The Cosmic Computer - H. Beam Piper (best black authors txt) 📗

and does he love it. That’ll keep him out of mischief. Dolf Kellton’s secretary; he has an office force at the Academy and can conscript students to help. He’s organizing a research team from his seniors and post-grad students to work in the Planetary Library at Storisende. There are a lot of old Third Force records there; he may find something useful. Of course, Lester Dawes is treasurer.”

“What are you?”

“Vice-president in charge of operations. That’s what I spent all yesterday logrolling, baby-kissing and cigar-passing to get.”

“And what am I, if it’s a fair question?”

“You have a very distinguished position; you are a non-office-holding stockholder. The only other one is Judge Ledue; as a member of the judiciary, he did not feel it proper to accept official position in a private corporation. Tom Brangwyn’s Chief of Company Police; Klem Fawzi is Commander of the Company Guards. And we have a law firm in Storisende lined up to handle our charter application. Sterber, Flynn & Chen-Wong. Sterber’s married to Jake Vyckhoven’s sister, Flynn’s son is married to the daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, and Chen-Wong is a nephew of the Chief Justice. All of them are directly descended from members of Genji Gartner’s original crew.”

“You don’t anticipate any trouble about getting the charter?”

“Not exactly. And Lester Dawes is in Storisende now, trying to find us a contragravity ship. There are about a dozen in the hands of receivers for bankrupt shipping companies; he might find one that’s still airworthy. Oh; you remember how I insisted on absolute secrecy about our Merlin objective? That’s working out better than my fondest expectations. It’s leaking like a machine-gunned water tank, and everybody it leaks to is positive that we know exactly where Merlin is or we wouldn’t be trying to keep it a secret.”

Three days later, Conn hitched a ride on a freight-scow to Litchfield. From the air, he could see a haze of bonfire smoke over High Garden Terrace, and a gang of men at work. There were more men at work on the Mall and along the streets on either side. He went up from the yard below the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found his mother in the living room watching a screen play with one eye and keeping the other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravity tank, which was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and taking swipes at the furniture with a rotary dustmop. She was glad to see him, and then became troubled.

“Conn, when Flora comes home, you won’t argue with her, will you?”

“Only in self-defense.” That was the wrong thing to say. He changed it to, “No; I won’t argue with her at all,” and then quoted Wade Lucas quoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple of times that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that it wouldn’t get loose and hurt anybody if he did find it.

In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, the housecleaning-robot began knocking things off the top of a table.

“Oscar! You stop that!” his mother yelled.

Oscar, deaf as the adder, kept on. Conn yelled at his mother to use her control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like an old-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got the robot stopped.

No wonder she was afraid of Merlin.

He took advantage of the interruption to get to his room and change clothes, then went up to the hangar and got out an air-cavalry mount. About fifty men were working on High Garden Terrace, pruning and trimming and leveling the lawns. There was a big vitrifier on the Mall⁠—even at five hundred feet he could feel the heat from it⁠—chuffing and clanking and pouring lavalike molten rock for a new pavement. And all the nymphs and satyrs and dryads and fauns and centaurs had had their pedestals rebuilt and were sandblasted clean.

He landed on the top of the Airlines Building and rode a lift down to the office where Kurt Fawzi neglected the affairs of his shipline agency, his brokerage business, and the city of Litchfield. The afternoon habitués had begun to gather⁠—Raymond Fitch, the used-vehicles dealer, Lorenzo Menardes, Judge Ledue, Tom Brangwyn, Klem Zareff. Fawzi was on the screen, talking to somebody with sandy hair and a suit that didn’t seem to be made of any sort of Federation Armed Forces material, about warehouse facilities. The addresses they were mentioning were in Storisende.

“No, Leo, I don’t know when,” Fawzi was saying, “but don’t you worry. You just have space for it, and we’ll fill it up. And don’t ask me what sort of stuff. You know what a salvage operation’s like; you just haul out the stuff as you come to it.”

Tom Brangwyn, lounging in one of the deep chairs, looked up.

“Hello, Conn. We’re having a time. Another two hundred tramps came in on the Countess this morning, and Ghu only knows how many in their own vehicles, and they all seem to think if there’s work for some there ought to be work for all, and some of them are getting nasty.”

“We can use some more out at the dig. The ones you sent out Thursday are doing all right, once they found out we weren’t taking any foolishness.”

Fawzi turned away from the screen. “Well, Conn, we’re in,” he said. “The charter was granted this morning; now we’re Litchfield Exploration & Salvage, Ltd. And Lester Dawes has found us a contragravity ship.”

“How much will it cost us?”

Fawzi began to laugh. “Conn, this’ll slay you! She isn’t costing us a centisol. You know those old ships on Mothball Row, back of the old West End ship docks at Storisende?”

Conn nodded. He’d seen them before he had gone away, and from the City of Asgard coming in⁠—a lot of old Army Transport craft, covered with muslin and sprayed with protectoplast. The Planetary Government had taken them over after the War