XVII
There were no bands or speeches when they came in this time. A lot ofcontragravity vehicles circled widely around the spaceport, but exceptfor a few news-service cars, the police were keeping them back of atwo-mile radius around the landing-pits. A couple of gunboats weremaking tight circles above, and on the dock were more vehicles and ahorde of police and guards.
When Rodney Maxwell came across the bridge from the dock after theyopened the airlocks, he was followed by a dozen Barton-Massarraprivate police, as villainous-looking a collection of ruffians as Connhad ever seen. He was wearing a new suit, with a waist-length jacketinstead of the long coat he usually wore, and there was a holsteredautomatic on each hip. In Litchfield, he never carried more than onepistol, and Storisende was supposed to be an orderly place wherenobody needed to go armed. More than anything else, that told Connapproximately what had been going on while he had been on Koshchei.
"Ship-guard," his father told Yves Jacquemont. "All your crew can comeoff; they'll take care of things. Get your people in that troopcarrier over there. Everybody will stay at Interplanetary Building.None of the hotels are safe, not even the Ritz-Gartner. And be sureeverybody's well armed when they come off the ship."
Jacquemont nodded. "I know the drill; I've been in Port Oberth onVenus and Skorvann on Loki. Any law we want, we make for ourselves."
"That's about it. I'll see you there. Conn, I wish you'd come with me.Somebody here wants to talk to you."
He wondered if his mother, or Flora, had come to Storisende. When heasked his father as they crossed onto the dock, there was a brieftwinge of pain in Rodney Maxwell's face.
"No, they're not having anything to do--_Duck; quick!_"
Then his father was diving under a lifter-truck that stood empty onthe dock. The private police were scattering for cover, and anauto-cannon began pom-pomming. Conn took one quick look in thedirection in which it was firing, saw an aircar that had brokenthrough the police line and was rushing toward them, and dived underthe lifter after his father. As he did, he saw a missile flash outfrom one of the gunboats like a thrown knife. Then he huddled besidehis father and put his arms over his head.
He felt the heat and shock of the explosion and, an instant later,heard the roar. When nothing immediately disastrous happened after hehad counted fifteen seconds, he stuck his head out and looked up. Thegunboat was struggling to regain her equilibrium, and the aircar hadvanished in a fireball. They both emerged, straightening. His fatherwas brushing himself with his hands and saying something about alwayshaving to duck under something when he had a new suit on.
"Robot control, probably; could have been launched from anywhere intown. Why, no; your mother and Flora aren't speaking to either of us,any more. Pity, of course, but I'm glad they're in Litchfield. It's alittle healthier there."
They walked to the slim recon-car and climbed in, pulling the doorshut after them. Wade Lucas was waiting for them at the controls.
"There, you see!" he began, as soon as he had the car lifting. "WhatI've been telling you. We'll have to stop this."
"Conn, meet our new partner. I told him everything you told me, out onthe Mall, the day you came home. I had to," his father hastened toadd. "He'd figured most of it out for himself. The only thing to dowas admit him to the lodge and give him the oath."
"I didn't know about General Travis; I didn't even know he was stillalive," Lucas said. "But the rest of it was pretty obvious, once Istopped jumping to conclusions and did a little thinking. You know,ever since I came here I've been preaching to these people to stoplooking for Merlin and do something to help themselves. You're smarterthan I am, Conn; instead of opposing them, you're guiding them."
"Did you tell Flora?"
Lucas shook his head. "I tried to explain what you're trying to do,but she wouldn't listen. She just told me I'd gotten to be as big acrook as you two." He had the car up to fifty thousand; putting itinto a wide circle around the city, he locked the controls and got outhis cigarettes. "Rod, we've got to stop this. You were just lucky thistime. Some of these days your luck's going to run out."
"How can we stop?" Conn demanded. "Tell them the truth? They'd lynchus, and then go on hunting for Merlin."
"Worse than that; it'd be a smash worse than the one when the Warended. I was only ten then, but I can remember that very plainly. Wecan't stop it, and we wouldn't dare stop it if we could."
"What's been going on here in the last month?" Conn asked. "I've beentoo busy to keep in touch. I know there's been rioting, and thesecrackpot sects, but...."
"I think this is personal to us. There have been some ugly thingshappening. There were four attempts to burglarize our offices. I toldyou about some of the other stuff, the microphones we found, and soon. The worst thing was Lucy Nocero, my secretary. She just vanished,a couple of weeks ago. Three days later, the police found herwandering in a park, a complete imbecile. Somebody who either didn'tknow how to use one or didn't care what happened had used a mind-probeon her. It's twenty to one she'll never recover."
"It's this Storisende financial crowd," Wade Lucas said. "They hadthings all their own way till Alpha-Interplanetary was organized. Nowthey're getting shoved into the background, and they don't like it."
"They're making more money than they ever did, and they just love it,"Rodney Maxwell said. "I'd think it was either Jake Vyckhoven or SamMurchison."
"Murchison!" Lucas hooted. "Why, he's nobody! FederationMinister-General; all the authority of the Terran Federation, andnothing to enforce it with. He doesn't have a position, here; he has adisease. Sleeping sickness."
"He certainly doesn't believe there is a Merlin, does he?" Conn asked.
"I don't know what he believes, but he's getting to be Klem Zareff'sopposite number. He thinks this whole thing's a plot against theFederation. It's a good thing Klem didn't get around to repainting hiscombat vehicles black and green, the way he did the Home Guard stuffat Litchfield."
"I'd be more likely to think it was Vyckhoven."
"Could be. Or it could be the Armageddonists, or Human Supremacy; I amashamed to say that this heil-Merlin Cybernarchist gang are friendlyto us. Or it could be some of the banking crowd, or some of theserival space-companies. Barton-Massarra is trying to find out. Well, wehave some of Wade's pet suspects at Interplanetary Building now.There's been a meeting going for the last week to partition the AlphaGartner System."
The Interplanetary Building had been a medium-class residence hotel atthe time of the War. Junior staff officers and civilian techniciansand their families had lived there. It had been vacant ever since thedisastrous outbreak of peace. Now it had a big new fluorolite sign,and housed the offices of all the Maxwell companies. There was atruculent display of anti-vehicle weapons on the top landing stage,and more Barton-Massarra private police. They looked even morevillainous then the ones at the spaceport. Conn recalled having heardthat most of the Blackie Perales gang had been discharged for lack ofevidence; he wondered how many of them had hired with Barton-Massarra.
The meeting was in a big conference room six floors down; it had beengoing on uninterrupted for days, with all the interested companies'representatives standing watch-and-watch around the clock. LesterDawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes were there for L. E. &S.; Transcontinent & Overseas was represented; there were people fromAlpha-Interplanetary, and bankers and financiers, and people from thecompanies building the two ships at the spaceport. And J. FitzwilliamSterber, the lawyer.
And reporters, phoning stories in and getting audiovisual interviewsof anybody who would hold still long enough. They converged in a rushas Conn and his father and Lucas came in.
"No statement, gentlemen!" Rodney Maxwell shouted, above the babble oftheir questions. "When we have anything to release, it will bereleased to all of you."
Jacquemont and Nichols had already arrived; Lucas went to them andbegan talking about stevedores and lifters to get off the cargoes fromthe ships. Conn hastened to join them.
"The sc
anning and mining equipment aboard the _Helen O'Loy_," he said."That shouldn't be unloaded here; we'll take the ship out to ForceCommand and unload it there."
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw, a lurking reporter snatch thehandphone off his radio and begin talking; it would be statedauthoritatively that Merlin was at Force Command and would beuncovered as soon as special equipment from Koshchei arrived.
Everybody at the long table was shouting at everybody else. The Jurgenand Janicot Companies wanted to buy ships from Koshchei Exploitation &Development. The Alpha-Interplanetary director, who was also avice-president of Transcontinent & Overseas, opposed that; anotherdirector of A-I, who was also board chairman of Koshchei Exploitation& Development, wanted to sell ships to anybody who had the price, theTranscontinent & Overseas man was calling him a traitor to thecompany, and one of the stockbrokers, who was also a vice-president ofTrisystem Investments and a director of Trisystem & InterstellarSpacelines, was wanting to know which company. And a banker who wasstockholder in all the companies was shouting that they were all agang of crooks, and J. Fitzwilliam Sterber was declaring that anybodywho called him a crook could continue the discussion through seconds.
Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal onPoictesme. He wondered how many duels this meeting was going to hatch.
The next afternoon the _Helen O'Loy_ was unloaded, all but the miningequipment; Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley Gatworth and a fewothers took her out to Force Command. They were met by Klem Zareff'sarmed airboats two hundred and fifty miles from the mesa, and theyfound the place in more of a state of siege than when the Badlands hadbeen full of outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have beenmoved in from Barathrum Spaceport, and Zareff had more men andfirepower than he had ever commanded during the System States War. IfMinister-General Murchison was convinced that the Merlin excitementwas a cover for some seditious plot against the Federation, this oughtto give him food for thought.
There was still work, mostly boring lateral shafts for echo shots,going on at the butte, under the relay station. That was Leibert, whowas still insisting that that was where Merlin was buried. There wasalso some work on top of the mesa, by those who were convinced thatthat was where Merlin was to be found. Kurt Fawzi was taking the leadin that. Franz Veltrin and Dolf Kellton sided with Leibert, andFawzi's office clique had split into two factions. Judge Ledue wasmaintaining strict impartiality, as befitted his judicial position.
"Why hasn't your father gotten those detectives of his to work on thisfake preacher?" Zareff wanted to know, when he and Tom Brangwyn wereable to talk to Conn alone.
"Well, they've been busy," Conn said. "Trying to keep him alive, forone thing. You heard about the robo-bomb somebody launched at us theday we brought the ships in, didn't you?"
"Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl, too," Brangwyn said. "Buthasn't it ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that callshimself Leibert might be mixed up with the gang that did that?"
"You suspect him, too?"
Brangwyn nodded. "I took a few audiovisuals of him, when he didn'tknow it; I sent them to some different law-enforcement people over inMorven, where he says he comes from. They never saw him before, andcouldn't find anybody who did."
"Well? He just doesn't have a police record, then."
"He says he's a preacher. Preachers don't go off in the woods bythemselves to preach; they get up in pulpits, in front of a lot ofpeople. Those towns over in Morven are small enough for everybody tohave known something about him. He's a fake, I tell you."
"Let me have copies of those audiovisuals, Tom. I'll see what can befound out about him. I'm beginning to wonder about him myself. I'msure I've seen him, somewhere...."
When he got back to Storisende, he found that the marathon conferenceon the sixth floor down at the Interplanetary Building had finallycome to an end. Everybody seemed satisfied, and apparently nobody wasgoing to have pistols and coffee with anybody else about it.
"We have things fixed up," his father told him. "The gang who arebuilding the ship out of four air-freighters are chartered as JanicotIndustries, Ltd.; they're going to specialize in chemical products.The other company has a charter now, too. They're going to operate onJurgen and Horvendile. We'll sell them ships, and Alpha-Interplanetarywill put on scheduled trips to all three planets and also Koshchei.We're getting along very nicely with them, except that everybody'scompeting for technicians and skilled labor. We have two hundred morepeople signed up for Koshchei. What you want to do is train as many ofthem as you can for ship-operation. Alpha-Interplanetary is going tostart a training program here at Storisende; you'd better leave one ofyour ships for them to work on, and send back as many ships as you canfind officers and crews for."
"We're getting things really started."
"Yes. The only trouble is...." His father frowned. "I don't understandthese people, Conn. Everybody ought to be making millions out of thisby this time next year, but all any of them, even these Storisendebankers, can talk about is how soon we're going to find Merlin."
"I wish we could stop that, somehow. Listen; I have it. Merlin neverwas on Poictesme; Merlin was a space-station a few thousand milesoff-planet; there was a crew of operators aboard, and theycommunicated with Force Command by radio. When the War ended, theytook it outside the system and shot off a planetbuster inside her. Nomore Merlin. How would that be?"
His father shook his head. "Wouldn't do. If anybody believed it, whichI doubt, they'd just quit. The market would collapse, everybody wouldbe broke, it would just be the end of the War all over again. Conn, wecan't let it stop now. We're going too fast to stop; if we tried it,we'd smash up and break our necks."