bribe and intimidate some of my office help. I have found microphones and screen-pickups planted around. I caught one of our clerks trying to make copies of voice-tapes. I think it's some of these other Merlin-chasing companies, trying to find out how close we are to it. Klem Zareff is recruiting more guards. But how soon are you going to get that ship built?"
"We're working on it. That's all I know, now."
He went back to work getting a classroom ready for his students. If he'd accepted that instructorship at Montevideo, he wouldn't be a full professor now, but none of the rest of this would be happening, either.
That night, he had the dream about starting the big machine and not being able to stop it again.
There was street-fighting in Storisende between the Cybernarchists and Government troops. There was a pitched battle in the west between the Armageddonists (Merlin-is-Satan) and the Human Supremacy League (Merlin-is-the-Golem), with heavy losses and claims of victory on both sides. President Vyckhoven proclaimed planet-wide martial law, and then discovered that he had nothing to enforce it with.
Luther Chen-Wong screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice was almost inaudibly low at first.
"Conn, I just had a call from Jerry and Clyde. I think we can knock off work on that ship we're building now. We won't need it."
"Have they found a ship?" If they had, it would be the first one anybody had found. "Where?"
"They haven't found a ship, Conn; they've found all of them. All the ships in the Alpha System except the Harriet Barne and the two they're building at Storisende. The place is marked on the map as Sickle Mountain Naval Observatory. It's just a bitty little dot, but the map was made before the evacuation started. It's where most of the troops in the system were embarked on hyperships, I think. Wait till I show you the views."
Conn put on another screen; the first view was from an altitude of five miles. He didn't need Luther's voice to identify Sickle Mountain; a long curve, with a spur at right angles to one end, the name must have suggested itself to whoever saw it first. The observatory had been built where the handle of the sickle joined the blade; as the ship from which the view had been taken had approached, the details grew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plain inside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like tinsel dust on red-brown velvet.
"Great Ghu, are those all ships?"
"That's right. Look at this one, now."
The view changed. The aircraft was down, now, below the crest of the mountain, circling slowly above the plain. Hundreds, no, over a thousand, of them; two- and three-and five-hundred-footers, and here and there a thousand-footer that could have been converted into a hypership if anybody had wanted to take the trouble. The view changed again; this time from an aircar dropped from the ship, he supposed; it was down almost to the tops of the ships, and he could read names and home ports: Pixie, Chloris; Helen O'Loy, Anaïtis. They were from Jurgen. Sky-Rover, Port Saunders; she was from Horvendile. Ships from Storisende, and Yellowmarsh on Janicot, and....
"Now we know where they all went."
It was logical, of course. Most of the hyperships used in the evacuation had been built here. It had been less trouble to lead the troops and the civilian workers from Poictesme and the other planets onto small normal-space ships and bring them here than to take the big ships away on short interplanetary runs to the other planets.
"Have you screened my father yet?"
"Yes. This is going to knock the bottom out of the companies that are building those ships at Storisende, I'm afraid."
"Their tough luck."
"It could be everybody's tough luck. Both those companies have been issuing stock, and there's been a lot of speculation in it. This market's so inflated now that a puncture at one place might blow the whole thing out."
He knew that. He shrugged. "Father will have to think of something. Tell him I'll screen him from Sickle Mountain."
Then he went back to his classroom.
"All right, class dismissed," he said. "You have twenty minutes to get your bags packed. We're going to work for real, now."
Airboats and airships flocked to Sickle Mountain; some of them hastened back to Port Carpenter for loads of food, for there was none in the storehouses at the embarkation camp. They inspected ship after ship, and chose two three-hundred-footers. They sent airships and freight-scows to the dozen-odd cities and industrial centers that had been already explored, to gather cargo, as far as possible the items in shortest supply on Poictesme.
"Don't worry about a market smash," his father told him. "We have that taken care of. Trisystem Investments has just bought up a lot of stock in both of those companies, and we've set up agreements with them—informally, of course; we'll have to get them voted on by our own companies—to sell them ships from Koshchei. In return, the company that's building the ship out of four air-freighters will go to Janicot, and the company that's building a ship out of the old Leitzenring Building will go to Jurgen, and they'll both stay off Koshchei. Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong will probably be defending antitrust suits till the end of time. The Planetary Government has stopped liking us, you know."
"Then we'll have to get one that will like us. There'll be an election about this time next year, won't there?"
His father nodded. "To use one of your expressions, we're working on it. How soon can you get your ships in?"
"Well be loaded and ready to lift off in a week. Another week for the trip."
"Well, don't forget that equipment you promised Kurt Fawzi."
"We'll have that on. Jerry Rivas is gathering it up now."
"How are you fixed for arms on Koshchei?"
"Arms? Why, there are some. There was a pretty big force of Space Marines on duty here, and they left everything they couldn't carry in their hands. Why? The Armageddonists and the Cybernarchists and Human Supremacy bought all you had on hand?"
"They're buying, but I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking that your crews might need something to argue their way off the ships at Storisende with. Things are getting just slightly rugged here, now."
XVII
There were no bands or speeches when they came in this time. A lot of contragravity vehicles circled widely around the spaceport, but except for a few news-service cars, the police were keeping them back of a two-mile radius around the landing-pits. A couple of gunboats were making tight circles above, and on the dock were more vehicles and a horde of police and guards.
When Rodney Maxwell came across the bridge from the dock after they opened the airlocks, he was followed by a dozen Barton-Massarra private police, as villainous-looking a collection of ruffians as Conn had ever seen. He was wearing a new suit, with a waist-length jacket instead of the long coat he usually wore, and there was a holstered automatic on each hip. In Litchfield, he never carried more than one pistol, and Storisende was supposed to be an orderly place where nobody needed to go armed. More than anything else, that told Conn approximately what had been going on while he had been on Koshchei.
"Ship-guard," his father told Yves Jacquemont. "All your crew can come off; they'll take care of things. Get your people in that troop carrier over there. Everybody will stay at Interplanetary Building. None of the hotels are safe, not even the Ritz-Gartner. And be sure everybody's well armed when they come off the ship."
Jacquemont nodded. "I know the drill; I've been in Port Oberth on Venus and Skorvann on Loki. Any law we want, we make for ourselves."
"That's about it. I'll see you there. Conn, I wish you'd come with me. Somebody here wants to talk to you."
He wondered if his mother, or Flora, had come to Storisende. When he asked his father