about this?" the lawyer demanded, and began to laugh.
"If we have to. Look, if you people don't want her, sign her over to Litchfield Exploration & Salvage. But if you do want her, you'll have to pay for her."
"We'll give you twenty thousand sols," the lawyer said. "We don't want to be tightfisted. After all, you fought a gang of pirates and lost some men and a couple of boats; we have some moral obligation to you. But you'll have to realize that this ship, in her present state, is practically valueless."
"The collapsium on her is worth twice that, and the engines are worth even more," Jacquemont said. "I worked on them."
The discussion ended there. By midafternoon, Luther Chen-Wong, the junior partner of the law firm, arrived from Storisende with a couple of engineers of his own. Reporters began arriving; both sides were anxious to keep them away from the ship. Conn took care of them, assisted by Sylvie, who had rummaged an even more attractive costume out of what she called the loot-cellar. The reporters all used up a lot of film footage on her. And the Fawzis' Office Gang arrived from Force Command, bitterly critical of the value of the spaceport against its cost in lives and equipment. Brangwyn and Zareff returned to Force Command with them. A Planetary Air Patrol ship arrived and removed the captured pirates. The liberated prisoners were airlifted to Litchfield.
The third day after the battle, Conn and his father and Sylvie and her father flew to Litchfield. To Conn's surprise, Flora greeted him cordially, and Wade Lucas, rather stiffly, congratulated him. Maybe it was as Tom Brangwyn had said; he hadn't been on Poictesme in the last four or five years and didn't know how bad things had gotten. His mother seemed to think he had won the Battle of Barathrum single-handed.
He was even more surprised and gratified that Flora made friends with Sylvie immediately. His mother, however, regarded the engineer's daughter with badly concealed hostility, and seemed to doubt that Sylvie was the kind of girl she wanted her son getting involved with. Outwardly, of course, she was quite gracious.
Rodney Maxwell and Yves Jacquemont flew to Storisende the next morning, both more optimistic about finding a ship than Conn thought the circumstances warranted. Conn stayed at home for the next few days, luxuriating in idleness. He and Sylvie tore down his mother's household robots and built sound-sensors into them, keying them to respond to their names and to a few simple commands, and including recorded-voice responses in a thick Sheshan accent. All the smart people on Terra, he explained, had Sheshan humanoid servants.
His mother was delighted. Robots that would answer when she spoke to them were a lot more companionable. She didn't seem to think, however, that Sylvie's mechanical skills were ladylike accomplishments. Nice girls, Litchfield model, weren't quite so handy with a spot-welder. That was what Conn liked about Sylvie; she was like the girls he'd known at the University.
They were strolling after dinner, down the Mall. The air was sharp and warned that autumn had definitely arrived; the many brilliant stars, almost as bright as the moon of Terra, were coming out in the dusk.
"Conn, this thing about Merlin," she began. "Do you really believe in it? Ever since Dad and I came to Poictesme, I've been hearing about it, but it's just a story, isn't it?"
He was tempted to tell her the truth, and sternly put the temptation behind him.
"Of course there's a Merlin, Sylvie, and it's going to do wonderful things when we find it."
He looked down the starlit Mall ahead of him. Somebody, maybe Lester Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes, had gotten things finished and cleaned up. The pavement was smooth and unbroken; the litter had vanished.
"It's done wonderful things already, just because people started looking for it," he said. "Some of these days, they're going to realize that they had Merlin all along and didn't know it."
There was a faint humming from somewhere ahead, and he was wondering what it was. Then they came to the long escalators, and he saw that they were running.
"Why, look! They got them fixed! They're running!"
Sylvie grinned at him and squeezed his arm.
"I get you, chum," she said. "Of course there's a Merlin."
Maybe he didn't have to tell her the truth.
When they returned to the house, his mother greeted him:
"Conn, your father's been trying to get you ever since you went out. Call him, right away; Ritz-Gartner Hotel, in Storisende. It's something about a ship."
It look a little time to get his father on-screen. He was excited and happy.
"Hi, Conn; we have one," he said.
"What kind of a ship?"
"You know her. The Harriet Barne."
That he hadn't expected. Something off Mothball Row that would have to be flown to Barathrum and torn down and completely rebuilt, but not the one that was there already, partly finished.
"How the dickens did you wangle that?"
"Oh, it was Yves' idea, to start with. He knew about her; the T. & O.'s been losing money on her for years. He said if they had to pay prize-money on her and then either restore her to original condition or finish the job and build a spaceship they didn't want, it would almost bankrupt the company. They got up as high as fifty thousand sols for prize-money and we just laughed at them. So we made a proposition of our own.
"We proposed organizing a new company, subsidiary to both L. E. & S. and T. & O., to engage in interplanetary shipping; both companies to assign their equity in the Harriet Barne to the new company, the work of completing her to be done at our spaceport and the labor cost to be shared. This would give us our spaceship, and get T. & O. off the hook all around. Everybody was for it except the president of T. & O. Know anything about him?"
Conn shook his head. His father continued:
"Name's Jethro Sastraman. He could play Scrooge in Christmas Carol without any makeup at all. He hasn't had a new idea since he got out of college, and that was while the War was still going on. 'Preposterous; utterly visionary and impractical,'" his father mimicked. "Fortunately, a majority of the big stockholders didn't agree; they finally bullied him into agreeing. We're calling the new company Alpha-Interplanetary, we have an application for charter in, and that'll go through almost automatically."
"Who's going to be the president of this new company?"
"You know him. Character named Rodney Maxwell. Yves is going to be vice-president in charge of operations; he's flying to Barathrum tomorrow or the next day with a gang of technicians we're recruiting. T. & O. are giving us Clyde Nichols and Mack Vibart, and a lot of men from their shipyard. I'm staying here in Storisende; we're opening an office here. By this time next week, we're all going to wish we'd been born quintuplets."
"And Conn Maxwell, I suppose, will be an influential non-office-holding stockholder?"
"That's right. Just like in L. E. & S."
XII
He found Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and a score of workmen making a survey and inventory of the spaceport. Captain Nichols and four of the original crew of the Harriet Barne, who had shared his captivity among the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And Fred Karski, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, was keeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formation of Alpha-Interplanetary when Conn arrived.
The next day, Yves Jacquemont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, a gang from the T. & O. shipyard, and a dozen engineers and construction men whom he had recruited around Storisende. More workers arrived in the next few days, including a number who had already worked on the ship as slaves of the Perales gang.
It didn't take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in the conversion. Built