H. Piper - The Greatest Works of H. Beam Piper - 35 Titles in One Edition

"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 it to, "No; I won't argue with her at all," and then quoted Wade Lucas quoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple of times that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that it wouldn't get loose and hurt anybody if he did find it.

In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, the housecleaning-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 use her control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like an old-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got the robot stopped.

No wonder she was afraid of Merlin.

He took advantage of the interruption to get to his room and change clothes, then went up to the hangar and got out an air-cavalry mount. About fifty men were working on High Garden Terrace, pruning and trimming and leveling the lawns. There was a big vitrifier on the Mall—even at five hundred feet he could feel the heat from it—chuffing and clanking and pouring lavalike molten rock for a new pavement. And all the nymphs and satyrs and dryads and fauns and centaurs had had their pedestals rebuilt and were sand-blasted clean.

He landed on the top of the Airlines Building and rode a lift down to the office where Kurt Fawzi neglected the affairs of his shipline agency, his brokerage business, and the city of Litchfield. The afternoon habitués had begun to gather—Raymond Fitch, the used-vehicles dealer, Lorenzo Menardes, Judge Ledue, Tom Brangwyn, Klem Zareff. Fawzi was on the screen, talking to somebody with sandy hair and a suit that didn't seem to be made of any sort of Federation Armed Forces material, about warehouse facilities. The addresses they were 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 me what sort of stuff. You know what a salvage operation's like; you just haul 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 in on the Countess this morning, and Ghu only knows how many in their own vehicles, and they all seem to think if there's work for some there 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 Thursday are doing all right, once they found out we weren't taking any foolishness."

Fawzi turned away from the screen. "Well, Conn, we're in," he said. "The charter was granted this morning; now we're Litchfield Exploration & Salvage, Ltd. And Lester Dawes has found us a contragravity ship."

"How much will it cost us?"

Fawzi began to laugh. "Conn, this'll slay you! She isn't costing us a centisol. You know those old ships on Mothball Row, back of the old West 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, covered with muslin and sprayed with protectoplast. The Planetary Government had taken them over after the War and forgotten them.

"Well, Lester's getting one of them for us under the old 878 Commercial Enterprise Encouragement Act. She's an Army combat freighter, regimental ammunition ship. Of course, she still has armament; we'll have to pay to get that off."

"Why?"

Fawzi looked at him in surprise. "It would only be in the way and add weight. 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-drive missile launchers amidships. And a secondary gun battery of 70-mm's and 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 Air Patrol. Look, the Government won't like our having anything like that."

"They're giving her to us, aren't they?" Menardes asked.

"Gehenna with what the Government likes!" the old Rebel swore. "If they'd put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe out these 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 operating office at Tenth Army, and finally got his father on. He told him about the ship.

"There's talk about tearing the armament out," he added.

"Is that so, now? Well, I'll call Lester Dawes before he can get started on it. I think I'll go in to Storisende tomorrow and see the ship for myself. See what I can do about ammunition for those guns, too."

"But, Rod," Fawzi protested, joining the conversation, "we don't want to start a war."

"No. We want to stay out of one. You don't do that by disarming. We're taking that ship down into the Badlands. Remember?" Rodney Maxwell said. "Ever hear the name Blackie Perales?"

Fawzi had. He stopped arguing about armament. Instead, he began worrying about how much the civic clean-up campaign was costing Litchfield.

"You think we really need that, Rod?"

"Of course we do. You'd be surprised how much labor we're going to need, and how hard up we're going to be for capable supervisors. This thing's a training program, Kurt, and we'll need every man we train on it."

"But it's costing like Nifflheim, Rod. We're going to bankrupt the city."

"Worse than it is now, you mean? Oh, don't worry, Kurt. As soon as we find Merlin, everything'll be all right."

Franz Veltrin came in, shortly after Rodney Maxwell was off the screen. He dropped his audiovisual camera and sound recorder on the table, 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 a trough. Then he looked around accusingly.

"Somebody's been talking!" he declared. "I've had all the news services on the planet on my screen today; they all want the story about 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, and found 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, they didn't believe me. A bunch of them are coming out here tomorrow. What are 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 leaving town till they're gone."

"Why don't you steer them onto Wade Lucas?" Conn asked. "If you want anything denied, he'll do it for you."

Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, except Klem Zareff, and he waited until Conn was ready to go and rode up to the landing stage with 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 the meeting against him. I suppose if I'd come from off-planet, I wouldn't believe 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 staff officers who'd know where it was. Well, say they all went back to Terra on the same ship, and the ship was lost at space. Sabotage, one of our commerce raiders that hadn't heard the War was over, maybe just an ordinary accident. But the ship's lost, and the location of Merlin's lost with her."