“I don’t blame Conn,” Klem Zareff said. “If he’d told us that then, some of us might have believed it.”
“And look what we found,” Kurt Fawzi added, pointing at the ceiling. “Is that Merlin up there, or isn’t it?”
“That little thing!” Shanlee cried scornfully. “How could that be Merlin? I am going to my chamber, to pray for forgiveness for this wretch.”
He turned and started for the door.
“Stop him, Tom!” Conn said, and Tom Brangwyn put himself in front of the older man, gripping his right arm. Shanlee tried, briefly, to resist.
“Seems to me you lost faith in Merlin awfully quick,” the former town marshal of Litchfield said. “You knew there was a Merlin all along, and you never wanted us to find it.”
Franz Veltrin, who had been “Leibert’s” most enthusiastic adherent, had also lost faith suddenly; he was shouting vituperation at the Prophet of Merlin.
“Knock it off, Franz; he was only doing his duty,” Conn said. “Weren’t you, General Shanlee?”
It took almost a minute before they stopped yelling for an explanation and allowed him to make one. He caught Klem Zareff’s comment: “Must be pretty hot, if they have to send a general to handle it.”
“I talked to Travis, yes. He gave me the same story he just repeated on that interview,” Conn said, picking his way carefully between fact and fiction. “After I went back to Montevideo, he and this aide of his must have been afraid I didn’t believe it, which I didn’t. When I was ready to graduate, I got this offer of an instructorship; that was a bribe to keep me on Terra and off Poictesme. When I turned it down and took the Mizar home, Travis sent Shanlee after me. He must have grown that beard and that pageboy bob on the way out. I suppose he contacted Murchison as soon as he landed. Wait a minute.”
He went to the communication screen and punched out a combination. A girl appeared and singsonged: “Barton-Massarra, Investigation and Protection.”
“Conn Maxwell here. We gave you some audiovisuals of a man with a white beard, alias Carl Leibert,” he began.
“Just a sec, Mr. Maxwell.” She spoke quickly into a handphone. The screen flickered, and she was replaced by a hard-faced young man in dark clothes.
“Hello, Mr. Maxwell; Joe Massarra. We haven’t anything on Leibert yet.”
“Are any of the officers of the Andromeda where you can contact them? Let them see those audiovisual. I’ll bet that beard was grown aboard ship coming out from Terra.”
Bedlam broke out suddenly. Shanlee, who had been standing passively, his right arm loosely grasped by Tom Brangwyn, came down on Brangwyn’s instep with the heel of his left foot and hit Brangwyn under the chin with the heel of his left palm. Wrenching his arm free, he started for the door. Sylvie Jacquemont snatched a chair and threw it along the floor; it hit the fleeing man’s ankles and brought him down. Half a dozen men piled on top of him, and Brangwyn was yelling to them not to choke him to death till he could answer some questions.
“Hey, what’s going on?” the detective-agency man in the screen was asking. “Need help? We’ll start a car right away.”
“Everything’s under control, thank you.”
Massarra hesitated for a moment. “What’s the dope on this statement that was on telecast a few minutes ago?” he asked.
“Travis doesn’t want us to find Merlin. What you just heard was one of his people, planted here at Force Command. We’re going to question him when we have time. But there isn’t a word of truth in that statement you just heard on the Herald-Guardian newscast. Merlin exists, and we’ve found it. We’ll have it opened inside of thirty hours at most.”
That was the line he was going to take with everybody. As soon as he had Massarra off the screen, he was punching the combination of his father’s private screen at Interplanetary Building. It took five interminable minutes before Rodney Maxwell came on. He could hear Klem Zareff shouting orders into one of the inside communication screens—general turnout, everything on combat-ready; guards to come at once to the office.
“How close are you to digging that thing out?” his father asked as soon as he appeared.
“We’re down to it; we can start cutting the collapsium any time now.”
“Start cutting it ten minutes ago,” his father told him. “And don’t leave Force Command till you have it open. How many men and vehicles does Klem have for defense? You’ll need all of them in a couple of hours. Everybody here is stunned, now; they’ll come out of it inside an hour, and they’ll come out fighting.”
“You’d better come out here.” He turned, saw Jerry Rivas helping hold Shanlee in a chair, and shouted to him: “Jerry! Turn out the workmen. Start cutting the can open right away.” He turned back to his father. “Klem’s just ordered all his force out. Are you coming here?”
“I can’t. In about an hour, everything’s going up with a bang. I have to be here to grab a few of the pieces.”
“You’ll do a lot of good in jail, or on the end of a rope.”
“Chance I have to take,” his father replied. “I think I’ll have a couple of hours. If anybody from the press calls you, what are you going to tell them?”
Conn repeated the line he had taken already. His father nodded.
“All right. I’ll call you later. If I can. Just keep things going at your end.”
A dozen of Klem Zareff’s men were crowding into the room.
“This man’s under
