XV
The _Harriet Barne_ settled comfortably at the dock, thebunting-swathed tugs lifting away from her. They had the outside soundpickups turned as low as possible, and still the noise was deafening.The spaceport was jammed, people on the ground and contragravityvehicles swarming above, with police cars vainly trying to keep themin order. All the bands in Storisende seemed to have been combined;they were blaring the "Planetary Hymn";
_Genji Gartner's body lies a-moldering in the tomb,But his soul goes marching on!_
When they opened the airlock, there was a hastily improvisedceremonial barge, actually a farm-scow completely draped in red andwhite, the Planetary colors. They all stopped, briefly, as they cameout, to enjoy the novelty of outdoor air which could actually bebreathed. Conn saw his father in the scow, and beside him SylvieJacquemont, trying, almost successfully, to keep from jumping up anddown in excitement. Morgan Gatworth to meet his son, and Lester Dawesto meet his. Kurt Fawzi, Dolf Kellton, Colonel Zareff, Tom Brangwyn.He didn't see his mother, or his sister. Flora he had hardly countedon, but he was disappointed that his mother wasn't there to meet him.
Sylvie was embracing her father as he shook hands with his; then shethrew her arms around his neck.
"Oh, Conn, I'm so happy! I was watching everything I could on-screen,everything you saw, and all the places you were, and everything youwere doing...."
The scow--pardon, ceremonial barge--gave a slight lurch, throwingthem together. Over her shoulder, he saw his father and YvesJacquemont exchanging grins. Then they had to break it up while heshook hands with Fawzi and Judge Ledue and the others, and by the timethat was over, the barge was letting down in front of the stand at theend of the dock, and the band was still deafening Heaven with "GenjiGartner's Body," and they all started up the stairs to be greeted byPlanetary President Vyckhoven; he looked like an elderly bear who hasbeen too well fed for too long in a zoo. And by Minister-GeneralMurchison, who represented the Terran Federation on Poictesme. He wasthin and balding, and he looked as though he had just mistaken thevinegar cruet for the wine decanter. Genji Gartner's soul stoppedmarching on, but the speeches started, and that was worse. And afterthe speeches, there was the parade, everybody riding intransparent-bodied aircars, and the _Lester Dawes_ and the two shipsof the new Planetary Air Navy and a swarm of gunboats in column fivehundred feet above, all firing salutes.
In spite of what wasn't, but might just as well have been, a concertedconspiracy to keep them apart, he managed to get a few words privatelywith Sylvie.
"My mother; she didn't get here. Is anything wrong?"
"Is anything anything else? I've been in the middle of it ever sinceyou went away. Your mother's still moaning about all these companiesyour father's promoting--he never used to do anything like that, andit's all too big, and it's going to end in a big smash. And then shegets onto Merlin. You know, she won't say Merlin, she always calls it,'that thing.'"
"I've noticed that."
"Then she begins talking about all the horrible things that'll happenwhen it's found, and that sets Flora off. Flora says Merlin's a bigfake, and you and your father are using it to rob thousands of widowsand orphans of their life savings, and that sets your mother offagain. Self-sustaining cyclic reaction, like the Bethe solar-phoenix.And every time I try to pour a little oil on the troubled waters, Ifind I've gotten it on the fire instead. And then, Flora had thisfight with Wade Lucas, and of course, she blames you for that."
"Good heavens, why?"
"Well, she couldn't blame it on herself, could she? Oh, you mean whythe fight? Lucas is in business with your father now, and she can'tconvince him that you and your father are a pair of quadruple-dyedvillains, I suppose. Anyhow, the engagement is _phttt_! Conn, is myfather going back to Koshchei?"
"As soon as we can round up some people to help us on the ship."
"Then I'm going along. I've had it, Conn. I'm a combat-fatigue case."
"But, Sylvie; that isn't any place for a girl."
"Oh, poo! This is Sylvie. We're old war buddies. We soldiered togetheron Barathrum; remember?"
"Well, you'd be the only girl, and...."
"That's what you think. If you expect to get any kind of a gangtogether, at least a third of them will be girls. A lot of techniciansare girls, and when work gets slack, they're always the first ones toget shoved out of jobs. I'll bet there are a thousand girl techniciansout of work here--any line of work you want to name. I know what I'lldo; I'll make a telecast appearance. I still have some news value,from the Barathrum business. Want to bet that I won't be the workinggirl's Joan of Arc by this time next week?"
That cheered him. A girl can punch any kind of a button a man can, anda lot of them knew what buttons to punch, and why. Say she could findfifty girls....
He had a slightly better chance to talk to his father before thebanquet at the Executive Palace that evening. They shared the samesuite at the Ritz-Gartner, and even welcoming committees seldom chasetheir victims from bedroom to bath.
"Yes, I know all about it," Rodney Maxwell said bitterly. "I was home,a couple of weeks ago. Flora simply will not speak to me, and yourmother begged me, in tears, to quit everything we're doing here. Itried to give her some idea of what would happen if I dropped this,even supposing I could; she wouldn't listen to me." He finishedputting the studs in his shirt. "You still think this is worth whatit's costing us?"
"You saw the views we sent back. There's work on Koshchei for amillion people, at least. Why, even these two makeshift ships they'reputting together here at Storisende are giving work, one way oranother, to almost a thousand. Think what things will be like a yearfrom now, if this keeps on."
Rodney Maxwell gave a wry laugh. "Didn't know I had a real Simon-purealtruist for a son."
"Pardner, when you call me that, smile."
"I am smiling. With some slight difficulty."
He didn't think well of the banquet. Back in Litchfield, Senta wouldhave fired half her human help and taken a sledgehammer to herrobo-chef for a meal like that. Even his father's camp cook would havebeen ashamed of it. And there were more speeches.
President Vyckhoven managed to get hold of him and Yves Jacquemontafterward, and steered them into his private study.
"Have you any real reason for thinking that Merlin might be onKoshchei?" the Planetary President asked.
"Great Ghu, no! We weren't looking for Merlin, Mr. President. We werelooking for a hypership. We have one, too. Calling her _Ouroboros II_.Twenty-five-hundred-footer. We expect to have her to space in a fewmonths. I surely don't need to tell you what that will do towardrestoring planetary prosperity."
"No, of course not; a hypership of our own. But...." He looked fromone to the other of them. "But I understood.... That is, Mr. KurtFawzi was saying...."
"Mr. Fawzi is looking for Merlin here on Poictesme. If anybody findsit, that's where it'll be found. I'm interested in getting businessstarted again. If Merlin is found, it would help, of course." Heshrugged.
"Don't look at me," Jacquemont said. "Mr. Maxwell--both of them,father and son--want some spaceships. They hired me to help buildthem. That's all I have in it." Then he relit the cigar the Presidenthad given him and leaned back in his chair, staring at the stuffedalcesoid head with the seven-foot hornspread above the fireplace.
Conn described the interview to his father after they were back at thehotel.
"I hope you convinced him. You know, he's afraid of Merlin. A lot ofpeople have been saying that if Merlin's found, it should be used todetermine Government policy. A few extremists are beginning to saythat Merlin ought to _be_ the Government, and Jake Vyckhoven and hiscronies ought to be dumped. Into the handiest mass-energy converter,preferably. You know, if anybody found Merlin and started it auditingthe Planetary Treasury, Jake Vyckhoven'd be the one who'd be wanting ahypership."
Tom Brangwyn ran him down the next morning in the dining room.
"Conn, I wish you'd come along with me," he said. "Some of us are upin Kurt's suite; we'd al
l like to talk to you."
Somehow, he was acting as though he were making an arrest. That mighthave been nothing but professional habit. Conn went up to Fawzi'ssuite, and found Fawzi and Judge Ledue and Dolf Kellton and close to adozen others there.
"I'm glad you could come, Conn," the Judge greeted him. Now that thedefendant had arrived, the trial could begin. "I wish your fathercould have gotten here. I asked him to come, but he had a priorengagement. A meeting with some of the financial people here, aboutsome company he's interested in."
"That's right; Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines."
"Interstellar!" Kurt Fawzi almost howled. "Great Ghu! Now it isn'tenough to go out to Koshchei; he wants to go clear out of theTrisystem. That's what we wanted to talk about; all this nonsense youand your father are in. Merlin's right here on Poictesme. It's rightat Force Command, and if your father hadn't robbed us of all our bestmen, like Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, we'd have found it by now. Idon't think you and your father care a hoot if we ever find Merlin ornot!"
"Kurt, that's a dreadful thing to say," Dolf Kellton objected in ashocked voice.
"It's a dreadful thing to have to say," Fawzi replied, "but you tellme what Conn Maxwell or Rodney Maxwell are doing to help find it."
"Who showed you where Force Command was?" Klem Zareff asked.
Nobody could think of any good quick comeback to that.
Conn took advantage of the pause to ask, "Why do you want to findMerlin?"
"Why do we ..." Fawzi spluttered indignantly. "If you don't know...."
"I know why I do. I want to see if you do. Do you?"
"Merlin would answer so many questions," Dolf Kellton told him gently."Questions I can't answer for myself."
"With Merlin, we could set up a legal code and a system ofjurisprudence that would give everybody absolute justice," Judge Leduesaid.
As if absolute justice wasn't the last thing anybody in his rightsenses would want; a robot-judge would have the whole planet in jailinside a month.
"We have a man who joined us after you went off to Koshchei, Conn,"Franz Veltrin said. "A Mr. Carl Leibert. He's some kind of aclergyman, from over Morven way. He says that Merlin could formulatean entirely new religion, which would regenerate humanity."
"Well, I don't have any such lofty ideas," Fawzi said. "I just wantMerlin to show us how to get some prosperity here; bring things backto what they were before Poictesme went broke."
"And that's what Father and I are trying to do. You're going into thewoods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax." Fawzi lookedat him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better ofit. "If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss ofmarkets. If we find Merlin, and tape it with everything that'shappened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tellus where to find new markets. But the markets won't come to us. We'llhave to do our own exporting, and we'll need ships. Now, you men havebeen studying about Merlin, and hunting for Merlin, all your lives. Ican't add anything to what you know, and neither can my father. Youfind Merlin, and we'll have the ships ready when you do find it."
"Kurt, I think he has a point," somebody said.
"You're blasted well right he has," Klem Zareff put in. "If it wasn'tfor Conn Maxwell, you know where we'd be? Back in Litchfield, sittingaround in Kurt's office, talking about how wonderful things'll be whenwe find Merlin, and doing nothing to find it."
"Kurt, I believe Conn is entitled to an apology," Judge Ledue ruled."How close we are to finding Merlin I don't know, but it is due to himthat we have any hope of finding it at all."
"Conn, I'm sorry," Fawzi said. "I oughtn't to have said some of thethings I did. But we're all on edge; we've been having so muchtrouble.... Conn, it's right there at Force Command; I know it is.We've been all over the place. We have shafts sunk at each of thecorners; we've used scanners, and put off echo shots. Nothing. Welooked for additional passages out of the headquarters; there aren'tany. But it has to be somewhere around. It just _has_ to be!"
"Maybe if I go out to Force Command with you, I might see somethingyou've overlooked. And if I can't, I'll try to scrape up some stuff onKoshchei for you. Deep-vein scanners, that sort of thing, from themines."
They took the _Lester Dawes_ out at a little past noon and turnedsouth and east. Everybody aboard was happy--except Conn Maxwell. Hewas thinking of the years and years ahead of these trusting, hopefulold men, each year the grave of another expectation. Two hundred milesfrom Force Command, the _Goblin_ met them, her sides still spalled anddented from the hits she had taken in Barathrum Spaceport. When theycame in sight of it, the mesa-top was deserted. Fawzi began wonderingwhere in Nifflheim all the drilling rigs, and the seismo-trucks, were.Somebody with a pair of binoculars called attention to activity on theside of the high butte on top of which the relay station was located.Fawzi began swearing exasperatedly.
"Might be something Mr. Leibert thought of," Franz Veltrin suggested.
"Then why in blazes didn't he screen us about it?"
"Who is this Leibert?" Conn asked. "Somebody mentioned him thismorning, I think."
"He joined us after you left, Conn," Dolf Kellton said. "He's aclergyman from Morven. No regular denomination; he has a sect of hisown."
"Yah, he would!" Klem Zareff rumbled. "Pious fraud!"
"He's really a good man, Conn; Klem's prejudiced. He says we ought touse Merlin to show us the true nature of God, and how to live inaccordance with the Divine Will. He says Merlin can teach us a newreligion."
A new religion, based on Merlin; that would be good. And then thefanatics who thought Merlin was the Devil would start a holy war towipe out the servants of Satan, and with all the combat equipment thatwas lying around on this planet.... For the first time since thisbusiness started, he began to feel really frightened.
An aircar came bulleting away from the butte and landed on the mesa asthe _Lester Dawes_ set down. The man who met them at the head of thevertical shaft wore Federation fatigues--baggy trousers, ankle bootsand long smock, dyed black. He was bareheaded, and his white hair wasalmost shoulder-long. He had a white beard.
"Welcome, Brothers," he greeted, a hand raised in benediction. "Andwho is this with you?"
His voice was high and quavery; not a good pulpit voice, Conn thought.
Kurt Fawzi introduced Conn, and Leibert grasped his hand with a gripthat was considerably stronger than his voice.
"Bless you, young man! It is to you alone that we owe our thanks thatwe are about to find the Great Computer. Every sapient being in theGalaxy will honor your name for a thousand years."
"Well, I hadn't counted on quite that much, Mr. Leibert. If it'll onlyhelp a few of these people to make a decent living I'll be satisfied."
Leibert shook his head sadly. "You think entirely in material terms,young man," he reproved. "Forget these things; acquire the higherspiritual values. The Great Computer must not be degraded to suchuses; we should let it show us how to lift ourselves to a highspiritual plane...."
It went on like that, after they went down to Foxx Travis's--nowFawzi's--office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters insteadof the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thickcarpets on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi's officegang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had noidea what a computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build acomputer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn't need it, he_would_ be God.
As he talked, Conn began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition.He'd seen this Carl Leibert before, somewhere, and somehow he was surethat the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren't part of thepicture. That puzzled him. He doubted if he'd have remembered Leibertfrom six years ago, almost seven, now, though a lot of itinerantevangelists showed up in Litchfield. That might have been it.
"I tell you, the Great Computer is there, in the heart of the butte,"Leibert was insisting, now. "It has been revealed to me in a dream. Itis completely buried. After it was made, no hu
man touched it. The menwho were here and used it in the War communicated with it only byradio."
That could be so. There were fully robotic computers, intended for usein places where no human could go and live. There was a big one onNifflheim, armored against the fluorine atmosphere and thehydrofluoric-acid rains. But there was no point in that here, thethings were enormously complicated, and military engineering of anysort emphasized simplicity--_Aaaagh!_ Was he beginning to believe thisbalderdash himself?
Klem Zareff fell in with him as they were going to dinner. "Revealedin a dream!" the old Rebel snorted. "One thing you can always getaway with lying about is what you dream."
"You think he's lying? I think he's just crazy."
"That's what he wants you to think. Look, Conn, he knows Merlin ishere; he's trying to keep us from it. That's why he shifted all thatequipment over on the butte. He's working for Sam Murchison."
"I thought your theory was that the Federation had lost Merlin."
"It was, at first. It doesn't look that way to me now. It's right hereat Force Command, somewhere. They don't want it found, and they'regoing to do everything they can to stop us. I oughtn't to have leftthis fellow Leibert here alone; well, I won't do that again. Get TomBrangwyn to help me."
The Cosmic Computer Page 15
