it didn't take as long as mohammed matsui expected. they found the fissionables magazine, and in it plenty of plutonium, each subcritical slug in a five-hundred-pound collapsium canister. there were repair-robots, and they only had to replace the cartridges in the power units of three of them. they sent them inside the collapsium-shielded death-to-people area—transmitter robots, to relay what the others picked up through receptors wire-connected with the outside; foremen-robots, globes a yard in diameter covered[pg 112] with horns and spikes like old-fashioned ocean-navy mines; worker-robots, in a variety of shapes, but mostly looking like many-clawed crabs.

neither the converter nor the reactor had sustained any damage while the fissionables were burning out. so the robots began tearing out reactor-elements, and removing plutonium slugs no longer capable of sustaining chain reaction but still dangerously radioactive. nuclear reactors had become simpler and easier to service since the first day of the year zero, when enrico fermi put the first one into operation, but the principles remained the same. work was less back-breaking and muscle-straining, but it called for intense concentration on screens and meters and buttons that was no less exhausting.

the air around them began to grow foul. finally, the air-analyzer squawked and flashed red lights to signal that the oxygen had dropped below the safety margin. they had no mobile fan equipment, or time to hunt any; they put on their fishbowl helmets and went back to work. after twelve hours, with a few short breaks, they had the reactors going. jerry rivas and a couple of others took a heavy-duty lifter and went looking for conversion mass; they brought back a couple of tons of scrap-iron and fed it to the converters. a few seconds after it was in, the pilot lights began coming on all over the panels. they took two more hours to get the oxygen-separator and the ventilator fans going, and for good measure they started the water pumps and the heating system. then they all went outside to the ship to sleep. the sun was just coming up.

it was sunset when they rose and returned to the building. the airlocks opened at a touch on the operating handles. inside, the air was fresh and sweet, the temperature was a pleasantly uniform 75 degrees fahrenheit, the fans were humming softly, and there was running hot and cold water everywhere.

jerry rivas, anse dawes, and the three tramp freighter fo'c'sle hands took lifters and equipment and went off foraging. the rest of them went to the communications center to get the telecast station, the radio beacon, and the inside-screen[pg 113] system into operation. there were a good many things that had to be turned on manually, and more things that had been left on, forty years ago, and now had to be repowered or replaced. they worked at it most of the night; before morning, almost everything was working, and they were sending a signal across twenty-eight million miles to storisende, on poictesme.

it was late evening, storisende time, but rodney maxwell, who must have been camping beside his own screen, came on at once, which is to say five and a half minutes later.

"well, i see you got in somewhere. where are you, and how is everything?"

then he picked up a cigar out of an ashtray in front of him and lit it, waiting.

"port carpenter; we're in the main administration building," conn told him. he talked for a while about what they had found and done since their arrival. "have you an extra viewscreen, fitted for recording?" he asked.

five and a half minutes later, his father nodded. "yes, right here." he leaned forward and away from the communication screen in front of him. "i have it on." he gave the wave-length combination. "ready to receive."

"this is about all we have, now. views we took coming in, from the ship and a scout-boat." he started transmitting them. "we haven't sent in any claims yet. i wasn't sure whether i should make them for alpha-interplanetary, or litchfield exploration & salvage."

"don't bother sending in anything to the claims office," his father said. "send anything you want to claim in here to me, and i'll have sterber, flynn & chen-wong file them. they'll be made for a new company we're organizing."

"what? another one?"

his father nodded, grinning. "koshchei exploitation & development; we've made application already. we can't claim exclusive rights to the whole planet, like the old interstellar exploration companies did before the war, but since you're the only people on the planet, we can come pretty close to it by detail." he was looking to one side, at the other screen. "great ghu, conn! this place of yours all[pg 114] together beats everything i ever dug, force command and barathrum spaceport included. how big would you say it is? more than ten miles in radius?"

"about five or six. ten or twelve miles across."

"that's all right, then. we'll just claim the building you're in, now, and the usual ten-mile radius, the same as at force command. we'll claim the place as soon as the company's chartered; in the meantime, send in everything else you can get views of."

they set up a regular radio-and-screen watch after that. charley gatworth and piet ludvyckson, both of whom were studying astrogation in hopes of qualifying as space officers after they had a real spaceship, elected themselves to that duty; it gave them plenty of time for study. jerry rivas and anse dawes, with whomever they could find to help them, were making a systematic search. they looked first of all for foodstuffs, and found enough in the storerooms of three restaurants on the executive level to feed their own party in gourmet style for a year, and enough in the main storerooms to provision an army. they even found refrigerators and freeze-bins full of meat and vegetables fresh after forty years. that surprised everybody, for the power units had gone dead long ago. then it was noticed that they were covered with collapsium. anything that would stop cosmic rays was a hundred percent efficient as a heat insulator.

coming in, the first day, conn had seen an almost completed hypership bulking above the domes and roofs of port carpenter in the distance. he saw it again on screen from a pickup atop the central tower. as soon as the party was comfortably settled in the executive apartments on the upper levels, he and yves jacquemont and mack vibart and schalk retief, the construction engineer, found an aircar in one of the hangars and went to have a closer look at her.

she had all her collapsium on, except for a hundred-foot circle at the top and a number of rectangular openings around the sides. yves jacquemont said that would be where the airlocks would go.

"they always put them on last. but don't be surprised at anything you find or don't find inside. as soon as the skeleton's[pg 115] up they put the armor on, and then build the rest of the ship out from the middle. it might be slower getting material in through the airlock openings, but it holds things together while they're working."

they put on the car's lights, lifted to the top, and let down through the upper opening. it was like entering a huge globular spider's web, globe within globe of interlaced girders and struts and braces, extending from the center to the outer shell. even the spider was home—a three-hundred-foot ball of collapsium, looking tiny at the very middle.

"why, this isn't a ship!" vibart cried in disgust. "this is just the outside of a ship. they haven't done a thing inside."

"oh, yes, they have," jacquemont contradicted, aiming a spotlight toward the shimmering ball in the middle. "they have all the engines in—abbott lift-and-drive, dillingham hyperdrives, pseudograv, power reactors, converters, everything. they wouldn't have put on the shielding if they hadn't. they did that as soon as they had the outside armor on."

"wonder why they didn't finish her, if they got that far," retief said.

"they didn't need her. they'd had it; they wanted to go home."

"well, we're not going to finish her, not with any fifteen men," retief said. "one man has only two hands, two feet and one brain; he can only handle so much robo-equipment at a time."

"i never expected we'd build a ship ourselves," conn said. "we came to look the place over and get a few claims staked. when we've done that, we'll go back and get a real gang together."

"i don't know where you'll find them," jacquemont commented. "we'll need a couple of hundred, and they ought all to be graduate engineers. we can't do this job with farm-tramps."

"you made some good shipyard men out of farm-tramps on barathrum."

"and what'll you do for supervisors?"[pg 116]

"you're one. general superintendent. mack, you and schalk are a couple of others. you just keep a day ahead of your men in learning the job, you'll do all right."

vibart turned to jacquemont. "you know, yves, he'll do it," he said. "he doesn't know how impossible this is, and when we try to tell him, he won't believe us. you can't stop a guy like that. all right, conn; deal me in."

"i won't let anybody be any crazier than i am," jacquemont declared, and then looked around the vastness of the empty ship with its lacework of steel. "all you need is about ten million square feet of decks and bulkheads, an air-and-water system, hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats, astrogation and robo-pilot equipment, about which i know very little, a hyperspace pilot system, about which i know nothing at all.... conn, why don't you just build a new merlin? it would be simpler."

"i don't want a new merlin. i'm not even interested in the original merlin. this is what i want, right here."

he told his father, by screen, about the ship. "i believe we can finish her, but not with the gang that's here. we'll need a couple of hundred men. now, with the supplies we've found, we can stay here indefinitely. should we do more exploring and claim some more of these places, or should we come home right away and start recruiting, and then come back with a large party, start work on the ship, and explore and make further claims as we have time?" he asked.

"better come back as soon as possible. just explore port carpenter, find out what's going to be needed to finish the ship and what facilities you have to produce it, and get things cleaned up a little so that you can start work as soon as you have people to do it. i'm organizing another company—don't laugh, now; i've only started promotioneering—which i think we will call trisystem & interstellar spacelines. get me all the views you can of the ship herself and of the steel mills and that sort of thing that will produce material for finishing her; i want to use them in promotion. by the way, has she a name?"

"only a shipyard construction number."[pg 117]

"then suppose you call her ouroboros, after genji gartner's old ship, the one that discovered the trisystem."

"ouroboros ii; that's fine. will do."

"good. i'll have sterber, flynn & chen-wong make application for a charter right away. we'll have to make alpha-interplanetary one of the stockholding companies, and also koschchei exploitation & development, and, of course, litchfield exploration & salvage...."

it was a pity there really wasn't a merlin. if this kept on nothing else would be able to figure out who owned how much stock in what.

they found the on-the-job engineering office for the ship in a small dome half a mile from the construction dock. yves jacquemont and mack vibart and schalk retief moved in and buried themselves to the ears in specifications and blueprints. the others formed into parties of three or four, and began looking about production facilities for material. there was a steel mill a mile from the construction site; it was almost fully robotic. iron ore went in at one end, and finished sheet steel and girders and deck plates came out at the other, and a dozen men could handle the whole thing. there was a collapsium plant; there were machine-shops and forging-shops. every time they finished inspecting one, yves jacquemont would have a list of half a dozen more plants that he wanted found and examined yesterday morning at the latest.

some of them were in a frightful mess; work had been suspended and everybody had gone away leaving everything as it was. some were in perfect order, ready to go into operation again as soon as power was put on. it had depended, apparently, upon the personal character of whoever had been in charge in the end. the nuclear-electric power unit plant was in the latter class. the man in charge of it evidently hadn't believed in leaving messes behind, even if he didn't expect to come back.

it was built in the shape of a t. one side of the cross-stroke contained the cartridge-case plant, where presses formed sheet-steel cylinders, some as small as a round of[pg 118] pistol ammunition and some the size of ten-gallon kegs. they moved toward the center on a production line, finally reaching a matter-collapser where they were plated with collapsium. from the other side, radioactive isotopes, mostly reactor-waste, came in through evacuated and collapsium-shielded chambers, were sorted, and finally, where the cross-arm of the t joined the downstroke, packed in the collapsium cases. the production line continued at right angles down the long building in which the apparatus which converted nuclear energy to electric current was assembled and packed; at the end, the finished power cartridges came off, big ones for heavy machines and tiny ones for things like hand tools and pocket lighters and razors. there were stacks of them, in all sizes, loaded on skids and ready to move out. except for the minute and unavoidable leakage of current, they were as good as the day they were assembled, and would be for another century.

like almost everything else, the power-cartridge plant was airtight and had its own oxygen-generator. the air-analyzer reported the oxygen insufficient to support life. that was understandable; there were a lot of furnaces which had evidently been hot when the power was cut off; they had burned up the oxygen before cooling. they put on their oxygen equipment when they got out of the car.

"i'll go back and have a look at the power plant," matsui said. "if it's like the rest of this place, it'll be ready to go as soon as the reactors are started. i wish everybody here had left things like this."

"well, we'll have to check everything to make sure nothing was left on when the main power was cut," conn said. "don't do anything back there till we give you the go-ahead."

matsui nodded and set off on foot along the broad aisle in the middle. conn looked around in the dim light that filtered through the dusty glass overhead. on either side of the central aisle were two production lines; between each pair, at intervals, stood massive machines which evidently fabricated parts for the power cartridges. over them, and over the machines directly involved in production, were[pg 119] receptor aerials, all oriented toward a stubby tower, twenty feet thick and fifty in height, topped by a hemispherical dome.

"that'll be the control tower for all the machinery in here," he decided. "anse, suppose you and i go take a look at it."

"we'll take a look at the machines," rivas said. "clyde, you and i can work back on the right and then come down on the other side. you know anything about this stuff?"

"me? nifflheim, no," nichols said. "i know a robo-control when i see one, and i know whether it's set to receive or not."

there was a self-powered lift inside the control tower. conn and anse rode it to the top and got out, anse snapping on his flashlight. it was dark in the dome at the top; instead of windows there were viewscreens all around it. five men had worked here; at least, there were four chairs at four intricate control panels, one for each of the four production lines, and a fifth chair in front of a number of communication screens. there was a heavy-duty power unit, turned off. conn threw the switch. lights came on inside, and the outside viewscreens lit.

they were examining the control-panels when conn's belt radio buzzed. he plugged it in on his helmet. it was mohammed matsui.

"there's one big power plant back here," the engineer said. "right in the middle. it only powers what's in front of it. there must be another one in either wing, for the isotope plant and the cartridge-case plant. i'll go look at them. but the power's been cut off from the machines in the main building. there's four big switches, one for each production line—"

he was interrupted by a shout, almost a shriek, from somewhere. it sounded like jerry rivas. a moment later, rivas was clamoring:

"conn! what did you turn on? turn it off, right away!"

anse jumped to the switch, pulling it with one hand and getting on his flashlight with the other. the lights went out and the screens went dark.[pg 120]

"it's off."

"the dickens it is!" rivas disputed. "there are a couple of big supervisor-robots circling around, and a flock of workers...."

at the same time, clyde nichols began cursing. or maybe he was praying; it was hard to be certain.

"but we pulled the switch. it was only the lights and viewscreens in here, anyhow."

"it didn't do any good. pull another one."

matsui, back at the power plant, was wanting to know what was wrong. captain nichols stopped cursing—or praying?—and said, "mutiny, that's what! the robots have turned on us!"

he knew what had happened, or was almost sure he did. a radio impulse had gone out, somehow, from the control tower. something they hadn't checked, that had been left on. there was just enough current-leakage from the units in the robots to keep the receptors active for forty years. the supervisor-robots had gone active, and they had activated the rest. once on, cutting the current from the control tower wouldn't turn them off again.

"put the switch in again, anse; the damage is done and you won't make it any worse."

when the screens came on, he looked around from one to another. the two supervisors, big ovoid things like the small round ones they had used in repairing the power reactors the first day, were circling aimlessly near the roof, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise, dodging obstructions and getting politely out of each other's way. at lower altitude, a dozen assorted worker-robots were moving about, and more were emerging from cells at the end of the building. sweepers, with rotary brooms and rakes, crablike all-purpose handling robots, a couple of vacuum-cleaning robots, each with a flexible funnel-tipped proboscis and a bulging dust-sack. one tiling, a sort of special job designed to get into otherwise inaccessible places, had a twenty-foot, many-jointed, claw-tipped arm in front. it passed by and slightly over the tower, saw clyde nichols, and swooped toward him. with a howl, nichols dived under one of the large[pg 121] machines between two production lines. a pistol went off a couple of times. that would be jerry rivas. nobody else bothered with a gun on koshchei, but he carried one as some people carry umbrellas, whether he expected to need it or not and because he would feel lost without it.

that he took in at one glance. then he was looking at the control panels. the switches and buttons were all marked for machine-control in different steps of power-unit production. that was all for the big stuff, powered centrally. there weren't any controls for lifters or conveyers or other mobile equipment. evidently they were handled out in the shop, from mobile control-vehicles. he did find, on the communication-screen panel, a lot of things that had been left on. he snapped them off, one after another, snapping them on when a screen went dark. there were fifteen or twenty robots, some rather large, in the air or moving on the floor by now.

"we can't do anything here," he told anse. "these are the shop-cleaning robots. they were the last things used here when the place closed down, and the two supervisors were probably controlled from a vehicle, and it's anybody's guess where that is now. when you threw that switch, it sent out an impulse that activated them. they're running their instruction-tapes, and putting the others through all their tricks."

three more shots went off. jerry rivas was shouting: "hey, whattaya know! i killed one of the buggers!"

there were any number of ways in which a work-robot could be shot out of commission with a pistol. all of them would be by the purest of pure luck. the next time we go into a place like this, conn thought, we take a couple of bazookas along.

"turn everything off and let's go. see what we can do outside."

anse put on his flashlight and pulled the switch. they got into the lift and rode down, going outside. as soon as they emerged, they saw a rectangular object fifteen feet long settle over their aircar, let down half a dozen clawed arms, and pick it up, flying away with it. it had taped instructions to remove anything that didn't belong in the aisleway; it[pg 122] probably asked the supervisor about the aircar, and the supervisor didn't return an inhibitory signal, so it went ahead. conn and anse both shouted at it, knowing perfectly well that shouting was futile. then they were running for their lives with one of the crablike all-purpose jobs after them. they dived under the slightly raised bed of a long belt-conveyer and crawled. jerry rivas fired another shot, somewhere.

the robots themselves were having troubles. they had done all the work they were supposed to do; now the supervisors were insisting that they do it over again. uncomplainingly, they swept and raked and vacuum-cleaned where they had vacuum-cleaned and raked and swept forty years ago. the scrap-pickers, having picked all the scrap, were going over the same places and finding nothing, and then getting deflected and gathering a lot of things not definable as scrap, and then circling around, darting away from one another in obedience to their radar-operated evasion-systems, and trying to get to the outside scrap pile, and finding that the doors wouldn't open because the door openers weren't turned on, and finally dumping what they were carrying when the supervisors gave them no instructions.

one of them seemed to have dumped something close to where clyde nichols was hiding; if his language had been a little stronger, it would have burned out conn's radio. their own immediate vicinity being for the moment clear of flying robots, conn and anse rolled from under the conveyer and legged it between the two production lines. immediately, three of the crablike all-purpose handling-robots saw them, if that was the word for it, and came dashing for them, followed by a thing that was mostly dump-lifter; it was banging its bin-lid up and down angrily. about fifty yards ahead, jerry rivas stepped from behind a machine and fired; one of the handling-robots flashed green from underneath, went off contragravity, and came down with a crash. immediately, like wolves on a wounded companion, the other two pounced upon it, dragging and pulling against each other. that was a hunk of junk; their orders were to remove it.[pg 123]

the mobile trash-bin went zooming up to the ceiling, reversed within twenty feet of it and came circling back to the ground, to go zooming up again. it had gone crazy, literally. it had been getting too many contradictory orders from its supervisor, and its circuits were overloaded and its relays jammed. rats in mazes and human-type people in financial difficulties go psychotic in very much the same way.

the two surviving all-purpose robots were also headed for a padded repair shop. they had come close enough to each other to activate their anticollision safeties. immediately, they flew apart. then their order to pick up that big piece of junk took over, and they started forward again, to be bounced apart as soon as they were within five feet of one another. if left alone, their power units would run down in a year or so; until then, they would keep on trying.

soulless intelligences, indeed! then it occurred to him that for the past however-long-it-had-been he hadn't heard from mohammed matsui. he jiggled his radio.

"ham, where are you? are you still alive?"

"i'm back at the power plant," matsui said exasperatedly. "there's a big thing circling around here; every time i stick my head out, he makes a dive at me. i didn't know robots would attack people."

"they don't. he just thinks you're some more trash he's been told to gather up."

matsui was indignant. conn laughed.

"on the level, ham. he has photoelectric vision, and a picture of what that aisle is supposed to look like. when you get out in it, he knows you don't belong there and tries to grab you."

"hey, there's a lot of junk in here in a couple of baskets at the converter. say i chuck one out to him; what would he do?"

"grab it and take it away, like he's taped to do."

"okay; wait a minute."

they couldn't see the archway to the power plant, or even the robot that had matsui penned up, but after a few minutes they saw it soaring away, clutching a big wire basket full of broken boxes and other rubbish. it headed[pg 124] for the mutually repelling swarm of robots around the door that wouldn't open for them. conn and anse and jerry ran toward the rear, joined by clyde nichols, who popped up from behind a pile of spools of electric wire. they made it just before the coffin-shaped thing that had carried off the aircar came over to investigate.

"you want to be careful back there," matsui told them, as they started toward the temporary safety of the power plant. "all the reactor-repair robots are there; don't get them on the warpath next."

of course! there were always repair-robots at a power plant, to go into places no human could enter and live. behind the collapsium shielding, they wouldn't have been activated.

"let's have a look at them. what kind?"

"standard reactor-servicers; the same we used at the administration center."

matsui opened the door, and they went into the power plant. conn and matsui put on the service-power and activated the two supervisors; they, in turn, activated their workers. it was tricky work getting them all outside the collapsium-walled power-plant area; each worker had to be passed through by the supervisor inside, under matsui's control. because of the close quarters at which they worked inside the reactor and the converter, they weren't fitted with anticollision repulsors, and, working under close human supervision, they all had audiovisual pickups. it took some time to get adequate screens set up outside the collapsium.

finally, they were ready. their two supervisors went up to the ceiling, one controlled by conn and the other by matsui. the larger, egg-shaped shop-labor supervisors were still moving in irregular orbits; those of the workers still able to receive commands were trying to obey them, and the rest were jammed in a swarm at the other end.

first one, and then the other of the labor-boss robots were captured. they were by now at the end of what might, loosely, be called their wits. they weren't used to operating without orders, and had been sending out commands largely at random. now they came to a stop, and then began[pg 125] moving in tight, guided circles; one by one, the worker robots still able to heed them were brought to ground and turned off. that left the swarm at the door. the worker-robots under direct control of the power-plant supervisors went after them, grappling them and hauling them down to where anse and jerry rivas and captain nichols could turn them off manually.

the aircar was a hopeless wreck, but its radio was still functioning. conn called charley gatworth, who called a gang under gomez, working not far away; they came with another car.

it took all the next day for a gang of six of them to get the place straightened up. neither conn nor gomez, who was a roboticist himself, would trust any of the workers or the two supervisors; their experiences out of control had rendered them unreliable. they took out their power units and left them to be torn down and repaired later. other robots were brought in to replace them. when they were through, the power-unit cartridge plant was ready for operation.

jerry rivas wanted to start production immediately.

"we'll have to go back to poictesme pretty soon," he said. "we don't want to go back empty. well, i know that no matter what we dug up, and what we could sell or couldn't sell, there's always a market for power-unit cartridges. electric-light units, household-appliance units, aircar and airboat units, any size at all. we run that plant at full capacity for a few days and we can load the harriett barne full, and i'll bet the whole cargo will be sold in a week after we get in."