The Cosmic Computer

by H. Beam Piper

  XVIII

  Jerry Rivas, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping thingsrunning on Koshchei. Work on the interplanetary ship at PortCarpenter had stopped when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found;it had never been resumed. When Conn returned, he found work startedon the _Ouroboros II_. Some of the two hundred newcomers who came inon the _Helen O'Loy_ had special skills needed on the hypership; mostof them went with Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to SickleMountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. Some of them,it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. Sylvie, who hadbeen one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping himwith the long lists of needed materials, some of which had to bebrought from other places as much as a thousand miles away. JerryRivas went back to exploring; Nichols had to drop his space-trainingwork temporarily to organize a fleet of air-freighters; usually, themen best able to operate them were urgently needed on some job at theconstruction dock.

  Ships lifted out almost daily from Sickle Mountain. They tried to getsome kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselvesof what they needed for themselves. Some of the ships came back loadedwith provisions and bringing new recruits--for instance, the teachingof physics and mathematics almost stopped at Storisende Collegebecause the professors had been virtually shanghaied.

  Conn found himself losing touch with affairs on Poictesme. Ships hadlanded on both Janicot and Horvendile and were sending back claims toabandoned factories. By that time they had all the decks into the_Ouroboros II_, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogationaland hyperspace instruments put in place. The hypership _Andromeda_ wasback from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what theexpedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures aboutMerlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral.Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, andcombat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as itcame 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 fatherasked. "Things have turned serious. I don't like to talk about it byscreen--too many people know our scrambler combinations. But I wishyou 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 beaboard."

  The voyage back to Poictesme was a needed rest. He felt refreshed whenhe got off at Storisende Spaceport and was met by his father and WadeLucas in one of the slim recon-cars. They greeted him briefly and tookthe 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 therereally is a Merlin, after all."

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

  "I'm beginning to think so, too," Lucas said. "I don't like it atall."

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

  "They were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements forMerlin, weren't they?"

  "Yes. They found it. My Barton-Massarra operatives got to some of thecrew. This place had been turning out material for a computer ofabsolutely unconventional design; the two computermen they had withthem couldn't make head or tail of half of it. And every blueprint,every diagram, every scrap of writing or recording, had beendestroyed. But they found one thing, a big empty fiber folder that hadfallen under something and been overlooked. It was marked: TOPSECRET. 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 somereferences to Project Merlin, too. For instance, there was a routinedivision court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a verytrivial charge. Force Command ordered the court-martial stopped, andthe two officers simply dropped out of the Third Force records, it wasstated 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 mesaalmost to the top of the underground headquarters. They foundsomething on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped mass, fifty feetthick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium. It's directly overwhat used to be Foxx Travis's office."

  "That's not a tenth big enough for anything that could even resembleMerlin."

  "Well, it's something. I was out there day before yesterday. They'redown to the collapsium on top of this thing; I rode down the shaft ina jeep and looked at it. Look, Conn, we don't know what this ProjectMerlin was; all this lore about Merlin that's grown up since the Waris pure supposition."

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

  "Why did you lie to Kurt Fawzi and the others and tell them there wasa Merlin? You lied because telling the truth would hurt them. MaybeTravis had the same reason for lying to you. Maybe Merlin's toodangerous for anybody to be allowed to find."

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

  "It might be something just as bad. Maybe worse. I don't think a manlike Foxx Travis would lie if he didn't have some overriding moralobligation to."

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

  "Yes," Rodney Maxwell said, "we do. And sometime I'm going to inviteKlem Zareff to kick my pants-seat. Sam Murchison, the TerranFederation Minister-General."

  "How'd you get that?"

  "Barton-Massarra got some of it; they have an operative planted inMurchison's office. And some of our banking friends got the rest. ThisHuman Supremacy League is being financed by somebody. Every so often,their treasurer makes a big deposit at one of the banks here, allFederation currency, big denomination notes. When I asked them to,they started keeping a record of the serial numbers and checkingwithdrawals. The money was paid out, at the First Planetary Bank, toMr. Samuel S. Murchison, in person. The Armegeddonists are gettingmoney, too, but they're too foxy to put theirs through the banks. Ibelieve they're the ones who mind-probed Lucy Nocero. Barton-Massarrabelieve, but they can't prove, that Human Supremacy launched thatrobo-bomb at us, that time at the spaceport."

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

  "Gave them to Barton-Massarra. They haven't gotten anything, yet."

  "So we have to admit that Klem wasn't crazy after all. What do youwant me to do?"

  "Go out to Force Command and take charge. We have to assume that theremay be a Merlin, we have to assume that it may be dangerous, and wehave to assume that Kurt Fawzi and his covey of Merlinolators are justbefore digging it up. Your job is to see that whatever it is doesn'tget loose."

  The trouble was, if he started giving orders around Force Command he'dstop being a brilliant young man and become a half-baked kid, and oneword from him and the older and wiser heads would do just what theypleased. He wondered if the pro-Leibert and anti-Leibert factions werestill squabbling; maybe if he went out of his way to antagonize oneside, he'd make allies of the other. He took the precaution ofscreening in, first; Kurt Fawzi, with whom he talked, was almostincoherent with excitement. At least, he was reasonably sure that noneof Klem Zareff's trigger-happy mercenaries would shoot him down comingin.

  The well, fifty feet in diameter, went straight down from the top ofthe mesa; as the headquarters had been buried under loose rubble,they'd had to vitrify the sides going down. He let down into the holein a jeep, and stood on the collapsium roof of whatever it was theyhad found. It wasn't the top of the headquarters itself; the microrayscannings showed that. It was a drum-shaped superstructure, a sort ofunderground penthouse. And there they were
stopped. You didn't cutcollapsium with a cold chisel, or even an atomic torch. He began tosee how he was going to be able to take charge here.

  "You haven't found any passage leading into it?" he asked, when theywere gathered in Fawzi's--formerly Foxx Travis's--office.

  "Nifflheim, no! If we had, we'd be inside now." Tom Brangwyn swore."And we've been all over the ceiling in here, and we can't findanything but vitrified rock and then the collapsium shielding."

  "Sure. There are collapsium-cutters, at Port Carpenter, on Koshchei.They do it with cosmic rays."

  "But collapsium will stop cosmic rays," Zareff objected.

  "Stop them from penetrating, yes. A collapsium-cutter doesn'tpenetrate; it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like agrinding-wheel, or a buzz-saw."

  "Well, could you get one down that hole?" Judge Ledue asked.

  He laughed. "No. The thing is rather too large. In the first place,there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. Withthem, you produce negamatter--atoms with negatively charged protonsand positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them intocontact with normal positive-matte--That's done in a chamber the sizeof a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about ahundred tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impartrotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door thatwould lift ten ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_. Then you needanother fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield yourcutting-head. The cutting-head alone weighs three tons. The rotarybeam that does the cutting," he mentioned as an afterthought, "isabout the size of a silver five-centisol piece."

  Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated thatDivine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert'sstock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in thebutte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of ForceCommand.

  "Means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down towhere that thing is," Zareff said. "That'll take a year."

  "Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started," Conn toldthem. "It'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauledhere than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened."

  He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines onKoshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was goingto take charge here. He had just been unanimously electedIndispensable Man.

  "Bless you, young man!" Carl Leibert cried. "At last, the GreatComputer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of theAge of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks inprayer."

  "He's been doing a lot of praying lately," Tom Brangwyn remarked,after Leibert had gone out. "He's moved into the chaplain's quarters,back of the pandenominational chapel on the fourth level down. Alwayskeeps his door locked, too."

  "Well, if he wants privacy for his devotions, that's his business.Maybe we could all do with a little prayer," Veltrin said.

  "Probably praying to Sam Murchison by radio," Klem Zareff retorted."I'd like to see inside those rooms of his."

  He called Yves Jacquemont at Port Carpenter after dinner. When he toldJacquemont what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was apity screens couldn't be fitted with olfactory sensors, so that hecould smell Conn's breath.

  "I am not drunk. I am not crazy. And I am not exercising my sense ofhumor. I don't know what Fawzi and his gang have here, but if it isn'tMerlin it's something just as hot. We want at it, soonest, and we'llhave to dig a couple of hundred feet of rock off it and open acollapsium can."

  "How are we going to get that stuff on a ship?"

  "Anything been done to that normal-space job we started since I saw itlast? Can you find engines for it? And is there anything about thosemining machines or the cutter that would be damaged by space-radiationor re-entry heat?"

  Yves Jacquemont was silent for a good deal longer than theinterplanetary time-lag warranted. Finally he nodded.

  "I get it, Conn. We won't put the things in a ship; we'll build a shiparound them. No; that stuff can all be hauled open to space. They usethings like that at space stations and on asteroids and all sorts ofplaces. We'll have to stop work on _Ouroboros_, though."

  "Let _Ouroboros_ wait. We are going to dig up Merlin, and theneverybody is going to be rich and happy, and live happily foreverafter."

  Jacquemont looked at him, silent again for longer than the usual fiveand a half minutes.

  "You almost said that with a straight face." After all, Jacquemonthadn't been cleared yet for the Awful Truth About Merlin, but, likehis daughter, he'd been doing some guessing. "I wish I knew how muchof this Merlin stuff you believe."

  "So do I, Yves. Maybe after we get this thing open, I'll know."

  To give himself a margin of safety, Jacquemont had estimated thearrival of the equipment at three weeks. A week later, he wason-screen to report that the skeleton ship--they had christened her_The Thing_, and when Conn saw screen views of her he understoodwhy--was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big miningmachines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshchei had done a strokeof work on anything else.

  "Sylvie's coming along with her; so are Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes andHam Matsui and Gomez and Karanja and four or five others. They'll beready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads," Jacquemontadded.

  That was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any ofthe Merlin-hunting factions at Force Command. In case trouble started,he could rely on them.

  "Well, dig out some shootin'-irons for them," he advised. "They mayneed them here."

  Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened thatcollapsium can on top of Force Command, and how the people therereacted to it.

  _The Thing_ took a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip;conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabinwere apparently worse than on the _Harriet Barne_ on her second tripto Koschchei. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. CarlLeibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had topray the ship across space.

  At the same time, reports of the near completion of _Ouroboros II_were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention fromwhat was happening at Force Command. Cargo was being collected forher; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people wouldbe drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses ofeverything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up anddown the Gordon Valley. Melon and tobacco planters were talking aboutbreaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for thenext year. Agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing highprices. So were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery. It began tolook as though the Maxwell Plan was really getting started.

  It was decided to send the hypership to Baldur on her first voyage;that was Wade Lucas's suggestion. He was going with her himself, torecruit scientific and technical graduates from his alma mater, theUniversity of Paris-on-Baldur, and from the other schools there. Connwas enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers onKoshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and atextbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed todo while they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long onthe leavings of wartime production; too few people had botheredlearning how to produce anything.

  _The Thing_ finally settled onto the mesa-top. It looked likesomething from an old picture of the construction work on one of theTerran space-stations in the First Century. Immediately, every pieceof contragravity equipment in the place converged on her; men dangledon safety lines hundreds of feet above the ground, cutting away beamsand braces with torches. The two giant mining machines, one after theother, floated free on their own contragravity and settled into place._The Thing_ lifted, still carrying the collapsium-cutting equipment,and came to rest on the brush-grown flat beyond, out of the way.

  If Yves Jacquemont had overestimated the time required to get theequipment loaded and lifted off from Koshchei, Conn had beenoveroptimistic about the speed wit
h which the top of the mesa could bestripped off. Digging away the rubble with which the pit had beenfilled, and even the solid rock around it, was easier than getting thestuff out of the way. Farm-scows came in from all over, as fast asthey and pilots for them could be found; the rush to get brandy andtobacco to Storisende had caused an acute shortage of vehicles.

  One by one, the members of the old Fawzi's Office gang came driftingin--Lorenzo Menardes, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes. None of them hadany skills to contribute, but they brought plenty of enthusiasm.Rodney Maxwell came whizzing out from Storisende now and then to watchthe progress of the work. Of all the crowd, he and Conn watched thetwo steel giants strip away the tableland with apprehension instead ofhope. No, there was a third. Carl Leibert had stopped secludinghimself in his quarters; he still talked rapturously about themiracles Merlin would work, but now and then Conn saw him when hethought he was unobserved. His face was the face of a condemned man.

  The _Ouroboros II_ was finished. The whole planet saw, byscreen, the ship lift out; watched from the ship the dwindling awayof Koshchei and saw Poictesme grow ahead of her. Twelve hours beforeshe landed, work at Force Command stopped. Everybody was going toStorisende--Sylvie, whose father would command her on her voyage toBaldur, Morgan Gatworth, whose son would be first officer andastrogator, everybody. Except Carl Leibert.

  "Then I'm not going either," Klem Zareff decided. "Somebody's got tostay here and keep an eye on that snake."

  "No, nor me," Tom Brangwyn said. "And if he starts praying again, I'mgoing to go and pray along with him."

  Conn stayed, too, and so did Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes. They watchedthe newscast of the lift-out, a week later. It was peaceful andharmonious; everybody, regardless of their attitudes on Merlin, seemedagreed that this was the beginning of a new prosperity for the planet.There were speeches. The bands played "Genji Gartner's Body," and the"Spaceman's Hymn."

  And, at the last, when the officers and crew were going aboard, Connsaw his sister Flora clinging to Wade Lucas's arm. She was one of thesmall party who went aboard for a final farewell. When she came off,along with Sylvie, she was wiping her eyes, and Sylvie was comfortingher. Seeing that made Conn feel better even than watching the shipitself lift away from Storisende.