They were strolling after dinner, down the Mall. The air was sharp and warned that autumn had definitely arrived; the many brilliant stars, almost as bright as the moon of Terra, were coming out in the dusk.

"Conn, this thing about Merlin," she began. "Do you really believe in it? Ever since Dad and I came to Poictesme, 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 Menardes, 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 from somewhere ahead, and he was wondering what it was. Then they came to the long escalators, and he saw that they were running.

"Why, look! They 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:

"Conn, your father"s been trying to get you ever since you went out.

Call him, right away; Ritz-Gartner Hotel, in Storisende. It"s something about a ship."

It look a little time to get his father on-screen. He was excited and happy.

"Hi, Conn; we have one," he said.

"What kind of a ship?"

"You know her. The _Harriet Barne_."

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 d.i.c.kens did you w.a.n.gle that?"

"Oh, it was Yves" idea, to start with. He knew about her; the T. & O."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 s.p.a.ceship they didn"t want, it would almost bankrupt the company. They got up as high as fifty thousand 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 L. E. & S.

and T. & O., to engage in interplanetary shipping; both companies to a.s.sign their equity in the _Harriet Barne_ to the new company, the work of completing her to be done at our s.p.a.ceport and the labor cost to be shared. This would give us our s.p.a.ceship, and get T. & O. off the hook all around. Everybody was for it except the president of T. & O. Know anything about him?"

Conn shook his head. His father continued:

"Name"s Jethro Sastraman. 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.

"Preposterous; utterly visionary and impractical,"" 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 the president of this new company?"

"You know him. Character named Rodney Maxwell. Yves 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.

T. & O. are giving us Clyde Nichols and Mack Vibart, and a lot of men from their shipyard. I"m staying here in Storisende; we"re opening an office here. By this time next week, we"re all going to wish we"d been born quintuplets."

"And Conn Maxwell, I suppose, will be an influential non-office-holding stockholder?"

"That"s right. Just like in L. E. & S."

XII

He found Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and a score of workmen making a survey and inventory of the s.p.a.ceport. Captain Nichols and four of the original crew of the _Harriet Barne_, who had shared his captivity among the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And Fred Karski, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, was keeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formation of Alpha-Interplanetary when Conn arrived.

The next day, Yves Jacquemont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, a gang from the T. & O. shipyard, and a dozen engineers and construction men whom he had recruited around Storisende. More workers arrived in the next few days, including a number who had already worked on the ship as slaves of the Perales gang.

It didn"t take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in the conversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere and gravitation, the _Harriet Barne_ was long and narrow, like an old ocean ship; more than anything else, she had originally resembled a huge submarine. s.p.a.ceships, either interplanetary or interstellar, were always spherical with a pseudogravity system at the center. This, of course, the _Harriet Barne_ lacked.

"Well, are we going to make the whole trip in free fall?" he wanted to know.

"No, we"ll use our acceleration for pseudograv halfway, and deceleration the other half," Jacquemont told him. "We"ll be in free fall about ten or fifteen hours. What we"re going to have to do will be to lift off from Poictesme in the horizontal position the ship was designed for, and then make a ninety-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 Abbott 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.

Jacquemont and Nichols took charge of the work on the ship herself.

Chief Engineer Vibart, 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 engines 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 s.n.a.t.c.h a few minutes to read teleprint papers or listen to audiovisual newscasts from Storisende.

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 and factories on Koshchei, 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 Force Command Duplicate had convinced Litchfield Exploration & Salvage that the giant computer was somewhere off-planet.

Rodney Maxwell flew in from Storisende; 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 Yves Jacquemont; 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 were telling us about. Wade and I are forming a new company, Mainland Medical Materials, Ltd. Going to act as broker for L. E. & S. in getting rid of medical stores. n.o.body 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 had it 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--"

"Aaagh! Don"t talk to me about Merlin!" Conn interrupted. "I have to talk to Kurt Fawzi 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 out of that material," he said to his father. "And I see you"re not bulging the coat out behind with a hip-holster."