Part 18 (1/2)
”Oh, I stopped carrying a gun; I'm a city man, now nobody carries one in Storisende Won't even be necessary in Litchfield before long Our new n of terror in Tramptown for a few days, and you wouldn't know the place Wade, here, is actingabout the new co to have so many co,” Conn said
”Well, I' company; Trisyste stockholder in that, too”
Merlin was now a political issue A bill had been introduced in Parliament to amend the Abandoned Property Act of 867 and nationalize Merlin, when and if discovered and regardless by whom The support seemed to co the Administration, was opposed to it There was considerable acrimony, however, on the propositions: 1) that Merlin was too important to the prosperity of Poictesme to become a private monopoly; and 2) that Merlin was too ie plum
It was discovered, after they were half assembled, that the controls for the _Harriet Barne_ would only hile she was in a horizontal position The whole thing had to be torn out and rebuilt There was also trouble with the air-and-water recycling system The _City of Nefertiti_ came in from Aton for Odin; Rodney Maxas alo of medical stores from the first hospital to be opened
”There's all sorts of stuff,” he was fu, by screen ”Stuff that's in short supply anywhere and that we could get good prices for off-planet Get Federation sols for it, too”
”The _City of Asgard_ will be along in six o asseements in advance to dispose of it on Terra or Baldur or Marduk”
”There are a couple of other companies interested in interplanetary shi+ps now,” his father added ”One of thehters off Mothball Row, and they're tearing the the done here at Storisende spaceport And another cos and has a gang at work dis to build a real spaceshi+p”
That wasn't anything to worry about either The _Harriet Barne_ was better than half finished There was a collapsium plant at Storisende spaceport, but Yves Jacquemont said it was only half the size of the one at Barathrum; it would be three months before it could produce armor for one, let alone both, shi+ps
The crackpots were getting into the act, now, too A spirit medium on the continent of Acaire, to the north, had produced a coinate with a deceased Third Force Staff officer, now in the Spirit World There was considerable detail, all ludicrous to Conn's professional ear And a fanatic in one of the s the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavadgita to prove that if Merlin were ever found, Divine vengeance in a spectacular form would fall not only on Poictesme but on the entire Galaxy
The spaceshi+p that was building at Storisende got into the news; on-screen, it appeared that the as progressing rapidly So was the work of deirders for the second shi+p, on which work had not yet been started The one under construction seen, like an old-fashi+oned pre-contragravity winged airplane The design puzzled everybody at Barathruht that perhaps there would be decks in the cross-ar on coet a shi+pyard going on Koshchei and build so to be so around the Alpha Syste sky-scraper?” Conn said
”What I wonder,” Yves Jacqueot to Thereback and forth froen and Horvendile during the War They one somewhere”
”Couldn't they all have been fitted with Dillinghaines and used in the evacuation?”
”Possible But the average interplanetary shi+p isn't very big; five hundred to seven-fifty feet in dias couldn't carry more than a couple of hundred people, after you put in all the supplies and the hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats and so on for a four- to six- that small for interstellar work Why, the shters that come in here will run about fifteen hundred feet”
They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure
And there certainly weren't any of them left on Poictesme He puzzled over it briefly, then shoved it aside He had s to think about
In his spare ti he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had not given to anything since cra for examinations at the University
There was a lot of it
The fourth planet of Alpha Gartner was older than Poictes, the sun excepted, in the system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn't been captured from either Beta or Gaether It had certainly been forher teen or Horvendile For better than a billion years, it had been aseous for little to forht-rock crust All that had remained had been a core of alrade iron ore
The saone on, as it cooled, as on any Terra-size planet After the surface had started to congeal, gases, mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, had co a cloud envelope, condensing, and sending down rain that returned ies broke soen escaped into space Finally, the surface cooled further and the rain no longer steamed off
The whole planet started to rust It had been rusting, slowly, for the billion or so years that had followed, and alen had become locked in iron oxide The air was almost pure carbon dioxide It would have been different if life had ever appeared on Koshchei, but apparently the right amino acids never asseetation after the colonization of Poictesme, but they had all failed