XXII
It was autumn again, the second autumn since he had landed from the_City of Asgard_ at Storisende and taken the _Countess Dorothy_ hometo Litchfield. Again the fields were bare and brown; all up and downthe Gordon Valley the melons were harvested, and the wine-pressing wasready to start.
The house was crowded today. All top-level Litchfield seemed to haveturned out, and there were guests from Storisende, and even a few whohad made the trip from Koshchei to be there, Simon Macquarte, thepresident of Koshchei Tech; Conn would always remember him in thescreen threatening a whole planet with devastation. Luther Chen-Wong,the chief executive of Koshchei Colony. Clyde Nichols, the presidentof Koshchei Airlines.
He almost bumped into Yves Jacquemont, coming in from the hall.Jacquemont's beard had been trimmed down to a small imperial, and hewas wearing the uniform of Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines,nothing at all like a Federation Space Navy uniform. He was laughingabout something; he threw an arm over Conn's shoulder, and they wentinto the front parlor together.
"Oh, Gehenna of a big crop!" he heard Klem Zareff's voice, chucklinghappily, above the babble in the room. "You wouldn't believe it. Why,we had to build six new vats...."
The thin-faced, white-haired man in the chair beside him saidsomething. Mike Shanlee and Klem Zareff, old enemies, were now fastfriends. Shanlee had come in from Force Command with Conn thatmorning. He had stayed on Poictesme as nominal head of Project Merlin,and intended to remain there for the rest of his life.
"Oh, there aren't any more farm-tramps," Zareff replied. "Everybody'sgetting factory jobs off-planet. I have an awful time getting help,and what I can get won't work for less than ten sols a day. Why,they're even organizing a union...."
There were feminine shrieks from across the room, and a stampede. Thehousecleaning-robot had come in, running its vacuum-cleaning hosearound and brandishing its mops. He saw his mother break away from agroup of older ladies and shout:
"_Oscar!_"
The robot stopped dead. "Yash'm?" a voice came out of it,Sheshan-accented.
"Go out!" his mother commanded. "Go to kitchen. Stay there."
"Yash'm." The robot floated out the door to the hall.
His mother rejoined her friends. Probably telling them, for thethousandth time, that her boy Conn fixed up the sound receptors andvoice for Oscar. Or harping on how Conn had been telling everybody thetruth, all along, and people wouldn't believe him.
Sylvie came up to him and caught his arm. "Come on, Conn; they'regoing to start the rehearsal," she said.
"They've been going to start it for an hour," her father told her.
"Well, they're really going to start it now."
"All right. You two run along," Yves Jacquemont said. "And you'dbetter start rehearsing for your own wedding before long. The _Genji_will be ready to hyper out in another month, and I don't want to be atspace when my only daughter gets married."
They pushed through the crowd, dragging Conn's mother with them towardthe big living room beyond. On the way, Mrs. Maxwell stopped to try todrag Judge Ledue out of a chair.
"Judge, the rehearsal is starting; they can't do it without you."
Ledue clung to his chair. "They daren't do it with me, Mrs. Maxwell.If I get into it, it won't be a rehearsal; they'll be really married,and then there won't be any point in having a wedding tomorrow."
"Oh, Morgan!" Conn called across the room to Gatworth. "You've justbeen appointed temporary judge for the wedding rehearsal!"
There was a big crowd around Wade Lucas, in the next room; he wastelling them about the voyage to Baldur, from which he had returned,and the one to Irminsul, with a cargo of arms, machine tools andcontragravity vehicles, on which he and his bride would go for theirhoneymoon. There was another crowd around Flora; she was telling themabout the new fashions on Baldur, which had been brought back on the_Ouroboros II_.
"Where's your father?" his mother was asking him. "He has to rehearsegiving the bride away."
"Probably in his office. I'll go get him."
"You'll get into an argument with somebody and forget to come back,"his mother said. "Sylvie, you go with him, and bring both of themback."
"When'll we have our wedding, Sylvie?" he asked as they went offtogether.
"Well, before Dad goes to Aditya with the _Genji_. That'll have to bein a month."
"Two weeks? That ought to be plenty of time to get ready, and letpeople recover from this one."
"Everybody's here now. Let's make it a double wedding tomorrow," shesuggested.
He hadn't been prepared for that. "Well, I hadn't expected.... Sure!Good idea!" he agreed.
There was a crowd in Rodney Maxwell's little office--Fawzi and someothers, and some Storisende people. One of the latter wasvociferating:
"Jake Vyckhoven's no good, and he never was any good!"
"Well, you have to admit, if he hadn't ordered the banks and the StockExchange closed that time, we'd have had a horrible panic--"
"Admit nothing of the kind! Jethro, you were there, you'll bear meout. About a dozen of us were at Executive Palace for hours, bullyinghim into that. Why, we almost had to twist one of his arms while hewas signing the order with the other. And now he has the gall to runfor re-election on the strength of his heroic actions at the time ofthe Travis Hoax!"
"I know who we want for President!" another Storisende man exclaimed."He's right here in this room!"
"Yes!" Rodney Maxwell almost bellowed, before the other man could sayanything else. "Here he is!" He grabbed Kurt Fawzi by the arm andyanked him to his feet. "Here's the man most responsible for findingMerlin; the man who first suggested sending my son Conn to Terra toschool, the man who, more than anyone else, devoted his life to thesearch for Merlin, the man whose inextinguishable faith andindomitable courage kept that search alive through its darkest hours.Everybody, get a drink; a toast to our next President, Kurt Fawzi!"
Conn was sure he heard his father add: "Ghu, what a narrow escape!"
Then he and Sylvie began chanting, in unison, "_We want Fawzi! We wantFawzi!_"
If you enjoyed this novel, you will also want to read:
SPACE VIKINGbyH. BEAM PIPER
After a galaxy-wide war had left the planetary federation in ruins,every surviving civilized world was on its own. And that was a perfectsetup for the marauders from the far-out rim.
Trask was one of those dreaded Space Vikings, a warrior spaceman witha crew and a ship that struck terror to a thousand worlds. But Traskhad a special personal interest In scourging the stars--he wanted todraw upon himself the fire of a certain enemy--a renegadeplanet-wrecker with a yen for galactic empire building.
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"Is there really a Merlin?"
Everybody on the war-torn planet Poictesme believed it existed. Andthey all believed that when this super-gigantic computer was locatedamid the mountains of surplus equipment that was the planet's solesource of revenue, it would mean Utopia for everyone.
Conn Maxwell knew different. He had studied the records on Earth andhe thought he knew the true facts about this cosmic computer. To tellthem would be to panic Poictesme, so instead he set about a new searchin his own way--with startling results.
H. Beam Piper, author of SPACE VIKING, has again produced an originaland unusual novel of the space future.
The Cosmic Computer Page 22