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 siege than when the Badlands had been full of outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have been moved in from Barathrum s.p.a.ceport, and Zareff had more men and firepower than he had ever commanded during the System States War. If Minister-General 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 b.u.t.te, 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 thing. You heard about the robo-bomb 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 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 n.o.body 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 air-freighters 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 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; 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 s.p.a.ce-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."

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 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-s.p.a.ce officers and crewmen. Some of them, it was hoped, would later qualify for hypers.p.a.ce work. Sylvie, who had been one of the star pupils in the computer cla.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce-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 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 II_, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogational and hypers.p.a.ce instruments put in place. The hypership _Andromeda_ was back from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what the expedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures about Merlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral.

Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, and combat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as it came out. The Government was buying some, but by no means all of it.

"Conn, can you come back here to Poictesme for a while?" his father asked. "Things have turned serious. I don"t like to talk about it by screen--too many people know our scrambler combinations. But I wish you were here."

He started to object; there were millions, well, a couple of hundred, things he had to attend to. The look on his father"s face stopped him.

"Ship leaving Sickle Mountain tomorrow morning," he said. "I"ll be aboard."

The voyage back to Poictesme was a needed rest. He felt refreshed when he got off at Storisende s.p.a.ceport and was met by his father and Wade Lucas in one of the slim recon-cars. They greeted him briefly and took the car up and away from the city, where it was safe to talk.

"Conn, I"m scared," his father said. "I"m beginning to think there really is a Merlin, after all."

"Oh, come off it! I know it"s contagious, but I thought you"d been vaccinated."

"I"m beginning to think so, too," Lucas said. "I don"t like it at all."

"You know what that gang who took the _Andromeda_ to Panurge found?"

"They were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements for Merlin, weren"t they?"

"Yes. They found it. My Barton-Ma.s.sarra operatives got to some of the crew. This place had been turning out material for a computer of absolutely unconventional design; the two computermen they had with them couldn"t make head or tail of half of it. And every blueprint, every diagram, every sc.r.a.p of writing or recording, had been destroyed. But they found one thing, a big empty fiber folder that had fallen under something and been overlooked. It was marked: TOP SECRET. PROJECT MERLIN."

"Project Merlin could have been anything," Conn started to say. No.

Project Merlin was something they made computer parts for.

"Dolf Kellton"s research crew, at the Library here, came across some references to Project Merlin, too. For instance, there was a routine division court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a very trivial charge. Force Command ordered the court-martial stopped, and the two officers simply dropped out of the Third Force records, it was stated that they were engaged in work connected with Project Merlin.

That"s an example; there were half a dozen things like that."

"Tell him what Kurt Fawzi and his crew found," Wade Lucas said.

"Yes. They have a fifty-foot shaft down from the top of the mesa almost to the top of the underground headquarters. They found something on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped ma.s.s, fifty feet thick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium. It"s directly over what used to be Foxx Travis"s office."

"That"s not a tenth big enough for anything that could even resemble Merlin."

"Well, it"s something. I was out there day before yesterday. They"re down to the collapsium on top of this thing; I rode down the shaft in a jeep and looked at it. Look, Conn, we don"t know what this Project Merlin was; all this lore about Merlin that"s grown up since the War is pure supposition."

"But Foxx Travis told me, categorically, that there was no Merlin Project," Conn said. "The War"s been over forty years; it"s not a military secret any longer. Why would he lie to me?"

"Why did you lie to Kurt Fawzi and the others and tell them there was a Merlin? You lied because telling the truth would hurt them. Maybe Travis had the same reason for lying to you. Maybe Merlin"s too dangerous for anybody to be allowed to find."

"Great Ghu, are you beginning to think Merlin is the Devil, or Frankenstein"s Monster?"

"It might be something just as bad. Maybe worse. I don"t think a man like Foxx Travis would lie if he didn"t have some overriding moral obligation to."

"And we know who"s been making most of the trouble for us, too," Lucas added.

"Yes," Rodney Maxwell said, "we do. And sometime I"m going to invite Klem Zareff to kick my pants-seat. Sam Murchison, the Terran Federation Minister-General."

"How"d you get that?"

"Barton-Ma.s.sarra got some of it; they have an operative planted in Murchison"s office. And some of our banking friends got the rest. This Human Supremacy League is being financed by somebody. Every so often, their treasurer makes a big deposit at one of the banks here, all Federation currency, big denomination notes. When I asked them to, they started keeping a record of the serial numbers and checking withdrawals. The money was paid out, at the First Planetary Bank, to Mr. Samuel S. Murchison, in person. The Armegeddonists are getting money, too, but they"re too foxy to put theirs through the banks. I believe they"re the ones who mind-probed Lucy Nocero. Barton-Ma.s.sarra believe, but they can"t prove, that Human Supremacy launched that robo-bomb at us, that time at the s.p.a.ceport."

"Have you done anything with those audiovisuals of Leibert?"