V

The meeting was at the Academy; when Conn and his father arrived, they found the central hall under the topside landing stage crowded. Kurt Fawzi and Professor Kellton had const.i.tuted themselves a reception committee. Franz Veltrin was in evidence with his audiovisual recorder, and Colonel Zareff was leaning on his silver-headed sword cane. Tom Brangwyn, in an unaccustomed best-suit. Wade Lucas, among a group of merchants, arguing heatedly. Lorenzo Menardes, the distiller, and Lester Dawes, the banker, and Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer, talking to Judge Ledue. About four times as many as had been in Fawzi"s office the afternoon before.

Finally, everybody was shepherded into a faculty conference room; there was a long table, and a shorter one T-wise at one end. Fawzi and Kellton conducted them to this. Both of them were trying to preside, Kellton because it was his Academy, and Fawzi ex officio as mayor and professional leading citizen, and because he had come to regard Merlin as his own private project. After everybody else was seated, the two rival chairmen-presumptive remained on their feet. Fawzi was saying, "Let"s come to order; we must conduct this meeting regularly," and Kellton was saying, "Gentlemen, please; let me have your attention."

If either of them took the chair, the other would resent it. Conn got to his feet again.

"Somebody will have to preside," he said, loudly enough to cut through the babble at the long table. "Would you take the chair, Judge Ledue?"

That stopped it. Neither of them wanted to contest the honor with the president-judge of the Gordon Valley court.

"Excellent suggestion, Conn. Judge, will you preside?" Professor Kellton, who had seen himself losing out to Fawzi, asked. Fawzi threw one quick look around, estimated the situation, and got with it. "Of course, Judge. You"re the logical chairman. Here, will you sit here?"

Judge Ledue took the chair, looked around for something to use as a gavel, and rapped sharply with a paperweight.

"Young Mr. Conn Maxwell, who has just returned from Terra, needs no introduction to any of you," he began. Then, having established that, he took the next ten minutes to introduce Conn. When people began fidgeting, he wound up with: "Now, only about a dozen of us were at the informal meeting in Mr. Fawzi"s office, yesterday. Conn, would you please repeat what you told us? Elaborate as you see fit."

Conn rose. He talked briefly about his studies on Terra to qualify himself as an expert. Then he began describing the wealth of abandoned and still undiscovered Federation war material and the many installations of which he had learned, careful to avoid giving clues to exact locations. The s.p.a.ceport; the underground duplicate Force Command Headquarters; the vast underground a.r.s.enals and shops and supply depots. Everybody was awed, even his father; he hadn"t had time to tell him more than a fraction of it.

Finally, somebody from the long table interrupted:

"Well, Conn; how about Merlin? That"s what we"re interested in."

Wade Lucas snorted indignantly.

"He"s telling you about real things, things worth millions of sols, and you want him to talk about that idiotic fantasy!"

There was an angry outcry. n.o.body actually shouted "_To the stake with the blasphemer!_" but that was the general idea. Judge Ledue was rapping loudly for order.

"I don"t know the exact location of Merlin." Conn strove to make himself heard. "The whole subject"s cla.s.sified top secret. But I am certain that Merlin exists, if not on Poictesme then somewhere in the Alpha System, and I am equally certain that we can find it."

Cheers. He waited for the hubbub to subside. Lucas was trying to yell above it.

"You admit you couldn"t learn anything about this so-called Merlin, but you"re still certain it exists?"

"Why are you certain it doesn"t?"

"Why, the whole thing"s absurdly fantastic!"

"Maybe it is, to a layman like you. I studied computers, and it isn"t to me."

"Well, take all these elaborate preparations against s.p.a.ce attack you were telling us about. I think Colonel Zareff, here, who served in the Alliance Army, will bear me out that such an attack was plainly impossible."

Zareff started to agree, then realized that he was aiding and comforting the enemy. "Intelligence lag," he said. "What do you expect, with General Headquarters thirty pa.r.s.ecs from the fighting?"

"Yes. A computer can only process the data that"s been taped into it,"

Conn said. That was a point he wanted to ram home, as forcibly and as often as possible. "I suppose Merlin cla.s.sified an Alliance attack on Poictesme as a low-order probability, but war is the province of chance; Clausewitz said that a thousand years ago. Foxx Travis wasn"t the sort of commander to let himself get caught, even by a very low-order probability."

"Well how do you explain the absence, after forty years, of any mention, in any history of the War, of Merlin? How do you get around that?"

"I don"t have to. How do you get around it?"

"_Huh?_" Lucas was startled.

"Yes. Stories about Merlin were all over Poictesme, all through the Third Force, even to the enemy. Say the stories were unfounded; say Merlin never existed. Yet the belief in Merlin was an important historical fact, and no history of the War gives it so much as a footnote." He paused for effect, then continued: "That can mean only one thing. Systematic suppression, backed by the whole force of the Terran Federation. A gigantic conspiracy of silence!"

Brother! If they swallow that, I have it made; they"ll swallow anything!

They did, all but Lucas. He banged his fist on the table.

"Now I"ve heard everything!" he shouted in disgust.

"Not quite everything, Doctor," Morgan Gatworth said. "You will hear, one of these days, that we have found Merlin."

"Yes, that"ll be the day!" Lucas sprang to his feet, his chair toppling behind him. He shoved it aside with his foot. "I"m not going to argue with you. Conn Maxwell gave you a thousand-year-old quotation; I"ll give you another, from Thomas Paine: "To argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead." I"ll add this. Conn Maxwell knows better than this balderdash he"s been spouting to you. I don"t know what his racket is, and I"m not staying to find out. You will, though--to your regret."

He turned and strode from the room. There was a moment"s silence, after the door slammed behind him. Too bad, Conn thought. He would have made a good friend. Now he was going to make a very nasty enemy.

"Well, let"s get to business," his father said. "We don"t have to argue about the existence of Merlin; we know that. Let"s discuss the question of finding it."

"I still think it"s somewhere off-planet," Lorenzo Menardes said. "The moons of Pantagruel...."

Evidently he"d read something, or seen an old film, about the moons of Pantagruel.

"No, that"s too far; they"d keep it where they could use it."

"The old GHQ," Lester Dawes suggested. "Suppose it"s down under that, like the place Rodney found under Tenth Army."

"I hope not," Gathworth said. "The Planetary Government took that over."

"Well, wherever it is, finding it is going to be expensive," Rodney Maxwell said. "Now, to finance the search, I propose we use this information my son brought back from Terra. Doctor Lucas was right about one thing; that"s worth millions of sols. Well, I propose, also, that we set up a company and get it chartered; a prospecting company, to operate under the Abandoned Property Act of 867. My son and I will contribute this information as our share in the capitalization of the company. The work of opening these Federation installations can go on concurrently with the search for Merlin, and the profits can finance it."

Silence for a moment, then a bedlam of cheering.

"Well, let"s get organized," Gatworth said. "What will we call this company?"

A number of voices shouted suggestions. Rodney Maxwell managed to get recognition and partial silence.

"It is of the first importance," he said, "that we keep our real objective--Merlin--as close a secret as possible. The Planetary Government would like to get hold of it--and I leave you to ask yourselves how far Jake Vyckhoven and his cronies are to be trusted with anything like that--and I have no doubt the Federation might try to take it away from us."

"Couldn"t do it, Rodney," Judge Ledue objected. "Everything the Federation abandoned in the Trisystem is public domain now. We have a Federation Supreme Court ruling--"

"What"s legality to the Federation?" Klem Zareff demanded. "They fought a criminally illegal war of aggression against my people."

Down the table, somebody started singing "Rally Round the Banner, the Banner Black and Green."