Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated that Divine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert’s stock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in the butte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of Force Command.
“Means we’re going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down to where that thing is,” Zareff said. “That’ll take a year.”
“Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started,” Conn told them. “It’ll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauled here than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened.”
He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on Koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going to take charge here. He had just been unanimously elected Indispensable Man.
“Bless you, young man!” Carl Leibert cried. “At last, the Great Computer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of the Age of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks in prayer.”
“He’s been doing a lot of praying lately,” Tom Brangwyn remarked, after Leibert had gone out. “He’s moved into the chaplain’s quarters, back of the pandenominational chapel on the fourth level down. Always keeps his door locked, too.”
“Well, if he wants privacy for his devotions, that’s his business. Maybe we could all do with a little prayer,” Veltrin said.
“Probably praying to Sam Murchison by radio,” Klem Zareff retorted. “I’d like to see inside those rooms of his.”
He called Yves Jacquemont at Port Carpenter after dinner. When he told Jacquemont what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was a pity screens couldn’t be fitted with olfactory sensors, so that he could smell Conn’s breath.
“I am not drunk. I am not crazy. And I am not exercising my sense of humor. I don’t know what Fawzi and his gang have here, but if it isn’t Merlin it’s something just as hot. We want at it, soonest, and we’ll have to dig a couple of hundred feet of rock off it and open a collapsium can.”
“How are we going to get that stuff on a ship?”
“Anything been done to that normal-space job we started since I saw it last? Can you find engines for it? And is there anything about those mining machines or the cutter that would be damaged by space-radiation or reentry heat?”
Yves Jacquemont was silent for a good deal longer than the interplanetary time-lag warranted. Finally he nodded.
“I get it, Conn. We won’t put the things in a ship; we’ll build a ship around them. No; that stuff can all be hauled open to space. They use things like that at space stations and on asteroids and all sorts of places. We’ll have to stop work on Ouroboros, though.”
“Let Ouroboros wait. We are going to dig up Merlin, and then everybody is going to be rich and happy, and live happily forever after.”
Jacquemont looked at him, silent again for longer than the usual five and a half minutes.
“You almost said that with a straight face.” After all, Jacquemont hadn’t been cleared yet for the Awful Truth About Merlin, but, like his daughter, he’d been doing some guessing. “I wish I knew how much of this Merlin stuff you believe.”
“So do I, Yves. Maybe after we get this thing open, I’ll know.”
To give himself a margin of safety, Jacquemont had estimated the arrival of the equipment at three weeks. A week later, he was on-screen to report that the skeleton ship—they had christened her The Thing, and when Conn saw screen views of her he understood why—was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big mining machines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshchei had done a stroke of work on anything else.
“Sylvie’s coming along with her; so are Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and Ham Matsui and Gomez and Karanja and four or five others. They’ll be ready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads,” Jacquemont added.
That was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any of the Merlin-hunting factions at Force Command. In case trouble started, he could rely on them.
“Well, dig out some shootin’-irons for them,” he advised. “They may need them here.”
Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened that collapsium can on top of Force Command, and how the people there reacted to it.
The Thing took a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip; conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabin were apparently worse than on the Harriet Barne on her second trip to Koschchei. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. Carl Leibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had to pray the ship across space.
At the same time, reports of the near completion of Ouroboros II were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention from what was happening at Force Command. Cargo was being collected for her; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people would be drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses of everything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up and down the Gordon Valley. Melon and
