“I tell you, the Great Computer is there, in the heart of the butte,” Leibert was insisting, now. “It has been revealed to me in a dream. It is completely buried. After it was made, no human touched it. The men who were here and used it in the War communicated with it only by radio.”
That could be so. There were fully robotic computers, intended for use in places where no human could go and live. There was a big one on Nifflheim, armored against the fluorine atmosphere and the hydrofluoric-acid rains. But there was no point in that here, the things were enormously complicated, and military engineering of any sort emphasized simplicity—Aaaagh! Was he beginning to believe this balderdash himself?
Klem Zareff fell in with him as they were going to dinner. “Revealed in a dream!” the old Rebel snorted. “One thing you can always get away with lying about is what you dream.”
“You think he’s lying? I think he’s just crazy.”
“That’s what he wants you to think. Look, Conn, he knows Merlin is here; he’s trying to keep us from it. That’s why he shifted all that equipment over on the butte. He’s working for Sam Murchison.”
“I thought your theory was that the Federation had lost Merlin.”
“It was, at first. It doesn’t look that way to me now. It’s right here at Force Command, somewhere. They don’t want it found, and they’re going to do everything they can to stop us. I oughtn’t to have left this fellow Leibert here alone; well, I won’t do that again. Get Tom Brangwyn to help me.”
XVI
The voyage back to Koshchei had been a week-long nightmare. When she had been the pride and budget-wrecker of Transcontinent & Overseas Airline, the Harriet Barne had accommodated two hundred first-class and five hundred lower-deck passengers, but the conversion to a spaceship had drastically reduced her capacity. The three hundred men and women who had been recruited for the Koshchei colony had been crammed into her with brutal disregard for comfort, privacy or anything else except the ability of the air-recyclers to keep them breathing. When Captain Nichols set her down at the administration building at Port Carpenter, a few had had to be carried off, but they were all alive, which made the trip an unqualified success.
The dozen leaders of the expedition were congratulating themselves on that in one of the executive offices after the first dinner at Port Carpenter. Rodney Maxwell, in Storisende, had joined them in screen-image; he was mostly listening, and sometimes contributing a remark apropos of something the rest of them had said five minutes ago.
“Our hypership,” Conn was saying, “is going to have to be item two on the agenda. The first thing we need is a ship for the Poictesme–Koshchei run. By this time next year, we ought to have a thousand to fifteen hundred people here at the least. We can’t haul them all on that flying sardine can.”
“We’ll need supplies, too. What was left here won’t last forever,” Nichols added.
“And you’re going to have to run this at a profit,” Luther Chen-Wong, who had come along for first hand experience and to help with administrative work, added. “You have a big payroll to meet, and you’ll have to keep the stockholders happy. People like Jethro Sastraman and some of these Storisende bankers aren’t going to be satisfied with promises and long-term prospects; they’ll want dividends.”
“We’ll have to get claims staked on something besides Port Carpenter, too. Those ships that are building at Storisende will be finished before long,” Jerry Rivas said. “If we don’t get some more things claimed, the first thing you know, we’ll own Port Carpenter and nothing else.”
“Well, let’s see what we can find in the way of a big airboat, or a small ship,” Conn said. “Jerry, you can pick a party for exploring. Just zigzag around the planet and transmit in locations and views of whatever you find, and we’ll send it on to Storisende.”
“And don’t pick anybody for your exploring party that can’t be spared from anything here,” Jacquemont added. “We don’t want to have to chase you halfway around the world to bring back the only specialist in something yesterday at the latest.”
“Are you going to come along, Conn?” Rivas asked.
“Oh, Lord, no! I’m going to be doing fifteen things at once here.”
All the computer work. Finding materials to make astrogational equipment and robo-pilots. Studying hyperspace theory—fortunately, there was an excellent library here—and setting up classes, and teaching school. And keeping in touch with his father, on Poictesme. It was making him nervous not to know what sort of foolishness the older and wiser heads might be getting into.
The next morning, they began organizing work-gangs and setting up committees. Three men, two girls and about twenty robots got an open-pit iron mine started; as soon as the steel mill was ready, ore started coming in. Anse Dawes had a gang looking for something they could build a 350-foot interplanetary ship out of; Jacquemont and Mack Vibart were getting plans and specifications and making lists of needed materials. Conn gathered a dozen men and women and started classes in computer theory and practice; at the same time, he and Charley Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatial astrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into some everythingless noplace outside normal space-time, and then pulling her out again by her bootstraps at some other place in the normal continuum, light-years away.
Roughly, it compared to shooting hummingbirds on the wing, blindfolded, with a not particularly accurate pistol, from a mile-a-minute merry-go-round.
That was something you could only do with a computer. A human, with a slide rule, a pencil and pad, could figure it out, of course—if he had
