Part 26 (2/2)
He started to object; there were s he had to attend to The look on his father's face stopped hi,” he said ”I'll be aboard”
The voyage back to Poictesot off at Storisende spaceport and was met by his father and Wade Lucas in one of the slireeted him briefly and took the car up and away from the city, where it was safe to talk
”Conn, I' to think there really is a Merlin, after all”
”Oh, coht you'd been vaccinated”
”I' to think so, too,” Lucas said ”I don't like it at all”
”You knohat that gang who took the _Andro for the plant that fabricated the elements for Merlin, weren't they?”
”Yes They found it My Barton-Massarra operatives got to so out n; the two computermen they had with them couldn't make head or tail of half of it And every blueprint, every diagra, had been destroyed But they found one thing, a big e and been overlooked It was marked: TOP SECRET PROJECT MERLIN”
”Project Merlin could have been anything,” Conn started to say No
Project Merlin was so they made computer parts for
”Dolf Kellton's research crew, at the Library here, came across some references to Project Merlin, too For instance, there was a routine division court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a very trivial charge Force Command ordered the court-martial stopped, and the two officers simply dropped out of the Third Force records, it was stated that they were engaged in work connected with Project Merlin
That's an exas like that”
”Tell him what Kurt Fawzi and his crew found,” Wade Lucas said
”Yes They have a fifty-foot shaft down froround headquarters They found so on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped mass, fifty feet thick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium It's directly over what used to be Foxx Travis's office”
”That's not a tenth big enough for anything that could even rese I was out there day before yesterday They're down to the collapsiu; I rode down the shaft in a jeep and looked at it Look, Conn, we don't knohat this Project Merlin was; all this lore about Merlin that's grown up since the War is pure supposition”
”But Foxx Travis told orically, that there was no Merlin Project,” Conn said ”The War's been over forty years; it's not a er Why would he lie to me?”
”Why did you lie to Kurt Fawzi and the others and tell the the truth would hurt the to you Maybe Merlin's too dangerous for anybody to be allowed to find”
”Great Ghu, are you beginning to think Merlin is the Devil, or Frankenstein's Monster?”
”Itjust as bad Maybe worse I don't think a man like Foxx Travis would lie if he didn't have soation to”
”And we knoho's beenmost of the trouble for us, too,” Lucas added
”Yes,” Rodney Maxwell said, ”we do And so to invite Klem Zareff to kick my pants-seat Sam Murchison, the Terran Federation Minister-General”
”How'd you get that?”
”Barton-Massarra got some of it; they have an operative planted in Murchison's office And soot the rest This Hu financed by so deposit at one of the banks here, all Federation currency, big deno a record of the serial nu withdrawals The money was paid out, at the First Planetary Bank, to Mr Sa h the banks I believe they're the ones who mind-probed Lucy Nocero Barton-Massarra believe, but they can't prove, that Human Supremacy launched that robo-bomb at us, that ti with those audiovisuals of Leibert?”