LITMIR.BIZ

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put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe out these outlaws and a private company wouldn't need an armed ship."

      "May I use your screen, Kurt?" Conn asked.

      When Fawzi nodded, he punched out the combination of the operating office at Tenth Army, and finally got his father on. He told him about the ship.

      "There's talk about tearing the armament out," he added.

      "Is that so, now? Well, I'll call Lester Dawes before he can get started on it. I think I'll go in to Storisende tomorrow and see the ship for myself. See what I can do about ammunition for those guns, too."

      "But, Rod," Fawzi protested, joining the conversation, "we don't want to start a war."

      "No. We want to stay out of one. You don't do that by disarming. We're taking that ship down into the Badlands. Remember?" Rodney Maxwell said. "Ever hear the name Blackie Perales?"

      Fawzi had. He stopped arguing about armament. Instead, he began worrying about how much the civic clean-up campaign was costing Litchfield.

      "You think we really need that, Rod?"

      "Of course we do. You'd be surprised how much labor we're going to need, and how hard up we're going to be for capable supervisors. This thing's a training program, Kurt, and we'll need every man we train on it."

      "But it's costing like Nifflheim, Rod. We're going to bankrupt the city."

      "Worse than it is now, you mean? Oh, don't worry, Kurt. As soon as we find Merlin, everything'll be all right."

      Franz Veltrin came in, shortly after Rodney Maxwell was off the screen. He dropped his audiovisual camera and sound recorder on the table, laid his pistol-belt on top of them and took a drink of brandy, downing it with the audible satisfaction of a thirsty horse at a trough. Then he looked around accusingly.

      "Somebody's been talking!" he declared. "I've had all the news services on the planet on my screen today; they all want the story about what's happening here. They've heard we know where Merlin is; that Conn Maxwell found out on Terra."

      "They just put two and two together and threw seven," Conn said. "A Herald-Guardian ship-news reporter interviewed me when I got in, and found out I'd been studying cybernetics and computer theory on Terra. What did you tell them?"

      "Complete denial. We don't know a thing about Merlin. Naturally, they didn't believe me. A bunch of them are coming out here tomorrow. What are we going to tell them? We'll all have to have the same story."

      "I," said Judge Ledue, "am not going to be interviewed, I am leaving town till they're gone."

      "Why don't you steer them onto Wade Lucas?" Conn asked. "If you want anything denied, he'll do it for you."

      Everybody thought that was a wonderful idea, except Klem Zareff, and he waited until Conn was ready to go and rode up to the landing stage with him.

      "Conn, I know this Lucas is going to marry your sister," he began, "but how much do you know about him?"

      "Not much. He seems like a nice chap. I don't hold what he said at the meeting against him. I suppose if I'd come from off-planet, I wouldn't believe in Merlin either."

      "Hah! But doesn't he believe in Merlin?"

      "He makes noises like it."

      "You know what I think?" Klem Zareff lowered his voice to a whisper. "I think he's a Federation spy! I think the Federation's lost Merlin. That's why they haven't come back to get it long ago."

      "Pretty big thing to mislay."

      "It could happen. There'd only be a few scientists and some high staff officers who'd know where it was. Well, say they all went back to Terra on the same ship, and the ship was lost at space. Sabotage, one of our commerce raiders that hadn't heard the War was over, maybe just an ordinary accident. But the ship's lost, and the location of Merlin's lost with her."

      "That could happen," Conn agreed seriously.

      "All right. So ever since, they've had people here, listening, watching, spying. This Lucas; he showed up here about a year after you went to Terra. And who does he get engaged to? Your sister. And what does he do here? Goes around arguing that there is no Merlin, getting people to argue with him, getting them mad, so they'll blurt out anything they know. I'm an old field officer; I know all the prisoner-interrogation tricks in the book, and that's always been one of the best."

      "Then why did he act the way he did at the meeting? All he did there was cut himself off from learning anything more from any of us. In his place, would you have done that? No; you'd have tried to take the lead in hunting for Merlin yourself. Now wouldn't you?"

      Zareff was silent, first puzzled, and then hurt. Now he would have to tear the whole idea down and build it over.

      Flora was quite friendly when she came home from school. She'd found out, somewhere, that Conn had been the originator of the municipal face-lifting project. He was tempted, briefly, to tell her a little, if not all, of the truth about the Maxwell Plan, then decided against it. The way to keep a secret was to confide it to nobody; every time you did, you doubled, maybe even squared, the chances of exposure.

      He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, about his talk with Klem Zareff.

      "How long's he been like that, anyhow?" he asked.

      "As long as I've known him. When it comes to melons and wine and bossing tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out of the rain, Klem Zareff's as sane as I am. But on the subject of the Terran Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"

      "They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have places like Tramptown on Terra, too."

      "Uhuh. I suppose, in Klem's boots, I'd be just as crazy as he is," Rodney Maxwell said. "One minute, he had a wife and two children in Kindelburg, on Ashmodai, and the next minute Kindelburg was a puddle of radioactive slag."

      "That was in '51, wasn't it? I read about it," Conn said. "It was a famous victory."

      That was from a poem, too.

      Rodney Maxwell flew to Storisende early the next morning. Conn rode back to Tenth Army on an empty scow and pitched into the job of getting the stores and equipment out of the underground shelters. More farm-tramps arrived, and had to be pounded into obedience and taught the work. At the same time, Litchfield was getting a steady influx of job-seekers, and a secondary swarm of thugs, grifters and gangsters who followed them. Klem Zareff, having gotten all his melons pressed, came out to Tenth Army, where he selected fifty of the best men from the work-gangs and began drilling them as soldiers to guard the next operation. The manual of arms, drill and salute he taught them was, of course, System States Alliance.

      A week later, the ship arrived from Storisende; a hundred and sixty feet, three thousand tons, small enough to be berthed inside a hyperspace transport, and fast enough to get a load of ammunition to troops at the front, unload, and get out again before the enemy could zero in on her, and armed to fight off any Army Air Force combat craft. The delay had been in recruiting officers and crew. The captain and chief engineer were out-of-work shipline officers, the gunner was a former Federation artillery officer, and the crew looked more like pirates than most pirates did.

      They christened her the Lester Dawes, because Dawes had secured her and because the name began with the initials of Litchfield Exploration & Salvage. From then on, it was a race to see whether the Tenth Army attack-shelters would be emptied before the wine was all pressed, or vice versa.

      VII

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      Fifty-two years before, they had come to the mesa in the Badlands and dug a pit on top of it, a thousand feet in diameter and more than five hundred deep, and in it they built a duplicate of the headquarters for Third Fleet-Army Force Command. They built a shaft a hundred feet in

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