronic computer theory."

"You never mentioned that in your letters, son," his father said.

"It was too late for any letter except one that would come on the same ship I did. Beside, it wasn"t very important."

"I think it was." There was a catch in old Professor Kellton"s voice.

"One of my boys, from the Academy, offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo, on Terra!" He poured himself a second drink, something he almost never did.

"Conn means it wasn"t important because it didn"t have anything to do with the Brain," Fawzi explained and then looked at Conn expectantly.

All right; now he"d tell them. "I went over all the records of the Third Fleet-Army Force"s occupation of Poictesme that are open to the public.

On one pretext or another, I got permission to examine the non-cla.s.sified files that aren"t open to public examination. I even got a few peeps at some of the stuff that"s still cla.s.sified secret. I have maps and plans of all the installations that were built on this planet--literally thousands of them, many still undiscovered. Why, we haven"t more than scratched the surface of what the Federation left behind here. For instance, all the important installations exist in duplicate, some even in triplicate, as a precaution against Alliance s.p.a.ce attack."

"s.p.a.ce attack!" Colonel Zareff was indignant. "There never was a time when the Alliance could have taken the offensive against Poictesme, even if an offensive outside our own s.p.a.ce-area had been part of our policy.

We just didn"t have the ships. It took over a year to move a million and a half troops from Ashmodai to Marduk, and the fleet that was based on Amaterasu was blasted out of existence in the s.p.a.ceports and in orbit.

h.e.l.l, at the time of the surrender, we didn"t have--"

"They weren"t taking chances on that, Colonel. But the point I want to make is that with everything I did find, I never found, in any official record, a single word about the giant computer we call the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain."

For a time, the only sound in the room was the tiny insectile humming of the electric clock on the wall. Then Professor Kellton set his gla.s.s on the table, and it sounded like a hammer-blow.

"Nothing, Conn?" Kurt Fawzi was incredulous and, for the first time, frightened. The others were exchanging uneasy glances. "But you must have! A thing like that--"

"Of course it would be one of the closest secrets during the war,"

somebody else said. "But in forty years, you"d expect _something_ to leak out."

"Why, _during_ the war, it was all through the Third Force. Even the Alliance knew about it; that"s how Klem heard of it."

"Well, Conn couldn"t just walk into the secret files and read whatever he wanted to. Just because he couldn"t find anything--"

"Don"t tell _me_ about security!" Klem Zareff snorted. "Certainly they still have it cla.s.sified; staff-bra.s.s"d rather lose an eye than decla.s.sify anything. If you"d seen the lengths our staff went to--h.e.l.l, we lost battles because the staff wouldn"t release information the troops in the field needed. I remember once--"

"But there _was_ a Brain," Judge Ledue was saying, to rea.s.sure himself and draw agreement from the others. "It was capable of combining data, and scanning and evaluating all its positronic memories, and forming a.s.sociation patterns, and reasoning with absolute perfection. It was more than a positronic brain--it was a positronic super-mind."

"We"d have won the war, except for the Brain. We had ninety systems, a hundred and thirty inhabited planets, a hundred billion people--and we were on the defensive in our own s.p.a.ce-area! Every move we made was known and antic.i.p.ated by the Federation. How could they have done that without something like the Brain?"

"Conn, from what you learned of computers, how large a volume of s.p.a.ce would you say the Brain would have to occupy?" Professor Kellton asked.

Professor Kellton was the most unworldly of the lot, yet he was asking the most practical question.

"Well, the astrophysics computer I worked with at the University occupies a total of about one million cubic feet," Conn began. This was his chance; they"d take anything he told them about computers as gospel.

"It was only designed to handle problems in astrophysics. The Brain, being built for s.p.a.ce war, would have to handle any such problem. And if half the stories about the Brain are anywhere near true, it handled any other problem--mathematical, scientific, political, economic, strategic, psychological, even philosophical and ethical. Well, I"d say that a hundred million cubic feet would be the smallest even conceivable."

They all nodded seriously. They were willing to accept that--or anything else, except one thing.

"Lot of places on this planet where a thing that size could be hidden,"

Tom Brangwyn said, undismayed. "A planet"s a mighty big place."