Part 26 (1/2)
Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal on Poictes to hatch
The next afternoon the _Helen O'Loy_ was unloaded, all but theequipment; Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley Gatworth and a few others took her out to Force Command They were met by Klem Zareff's armed airboats two hundred and fifty miles from the e than when the Badlands had been full of outlaws A lot of heavy armament seemed to have been moved in from Barathrum spaceport, and Zareff hadthe System States War If Minister-General Murchison was convinced that the Merlin exciteainst the Federation, this ought to give hi lateral shafts for echo shots, going on at the butte, under the relay station That was Leibert, as still insisting that that here Merlin was buried There was also some work on top of the mesa, by those ere convinced that that here Merlin was to be found Kurt Faas taking the lead in that Franz Veltrin and Dolf Kellton sided with Leibert, and Fawzi's office clique had split into two factions Judge Ledue wasstrict impartiality, as befitted his judicial position
”Why hasn't your father gotten those detectives of his to work on this fake preacher?” Zareff wanted to knohen he and Toere able to talk to Conn alone
”Well, they've been busy,” Conn said ”Trying to keep hi You heard about the robo-boht the shi+ps in, didn't you?”
”Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl, too,” Brangwyn said ”But hasn't it ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that calls hi that did that?”
”You suspect hiwyn nodded ”I took a few audiovisuals of him, when he didn't know it; I sent them to some different law-enforcement people over in Morven, where he says he comes from They never saw him before, and couldn'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 by theet up in pulpits, in front of a lot of people Those towns over in Morven are s about him He's a fake, I tell you”
”Let me have copies of those audiovisuals, To to wonder about him ot back to Storisende, he found that the marathon conference on the sixth floor down at the Interplanetary Building had finally come to an end Everybody see to have pistols and coffee with anybody else about it
”We have things fixed up,” his father told hi the shi+p out of four air-freighters are chartered as Janicot Industries, Ltd; they're going to specialize in chemical products
The other coen and Horvendile We'll sell them shi+ps, and Alpha-Interplanetary will put on scheduled trips to all three planets and also Koshchei
We're getting along very nicely with the for technicians and skilled labor We have two hundred ned up for Koshchei What you want to do is train as many of theoing to start a training program here at Storisende; you'd better leave one of your shi+ps for them to work on, and send back as many shi+ps as you can find officers and crews for”
”We're getting things really started”
”Yes The only trouble is” His father frowned ”I don't understand these people, Conn Everybody ought to bemillions out of this by this time next year, but all any of them, even these Storisende bankers, can talk about is how soon we're going to find Merlin”
”I e could stop that, somehow Listen; I have it Merlin never was on Poictesme; Merlin was a space-station a few thousand miles off-planet; there was a crew of operators aboard, and they communicated with Force Command by radio When the War ended, they took it outside the system and shot off a planetbuster inside her No more Merlin Hoould that be?”
His father shook his head ”Wouldn't do If anybody believed it, which I doubt, they'd just quit The market would collapse, everybody would be broke, it would just be the end of the War all over again Conn, we can't let it stop now We're going too fast to stop; if we tried it, we'd smash up and break our necks”
XVIII
Jerry Rivas, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping things running on Koshchei Work on the interplanetary shi+p at Port Carpenter had stopped when the Sickle Mountain shi+ps had been found; it had never been resumed When Conn returned, he found work started on the _Ouroboros II_ Some of the two hundred newcomers who came in on the _Helen O'Loy_ had special skills needed on the hypershi+p; most of them ith Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to Sickle Mountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen Some of them, it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work Sylvie, who had been one of the star pupils in the co lists of needed ht from other places as much as a thousand ; Nichols had to drop his space-training work tehters; usually, the ently needed on some job at the construction dock
shi+ps lifted out alet so themselves of what they needed for themselves Soing new recruits--for instance, the teaching of physics and e because the professors had been virtually shanghaied
Conn found hi touch with affairs on Poictesme shi+ps had landed on both Janicot and Horvendile and were sending back claims to abandoned factories By that time they had all the decks into the _Ouroboros II_, and he orking aboard, getting the astrogational and hyperspace instruments put in place The hypershi+p _Andromeda_ was back from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what the expedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures about Merlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral
Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, and co as fast as it ca some, but by no means all of it
”Conn, can you come back here to Poictess have turned serious I don't like to talk about it by screen--too many people know our scrambler combinations But I wish you were here”