jerry rivas, mack vibart and luther chen-wong had been keeping things running on koshchei. work on the interplanetary ship at port carpenter had stopped when the sickle mountain ships had been found; it had never been[pg 151] resumed. when conn returned, he found work started on the ouroboros ii. some of the two hundred newcomers who came in on the helen o'loy had special skills needed on the hypership; most of them went with clyde nichols and charley gatworth to sickle mountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. some of them, it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. sylvie, who had been one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping him with the long lists of needed materials, some of which had to be brought from other places as much as a thousand miles away. jerry rivas went back to exploring; nichols had to drop his space-training work temporarily to organize a fleet of air-freighters; usually, the men best able to operate them were urgently needed on some job at the construction dock.

ships lifted out almost daily from sickle mountain. they tried to get some kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselves of what they needed for themselves. some of the ships came back loaded with provisions and bringing new recruits—for instance, the teaching of physics and mathematics almost stopped at storisende college because the professors had been virtually shanghaied.

conn found himself losing touch with affairs on poictesme. ships had landed on both janicot and horvendile and were sending back claims to abandoned factories. by that time they had all the decks into the ouroboros ii, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogational and hyperspace instruments put in place. the hypership andromeda was back from the gamma system; there was close secrecy about what the expedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures about merlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral. litchfield exploration & salvage opened a huge munitions depot, and combat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as it came out. the government was buying some, but by no means all of it.

"conn, can you come back here to poictesme for a while?" his father asked. "things have turned serious. i don't like to[pg 152] talk about it by screen—too many people know our scrambler combinations. but i wish you were here."

he started to object; there were millions, well, a couple of hundred, things he had to attend to. the look on his father's face stopped him.

"ship leaving sickle mountain tomorrow morning," he said. "i'll be aboard."

the voyage back to poictesme was a needed rest. he felt refreshed when he got off at storisende spaceport and was met by his father and wade lucas in one of the slim recon-cars. they greeted him briefly and took the car up and away from the city, where it was safe to talk.

"conn, i'm scared," his father said. "i'm beginning to think there really is a merlin, after all."

"oh, come off it! i know it's contagious, but i thought you'd been vaccinated."

"i'm beginning to think so, too," lucas said. "i don't like it at all."

"you know what that gang who took the andromeda to panurge found?"

"they were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements for merlin, weren't they?"

"yes. they found it. my barton-massarra operatives got to some of the crew. this place had been turning out material for a computer of absolutely unconventional design; the two computermen they had with them couldn't make head or tail of half of it. and every blueprint, every diagram, every scrap of writing or recording, had been destroyed. but they found one thing, a big empty fiber folder that had fallen under something and been overlooked. it was marked: top secret. project merlin."

"project merlin could have been anything," conn started to say. no. project merlin was something they made computer parts for.

"dolf kellton's research crew, at the library here, came across some references to project merlin, too. for instance, there was a routine division court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a very trivial charge. force command[pg 153] ordered the court-martial stopped, and the two officers simply dropped out of the third force records, it was stated that they were engaged in work connected with project merlin. that's an example; there were half a dozen things like that."

"tell him what kurt fawzi and his crew found," wade lucas said.

"yes. they have a fifty-foot shaft down from the top of the mesa almost to the top of the underground headquarters. they found something on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped mass, fifty feet thick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium. it's directly over what used to be foxx travis's office."

"that's not a tenth big enough for anything that could even resemble merlin."

"well, it's something. i was out there day before yesterday. they're down to the collapsium on top of this thing; i rode down the shaft in a jeep and looked at it. look, conn, we don't know what this project merlin was; all this lore about merlin that's grown up since the war is pure supposition."

"but foxx travis told me, categorically, that there was no merlin project," conn said. "the war's been over forty years; it's not a military secret any longer. why would he lie to me?"

"why did you lie to kurt fawzi and the others and tell them there was a merlin? you lied because telling the truth would hurt them. maybe travis had the same reason for lying to you. maybe merlin's too dangerous for anybody to be allowed to find."

"great ghu, are you beginning to think merlin is the devil, or frankenstein's monster?"

"it might be something just as bad. maybe worse. i don't think a man like foxx travis would lie if he didn't have some overriding moral obligation to."

"and we know who's been making most of the trouble for us, too," lucas added.

"yes," rodney maxwell said, "we do. and sometime i'm going to invite klem zareff to kick my pants-seat. sam murchison, the terran federation minister-general."[pg 154]

"how'd you get that?"

"barton-massarra got some of it; they have an operative planted in murchison's office. and some of our banking friends got the rest. this human supremacy league is being financed by somebody. every so often, their treasurer makes a big deposit at one of the banks here, all federation currency, big denomination notes. when i asked them to, they started keeping a record of the serial numbers and checking withdrawals. the money was paid out, at the first planetary bank, to mr. samuel s. murchison, in person. the armegeddonists are getting money, too, but they're too foxy to put theirs through the banks. i believe they're the ones who mind-probed lucy nocero. barton-massarra believe, but they can't prove, that human supremacy launched that robo-bomb at us, that time at the spaceport."

"have you done anything with those audiovisuals of leibert?"

"gave them to barton-massarra. they haven't gotten anything, yet."

"so we have to admit that klem wasn't crazy after all. what do you want me to do?"

"go out to force command and take charge. we have to assume that there may be a merlin, we have to assume that it may be dangerous, and we have to assume that kurt fawzi and his covey of merlinolators are just before digging it up. your job is to see that whatever it is doesn't get loose."

the trouble was, if he started giving orders around force command he'd stop being a brilliant young man and become a half-baked kid, and one word from him and the older and wiser heads would do just what they pleased. he wondered if the pro-leibert and anti-leibert factions were still squabbling; maybe if he went out of his way to antagonize one side, he'd make allies of the other. he took the precaution of screening in, first; kurt fawzi, with whom he talked, was almost incoherent with excitement. at least, he was reasonably sure that none of klem zareff's trigger-happy mercenaries would shoot him down coming in.

the well, fifty feet in diameter, went straight down from[pg 155] the top of the mesa; as the headquarters had been buried under loose rubble, they'd had to vitrify the sides going down. he let down into the hole in a jeep, and stood on the collapsium roof of whatever it was they had found. it wasn't the top of the headquarters itself; the microray scannings showed that. it was a drum-shaped superstructure, a sort of underground penthouse. and there they were stopped. you didn't cut collapsium with a cold chisel, or even an atomic torch. he began to see how he was going to be able to take charge here.

"you haven't found any passage leading into it?" he asked, when they were gathered in fawzi's—formerly foxx travis's—office.

"nifflheim, no! if we had, we'd be inside now." tom brangwyn swore. "and we've been all over the ceiling in here, and we can't find anything but vitrified rock and then the collapsium shielding."

"sure. there are collapsium-cutters, at port carpenter, on koshchei. they do it with cosmic rays."

"but collapsium will stop cosmic rays," zareff objected.

"stop them from penetrating, yes. a collapsium-cutter doesn't penetrate; it abrades. throws out a rotary beam and works like a grinding-wheel, or a buzz-saw."

"well, could you get one down that hole?" judge ledue asked.

he laughed. "no. the thing is rather too large. in the first place, there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. with them, you produce negamatter—atoms with negatively charged protons and positive electrons, positrons. then, you have to bring them into contact with normal positive-matter—that's done in a chamber the size of a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about a hundred tons. then you have to have a pseudograv field to impart rotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door that would lift ten ships the size of the lester dawes. then you need another fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield your cutting-head. the cutting-head alone weighs three tons. the rotary beam that does[pg 156] the cutting," he mentioned as an afterthought, "is about the size of a silver five-centisol piece."

nobody said anything for a few seconds. carl leibert stated that divine power would aid them. nobody paid much attention; leibert's stock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in the butte and fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of force command.

"means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down to where that thing is," zareff said. "that'll take a year."

"oh, no. maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started," conn told them. "it'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauled here than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened."

he told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going to take charge here. he had just been unanimously elected indispensable man.

"bless you, young man!" carl leibert cried. "at last, the great computer! those who come after will reckon this the year zero of the age of regeneration. i will go to my chamber and return thanks in prayer."

"he's been doing a lot of praying lately," tom brangwyn remarked, after leibert had gone out. "he's moved into the chaplain's quarters, back of the pandenominational chapel on the fourth level down. always keeps his door locked, too."

"well, if he wants privacy for his devotions, that's his business. maybe we could all do with a little prayer," veltrin said.

"probably praying to sam murchison by radio," klem zareff retorted. "i'd like to see inside those rooms of his."

he called yves jacquemont at port carpenter after dinner. when he told jacquemont what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was a pity screens couldn't be fitted with olfactory sensors, so that he could smell conn's breath.

"i am not drunk. i am not crazy. and i am not exercising my sense of humor. i don't know what fawzi and his gang have here, but if it isn't merlin it's something just as hot.[pg 157] we want at it, soonest, and we'll have to dig a couple of hundred feet of rock off it and open a collapsium can."

"how are we going to get that stuff on a ship?"

"anything been done to that normal-space job we started since i saw it last? can you find engines for it? and is there anything about those mining machines or the cutter that would be damaged by space-radiation or re-entry heat?"

yves jacquemont was silent for a good deal longer than the interplanetary time-lag warranted. finally he nodded.

"i get it, conn. we won't put the things in a ship; we'll build a ship around them. no; that stuff can all be hauled open to space. they use things like that at space stations and on asteroids and all sorts of places. we'll have to stop work on ouroboros, though."

"let ouroboros wait. we are going to dig up merlin, and then everybody is going to be rich and happy, and live happily forever after."

jacquemont looked at him, silent again for longer than the usual five and a half minutes.

"you almost said that with a straight face." after all, jacquemont hadn't been cleared yet for the awful truth about merlin, but, like his daughter, he'd been doing some guessing. "i wish i knew how much of this merlin stuff you believe."

"so do i, yves. maybe after we get this thing open, i'll know."

to give himself a margin of safety, jacquemont had estimated the arrival of the equipment at three weeks. a week later, he was on-screen to report that the skeleton ship—they had christened her the thing, and when conn saw screen views of her he understood why—was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big mining machines were aboard. evidently nobody on koshchei had done a stroke of work on anything else.

"sylvie's coming along with her; so are jerry rivas and anse dawes and ham matsui and gomez and karanja and four or five others. they'll be ready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads," jacquemont added.[pg 158]

that was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any of the merlin-hunting factions at force command. in case trouble started, he could rely on them.

"well, dig out some shootin'-irons for them," he advised. "they may need them here."

depending, of course, on what they found when they opened that collapsium can on top of force command, and how the people there reacted to it.

the thing took a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip; conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabin were apparently worse than on the harriet barne on her second trip to koschchei. everybody at force command was anxious and excited. carl leibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had to pray the ship across space.

at the same time, reports of the near completion of ouroboros ii were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention from what was happening at force command. cargo was being collected for her; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people would be drinking water. lorenzo menardes had emptied his warehouses of everything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up and down the gordon valley. melon and tobacco planters were talking about breaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for the next year. agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing high prices. so were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery. it began to look as though the maxwell plan was really getting started.

it was decided to send the hypership to baldur on her first voyage; that was wade lucas's suggestion. he was going with her himself, to recruit scientific and technical graduates from his alma mater, the university of paris-on-baldur, and from the other schools there. conn was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on koshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and a textbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to do while they were doing it. poictesme had been living for too long on the leavings of wartime[pg 159] production; too few people had bothered learning how to produce anything.

the thing finally settled onto the mesa-top. it looked like something from an old picture of the construction work on one of the terran space-stations in the first century. immediately, every piece of contragravity equipment in the place converged on her; men dangled on safety lines hundreds of feet above the ground, cutting away beams and braces with torches. the two giant mining machines, one after the other, floated free on their own contragravity and settled into place. the thing lifted, still carrying the collapsium-cutting equipment, and came to rest on the brush-grown flat beyond, out of the way.

if yves jacquemont had overestimated the time required to get the equipment loaded and lifted off from koshchei, conn had been overoptimistic about the speed with which the top of the mesa could be stripped off. digging away the rubble with which the pit had been filled, and even the solid rock around it, was easier than getting the stuff out of the way. farm-scows came in from all over, as fast as they and pilots for them could be found; the rush to get brandy and tobacco to storisende had caused an acute shortage of vehicles.

one by one, the members of the old fawzi's office gang came drifting in—lorenzo menardes, morgan gatworth, lester dawes. none of them had any skills to contribute, but they brought plenty of enthusiasm. rodney maxwell came whizzing out from storisende now and then to watch the progress of the work. of all the crowd, he and conn watched the two steel giants strip away the tableland with apprehension instead of hope. no, there was a third. carl leibert had stopped secluding himself in his quarters; he still talked rapturously about the miracles merlin would work, but now and then conn saw him when he thought he was unobserved. his face was the face of a condemned man.

the ouroboros ii was finished. the whole planet saw, by screen, the ship lift out; watched from the ship the dwindling away of koshchei and saw poictesme grow ahead of her. twelve hours before she landed, work at force command[pg 160] stopped. everybody was going to storisende—sylvie, whose father would command her on her voyage to baldur, morgan gatworth, whose son would be first officer and astrogator, everybody. except carl leibert.

"then i'm not going either," klem zareff decided. "somebody's got to stay here and keep an eye on that snake."

"no, nor me," tom brangwyn said. "and if he starts praying again, i'm going to go and pray along with him."

conn stayed, too, and so did jerry rivas and anse dawes. they watched the newscast of the lift-out, a week later. it was peaceful and harmonious; everybody, regardless of their attitudes on merlin, seemed agreed that this was the beginning of a new prosperity for the planet. there were speeches. the bands played "genji gartner's body," and the "spaceman's hymn."

and, at the last, when the officers and crew were going aboard, conn saw his sister flora clinging to wade lucas's arm. she was one of the small party who went aboard for a final farewell. when she came off, along with sylvie, she was wiping her eyes, and sylvie was comforting her. seeing that made conn feel better even than watching the ship itself lift away from storisende.