couple of drinks, he'd be betterable to tell them.
"Yes, indeed, Mr. Fawzi," Conn said. "I know you're all anxious, butit's a long story. This'll be a good chance to tell you."
Fawzi turned to his wife and daughter, interrupting himself to shoutinstructions to a couple of dockhands who were floating the baggage offthe ship on a contragravity-lifter. Conn's father had sent Charley offwith a message to his mother and Flora.
Conn turned to Colonel Zareff. "I noticed extra workers coming out fromthe hiring agencies in Storisende, and the crop was all in across theCalders. Big wine-pressing this year?"
"Yes, we're up to our necks in melons," the old planter grumbled."Gehenna of a big crop. Price'll drop like a brick of collapsium, andthis time next year we'll be using brandy to wash our feet in."
"If you can't get good prices, hang onto it and age it. I wish you couldsee what the bars on Terra charge for a drink of ten-year-oldPoictesme."
"This isn't Terra and we aren't selling it by the drink. Only place wecan sell brandy is at Storisende spaceport, and we have to take what thetrading-ship captains offer. You've been on a rich planet for the lastfive years, Conn. You've forgotten what it's like to live in apoorhouse. And that's what Poictesme is."
"Things'll be better from now on, Klem," the mayor said, putting onehand on the old man's shoulder and the other on Conn's. "Our boy's home.With what he can tell us, we'll be able to solve all our problems. Comeon, let's go up and hear about it."
They entered the wide doorway of the warehouse on the dock-level floorof the Airport Building and crossed to the lift. About a dozen othershad joined them, all the important men of Litchfield. Inside, KurtFawzi's laborers were floating out cargo for the ship--casks of brandy,of course, and a lot of boxes and crates painted light blue and markedwith the wreathed globe of the Terran Federation and the gold triangleof the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of OrdnanceService. Long cases of rifles, square boxes of ammunition, machine guns,crated auto-cannon and rockets.
"Where'd that stuff come from?" Conn asked his father. "You dig itup?"
His father chuckled. "That happened since the last time I wrote you.Remember the big underground headquarters complex in the Calders?Everybody thought it had been all cleaned out years ago. You know, it'snever a mistake to take a second look at anything that everybodybelieves. I found a lot of sealed-off sections over there that had neverbeen entered. This stuff's from one of the headquarters defensearmories. I have a gang getting the stuff out. Charley and I flew inafter lunch, and I'm going back the first thing tomorrow."
"But there's enough combat equipment on hand to outfit a private armyfor every man, woman and child on Poictesme!" Conn objected. "Where arewe going to sell this?"
"Storisende spaceport. The tramp freighters are buying it for newlycolonized planets that haven't been industrialized yet. They don't paymuch, but it doesn't cost much to get it out, and I've been clearingabout three hundred sols a ton on the spaceport docks. That's not bad,you know."
Three hundred sols a ton. A lifter went by stacked with cases of M-504submachine guns. Unloaded, one of them weighed six pounds, and even aused one was worth a hundred sols. Conn started to say something aboutthat, but then they came to the lift and were crowding onto it.
He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office a few times, always with his father,and he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality andrambling conversations, with deep, comfortable chairs and many ashtrays.Fawzi's warehouse and brokerage business, and the airline agency, andthe government, such as it was, of Litchfield, combined, made fewdemands on his time and did not prevent the office from being a favoredloafing center for the town's elders. The lights were bright only overthe big table that served, among other things, as a desk, and the wallswere almost invisible in the shadows.
As they came down the hallway from the lift, everybody had begunspeaking more softly. Voices were never loud or excited in Kurt Fawzi'soffice.
Tom Brangwyn went to the table, taking off his belt and holster andlaying his pistol aside. The others, crowding into the room, added theirweapons to his.
That was something else Conn was seeing with new eyes. It had been fiveyears since he had carried a gun and he was wondering why any of thembothered. A gun was what a boy put on to show that he had reachedmanhood, and a man carried for the rest of his life out of habit.
Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn'tcount the farm tramps and drifters, who kept to the lower level orcamped in the empty buildings at the edge of town. Or maybe that was it;maybe Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was armed. It certainlywasn't because of anything the Planetary Government at Storisende did tomaintain order.
After divesting himself of his gun, Tom Brangwyn took over thebartending, getting out glasses and filling a pitcher of brandy from akeg in the corner.
"Everybody supplied?" Fawzi was asking. "Well, let's drink to ourreturned emissary. We're all anxious to hear what you found out, Conn.Gentlemen, here's to our friend Conn Maxwell. Welcome home, Conn!"
"Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi--"
"No, let's not have any of this mister foolishness! You're one of thegang now. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, even if wedon't have anything else."
"You telling us, Kurt?" somebody demanded. One of the distillerycompany; the name would come back to Conn in a moment. "When this cropgets pressed and fermented--"
"When I start pressing, I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vatthe stuff till it ferments," Colonel Zareff said. "Or why. You won't beable to handle all of it."
"Now, now!" Fawzi reproved. "Let's not start moaning about our troubles.Not the day Conn's come home. Not when he's going to tell us how to findthe Third Fleet-Army Force Brain."
"You _did_ find out where the Brain is, didn't you, Conn?" Brangwynasked anxiously.
That set half a dozen of them off at once. They had all sat down afterthe toast; now they were fidgeting in their chairs, leaning forward,looking at Conn fixedly.
"What did you find out, Conn?"
"It's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?"
"Did you find out where it is?"
He wanted to tell them in one quick sentence and get it over with. Hecouldn't, any more than he could force himself to squeeze the trigger ofa pistol he knew would blow up in his hand.
"Wait a minute, gentlemen." He finished the brandy, and held out theglass to Tom Brangwyn, nodding toward the pitcher. Even the first drinkhad warmed him and he could feel the constriction easing in his throatand the lump at the pit of his stomach dissolving. "I hope none of youexpect me to spread out a map and show you the cross on it, where theBrain is. I can't. I can't even give the approximate location of thething."
Much of the happy eagerness drained out of the faces around him. Some ofthem were looking troubled; Colonel Zareff was gnawing the bottom of hismustache, and Judge Ledue's hand shook as he tried to relight his cigar.Conn stole a quick side-glance at his father; Rodney Maxwell waswatching him curiously, as though wondering what he was going to saynext.
"But it is still here on Poictesme?" Fawzi questioned. "They didn't takeit away when they evacuated, did they?"
Conn finished his second drink. This time he picked up the pitcher andrefilled for himself.
"I'm going to have to do a lot of talking," he said, "and it's going tobe thirsty work. I'll have to tell you the whole thing from thebeginning, and if you start asking questions at random, you'll get memixed up and I'll miss the important points."
"By all means!" Judge Ledue told him. "Give it in your own words, inwhat you think is the proper order."
"Thank you, Judge."
Conn drank some more brandy, hoping he could get his courage up withoutgetting drunk. After all, they had a right to a full report; all of themhad contributed something toward sending him to Terra.
"The main purpose in my going to the University was to learn computertheory and practice. It wouldn't do any goo
d for us to find the Brain ifnone of us are able to use it. Well, I learned enough to be able tooperate, program and service any computer in existence, and trainassistants. During my last year at the University, I had a part-timepaid job programming the big positron-neutrino-photon computer in theastrophysics department. When I graduated, I was offered a position asinstructor in positronic computer theory."
"You never mentioned that in your letters, son," his father said.
"It was too late for any letter except one that would come on the sameship I did. Beside, it wasn't very important."
"I think it was." There was a catch in old Professor Kellton's voice."One of my boys, from the Academy, offered a place on the faculty of theUniversity of Montevideo, on Terra!" He poured himself a second drink,something he almost never did.
"Conn means it wasn't important because it didn't have anything to dowith the Brain," Fawzi explained and then looked at Conn expectantly.
All right; now he'd tell them. "I went over all the records of the ThirdFleet-Army Force's occupation of Poictesme that are open to the public.On one pretext or another, I got permission to examine thenon-classified files that aren't open to public examination. I even gota few peeps at some of the stuff that's still classified secret. I havemaps and plans of all the installations that were built on thisplanet--literally thousands of them, many still undiscovered. Why, wehaven't more than scratched the surface of what the Federation leftbehind here. For instance, all the important installations exist induplicate, some even in triplicate, as a precaution against Alliancespace attack."
"Space attack!" Colonel Zareff was indignant. "There never was a timewhen the Alliance could have taken the offensive against Poictesme, evenif an offensive outside our own space-area had been part of our policy.We just didn't have the ships. It took over a year to move a million anda half troops from Ashmodai to Marduk, and the fleet that was based onAmaterasu was blasted out of existence in the spaceports and in orbit.Hell, at the time of the surrender, we didn't have--"
"They weren't taking chances on that, Colonel. But the point I want tomake is that with everything I did find, I never found, in any officialrecord, a single word about the giant computer we call the ThirdFleet-Army Force Brain."
For a time, the only sound in the room was the tiny insectile humming ofthe electric clock on the wall. Then Professor Kellton set his glass onthe table, and it sounded like a hammer-blow.
"Nothing, Conn?" Kurt Fawzi was incredulous and, for the first time,frightened. The others were exchanging uneasy glances. "But you musthave! A thing like that--"
"Of course it would be one of the closest secrets during the war,"somebody else said. "But in forty years, you'd expect _something_ toleak out."
"Why, _during_ the war, it was all through the Third Force. Even theAlliance knew about it; that's how Klem heard of it."
"Well, Conn couldn't just walk into the secret files and read whateverhe wanted to. Just because he couldn't find anything--"
"Don't tell _me_ about security!" Klem Zareff snorted. "Certainly theystill have it classified; staff-brass'd rather lose an eye thandeclassify anything. If you'd seen the lengths our staff went to--hell,we lost battles because the staff wouldn't release information thetroops in the field needed. I remember once--"
"But there _was_ a Brain," Judge Ledue was saying, to reassure himselfand draw agreement from the others. "It was capable of combining data,and scanning and evaluating all its positronic memories, and formingassociation patterns, and reasoning with absolute perfection. It wasmore than a positronic brain--it was a positronic super-mind."
"We'd have won the war, except for the Brain. We had ninety systems, ahundred and thirty inhabited planets, a hundred billion people--and wewere on the defensive in our own space-area! Every move we made wasknown and anticipated by the Federation. How could they have done thatwithout something like the Brain?"
"Conn, from what you learned of computers, how large a volume of spacewould you say the Brain would have to occupy?" Professor Kellton asked.
Professor Kellton was the most unworldly of the lot, yet he was askingthe most practical question.
"Well, the astrophysics computer I worked with at the Universityoccupies a total of about one million cubic feet," Conn began. This washis chance; they'd take anything he told them about computers as gospel."It was only designed to handle problems in astrophysics. The Brain,being built for space war, would have to handle any such problem. And ifhalf the stories about the Brain are anywhere near true, it handled anyother problem--mathematical, scientific, political, economic, strategic,psychological, even philosophical and ethical. Well, I'd say that ahundred million cubic feet would be the smallest even conceivable."
They all nodded seriously. They were willing to accept that--or anythingelse, except one thing.
"Lot of places on this planet where a thing that size could be hidden,"Tom Brangwyn said, undismayed. "A planet's a mighty big place."
"It could be under water, in one of the seas," Piet Dawes, the banker,suggested. "An underwater dome city wouldn't be any harder to build thana dome city on a poison-atmosphere planet like Tubal-Cain."
"It might even be on Tubal-Cain," a melon-planter said. "Or Hiawatha, oreven one of the Beta or Gamma planets. The Third Force was occupying thewhole Trisystem, you know." He thought for a moment. "If I'd been incharge, I'd have put it on one of the moons of Pantagruel."
"But that's clear out in the Alpha System," Judge Ledue objected. "Wedon't have a spaceship on the planet, certainly nothing with ahyperdrive engine. And it would take a lifetime to get out to the GammaSystem and back on reaction drive."
Conn put his empty brandy glass on the table and sat erect. A newthought had occurred to him, chasing out of his mind all the worries andfears he had brought with him all the way from Terra.
"Then we'll have to build a ship," he said calmly. "I know, when theFederation evacuated Poictesme, they took every hyperdrive ship withthem. But they had plenty of shipyards and spaceports on this planet,and I have maps showing the location of all of them, and barely a thirdof them have been discovered so far. I'm sure we can find enough hulks,and enough hyperfield generator parts, to assemble a ship or two, and Iknow we'll find the same or better on some of the other planets.
"And here's another thing," he added. "When we start looking into someof the dome-city plants on Tubal-Cain and Hiawatha and Moruna andKoshchei, we may find the plant or plants where the components for theBrain were fabricated, and if we do, we may find records of where theywere shipped, and that'll be it."
"You're right!" Professor Kellton cried, quivering with excitement."We've been hunting at random for the Brain, so it would only be anaccident if we found it. We'll have to do this systematically, and withConn to help us--Conn, why not build a computer? I don't mean anotherBrain; I mean a computer to help us find the Brain."
"We can, but we may not even need to build one. When we get out to theindustrial planets, we may find one ready except for perhaps some minoralterations."
"But how are we going to finance all this?" Klem Zareff demandedquerulously. "We're poorer than snakes, and even one hyperdrive ship'sgoing to cost like Gehenna."
"I've been thinking about that, Klem," Fawzi said. "If we can findmaterial at these shipyards Conn knows about, most of our expense willbe labor. Well, haven't we ten workmen competing for every job? Theydon't really need money, only the things money can buy. We can raisefood on the farms and provide whatever else they need out of Federationsupplies."
"Sure. As soon as it gets around that we're really trying to dosomething about this, everybody'll want in on it," Tom Brangwynpredicted.
"And I have no doubt that the Planetary Government at Storisende willgive us assistance, once we show that this is a practical and productiveenterprise," Judge Ledue put in. "I have some slight influence with thePresident and--"
"I'm not too sure we want the Government getting into this," Kurt Fawzireplied. "Give them half a chance and that gang at Storis
ende'll squeezeus right out."
"We can handle this ourselves," Brangwyn agreed. "And when we get somekind of a ship and get out to the other two systems, or even just toTubal-Cain or Hiawatha, first thing you know, we'll _be_ the PlanetaryGovernment."
"Well, now, Tom," Fawzi began piously, "the Brain is too big a thing fora few of us to try to monopolize; it'll be for all Poictesme. Of course,it's only proper that we, who are making the effort to locate it, shouldhave the direction of that effort...."
While Fawzi was talking, Rodney Maxwell went to the table, rummaged hispistol out of the pile and buckled it on. The mayor stopped short.
"You leaving us, Rod?"
"Yes, it's getting late. Conn and I are going for a little walk; we'llbe at Senta's in half an hour. The fresh air will do both of us good andwe have a lot to talk about. After
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