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

“Well, I don’t have any such lofty ideas,” Fawzi said. “I just want Merlin to show us how to get some prosperity here; bring things back to what they were before Poictesme went broke.”

“And that’s what Father and I are trying to do. You’re going into the woods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax.” Fawzi looked at him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better of it. “If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss of markets. If we find Merlin, and tape it with everything that’s happened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tell us where to find new markets. But the markets won’t come to us. We’ll have to do our own exporting, and we’ll need ships. Now, you men have been studying about Merlin, and hunting for Merlin, all your lives. I can’t add anything to what you know, and neither can my father. You find Merlin, and we’ll have the ships ready when you do find it.”

“Kurt, I think he has a point,” somebody said.

“You’re blasted well right he has,” Klem Zareff put in. “If it wasn’t for Conn Maxwell, you know where we’d be? Back in Litchfield, sitting around in Kurt’s office, talking about how wonderful things’ll be when we find Merlin, and doing nothing to find it.”

“Kurt, I believe Conn is entitled to an apology,” Judge Ledue ruled. “How close we are to finding Merlin I don’t know, but it is due to him that we have any hope of finding it at all.”

“Conn, I’m sorry,” Fawzi said. “I oughtn’t to have said some of the things I did. But we’re all on edge; we’ve been having so much trouble⁠ ⁠… Conn, it’s right there at Force Command; I know it is. We’ve been all over the place. We have shafts sunk at each of the corners; we’ve used scanners, and put off echo shots. Nothing. We looked for additional passages out of the headquarters; there aren’t any. But it has to be somewhere around. It just has to be!”

“Maybe if I go out to Force Command with you, I might see something you’ve overlooked. And if I can’t, I’ll try to scrape up some stuff on Koshchei for you. Deep-vein scanners, that sort of thing, from the mines.”

They took the Lester Dawes out at a little past noon and turned south and east. Everybody aboard was happy⁠—except Conn Maxwell. He was thinking of the years and years ahead of these trusting, hopeful old men, each year the grave of another expectation. Two hundred miles from Force Command, the Goblin met them, her sides still spalled and dented from the hits she had taken in Barathrum Spaceport. When they came in sight of it, the mesa-top was deserted. Fawzi began wondering where in Nifflheim all the drilling rigs, and the seismo-trucks, were. Somebody with a pair of binoculars called attention to activity on the side of the high butte on top of which the relay station was located. Fawzi began swearing exasperatedly.

“Might be something Mr. Leibert thought of,” Franz Veltrin suggested.

“Then why in blazes didn’t he screen us about it?”

“Who is this Leibert?” Conn asked. “Somebody mentioned him this morning, I think.”

“He joined us after you left, Conn,” Dolf Kellton said. “He’s a clergyman from Morven. No regular denomination; he has a sect of his own.”

“Yah, he would!” Klem Zareff rumbled. “Pious fraud!”

“He’s really a good man, Conn; Klem’s prejudiced. He says we ought to use Merlin to show us the true nature of God, and how to live in accordance with the Divine Will. He says Merlin can teach us a new religion.”

A new religion, based on Merlin; that would be good. And then the fanatics who thought Merlin was the Devil would start a holy war to wipe out the servants of Satan, and with all the combat equipment that was lying around on this planet⁠ ⁠… For the first time since this business started, he began to feel really frightened.

An aircar came bulleting away from the butte and landed on the mesa as the Lester Dawes set down. The man who met them at the head of the vertical shaft wore Federation fatigues⁠—baggy trousers, ankle boots and long smock, dyed black. He was bareheaded, and his white hair was almost shoulder-long. He had a white beard.

“Welcome, Brothers,” he greeted, a hand raised in benediction. “And who is this with you?”

His voice was high and quavery; not a good pulpit voice, Conn thought.

Kurt Fawzi introduced Conn, and Leibert grasped his hand with a grip that was considerably stronger than his voice.

“Bless you, young man! It is to you alone that we owe our thanks that we are about to find the Great Computer. Every sapient being in the Galaxy will honor your name for a thousand years.”

“Well, I hadn’t counted on quite that much, Mr. Leibert. If it’ll only help a few of these people to make a decent living I’ll be satisfied.”

Leibert shook his head sadly. “You think entirely in material terms, young man,” he reproved. “Forget these things; acquire the higher spiritual values. The Great Computer must not be degraded to such uses; we should let it show us how to lift ourselves to a high spiritual plane⁠ ⁠…”

It went on like that, after they went down to Foxx Travis’s⁠—now Fawzi’s⁠—office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters instead of the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thick carpets on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi’s office gang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no idea what a computer could or couldn’t do. Anybody who could build a computer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn’t need it, he would be God.

As he talked, Conn began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition. He’d seen this Carl Leibert before, somewhere, and somehow he was sure that the long white hair and the untrimmed