There"d been a girl in his third-year biophysics cla.s.s; he"d found out that she was a great-granddaughter of Force General Travis. It had taken him until his senior midterm vacation to w.a.n.gle 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al 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 compet.i.tors for each one. On Poictesme, there were few opportunities, but n.o.body 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 att.i.tude 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 b.u.mper 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 gla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce-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."

"You heard me talk about the stuff I found out on Terra? Father, you have no idea what all there is. You remember the old Force Command Headquarters, the one the Planetary Government took over? I know where there"s a duplicate of that, completely underground. It has everything the other one had, and a lot more, because it"ll be cram-full of supplies to be used in case of a general blitz that would knock out everything on the planet. And a chain of hospitals. And a s.p.a.ceport, over on Barathrum, that was built inside the crater of an extinct volcano. There won"t be any hyperships there of course, but there"ll be equipment and material. We might be able to build a ship there. And supply depots, all over the planet; none of them has ever been opened since the War. Don"t worry about financing; we have that."

His father, he could see, appreciated what he had brought home from Terra. He was nodding, with quick head jerks, at each item.

"That"ll do it, all right. Now, listen; what we want to do is get a company organized, a regular limited-liability company, with a charter. We"ll contribute the information you brought back from Terra, and we"ll get the rest of this gang to put all the money we can twist out of them into it, so we"ll be sure they won"t say, "Aw, Nifflheim with it!" and walk out on us as soon as the going gets a little tough." Rodney Maxwell got to his feet, hitching his gun-belt. "I"ll pa.s.s the word to Kurt to get a meeting set up for tomorrow afternoon."

"What"ll we call this company? Merlin Rediscovery, Ltd?"

"No! We keep Merlin out of it. As far as the public is supposed to know, this is just a war-material prospecting company. I"ll impress on them that Merlin is to be kept a secret. That way, we"ll have to engage in regular prospecting and salvage work as a front. I"ll see to it that the front is also the main objective." He nodded down the Mall, toward the sunset, which was blazing even higher and redder.

"Well, let"s go. You don"t want to be late for your own welcome-home party."

They walked slowly, still talking, until they came to the end of the Mall. The escalators to the level below weren"t working. Now that he thought of it, they hadn"t been when he had gone away, six years ago, but he could remember riding up and down on them as a small child. For a moment they stood in the sunset light, looking down on the lower terrace as they finished their cigars.

Senta"s was mostly outdoors, the tables under the open sky. The people gathered below were looking at the sunset, too; Litchfielders loved to watch sunsets, maybe because a sunset was one of the few things economic conditions couldn"t affect. There was Kurt Fawzi, the center of a group to whom he was declaiming earnestly; there was his mother, and Flora, and Flora"s fiance, who was the uncomfortable lone man in an excited feminine flock. And there was Senta herself, short and dumpy, in one of her preposterous red and purple dresses, bubbling happily one moment and screaming invective at some laggard waiter the next.

They threw away their cigars and started down the long, motionless escalator. Conn Maxwell, Hero of the Hour, marching to Destiny. He seemed to hear trumpets sounding before him.

And an occasional muted Bronx cheer.

IV

The alarm chimed softly beside his bed; he reached out and silenced it, and lay looking at the early sunlight in the windows, and found that he was wishing himself back in his dorm room at the University.

No, back in this room, ten years ago, before any of this had started.

For a while, he imagined himself thirteen years old and knowing everything he knew now, and he began mapping a campaign to establish himself as Litchfield"s Juvenile Delinquent Number One, to the end that Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and the rest of them would never dream of sending him to school on Terra to find out where Merlin was.