VI
The car Rodney Maxwell got out of the hangar the next morning wasn'tthe one he and Conn had gone to the meeting in; it was the one he hadflown in from Tenth Army HQ at noon of the previous day. An Armyreconnaissance job, slim and needlelike, completely enclosed, lookingmore like a missile than a vehicle, and armored in dazzling,iridescent collapsium. There was something to living on Poictesme, atthat; only a millionaire on Terra could have owned a car like that.
"Nice," Conn said. "Where did you dig it?"
"Where we're going, Tenth Army."
"I'll bet she'll do Mach Three."
"Better than that. I've never had her above 2.5, but the airspeedgauge is marked up to four. And she has everything: all kinds ofdetection instruments, cameras, audiovisual pickups, armament. Andthe armor; you can take her through any kind of radiation."
The armor was only a couple of micromicrons thick, but it would stopanything. It was collapsed matter, the electron shells of the atomscollapsed upon the nuclei, the atoms in actual contact. That platingmade eighth-inch sheet steel as heavy as twelve-inch armor plate, andin texture and shielding properties, lead was like sponge bycomparison.
They climbed in, and Rodney Maxwell snapped on the screens that servedas windows. Conn leaned back and looked at the underside view in ascreen on the roof of the car, as his father started the lift-engine.
"Still think it's worth the price, son?" his father asked.
The price had begun to rise; even so, he was afraid that what they hadpaid so far was only the down payment. Dinner last evening. Flora, whohad evidently been talking to Wade Lucas, shouting accusations atthem; his mother fleeing from the table in tears. As the car rose, hereached out and turned on and adjusted the telescreen for theunder-view.
"Keep your eye on that, Father," he said. "That's what we're paying toget rid of."
A distillery, bigger than the Menardes plant, long closed and now halfroofless and crumbling. Rows of warehouses, empty after the War untiltaken over by homeless vagrants. Jerry-built shanties with rattletrapaircars grounded around them. Tramptown, a festering sore on the southside of Litchfield.
"If we put this over," he continued, "all those tramps will havesteady work and good homes. We can have a park there, with fountainsthat'll work. Maybe even Flora and Mother will think we've donesomething worth doing."
"It'll be kind of hard to take in the meantime, though, but if you cantake it, I can." Rodney Maxwell turned off the underside televiewscreen and put on the forward one. "See that little pink spot overthere? Sunrise on the east side of Snagtooth; Tenth Army's just behindus. Now, let's see if this airspeed gauge is telling the truth or justbragging."
Sudden acceleration pushed them back in their seats. The calibrationson the gauge rose swiftly; the pink-lighted peak grew swiftly in theteleview screen. The gauge hadn't been bragging, it had beenunderstating; the car had more speed than the instrument couldregister. Two and a half minutes from Litchfield, they weredecelerating and swinging slowly around Snagtooth, looking down on atilted plateau that ended on the western side in a sheer drop ofalmost a thousand feet.
There were ruinous buildings on it: barracks and storehouses andoffices, an airship dock and an air-traffic control tower from whichall the glass had long ago vanished, a great steel telecast tower thathad fallen, crushing a couple of buildings. Young trees had alreadygrown among the wreckage.
"Look over there, on the slope below it; there's one entrance to theshelters." There was a clearing among the evergreens, half a mile fromthe buildings, and raw earth, and a couple of big scows grounded near."They bulldozed rock and earth over the end of the tunnel. Then,there's another one down on that bench, a couple of hundred feet belowthe edge of the plateau. They blasted rock down over that. The mainentrance is a vertical shaft under that pre-stressed concrete dome.That was chapel, auditorium, or something. They just covered it withsheet metal and poured a foot of concrete on top."
They floated down above the broken roofs and crumbling walls, andgrounded in the area between the main administration building and theoffices, back of the ship docks. Once, he supposed, it had been alawn. Then it had been a jungle. Now it was a scuffed, littered,bare-trodden work-yard. Men were straggling out of the administrationbuilding, lighting pipes and cigarettes; they all wore new butwork-soiled infantry battle dress. All of them waved and shoutedgreetings; one, about Conn's own age, approached. As he got out, Connsaw the resemblance to Lester Dawes, the banker, before he recognizedAnse Dawes, who had been one of his closest friends six years ago.They shook hands and pounded each other on the back.
"Hey, you're looking great, Conn!" They all told him that; he'd beginto believe it pretty soon. "Sorry I couldn't make the party, butsomebody had to sit on the lid here, and Jerry Rivas and I cut cardsfor it and Jerry won."
"You didn't tell me Anse was with you," he reproached his father.Rodney Maxwell said he'd been saving that for a surprise.
When Conn asked Anse what was the matter with the bank, he said: "Forthe birds; I'd as soon count sheets of toilet paper as this stuffwe're using for money. Sooner. Toilet paper can be used for something,and this paper money's too stiff. Maybe some of this stuff we'redigging here isn't worth much, but at least it's real."
That was something else the Maxwell Plan would have to take care of.Gresham's Law was running hog-wild on Poictesme. A PlanetaryGovernment sol was worth about ten centisols, Federation, and asidefrom deposit boxes, woolen socks under the mattress, and tin cansburied in the corner of the cellar, Federation currency wasnonexistent.
"Had breakfast yet?" Rodney Maxwell asked.
"Oh, hours ago. I was out and shot another spikenose; it's hanging upback of the kitchen, waiting for the cook to skin it and cut it up."He grinned at Conn. "You don't get this kind of hunting in a bank,either."
"Jerry still inside? I want to see him. Suppose you take Conn aroundand show him the sights. And don't worry about him bumping you out ofa job. Worry about the six or eight extra jobs you'll have to dobesides your own, from now on."
Conn and Anse crossed the yard and entered one of the officebuildings, through a big breach in the wall. Anse said: "I did thatmyself; 90-mm tank gun. When we want a wall out of the way, we get itout of the way." Inside were a lot of lifters and skids and powershovels and things; laborers were assembling for work assignments.Most of them had been with his father six years ago and he knew them.They hadn't done any growing up in the meantime. They climbed into anairjeep and floated out over the edge of the plateau, letting downpast the sheer cliff to where the lower lateral shaft had been opened.A great deal of rock had been shoveled and bulldozed away to exposeit; it was twenty feet high and forty wide. Anse simply steered thejeep inside and up the tunnel.
There were occasional lights on at the ceiling. Anse said they wereall powered from their own nuclear-electric conversion units. "Wedon't have the central power on here; there's a big mass-energyconverter, but we're tearing it down to ship out."
That was something they could get a good price for. Maybe evenone-tenth of what it was worth. At least they wouldn't have to sell itby the ton.
The tunnel ended in an enormous room a couple of hundred feet squareand fifty high. There was a wide aisle up the middle; on either side,contragravity equipment was massed. Tanks with long 90-mm guns. Combatcars. Small airboats. Rank on rank of air-cavalry single-mounts,egg-shaped things just big enough for a man to sit in, with quadruplemachine guns in front and flame-jets behind. Ambulances armoredagainst radiation; decontamination units; mobile workshops; mobilekitchens. Troop carriers, jeeps, staff cars; power shovels,manipulators, lifters. All waiting, for forty years, to swarm out assoon as the bombs that never came stopped falling.
They floated the jeep along hallways beyond, and got down to look intorooms. Work was already going on in the power plant; a gang under aslim young man whom Anse introduced as Mohammed Matsui were usingrepair-robots to get canisters of live plutonium out of a reactor.Workshops. Laundries. Storerooms. Kitchens, so
me stripped and a fewstill intact. A hospital. Guardhouse and lockup.
More storerooms on the level above, reached by returning to thevehicle hangar and lifting to an upper entrance. By this time, gangswere at work there, too, moving contragravity skids in empty and outloaded.
"The CO here must have had squirrel blood," Anse said. "I think whenthe evacuation orders came through he just gathered up everythingthere was topside and crammed it down here, any old way. Honest toGhu, this place was packed solid when we found it. Nobody'd believeit."
"Wait till you see the next one."
"You mean there's another place like this?"
"You can say so. You can say a twenty-megaton thermonuclear is like ahand grenade, too."
Anse Dawes simply didn't believe that.
When they got back to the Administration Building on top, they foundRodney Maxwell, Jerry Rivas, the general foremen, and half a dozengang foremen, in consultation.
"We're getting a hundred and fifty more men and ten farm scows fromLitchfield," his father said. "Dave McCade's coming out from our yard,and Tom Brangwyn's sending one of his deputies to help boss them. Wellhave to keep an eye on this crowd; they're all Tramptown hoodlums, butthat's the best we can get. We're going to have to get this placecleaned out in a hurry. We only have about two weeks till thewine-pressing's over, and then we want to start the next operation.Conn, did you see all that engineering equipment, down on the bottomlevel?"
"Yes. I think we ought to leave a lot of that here--the shovels andbulldozers and manipulators and so on. We can move it direct to ForceCommand. How are we fixed for blasting explosives?"
"Name it and we have it. Cataclysmite, FJ-7, anything you want."
"We'll need a lot of it."
"We're going to have to get a ship. I mean a contragravity ship, afreighter; first, to move this stuff out of here, and then to move thestuff out of Force Command. And we want it mounted with heavyarmament, too. We not only want a freighter, we want a fighting ship."
"You think so?"
"I'm sure of it," Rodney Maxwell said. "Where we're going is full ofoutlaws; there must be hundreds of them holing up over there. That'swhere all the trouble on the east coast comes from. Now, outlaws aresure-thing players. They want to be alive to spend their loot, andthey won't tackle anything that's too tough for them. A lot of guardsand combat equipment may look like a loss on the books, but the bookswon't show how much of a loss you might take if you didn't have them.I want this operation armed till it'll be too much for all the outlawson the planet to tackle."
That made sense. It also made sense out of the billions of sols theFederation had spent preparing for an invasion that never came. If ithad come and found them unprepared, the loss might have been the waritself.
The scows and the newly hired workers began arriving a little afternoon. The scows had been borrowed from plantations where the crophad been gotten in; there were melon leaves and bits of vine inthe bottoms. The workers were a bleary-eyed and unsavory lot;Conn had a suspicion, which Brangwyn's deputy confirmed, thatthey had been collected by mass vagrancy arrests in Tramptown.As soon as they started arriving, Jerry Rivas hurried down tothe old provost-marshal's headquarters and came back with a lotof rubber billy-clubs, which he issued to his gang-bosses, regularand temporary. A few times they had to be used. By evening, however,the insubordinate and troublesome had been quieted. They would allsteal anything they could put in their pockets, but that was to beexpected. By evening, too, the contents of the underground treasuretrove was moving out in a steady stream, and scows were shuttling toand from Litchfield.
Rodney Maxwell was going back to town after lunch the next day. Connwanted to know if he should go along.
"No, you stay here; help keep things moving. Remember what I told youabout the older and wiser heads? Let me handle them. I've been aroundthem, heaven pity me, longer than you have. Just give me anaudiovisual of your proxy and I'll vote your stock."
"How much stock do I have, by the way?"
"The same as I have--ten thousand five hundred shares of common, attwenty centisols a share. But watch where it goes after we open ForceCommand."
His father was back, two days later, to report:
"We're organized. Kurt Fawzi's president, of course, and does he loveit. That'll keep him out of mischief. Dolf Kellton's secretary; he hasan office force at the Academy and can conscript students to help.He's organizing a research team from his seniors and post-gradstudents to work in the Planetary Library at Storisende. There are alot of old Third Force records there; he may find something useful. Ofcourse, Lester Dawes is treasurer."
"What are you?"
"Vice-president in charge of operations. That's what I spent allyesterday log-rolling, baby-kissing and cigar-passing to get."
"And what am I, if it's a fair question?"
"You have a very distinguished position; you are a non-office-holdingstockholder. The only other one is Judge Ledue; as a member of thejudiciary, he did not feel it proper to accept official position in aprivate corporation. Tom Brangwyn's Chief of Company Police; KlemFawzi is Commander of the Company Guards. And we have a law firm inStorisende lined up to handle our charter application. Sterber, Flynn& Chen-Wong. Sterber's married to Jake Vyckhoven's sister, Flynn's sonis married to the daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, andChen-Wong is a nephew of the Chief Justice. All of them are directlydescended from members of Genji Gartner's original crew."
"You don't anticipate any trouble about getting the charter?"
"Not exactly. And Lester Dawes is in Storisende now, trying to find usa contragravity ship. There are about a dozen in the hands ofreceivers for bankrupt shipping companies; he might find one that'sstill airworthy. Oh; you remember how I insisted on absolute secrecyabout our Merlin objective? That's working out better than my fondestexpectations. It's leaking like a machine-gunned water tank, andeverybody it leaks to is positive that we know exactly where Merlin isor we wouldn't be trying to keep it a secret."
Three days later, Conn hitched a ride on a freight-scow to Litchfield.From the air, he could see a haze of bonfire smoke over High GardenTerrace, and a gang of men at work. There were more men at work on theMall and along the streets on either side. He went up from the yardbelow the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found hismother in the living room watching a screen play with one eye andkeeping the other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravitytank, which was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and takingswipes at the furniture with a rotary dustmop. She was glad to seehim, and then became troubled.
"Conn, when Flora comes home, you won't argue with her, will you?"
"Only in self-defense." That was the wrong thing to say. He changed itto, "No; I won't argue with her at all," and then quoted Wade Lucasquoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple oftimes that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that itwouldn't get loose and hurt anybody if he did find it.
In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, thehousecleaning-robot began knocking things off the top of a table.
"Oscar! You stop that!" his mother yelled.
Oscar, deaf as the adder, kept on. Conn yelled at his mother to useher control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like anold-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got therobot stopped.
No wonder she was afraid of Merlin.
He took advantage of the interruption to get to his room and changeclothes, then went up to the hangar and got out an air-cavalry mount.About fifty men were working on High Garden Terrace, pruning andtrimming and leveling the lawns. There was a big vitrifier on theMall--even at five hundred feet he could feel the heat fromit--chuffing and clanking and pouring lavalike molten rock for a newpavement. And all the nymphs and satyrs and dryads and fauns andcentaurs had had their pedestals rebuilt and were sand-blasted clean.
He landed on the top of the Airlines Building and rode a lift down tothe office where Kurt Fawzi neglected the affairs
of his shiplineagency, his brokerage business, and the city of Litchfield. Theafternoon habitues had begun to gather--Raymond Fitch, theused-vehicles dealer, Lorenzo Menardes, Judge Ledue, Tom Brangwyn,Klem Zareff. Fawzi was on the screen, talking to somebody with sandyhair and a suit that didn't seem to be made of any sort of FederationArmed Forces material, about warehouse facilities. The addresses theywere mentioning were in Storisende.
"No, Leo, I don't know when," Fawzi was saying, "but don't you worry.You just have space for it, and we'll fill it up. And don't ask mewhat sort of stuff. You know what a salvage operation's like; you justhaul out the stuff as you come to it."
Tom Brangwyn, lounging in one of the deep chairs, looked up.
"Hello, Conn. We're having a time. Another two hundred tramps came inon the _Countess_ this morning, and Ghu only knows how many in theirown vehicles, and they all seem to think if there's work for somethere ought to be work for all, and some of them are getting nasty."
"We can use some more out at the dig. The ones you sent out Thursdayare doing all right, once they found out we weren't taking anyfoolishness."
Fawzi turned away from the screen. "Well, Conn, we're in," he said."The charter was granted this morning; now we're LitchfieldExploration & Salvage, Ltd. And Lester Dawes has found us acontragravity ship."
"How much will it cost us?"
Fawzi began to laugh. "Conn, this'll slay you! She isn't costing us acentisol. You know those old ships on Mothball Row, back of the oldWest End ship docks at Storisende?"
Conn nodded. He'd seen them before he had gone away, and from the
_City of Asgard_ coming in--a lot of old Army Transport craft, coveredwith muslin and sprayed with protectoplast. The Planetary Governmenthad taken them over after the War and forgotten them.
"Well, Lester's getting one of them for us under the old 878Commercial Enterprise Encouragement Act. She's an Army combatfreighter, regimental ammunition ship. Of course, she still hasarmament; we'll have to pay to get that off."
"Why?"
Fawzi looked at him in surprise. "It would only be in the way and addweight. We want her for a cargo ship, don't we?"
"That's what she was built for. What kind of armament?"
Fawzi didn't know. Klem Zareff did.
"Four 115-mm rifles, two fore and two aft. A pair of lift-and-drivemissile launchers amidships. And a secondary gun battery of 70-mm'sand 50-mm auto-cannon. I know the class; we captured a few of them.Good ships."
Fawzi was horrified. "Why, that's more firepower than the whole AirPatrol. Look, the Government won't like our having anything likethat."
"They're giving her to us, aren't they?" Menardes asked.
"Gehenna with what the Government likes!" the old Rebel swore. "Ifthey'd put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe outthese outlaws and a private company wouldn't need an armed ship."
"May I use your screen, Kurt?" Conn asked.
When Fawzi nodded, he punched out the combination of the operatingoffice at Tenth Army, and finally got his father on. He told him aboutthe ship.
"There's talk about tearing the armament out," he added.
"Is that so, now? Well, I'll call Lester Dawes before he can getstarted on it. I think I'll go in to Storisende tomorrow and see theship for myself. See what I can do about ammunition for those guns,too."
"But, Rod," Fawzi protested, joining the conversation, "we don't wantto start a war."
"No. We want to stay out of one. You don't do that by disarming. We'retaking that ship down into the Badlands. Remember?" Rodney Maxwellsaid. "Ever hear the name Blackie Perales?"
Fawzi had. He stopped arguing about armament. Instead, he beganworrying about how much the civic clean-up campaign was costingLitchfield.
"You think we really need that, Rod?"
"Of course we do. You'd be surprised how much labor we're going toneed, and how hard up we're going to be for capable supervisors. Thisthing's a training program, Kurt, and we'll need every man we train onit."
"But it's costing like Nifflheim, Rod. We're going to bankrupt thecity."
"Worse than it is now, you mean? Oh, don't worry, Kurt. As soon as wefind Merlin, everything'll be all right."
Franz Veltrin came in, shortly after Rodney Maxwell was off thescreen. He dropped his audiovisual camera and sound recorder on thetable, laid his pistol-belt on top of them and took a drink of brandy,downing it with the audible satisfaction of a thirsty horse at atrough. Then he looked around accusingly.
"Somebody's been talking!" he declared. "I've had all the newsservices on the planet on my screen today; they all want the storyabout what's happening here. They've heard we know where Merlin is;that Conn Maxwell found out on Terra."
"They just put two and two together and threw seven," Conn said. "A_Herald-Guardian_ ship-news reporter interviewed me when I got in, andfound out I'd been studying cybernetics and computer theory on Terra.What did you tell them?"
"Complete denial. We don't know a thing about Merlin. Naturally, theydidn't believe me. A bunch of them are coming out here tomorrow. Whatare we going to tell them? We'll all have to have the same story."
"I," said Judge Ledue, "am not going to be interviewed, I am leavingtown till they're gone."
"Why don't you steer them onto Wade Lucas?" Conn asked. "If you wantanything denied, he'll do it for you."
Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, except Klem Zareff, andhe waited until Conn was ready to go and rode up to the landing stagewith him.
"Conn, I know this Lucas is going to marry your sister," he began,"but how much do you know about him?"
"Not much. He seems like a nice chap. I don't hold what he said at themeeting against him. I suppose if I'd come from off-planet, I wouldn'tbelieve in Merlin either."
"Hah! But doesn't he believe in Merlin?"
"He makes noises like it."
"You know what I think?" Klem Zareff lowered his voice to a whisper."I think he's a Federation spy! I think the Federation's lost Merlin.That's why they haven't come back to get it long ago."
"Pretty big thing to mislay."
"It could happen. There'd only be a few scientists and some high staffofficers who'd know where it was. Well, say they all went back toTerra on the same ship, and the ship was lost at space. Sabotage, oneof our commerce raiders that hadn't heard the War was over, maybe justan ordinary accident. But the ship's lost, and the location ofMerlin's lost with her."
"That could happen," Conn agreed seriously.
"All right. So ever since, they've had people here, listening,watching, spying. This Lucas; he showed up here about a year after youwent to Terra. And who does he get engaged to? Your sister. And whatdoes he do here? Goes around arguing that there is no Merlin, gettingpeople to argue with him, getting them mad, so they'll blurt outanything they know. I'm an old field officer; I know all theprisoner-interrogation tricks in the book, and that's always been oneof the best."
"Then why did he act the way he did at the meeting? All he did therewas cut himself off from learning anything more from any of us. In hisplace, would you have done that? No; you'd have tried to take the leadin hunting for Merlin yourself. Now wouldn't you?"
Zareff was silent, first puzzled, and then hurt. Now he would have totear the whole idea down and build it over.
Flora was quite friendly when she came home from school. She'd foundout, somewhere, that Conn had been the originator of the municipalface-lifting project. He was tempted, briefly, to tell her a little,if not all, of the truth about the Maxwell Plan, then decided againstit. The way to keep a secret was to confide it to nobody; every timeyou did, you doubled, maybe even squared, the chances of exposure.
He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, abouthis talk with Klem Zareff.
"How long's he been like that, anyhow?" he asked.
"As long as I've known him. When it comes to melons and wine andbossing tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out ofthe rain, Klem Zareff's as sane as I am.
But on the subject of theTerran Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"
"They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have placeslike Tramptown on Terra, too."
"Uhuh. I suppose, in Klem's boots, I'd be just as crazy as he is,"Rodney Maxwell said. "One minute, he had a wife and two children inKindelburg, on Ashmodai, and the next minute Kindelburg was a puddleof radioactive slag."
"That was in '51, wasn't it? I read about it," Conn said. "It was afamous victory."
That was from a poem, too.
Rodney Maxwell flew to Storisende early the next morning. Conn rodeback to Tenth Army on an empty scow and pitched into the job ofgetting the stores and equipment out of the underground shelters. Morefarm-tramps arrived, and had to be pounded into obedience and taughtthe work. At the same time, Litchfield was getting a steady influx ofjob-seekers, and a secondary swarm of thugs, grifters and gangsterswho followed them. Klem Zareff, having gotten all his melons pressed,came out to Tenth Army, where he selected fifty of the best men fromthe work-gangs and began drilling them as soldiers to guard the nextoperation. The manual of arms, drill and salute he taught them was, ofcourse, System States Alliance.
A week later, the ship arrived from Storisende; a hundred and sixtyfeet, three thousand tons, small enough to be berthed inside ahyperspace transport, and fast enough to get a load of ammunition totroops at the front, unload, and get out again before the enemy couldzero in on her, and armed to fight off any Army Air Force combatcraft. The delay had been in recruiting officers and crew. The captainand chief engineer were out-of-work shipline officers, the gunner wasa former Federation artillery officer, and the crew looked more likepirates than most pirates did.
They christened her the _Lester Dawes_, because Dawes had secured herand because the name began with the initials of Litchfield Exploration &Salvage. From then on, it was a race to see whether the Tenth Armyattack-shelters would be emptied before the wine was all pressed, orvice versa.
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