The H. Beam Piper Megapack

by H. Beam Piper

  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 god, 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 assistant principal 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 competitors for each one. On Poictesme, there were few opportunities, but nobody 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 attitude 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 bumper 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 glass 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 space-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 spaceport, 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 pass 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 you
r 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 fiancé, 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.

  But he couldn’t even go back to yesterday afternoon in Kurt Fawzi’s office and tell them the truth. All he could do was go ahead. It had seemed so easy, when he and his father had been talking on the Mall; just get a ship built, and get out to Koshchei, and open some of the shipyards and engine works there, and build a hypership. Sure; easy—once he got started.

  He climbed out of bed, knuckled the sleep-sand out of his eyes, threw his robe around him, and started across the room to the bath cubicle.

  They had decided to have breakfast together his first morning home. The party had broken up late, and then there had been the excitement of opening the presents he had brought back from Terra. Nobody had had a chance to talk about Merlin, or about what he was going to do, now that he was home. That, and his career of mendacity, would start at breakfast. He wanted to let his father get to the table first, to run interference for him; he took his time with his toilet and dressed carefully and slowly. Finally, he zipped up the short waist-length jacket and went out.

  His father and mother and Flora were at the table, and the serving-robot was floating around a few inches off the floor, steam trailing from its coffee urn and its tray lid up to offer food. He greeted everybody and sat down at his place, and the robot came around to him. His mother had selected all the things he’d been most fond of six years ago: shovel-snout bacon, hotcakes, starberry jam, things he hadn’t tasted since he had gone away. He filled his plate and poured a cup of coffee.

  “You don’t want to bother coming out to the dig with me this morning, do you?” his father was saying. “I’ll be back here for lunch, and we’ll go to the meeting in the afternoon.”

  “Meeting?” Flora asked. “What meeting?”

  “Oh, we didn’t have time to tell you,” Rodney Maxwell said. “You know, Conn brought back a lot of information on locations of supply depots and things like that. An amazing list of things that haven’t been discovered yet. It’s going to be too much for us to handle alone; we’re organizing a company to do it. We’ll need a lot of labor, for one thing; jobs for some of these Tramptowners.”

  “That’s going to be something awfully big,” his mother said dubiously. “You never did anything like that before.”

  “I never had the kind of a partner I have now. It’s Maxwell & Son, from now on.”

  “Who’s going to be in this company?” Flora wanted to know.

  “Oh, everybody around town; Kurt and the Judge and Klem, and Lester Dawes. All that crowd.”

  “The Fawzis’ Office Gang,” Flora said disparagingly. “I suppose they’ll want Conn to take them right to where Merlin is, the first thing.”

  “Well, not the first thing,” Conn said. “Merlin was one thing I couldn’t find out anything about on Terra.”

  “I’ll bet you couldn’t!”

  “The people at Armed Forces Records would let me look at everything else, and make microcopies and all, but not one word about computers. Forty years, and they still have the security lid welded shut on that.”

  Flora looked at him in shocked surprise. “You don’t mean to tell me you believe in that thing?”

  “Sure. How do you think they fought a war around a perimeter of close to a thousand light-years? They couldn’t do all that out of their heads. They’d have to have computers, and the one they’d use to correlate everything and work out grand-strategy plans would have to be a dilly. Why, I’d give anything just to look at the operating panels for that thing.”

  “But that’s just a silly story; there never was anything like Merlin. No wonder you couldn’t find out about it. You were looking for something that doesn’t exist, just like all these old cranks that sit around drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin’s going to do for them, and never doing anything for themselves.”

  “Oh, they’re going to do something, now, Flora,” his father told her. “When we get this company organized—”

  “You’ll dig up a lot of stuff you won’t be able to sell, like that stuff you’ve been bringing in from Tenth Army, and then you’ll go looping off chasing Merlin, like the rest of them. Well, maybe that’ll be a little better than just sitting in Kurt Fawzi’s office talking about it, but not much.”

  It kept on like that. Conn and his father tried several times to change the subject; each time Flora ignored the effort and returned to her diatribe. Finally, she put her plate and cup on the robot’s tray and got to her feet.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Maybe I can do something to keep some of these children from growing up to be Merlin-worshipers like their parents.”

  She flung out of the room angrily. Mrs. Maxwell looked after her in distress.

  “And I thought it was going to be so nice, having breakfast together again,” she lamented.

  Somehow the breakfast wasn’t quite as good as he’d thought it was at first. He wondered how many more breakfasts like that he was going to have to sit through. He and his father finished quickly and got up, while his mother started the robot to clearing the table.

  “Conn,” she said, after his father had gone out, “you shouldn’t have gotten Flora started like that.”

  “I didn’t get Flora started; she’s equipped with a self-starter. If she doesn’t believe in Merlin, that’s her business. A lot of these people do, and I’m going to help them hunt for it. That’s why they all chipped in to send me to school on Terra; remember?”

  “Yes, I know.” Her voice was heavy with distress. “Conn, do you really believe there is a…that thing?” she asked.

  “Why, of course.” He was mildly surprised at how sincerely and straightforwardly he said it. “I don’t know where it is, but it’s somewhere on Poictesme, or in the Alpha System.”

  “Well, do you think it would be a good thing to find it?”

  That surprised him. Everybody knew it would be, and his mother didn’t share his father’s attitude about things everybody knew. She hadn’t any business questioning a fundamental postulate like that.

  “It frightens me,” she continued. “I don’t even like to think about it. A soulless intelligence; it seems evil to me.”

  “Well, of course it’s soulless. It’s a machine, isn’t it? An aircar’s soulless, but you’re not afr
aid to ride in one.”

  “But this is different. A machine that can think. Conn, people weren’t meant to make machines like that, wiser than they are.”

  “Now wait a minute, Mother. You’re talking to a computerman now.” Professional authority was something his mother oughtn’t to question. “A computer like Merlin isn’t intelligent, or wise, or anything of the sort. It doesn’t think; the people who make computers and use them do the thinking. A computer’s a tool, like a screwdriver; it has to have a man to use it.”

  “Well, but.…”

  “And please, don’t talk about what people are meant to do. People aren’t meant to do things; they mean to do things, and nine times out of ten, they end by doing them. It may take a hundred thousand years from a Stone Age savage in a cave to the captain of a hyperspace ship, but sooner or later they get there.”

  His mother was silent. The soulless machine that had been clearing the table floated out of the room, the dishwasher in its rectangular belly gurgling. Maybe what he had told her was logical, but women aren’t impressed by logic. She knew better—for the good old feminine reason, Because.

  “Wade Lucas wanted me to drop in on him for a checkup,” he mentioned. “That’s rubbish; I had one for my landing pratique on the ship. He just wants to size up his future brother-in-law.”

  “Well, you ought to go see him.”

  “How did Flora come to meet him, anyhow?”

  “Well, you know, he came from Baldur. He was in Storisende, looking for an opening to start a practice, and he heard about some medical equipment your father had found somewhere and came out to see if he could buy it. Your father and Judge Ledue and Mr. Fawzi talked him into opening his office here. Then he and Flora got acquainted.…” She asked, anxiously: “What did you think of him, Conn?”