The Cosmic Computer

by H. Beam Piper

  III

  The ship lurched slightly. In the outside screens, the lights around,the crowd that was waving good-bye, and the floor of the crater beganreceding. The sound pickups were full of cheering, and the boom of abig gun at one of the top batteries, and the recorded and amplifiedmusic of a band playing the traditional "Spacemen's Hymn."

  "It's been a long time since I heard that played in earnest,"Jacquemont said. "Well, we're off to see the Wizard."

  The lights dwindled and merged into a tiny circle in the darkness ofthe crater. The music died away; the cannon shots became a faintthrobbing. Finally, there was silence, and only the stars above andthe dark land and the starlit sea below. After a long while a sunsetglow, six hours past on Barathrum, appeared in the west, behind thenow appreciable curvature of the planet.

  "Stand by for shift to vertical," Captain Nichols called, his voiceechoing from PA-outlets through the ship.

  "Ready for shift, Captain Nichols," Jacquemont reported from theduplicate-control panel.

  Conn went to the after bulkhead, leaning his back against it. "Readyhere, Captain," he said.

  Other voices took it up. Lights winked on the control panels.

  "Shifting over," Nichols said. "Your ship now, Captain Jacquemont."

  "Thank you, Mr. Nichols."

  The deck began to tilt, and then he was lying on his back, his feetagainst the side of the control room, which had altered its shape anddimensions. There was a jar as the drive went on in line with the newdirection of the lift and the ship began accelerating. He got to hisfeet, and he and Charley Gatworth went to the astrogational computerand began checking the data and setting the course for the point inspace at which Koshchei would be in a hundred and sixty hours.

  "Course set, Captain," he reported to Jacquemont, after a while.

  A couple of lights winked on the control panel. There was nothing moreto do but watch Poictesme dwindle behind, and listen to the newscasts,and take turns talking to friends on the planet.

  They approached the halfway point; the acceleration rate decreased,and the gravity indicator dropped, little by little. Everybody wasenjoying the new sense of lightness, romping and skylarking like newlylanded tourists on Luna. It was fun, as long as they landed on theirfeet at each jump, and the food and liquids stayed on plates and inglasses and cups. Yves Jacquemont began posting signs in conspicuousplaces:

  WEIGHT IS WHAT YOU LIFT, MASS IS WHAT HURTSWHEN IT HITS YOU.WEIGHT DEPENDS ON GRAVITY; MASS IS ALWAYS CONSTANT.

  His father came on-screen from his office in Storisende. By then,there was a 30-second time lag in communication between the ship andPoictesme.

  "My private detectives found out about the _Andromeda_," he said."She's going to Panurge, in the Gamma System. They have a couple ofcomputermen with them, one they hired from the Stock Exchange, and onethey practically shanghaied away from the Government. And some of thepeople who chartered the ship are members of a family that wereinterested in a positronic-equipment plant on Panurge at the time ofthe War."

  "That's all right, then; we don't need to worry about that any more.They're just hunting for Merlin."

  Some of his companions were looking at him curiously. A little later,Piet Ludvyckson, the electromagnetics engineer, said: "I thought youwere looking for Merlin, Conn."

  "Not on Koschchei. We're looking for something to build a hypershipout of. If I had Merlin in my hip pocket right now, I'd trade it forone good ship like the _City of Asgard_ or the _City of Nefertiti_,and give a keg of brandy and a box of cigars to boot. If we had a shipof our own, we'd be selling lots of both, and not for StorisendeSpaceport prices, either."

  "But don't you think Merlin's important?" Charley Gatworth, who hadoverheard him, asked.

  "Sure. If we find Merlin, we can run it for President. It would make abetter one than Jake Vyckhoven."

  He let it go at that. Plenty of opportunities later to expand thetheme.

  The gravitation gauge dropped to zero. Now they were in free fall, andit lasted twice as long as Yves Jacquemont had predicted. There were afew misadventures, none serious and most of them comic--For example,when Jerry Rivas opened a bottle of beer, everybody was chasing theamber globules and catching them in cups, and those who were splashedwere glad it hadn't been hot coffee.

  They made their second, 180-degree turnover while weightless. Thenthey began decelerating and approached Koshchei stern-on, and thegravity gauge began climbing slowly up again, and things beganstaying put, and they were walking instead of floating. Koshchei grewlarger and larger ahead; the polar icecaps, and the faint dappling ofclouds, and the dark wiggling lines on the otherwise uniform red-brownsurface which were mountain ranges became visible. Finally they beganto see, first with the telescopic screens and then withoutmagnification, the little dots and specks that were cities andindustrial centers.

  Then they were in atmosphere, and Jacquemont made the final shift, tohorizontal position, and turned the ship over to Nichols.

  For a moment, the scout-boat tumbled away from the ship and Conn wasback in free fall. Then he got on the lift-and-drive and steadied it,and pressed the trigger button, firing a green smoke bomb. Beside him,Yves Jacquemont put on the radio and the screen pickups. He could seethe ship circling far above, and the manipulator-boat, with itsclaw-arms and grapples, breaking away from it. Then he looked down onthe endless desert of iron oxide that stretched in all directions tothe horizon, until he saw a spot, optically the size of afive-centisol piece, that was the shipbuilding city of Port Carpenter.He turned the boat toward it, firing four more green smokes atthree-second intervals. The manipulator-boat started to follow, andthe _Harriet Barne_, now a distant speck in the sky, began comingcloser.

  Below, as he cut speed and altitude, he could see the pock-marks ofopen-pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal andarmor-glass roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces andthe twisted slag-flows, like the ancient lava-flows of Barathrum. And,he reflected, he was an influential non-office-holding stockholder inevery bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storisende and getclaims filed.

  A high tower rose out of the middle of Port Carpenter, with aglass-domed mushroom top. That would be the telecast station; theadministrative buildings were directly below it and around its base.He came in slowly over the city, above a spaceport with its emptylanding pits in a double circle around a traffic-control building,and airship docks and warehouses beyond. More steel mills. Factories,either hemispherical domes or long buildings with rounded tops.Ship-construction yards and docks; for the most part, these wereempty, but on some of them the landing-stands of spaceships, likeeight-and ten-legged spiders, waiting for forty years for hulls to bebuilt on them. A few spherical skeletons of ships, a few with some ofthe outer skin on. It wasn't until he was passing close to them thathe realized how huge they were. And stacks of material--sheet steel,deckplate, girders--and contragravity lifters and constructionmachines, all left on jobs that were never finished, the brightrustless metal dulled by forty years of rain and windblown red dust.They must have been working here to the very last, and then, when theevacuation elsewhere was completed, they had dropped whatever theywere doing, piled into such ships as were completed, and lifted away.

  The mushroom-topped tower rose from the middle of a circular buildingpiled level on level, almost half a mile across. He circled over it,saw an airship dock, and called the _Harriet Barne_ while Jacquemonttalked to Jerry Rivas, piloting the manipulator-boat. Rivas came inand joined them in the air; they hovered over the dock and helped theship down when she came in, nudging her into place.

  By the time Conn and Jacquemont and Rivas and Anse Dawes and Roddelland Youtsko and Karanja were out on the dock in oxygen helmets, theship's airlock was opening and Nichols and Vibart and the others werecoming out, towing a couple of small lifters loaded with equipment.

  The airlocked door into the building, at the end of the dock, wasclosed; when somebody pulled the handle, it refused to open. Thatmeant it was powered from
the central power plant, wherever that was.There was a plug socket beside it, with the required voltage markedover it. They used an extension line from a power unit on one of thelifters to get it open, and did the same with the inner door; when itwas open, they passed into a dim room that stretched away ahead ofthem and on either side.

  It looked like a freight-shipping room; there were a few piles ofboxes and cases here and there, and a litter of packing materialeverywhere. A long counter-desk, and a bank of robo-clerks behind it.According to the air-analyzer, the oxygen content inside was safelyhigh. They all pulled off their fishbowl helmets and slung them.

  "Well, we can bunk inside here tonight," somebody said. "It won't beso crowded here."

  "We'll bunk here after we find the power plant and get the ventilatorfans going," Jacquemont said.

  Anse Dawes held up the cigarette he had lighted; that was all theair-analyzer he needed.

  "That looks like enough oxygen," he said.

  "Yes, it makes its own ventilation; convection," Jacquemont said. "Butyou go to sleep in here, and you'll smother in a big puddle of yourown exhaled CO_2. Just watch what the smoke from that cigarette'sdoing."

  The smoke was hanging motionless a few inches from the hot ash on theend of the cigarette.

  "We'll have to find the power plant, then," Matsui, the power-engineersaid. "Down at the bottom and in the middle, I suppose, and anybody'sguess how deep this place goes."

  "We'll find plans of the building," Jerry Rivas said. "Any big digI've ever been on, you could always find plans. The troubleshootersalways had them; security officer, and maintenance engineer."

  There were inside-use vehicles in the big room; they loaded what theyhad with them onto a couple of freight-skids and piled on, startingdown a passage toward the center of the building. The passageways werewell marked with direction-signs, and they found the administrativearea at the top and center, around the base of the telecast-tower. Thesecurity offices, from which police, military guard, fire protectionand other emergency services were handled, had a fine set of plans andmaps, not only for the building itself but for everything else in PortCarpenter. The power plant, as Matsui had surmised, was at the verybottom, directly below.

  The only trouble, after they found it, was that it was completelydead. The reactors wouldn't react, the converters wouldn't convert,and no matter how many switches they shoved in, there was no poweroutput. The inside telemetered equipment, of course, was self-powered.Some of them were dead, too, but from those which still workedMohammed Matsui got a uniformly disheartening story.

  "You know what happened?" he said. "When this gang bugged out, back in854, they left the power on. Now the conversion mass is all gone, andthe plutonium's all spent. We'll have to find more plutonium, and tearthis whole thing down and refuel it, and repack the mass-conversionchambers--provided nothing's eaten holes in itself after the massinside was all converted."

  "How long will it take?" Conn asked.

  "If we can find plutonium, and if we can find robots to do the workinside, and if there's been no structural damage, and if we keep atit--a couple of days."

  "All right; let's get at it. I don't know where we'll find shipyardslike these anywhere else, and if we do, things'll probably be as badthere. We came here to fix things up and start them, didn't we?"