The Cosmic Computer Part 29

He went to the communication screen and punched out a combination. A girl appeared and singsonged: "Barton-Ma.s.sarra, Investigation and Protection."

"Conn Maxwell here. We gave you some audiovisuals of a man with a white beard, alias Carl Leibert," he began.

"Just a sec, Mr. Maxwell." She spoke quickly into a handphone. The screen flickered, and she was replaced by a hard-faced young man in dark clothes.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Maxwell; Joe Ma.s.sarra. We haven't anything on Leibert yet."

"Are any of the officers of the _Andromeda_ where you can contact them? Let them see those audiovisual. I'll bet that beard was grown aboard ship coming out from Terra."

Bedlam broke out suddenly. Shanlee, who had been standing pa.s.sively, his right arm loosely grasped by Tom Brangwyn, came down on Brangwyn's instep with the heel of his left foot and hit Brangwyn under the chin with the heel of his left palm. Wrenching his arm free, he started for the door. Sylvie Jacquemont s.n.a.t.c.hed a chair and threw it along the floor; it hit the fleeing man's ankles and brought him down. Half a dozen men piled on top of him, and Brangwyn was yelling to them not to choke him to death till he could answer some questions.

"Hey, what's going on?" the detective-agency man in the screen was asking. "Need help? We'll start a car right away."

"Everything's under control, thank you."

Ma.s.sarra hesitated for a moment. "What's the dope on this statement that was on telecast a few minutes ago?" he asked.

"Travis doesn't want us to find Merlin. What you just heard was one of his people, planted here at Force Command. We're going to question him when we have time. But there isn't a word of truth in that statement you just heard on the _Herald-Guardian_ newscast. Merlin exists, and we've found it. We'll have it opened inside of thirty hours at most."

That was the line he was going to take with everybody. As soon as he had Ma.s.sarra off the screen, he was punching the combination of his father's private screen at Interplanetary Building. It took five interminable minutes before Rodney Maxwell came on. He could hear Klem Zareff shouting orders into one of the inside communication screens--general turnout, everything on combat-ready; guards to come at once to the office.

"How close are you to digging that thing out?" his father asked as soon as he appeared.

"We're down to it; we can start cutting the collapsium any time now."

"Start cutting it ten minutes ago," his father told him. "And don't leave Force Command till you have it open. How many men and vehicles does Klem have for defense? You'll need all of them in a couple of hours. Everybody here is stunned, now; they'll come out of it inside an hour, and they'll come out fighting."

"You'd better come out here." He turned, saw Jerry Rivas helping hold Shanlee in a chair, and shouted to him: "Jerry! Turn out the workmen.

Start cutting the can open right away." He turned back to his father.

"Klem's just ordered all his force out. Are you coming here?"

"I can't. In about an hour, everything's going up with a bang. I have to be here to grab a few of the pieces."

"You'll do a lot of good in jail, or on the end of a rope."

"Chance I have to take," his father replied. "I think I'll have a couple of hours. If anybody from the press calls you, what are you going to tell them?"

Conn repeated the line he had taken already. His father nodded.

"All right. I'll call you later. If I can. Just keep things going at your end."

A dozen of Klem Zareff's men were crowding into the room.

"This man's under close arrest," the old soldier was telling them. "He is very important and very dangerous. Take him out somewhere, search him to the skin, take his clothes away from him and give him a robe.

He's to be watched every second; make sure he hasn't poison or other suicide means. He's to be questioned later."

As soon as Rodney Maxwell was off the screen, there was a call-signal.

It was one of the news-services, wanting a statement.

"I'll take it," Gatworth said, and then began talking:

"This statement of General Travis's is completely false. There is a Merlin, and we've found it...."

They found something that might be good-enough Merlin for the next thirty hours. That superstructure was just big enough for the manually operated parts of a computer like Merlin; the input and output, and the programming machines.

XX

Klem Zareff's guardsmen were mercenaries. A little over a year ago they had, at best, been homeless drifters, and not a few had been outlaws. Now they were soldiers, well fed, clothed, quartered and equipped, and well and regularly paid. They had a good thing; they were willing to fight to keep it, Merlin or no Merlin. Conn left them to their commander. He did gather the workmen for a short harangue, but that wasn't really necessary. They had a good thing, too, and most of them realized that they were working toward a better thing. They could be depended upon, too.

They came crowding out and manned lifters; they got the heavy collapsium-cutter maneuvered into place and the shielding down around the cutting-head. After that, there were only four men who could work, each in his own heavily shielded cabin. In spite of the shielding that covered the actual work, there was an awesome display of multicolored light; it was like being in the middle of an aurora borealis. What was going on where that tiny rotating beam of cosmic rays was grinding at the collapsium simply couldn't have been imagined.

Conn would have liked to stay outside; he could not. Too many things were happening in too many places, and it was all coming in by screen.

Rioting had broken out in Storisende and in a dozen other places. He saw, on a news-screen, a mob raging in front of the Executive Palace; yellow-shirted Cybernarchists were battling with city police and Planetary troops, Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers were fighting both and one another. Above all the confused noise of shouting and shooting, an amplifier was braying: "_It's a lie! It's a lie! Merlin has been found!_" Newsmen began arriving--Zareff's men had orders to pa.s.s them through the cordon that had been put up around Force Command--and they took up his time. It was worth it, though.

They could tell him what was going on.

J. Fitzwilliam Sterber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested, on a farrago of fraud charges--"I don't know who he's supposed to have defrauded; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"--and bail was being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged, but he was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We're going to start a false-arrest suit--"

"If you're alive to." Apparently Sterber hadn't thought of that. "What do you think's going to happen when the Stock Exchange opens?"

"It's going to be bad. But don't worry; your father must have foreseen something like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a few more people." He named some of the Trisystem Investments people and some of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace the market as long as we can. n.o.body who keeps his head is going to lose anything in the long run."

Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and Clyde Nichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte had been running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemont had gone to s.p.a.ce in the _Ouroboros II_.

"Well, they caught up with you," he said. Evidently he had figured out what the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do about it?"

"Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find it before things get too bad." He told Luther the situation of the moment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?"

"We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to send any more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure this thing you've found is Merlin?"

"I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatus they'd need to operate a thing like Merlin--Yes, Luther. I am sure we have found Merlin."

Chen-Wong looked at him curiously. "I hope so. I can't think of anything else that can stop this business."

Tom Brangwyn was in the room when he turned from the screen.

"We searched Leibert's--Shanlee's--rooms," he said. "We found a bomb."

"What kind of a bomb?"

"Vest-pocket thermonuclear. He seems to have gotten the fissionables by taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing's packed inside a hundred-pound power-cartridge case. It was in a traveling-bag under his bed. And you know how it was to be fired? With a regular 40-mm flare-pistol, welded into the end of the bomb. The flare-powder had been taken out of the cartridge, and it had been reloaded with a big charge of rifle-powder. I suppose it would blow one subcritical ma.s.s into another. But the only way he could have fired the bomb would have been by pulling the trigger."

And blowing himself up along with it. He must have wanted Merlin destroyed pretty badly.

"Have you questioned him yet?"