“Judge, the rehearsal is starting; they can’t do it without you.”
Ledue clung to his chair. “They daren’t do it with me, Mrs. Maxwell. If I get into it, it won’t be a rehearsal; they’ll be really married, and then there won’t be any point in having a wedding tomorrow.”
“Oh, Morgan!” Conn called across the room to Gatworth. “You’ve just been appointed temporary judge for the wedding rehearsal!”
There was a big crowd around Wade Lucas, in the next room; he was telling them about the voyage to Baldur, from which he had returned, and the one to Irminsul, with a cargo of arms, machine tools and contragravity vehicles, on which he and his bride would go for their honeymoon. There was another crowd around Flora; she was telling them about the new fashions on Baldur, which had been brought back on the Ouroboros II.
“Where’s your father?” his mother was asking him. “He has to rehearse giving the bride away.”
“Probably in his office. I’ll go get him.”
“You’ll get into an argument with somebody and forget to come back,” his mother said. “Sylvie, you go with him, and bring both of them back.”
“When’ll we have our wedding, Sylvie?” he asked as they went off together.
“Well, before Dad goes to Aditya with the Genji. That’ll have to be in a month.”
“Two weeks? That ought to be plenty of time to get ready, and let people recover from this one.”
“Everybody’s here now. Let’s make it a double wedding tomorrow,” she suggested.
He hadn’t been prepared for that. “Well, I hadn’t expected … Sure! Good idea!” he agreed.
There was a crowd in Rodney Maxwell’s little office—Fawzi and some others, and some Storisende people. One of the latter was vociferating:
“Jake Vyckhoven’s no good, and he never was any good!”
“Well, you have to admit, if he hadn’t ordered the banks and the Stock Exchange closed that time, we’d have had a horrible panic—”
“Admit nothing of the kind! Jethro, you were there, you’ll bear me out. About a dozen of us were at Executive Palace for hours, bullying him into that. Why, we almost had to twist one of his arms while he was signing the order with the other. And now he has the gall to run for reelection on the strength of his heroic actions at the time of the Travis Hoax!”
“I know who we want for President!” another Storisende man exclaimed. “He’s right here in this room!”
“Yes!” Rodney Maxwell almost bellowed, before the other man could say anything else. “Here he is!” He grabbed Kurt Fawzi by the arm and yanked him to his feet. “Here’s the man most responsible for finding Merlin; the man who first suggested sending my son Conn to Terra to school, the man who, more than anyone else, devoted his life to the search for Merlin, the man whose inextinguishable faith and indomitable courage kept that search alive through its darkest hours. Everybody, get a drink; a toast to our next President, Kurt Fawzi!”
Conn was sure he heard his father add: “Ghu, what a narrow escape!”
Then he and Sylvie began chanting, in unison, “We want Fawzi! We want Fawzi!”
Colophon
The Cosmic Computer
was published in 1963 by
H. Beam Piper.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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David Grigg,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2007 by
Greg Weeks, Bethanne M. Simms, Jason Isbell and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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Distributed Proofreaders Open Library System.
The cover page is adapted from a
Bild 100 (Segelboote),
a painting completed in 1914 by
Jacoba van Heemskerck.
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