the meeting was at the academy; when conn and his father arrived, they found the central hall under the topside landing stage crowded. kurt fawzi and professor kellton had constituted themselves a reception committee. franz veltrin was in evidence with his audiovisual recorder, and colonel zareff was leaning on his silver-headed sword cane. tom brangwyn, in an unaccustomed best-suit. wade lucas, among a group of merchants, arguing heatedly.[pg 35] lorenzo menardes, the distiller, and lester dawes, the banker, and morgan gatworth, the lawyer, talking to judge ledue. about four times as many as had been in fawzi's office the afternoon before.
finally, everybody was shepherded into a faculty conference room; there was a long table, and a shorter one t-wise at one end. fawzi and kellton conducted them to this. both of them were trying to preside, kellton because it was his academy, and fawzi ex officio as mayor and professional leading citizen, and because he had come to regard merlin as his own private project. after everybody else was seated, the two rival chairmen-presumptive remained on their feet. fawzi was saying, "let's come to order; we must conduct this meeting regularly," and kellton was saying, "gentlemen, please; let me have your attention."
if either of them took the chair, the other would resent it. conn got to his feet again.
"somebody will have to preside," he said, loudly enough to cut through the babble at the long table. "would you take the chair, judge ledue?"
that stopped it. neither of them wanted to contest the honor with the president-judge of the gordon valley court.
"excellent suggestion, conn. judge, will you preside?" professor kellton, who had seen himself losing out to fawzi, asked. fawzi threw one quick look around, estimated the situation, and got with it. "of course, judge. you're the logical chairman. here, will you sit here?"
judge ledue took the chair, looked around for something to use as a gavel, and rapped sharply with a paperweight.
"young mr. conn maxwell, who has just returned from terra, needs no introduction to any of you," he began. then, having established that, he took the next ten minutes to introduce conn. when people began fidgeting, he wound up with: "now, only about a dozen of us were at the informal meeting in mr. fawzi's office, yesterday. conn, would you please repeat what you told us? elaborate as you see fit."
conn rose. he talked briefly about his studies on terra to qualify himself as an expert. then he began describing the wealth of abandoned and still undiscovered federation[pg 36] war material and the many installations of which he had learned, careful to avoid giving clues to exact locations. the spaceport; the underground duplicate force command headquarters; the vast underground arsenals and shops and supply depots. everybody was awed, even his father; he hadn't had time to tell him more than a fraction of it.
finally, somebody from the long table interrupted:
"well, conn; how about merlin? that's what we're interested in."
wade lucas snorted indignantly.
"he's telling you about real things, things worth millions of sols, and you want him to talk about that idiotic fantasy!"
there was an angry outcry. nobody actually shouted "to the stake with the blasphemer!" but that was the general idea. judge ledue was rapping loudly for order.
"i don't know the exact location of merlin." conn strove to make himself heard. "the whole subject's classified top secret. but i am certain that merlin exists, if not on poictesme then somewhere in the alpha system, and i am equally certain that we can find it."
cheers. he waited for the hubbub to subside. lucas was trying to yell above it.
"you admit you couldn't learn anything about this so-called merlin, but you're still certain it exists?"
"why are you certain it doesn't?"
"why, the whole thing's absurdly fantastic!"
"maybe it is, to a layman like you. i studied computers, and it isn't to me."
"well, take all these elaborate preparations against space attack you were telling us about. i think colonel zareff, here, who served in the alliance army, will bear me out that such an attack was plainly impossible."
zareff started to agree, then realized that he was aiding and comforting the enemy. "intelligence lag," he said. "what do you expect, with general headquarters thirty parsecs from the fighting?"
"yes. a computer can only process the data that's been taped into it," conn said. that was a point he wanted to ram home, as forcibly and as often as possible. "i suppose[pg 37] merlin classified an alliance attack on poictesme as a low-order probability, but war is the province of chance; clausewitz said that a thousand years ago. foxx travis wasn't the sort of commander to let himself get caught, even by a very low-order probability."
"well how do you explain the absence, after forty years, of any mention, in any history of the war, of merlin? how do you get around that?"
"i don't have to. how do you get around it?"
"huh?" lucas was startled.
"yes. stories about merlin were all over poictesme, all through the third force, even to the enemy. say the stories were unfounded; say merlin never existed. yet the belief in merlin was an important historical fact, and no history of the war gives it so much as a footnote." he paused for effect, then continued: "that can mean only one thing. systematic suppression, backed by the whole force of the terran federation. a gigantic conspiracy of silence!"
brother! if they swallow that, i have it made; they'll swallow anything!
they did, all but lucas. he banged his fist on the table.
"now i've heard everything!" he shouted in disgust.
"not quite everything, doctor," morgan gatworth said. "you will hear, one of these days, that we have found merlin."
"yes, that'll be the day!" lucas sprang to his feet, his chair toppling behind him. he shoved it aside with his foot. "i'm not going to argue with you. conn maxwell gave you a thousand-year-old quotation; i'll give you another, from thomas paine: 'to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason is as futile as to administer medicine to the dead.' i'll add this. conn maxwell knows better than this balderdash he's been spouting to you. i don't know what his racket is, and i'm not staying to find out. you will, though—to your regret."
he turned and strode from the room. there was a moment's silence, after the door slammed behind him. too bad, conn thought. he would have made a good friend. now he was going to make a very nasty enemy.[pg 38]
"well, let's get to business," his father said. "we don't have to argue about the existence of merlin; we know that. let's discuss the question of finding it."
"i still think it's somewhere off-planet," lorenzo menardes said. "the moons of pantagruel...."
evidently he'd read something, or seen an old film, about the moons of pantagruel.
"no, that's too far; they'd keep it where they could use it."
"the old ghq," lester dawes suggested. "suppose it's down under that, like the place rodney found under tenth army."
"i hope not," gathworth said. "the planetary government took that over."
"well, wherever it is, finding it is going to be expensive," rodney maxwell said. "now, to finance the search, i propose we use this information my son brought back from terra. doctor lucas was right about one thing; that's worth millions of sols. well, i propose, also, that we set up a company and get it chartered; a prospecting company, to operate under the abandoned property act of 867. my son and i will contribute this information as our share in the capitalization of the company. the work of opening these federation installations can go on concurrently with the search for merlin, and the profits can finance it."
silence for a moment, then a bedlam of cheering.
"well, let's get organized," gatworth said. "what will we call this company?"
a number of voices shouted suggestions. rodney maxwell managed to get recognition and partial silence.
"it is of the first importance," he said, "that we keep our real objective—merlin—as close a secret as possible. the planetary government would like to get hold of it—and i leave you to ask yourselves how far jake vyckhoven and his cronies are to be trusted with anything like that—and i have no doubt the federation might try to take it away from us."
"couldn't do it, rodney," judge ledue objected. "everything the federation abandoned in the trisystem is public domain now. we have a federation supreme court ruling—"[pg 39]
"what's legality to the federation?" klem zareff demanded. "they fought a criminally illegal war of aggression against my people."
down the table, somebody started singing "rally round the banner, the banner black and green."
"well, i think it's a good idea to keep quiet about it, myself," kurt fawzi said.
"all right," rodney maxwell said. "then we don't want this company to sound like anything but another salvage company. i suggest we call it litchfield exploration & salvage."
"good name, rodney," dawes approved. "that a motion? i second it."
unanimously carried. they had a name, now, anyhow. everybody began suggesting other topics for consideration—capitalization, application for charter, election of officers, stock issues. conn paid less and less attention. industrial finance and organization wasn't his subject, either. his father was plunging happily into it as though he had been promoting companies all his life. conn sat and doodled with his six-color pen, mostly spherical hyperspace ships.
"we can't get all this cleared up now," lester dawes was protesting. "your honor, i mean, mr. chairman; i suggest that committees be appointed...."
more hassling; everybody wanted to be on all the committees. finally, they appointed enough committees to include everybody.
"well, that seems to be cleared up," judge ledue said, "i suggest a meeting day after tomorrow evening; the committees should have everything set up, and we should be able to organize ourselves and elect permanent officers. is there anything else to discuss, or do i hear a motion to adjourn?"
somebody thought they ought to have some idea of what the first operation would be.
"you heard me mention a spaceport," conn said. "i can tell you, now, that it's over on barathrum, inside the crater of an extinct volcano. i think we ought to have a look at that, first of all."[pg 40]
"i know you seemed to think yesterday that merlin is off-planet," fawzi said, "i'm inclined to disagree, conn. i think it's right here on poictesme."
"we ought to nail that spaceport down first," conn argued.
"conn, you mentioned an underground duplicate of travis's general headquarters," zareff said. "they thought we'd possibly send a fleet here to blitz poictesme, or they wouldn't have built that. and this underground headquarters would be the safest place on the planet; they'd make sure of that. staff brass don't like to get caught out in the rain, not when it's raining hellburners and planetbusters. merlin would be too big to take there along with them, so they'd put it there in the first place."
that made sense. if he'd been foxx travis, and if there had been a merlin, that was exactly where he'd have put it himself. but there was no merlin, and he wanted a ship. he argued mulishly for a little, then saw that it was hopeless and gave in.
"i want to find merlin as much as any of you," he said. "more. merlin was the only thing i was trained for. we'll look there first."
somebody asked where, approximately, this underground force command headquarters was.
"why, it's in the badlands, over between the blaubergs and the east coast."
"great ghu! we'll need an army to go in there!" tom brangwyn said. "that's where all these outlaws have been coming from, blackie perales and all."
"then we'll get an army together," klem zareff said happily. "might make a little of that reward money that's been offered."
"we'll need more than that. well need excavation equipment, and labor. lots of labor," conn said. "it's a couple of hundred feet below the surface; from the plans, i'd say they just dug a big pit, built the headquarters in it, and filled it in. there are two entrances, a vertical shaft and a horizontal tunnel."
"when they pulled out, they probably filled the shaft and[pg 41] vitrified the rock at the outer ends," his father added. "that was what they did at tenth army."
another idea hit him. "mr. mayor, do you think you could set up some kind of a public-works program here in litchfield? we can't start this till after the wine-pressing's over, and we'll need a lot of labor, as i pointed out. now, it's important that we keep all our projects a secret until we can get our claims filed. if we start this municipal fix-up-and-clean-up program, we can give work to a lot of these drifters who haven't been able to get jobs on the plantations, get them organized into gangs, and keep them together till we're ready for the force command job."
lorenzo menardes supported the idea. "and while they were boondoggling around in litchfield, we could pick out the best workers, get rid of the incompetents, and train a few supervisors. that's going to be one of our worst headaches; getting capable supervisors."
"you telling me?" rodney maxwell asked. "that was what i was wondering about: where we'd get gang-bosses. and another thing; this municipal housecleaning would mask our real preparations."
"well, we need something like that," fawzi said. "we've needed it for a long time. i guess it took conn, coming home from terra, to see how badly we've let the town get run down. franz, suppose you and tom brangwyn and lorenzo form a committee on that. look around, see what needs fixing up worst, and set up a project. who's city engineer now?"
"abe o'leary; he died six years ago," dawes said. "you never appointed his successor."
"well, i guess i never got around to that," the mayor of litchfield admitted.
when the meeting finally adjourned, they went up and got in the car; his father lifted it straight up to thirty thousand feet and started circling. an aircar was one place where they could talk safely.
"conn, i was kind of worried, down there. you were being a little too positive. you know, you're only twenty-three. as long as you agree with those people, you're a brilliant[pg 42] young man; you start getting ideas of your own, and you're just a half-baked kid. you let the older and wiser heads run things. you can't begin to hope to foul things up the way they can. look at all the experience they've had."
"but we've got to have a ship. everything depends on that."
"i know it does. we'll get a ship. let kurt fawzi and klem zareff and the rest of them have this duplicate force command thing first, though. keep them happy. as soon as we have that opened, you can take a gang and run over to barathrum and grab your spaceport. wait till they find out that merlin isn't at force command duplicate. then you can convince them it's really on koshchei."
