He found the file his father kept up-to-date on salvage sites found and registered with the Claims Office in Storisende. Some of the locations he had brought back data for had been discovered, but, to his relief, not the underground duplicate Force Command Headquarters, and not the s.p.a.ceport on the island continent of Barathrum, to the east. That was all right.

He went to the house-defense arms closet and found a 10-mm Navy pistol, and a belt and spare clips. Making sure that the pistol and magazines were loaded, he buckled it on. He debated getting a vehicle out of the hangar on the landing stage, decided against it, and started downtown on foot.

One of the first people he met was Len Yeniguchi, the tailor. He would be at the meeting that afternoon. He managed, while talking, to comment on the cut of Conn"s suit, and finger the material.

"Ah, nice," he complimented. "Made on Terra? We don"t see cloth like that here very often."

He meant it wasn"t Armed Forces salvage.

"Father ought to be around to see you with a bolt of material, to have a suit made," he said. "For Ghu"s sake, either talk him into having a short jacket like this, or get him to buy himself a shoulder holster.

He"s ruined every coat he ever owned, carrying a gun on his hip."

A little farther on, he came to a combat car grounded in the middle of the street. It was green, with black tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and lettered in black, GORDON VALLEY HOME GUARD. Tom Brangwyn was standing beside it, talking to a young man in a green uniform.

"h.e.l.lo, Conn." The town marshal looked at his hip and grinned. "See you got all your clothes on this morning. You were just plain indecent, yesterday.... You know Fred Karski, don"t you?"

Yes, now that Tom mentioned it, he did. He and Fred had gone to school together at the Litchfield Academy. But the six years since they"d seen each other last had made a lot of difference in both of them. He was beginning to think that the only strangers in Litchfield were his own contemporaries. They shook hands, and Conn looked at the combat car and Fred Karski"s uniform.

"What"s going on?" he asked. "The System States Alliance to business again?"

Karski laughed. "Oh, that"s the Colonel"s idea. Green and black were his colors in the War, and he"s in command of the regiment."

"Regiment? You need a whole regiment?" Conn asked.

"Well, it"s two companies, each about the size of a regular army platoon, but we have to call it a regiment so he can keep his old Rebel Army rank."

"We could use a regiment, Conn," Tom Brangwyn said seriously. "You have no idea how bad things have gotten. Over on the east coast, the outlaws are looting whole towns. About four months ago, they sacked Waterville; burned the whole town and killed close to a hundred people. That was Blackie Perales" gang."

"Who is this Blackie Perales? I heard the name mentioned in connection with the _Harriet Barne_."

"Blackie Perales is anybody the Planetary Government can"t catch, which means practically any outlaw," Fred Karski said.

"No, Fred; there is a Blackie Perales," Tom Brangwyn said. "He used to be a planter, down in the south. The banks foreclosed on him when he couldn"t pay his notes, and he turned outlaw. That"s the way it"s going, all around. Every time a planter loses his plantation or a farmer loses his farm, or a mechanic loses his job, he turns outlaw.

Take Tramptown, here. We used to plant nothing but melons. Then, when the sale for wine and brandy dropped, the melon-planters began cutting their melon crops and raising produce, instead of buying it from up north, and turning land into pasture for cattle. The people we used to buy foodstuffs from couldn"t sell all they raised, and that threw a lot of farmhands out of work. So they got the idea there was work here, and they came flocking in, and when they couldn"t get jobs, they just stayed in Tramptown, stealing anything they could. We don"t even try to police Tramptown any more; we just see to it they don"t come up here."

"Well, where do these outlaws and pirates who are looting whole towns come from?"

"Down in the Badlands, mostly. None of them have been bothering us, since we organized the Home Guard. They tried to, a couple of times, at first. There may have been a few survivors; they spread it around that Gordon Valley wasn"t any outlaws" health resort."

"Why don"t you join us, Conn?" Fred Karski asked. "All our old gang belong."

"I"d like to, but I"m afraid I"m going to be kind of busy."

Brangwyn nodded. "Yes. You will be, at that," he agreed.

"So I hear," Fred Karski said. "Do you really know where it is, Conn?"

"Well, no." He went into the routine about Merlin being still cla.s.sified triple-top secret. "But we"ll find it. It may take time, but we will."

They talked for a while. He asked more questions about the Home Guard.

His father, it seemed, had donated all the equipment. They had a hundred and seventy men on the active list, but they had a reserve of over eight hundred, and combat vehicles and weapons on all the plantations and in all the towns along the river. The reserve had only been turned out twice; both times, outlaw attacks had been stopped dead--literally. The Home Guard, it appeared, was not given to making arrests or taking prisoners. Finally, he parted from them, strolling on along the row of stores and business places, many vacant, under the south edge of the Mall, until he saw a fluorolite sign, WADE LUCAS, M. D. He entered.

Lucas wasn"t busy. They went into his consultation office, and Conn took off his gun-belt and hung it up; Lucas offered cigarettes, and they lighted and sat down.

"I see you"ve started carrying one," he said, nodding to the pistol Conn had laid aside.

"Civic obligation. I"m going to be too busy for Home Guard duty, but if I can protect myself, it"ll save somebody else the job of protecting me."

"Maybe if there weren"t so many guns around, there wouldn"t be so much trouble."

He felt his good opinion of Wade Lucas start to slip. The Liberals on Terra had been full of that kind of talk, which was why only four out of ten of last year"s graduating cla.s.s at Armed Forces Academy had been able to get active commissions. The last war had been a disaster, so don"t prepare for another one; when it comes, let it be a worse disaster.

"Guns don"t make trouble; people make trouble. If the troublemakers are armed, you have to be armed too. When did you last see an Air Patrol boat around here, or even a Constabulary trooper? All we have here is the Home Guard and Tom Brangwyn and three deputies, and his pay and theirs is always six months in arrears."

Lucas nodded. "A bankrupt government, an unemployment rate that rises every year, currency that buys less every month. And do-it-yourself justice." The doctor blew a smoke ring and watched it float toward the ventilator-intake. "You said you"re going to be busy. This company your father"s talking about organizing?"

"That"s right. You"re going to be at the meeting at the Academy this afternoon, aren"t you?"

"Yes. Just what are you going to do, after you get it organized?"

"Well, I brought back information on a great deal of undiscovered equipment and stores that the Third Force left behind...." He talked on for some time, keeping to safe generalities. "It"s too big for my father and me to handle alone, even if we didn"t feel morally obligated to take in the people who contributed toward sending me to school on Terra. You ought to be interested in it. I know of six fully supplied hospitals, intended to take care of the casualties in case of a System States s.p.a.ce-attack. You can imagine, better than I can, what would be in them."

"Yes. Medical supplies of all sorts are getting hard to find. But look here; you"re not going to let these people waste time looking for this alleged computer, this thing they call Merlin, are you?"

"We"re looking for any valuable war material. I don"t know the location of Merlin, but--"

"I"ll bet you don"t!" Lucas said vehemently. That was the same thing Flora had said.

"--but Merlin is undoubtedly the most valuable item of abandoned TF equipment on this planet. In the long run, I"d say, more valuable than everything else together. We certainly aren"t going to ignore it."

"Good heavens, Conn! You aren"t like these people here; you were educated at the University of Montevideo."

"So I was. I studied computer theory and practice. I have some doubts about Merlin being able to do some of the things these laymen like Kellton and Fawzi and Judge Ledue think it could. Those sorts of misconceptions and exaggerations have to be allowed for. But I have no doubt whatever that the master computer with which they did their strategic planning is probably the greatest mechanism of its sort ever built, and I have no doubt whatever that it still exists somewhere in the Alpha System."

He almost convinced himself of it. He did not, however, convince Wade Lucas, who was now regarding him with narrow-eyed suspicion.

"You mean you categorically state that that computer actually exists?"

"That, I think, was the general idea. Yes. I certainly do believe that Merlin exists."

Maybe he was telling the truth. Merlin existed in the beliefs and hopes of people like Dolf Kellton and Klem Zareff and Judge Ledue and Kurt Fawzi. Merlin was a G.o.d to them. Well, take Ghu, the Thoran Grandfather-G.o.d. Ghu was as preposterous, theologically, as Merlin was technologically; Ghu, except to Thorans, was a Federation-wide joke.

But he"d known a couple of Thorans at the University, funny little fellows, with faces like terriers, their bodies covered with matted black hair. They believed in Ghu the way he believed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Ghu was with them every moment of their lives. Take away their belief in Ghu, and they would have been lost and wretched.

As lost and wretched as Kurt Fawzi or Judge Ledue, if they lost their belief in Merlin. He started to say something like that, and then thought better of it.

Yes, Virginia, there _is_ a Santa Claus.