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He found Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and a score of workmen making asurvey and inventory of the spaceport. Captain Nichols and four of theoriginal crew of the _Harriet Barne_, who had shared his captivityamong the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And FredKarski, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, waskeeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formationof Alpha-Interplanetary when Conn arrived.
The next day, Yves Jacquemont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, agang from the T. & O. shipyard, and a dozen engineers and constructionmen whom he had recruited around Storisende. More workers arrived inthe next few days, including a number who had already worked on theship as slaves of the Perales gang.
It didn't take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in theconversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere andgravitation, the _Harriet Barne_ was long and narrow, like an oldocean ship; more than anything else, she had originally resembled ahuge submarine. Spaceships, either interplanetary or interstellar,were always spherical with a pseudogravity system at the center. This,of course, the _Harriet Barne_ lacked.
"Well, are we going to make the whole trip in free fall?" he wanted toknow.
"No, we'll use our acceleration for pseudograv halfway, anddeceleration the other half," Jacquemont told him. "We'll be in freefall about ten or fifteen hours. What we're going to have to do willbe to lift off from Poictesme in the horizontal position the ship wasdesigned for, and then make a ninety-degree turn after we'reoff-planet, with our lift and our drive working together, just likeone of the old rocket ships before the Abbott Drive was developed."
That meant, of course, that the after bulkheads would become decks,and explained a lot of the oddities he had noticed about theconversion job. It meant that everything would have to be mounted ongimbals, everything stowed so as to be secure in either position, andnothing placed where it would be out of reach in either.
Jacquemont and Nichols took charge of the work on the ship herself.Chief Engineer Vibart, with a gang of half-taught, self-taught anduntaught helpers, went back to working the engines over, tearing outall the safety devices that were intended to keep the ship insideplanetary atmosphere, and arranging the lift engines so that theycould be swung into line with the drive engines. There was a lot ofcybernetic and robotic equipment, and astrogational equipment, thathad to be made from scratch. Conn picked a couple of helpers and wentto work on that.
From time to time, he was able to snatch a few minutes to readteleprint papers or listen to audiovisual newscasts from Storisende.He was always disappointed. There was much excitement about the newinterplanetary company, but the emphasis was all wrong. People weren'tinterested in getting hyperships built, or opening the mines andfactories on Koshchei, or talking about all the things now in shortsupply that could be produced there. They were talking about Merlin,and they were all positive, now, that something found at Force CommandDuplicate had convinced Litchfield Exploration & Salvage that thegiant computer was somewhere off-planet.
Rodney Maxwell flew in from Storisende; he was accompanied by WadeLucas, who shook hands cordially with Conn.
"Can you spare us Jerry Rivas for a while?" Rodney Maxwell asked.
"Well, ask Yves Jacquemont; he's vice-president in charge ofoperations. As an influential non-office-holding stockholder, I'dthink so. He's only running around helping out here and there."
"We want him to take charge of opening those hospitals you weretelling us about. Wade and I are forming a new company, MainlandMedical Materials, Ltd. Going to act as broker for L. E. & S. ingetting rid of medical stores. Nobody in the company knows where tosell that stuff or what we ought to get for it."
Wade Lucas began to talk about how desperately some types of drug andsome varieties of diagnostic equipment were needed. Conn had it on thetip of his tongue to ask Lucas whether he thought that was a racket,too. Lucas must have read his mind.
"I really didn't understand how much good this would do," he said. "Iwouldn't have spoken so forcefully against it if I had. I thought itwas nothing but this Merlin thing--"
"Aaagh! Don't talk to me about Merlin!" Conn interrupted. "I have totalk to Kurt Fawzi and that crowd about Merlin till I'm sick of thewhole subject."
His father shot him a warning glance; Lucas was looking at him insurprise. He hastened to change the subject:
"I see Len made you a suit out of that material," he said to hisfather. "And I see you're not bulging the coat out behind with ahip-holster."
"Oh, I stopped carrying a gun; I'm a city man, now. Nobody carries onein Storisende. Won't even be necessary in Litchfield before long. Ournew marshal had a regular reign of terror in Tramptown for a few days,and you wouldn't know the place. Wade, here, is acting mayor now."
They went back to talking about the new company. "You're going to haveso many companies you won't be able to to keep track of them beforelong," Conn said.
"Well, I'm doing something about that. A holding company; TrisystemInvestments, Ltd.; you're a non-office-holding stockholder in that,too."
Merlin was now a political issue. A bill had been introduced inParliament to amend the Abandoned Property Act of 867 and nationalizeMerlin, when and if discovered and regardless by whom. The supportseemed to come from an extremist minority; everybody else, includingthe Administration, was opposed to it. There was considerableacrimony, however, on the propositions: 1) that Merlin was tooimportant to the prosperity of Poictesme to become a private monopoly;and 2) that Merlin was too important, etc., to become a politicalfootball and patronage plum.
It was discovered, after they were half assembled, that the controlsfor the _Harriet Barne_ would only work while she was in a horizontalposition. The whole thing had to be torn out and rebuilt. There wasalso trouble with the air-and-water recycling system. The _City ofNefertiti_ came in from Aton for Odin; Rodney Maxwell was almostfrantic because they hadn't gotten together a cargo of medical storesfrom the first hospital to be opened.
"There's all sorts of stuff," he was fuming, by screen. "Stuff that'sin short supply anywhere and that we could get good prices foroff-planet. Get Federation sols for it, too."
"The _City of Asgard_ will be along in six months," Conn said. "Youcan have a real cargo assembled by then. You can make arrangements inadvance to dispose of it on Terra or Baldur or Marduk."
"There are a couple of other companies interested in interplanetaryships now," his father added. "One of them had gotten four oldfreighters off Mothball Row, and they're tearing them down andcannibalizing them into one spaceship. That work's being done here atStorisende Spaceport. And another company has gotten title to a coupleof old office buildings and has a gang at work dismantling them forthe structural steel. I think they're going to build a realspaceship."
That wasn't anything to worry about either. The _Harriet Barne_ wasbetter than half finished. There was a collapsium plant at StorisendeSpaceport, but Yves Jacquemont said it was only half the size of theone at Barathrum; it would be three months before it could producearmor for one, let alone both, ships.
The crackpots were getting into the act, now, too. A spirit medium onthe continent of Acaire, to the north, had produced a communicationpurporting to originate with a deceased Third Force Staff officer, nowin the Spirit World. There was considerable detail, all ludicrous toConn's professional ear. And a fanatic in one of the small towns onthe west coast was quoting the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavadgitato prove that if Merlin were ever found, Divine vengeance in aspectacular form would fall not only on Poictesme but on the entireGalaxy.
The spaceship that was building at Storisende got into the news;on-screen, it appeared that the work was progressing rapidly. So wasthe work of demolishing a block of empty buildings to get girders forthe second ship, on which work had not yet been started. The one underconstruction seemed to be of cruciform design, like an old-fashionedpre-contragravity winged airplane. The design puzzled everybody atBarathrum. Yves Jacquemont thought that perhaps the
re would be decksin the cross-arm which would be used when the ship was running oncombined lift and drive.
"Well, till we can get a shipyard going on Koshchei and build somereal spaceships, there are going to be some rare-looking objectstraveling around the Alpha System. I wonder what the next one's goingto look like--a flying sky-scraper?" Conn said.
"What I wonder," Yves Jacquemont replied, "is where all the oldinterplanetary ships got to. There must have been hundreds of themrunning back and forth from here to Janicot and Koshchei and Jurgenand Horvendile during the War. They must have gone somewhere."
"Couldn't they all have been fitted with Dillingham hyperdriveengines and used in the evacuation?"
"Possible. But the average interplanetary ship isn't very big; fivehundred to seven-fifty feet in diameter. One of those things couldn'tcarry more than a couple of hundred people, after you put in all thesupplies and the hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats and so on fora four- to six-month voyage. I can't see the economy of alteringanything that small for interstellar work. Why, the smallest of thesetramp freighters that come in here will run about fifteen hundredfeet."
They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure.And there certainly weren't any of them left on Poictesme. He puzzledover it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things tothink about.
In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work,everything he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had notgiven to anything since cramming for examinations at the University.There was a lot of it.
The fourth planet of Alpha Gartner was older than Poictesme;geologists claimed that it was the oldest thing, the sun excepted, inthe system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn'tbeen captured from either Beta or Gamma when the three stars had beenmuch closer together. It had certainly been formed at a much highertemperature than Janicot or Poictesme or Jurgen or Horvendile. Forbetter than a billion years, it had been molten-hot, and it had lostmost of its lighter elements in gaseous form along with its primaryatmosphere, leaving little to form a light-rock crust. All that hadremained had been a core of almost pure iron and a mantle that wasmostly high-grade iron ore.
The same process had gone on, as it cooled, as on any Terra-sizeplanet. After the surface had started to congeal, gases, mostly carbondioxide and water vapor, had come up to form a secondary atmosphere,the water vapor forming a cloud envelope, condensing, and sending downrain that returned immediately as steam. Solar radiations and electricdischarges broke some of that into oxygen and hydrogen; most of thehydrogen escaped into space. Finally, the surface cooled further andthe rain no longer steamed off.
The whole planet started to rust. It had been rusting, slowly, for thebillion or so years that had followed, and almost all the free oxygenhad become locked in iron oxide. The air was almost pure carbondioxide. It would have been different if life had ever appeared onKoshchei, but apparently the right amino acids never assembled. Someattempts had been made to introduce vegetation after the colonizationof Poictesme, but they had all failed.
Men went to Koshchei; they worked out of doors in oxygen helmets, andlived in airtight domes and generated their own oxygen. There had beenmines, and smelters, and blast furnaces and steel mills. And there hadbeen shipyards, where hyperships up to three thousand feet had beenbuilt. They had all been abandoned when the War had ended; they werewaiting there, on an empty, lifeless planet. Some of them had beenbuilt by the Third Fleet-Army Force during the War; most of them datedback almost a century before that, to the original industrial boom.All of them could be claimed under the Abandoned Property Act of 867,since all had been taken over by the Federation, and the originalowners, or their heirs, compensated.
And there was the matter of selecting a crew. As an influentialnon-office-holding stockholder in all the companies involved, ConnMaxwell, of course, would represent them. He would also serve asastrogator. Clyde Nichols would command the ship in atmosphere, andact as first mate in space. Mack Vibart would be chief engineer at alltimes. Yves Jacquemont would be first officer under Nichols, andcaptain outside atmosphere. They had three real space crewmen, namedRoddell, Youtsko and O'Keefe, who had been in Storisende jail as aresult of a riotous binge when their ship had lifted out, six monthsbefore. The rest of the company--Jerry Rivas, Anse Dawes, CharleyGatworth, Mohammed Matsui, and four other engineers, Ludvyckson,Gomez, Karanja and Retief--rated as ordinary spacemen for the trip,and would do most of the exploration work after landing.
They got the controls put up; they would work in either position. Theengines were lifted in and placed. Conn finished the robo-pilot andthe astrogational computers and saw them installed. The air-and-waterrecycling system went in. The collapsium armor went on. In thenews-screen, they saw the spaceship at Storisende still far from halffinished, with swarms of heavy-duty lifters and contragravitymachiners around it, and a set of landing-stands, on which the secondship was to be built, in the process of construction.
A tramp hyperspace freighter landed at Storisende, the _Andromeda_,five months from Terra, with a cargo of general merchandise. RodneyMaxwell and Wade Lucas had assembled a cargo of medicines and hospitalequipment which they thought could be sold profitably. They begandickering with the owner-captain of the hypership.
A farm-tramp down in the tobacco country to the south, evidentlyignorant that the former commander of the Third Force was still alive,had proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Foxx Travis and wasforbidding everybody, on pain of court-martial and firing squad, frommeddling with Merlin. And an evangelist in the west was declaring thatMerlin was really Satan in mechanical shape.
The _Harriet Barne_ was finished. The first test, lifting her to threehundred miles, turning her bow-up, and taking her another thousandmiles, had been a success. They brought her back and set her down inthe middle of the crater, and began getting the supplies aboard. KurtFawzi, Klem Zareff, Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin and the others flewover from Force Command. Sylvie Jacquemont came from Litchfield, andso did Wade Lucas, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes, Lorenzo Menardes anda number of others. Neither Conn's mother nor sister came.
"I don't know what's the matter with those two," Sylvie told him."They always seem to be scrapping with each other now, and the onlything they can agree on is that you and your father ought to stopwhatever you're doing, right away. Your mother can't adjust to yourfather being a big Storisende businessman, and she says he'll loseevery centisol he has and both of you will probably go to jail, andthen she's afraid you will find Merlin, and Flora's sure you and yourfather are swindling everybody on the planet."
"Sylvie, I had no idea things would be like that," he told hercontritely. "I wish I hadn't suggested that you stay there, now."
"Oh, it isn't so bad, so far. Your mother and I get along all rightwhen Flora isn't there, and Flora and I get along when your motherisn't around. Mealtimes aren't much fun, though."
His father came out from Storisende, looked the ship over, and seemedrelieved.
"I'm glad you're ready to get off," he said. "You know this hyperspacefreighter, the _Andromeda_? Some private group in Storisende haschartered her. She's loading supplies now. I have a private detectiveagency, Barton-Massarra, trying to find out where's she's going. Ithink you'd better get this ship off, right away."
"We have everything aboard, all the supplies and everything,"Jacquemont told him. "We can lift off tonight."
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