The Cosmic Computer H. Beam Piper (reader novel txt) 📖

was go ahead. It had seemed so easy, when he and his father had been talking on the Mall; just get a ship built, and get out to Koshchei, and open some of the shipyards and engine works there, and build a hypership. Sure; easy⁠—once he got started.

He climbed out of bed, knuckled the sleep-sand out of his eyes, threw his robe around him, and started across the room to the bath cubicle.

They had decided to have breakfast together his first morning home. The party had broken up late, and then there had been the excitement of opening the presents he had brought back from Terra. Nobody had had a chance to talk about Merlin, or about what he was going to do, now that he was home. That, and his career of mendacity, would start at breakfast. He wanted to let his father get to the table first, to run interference for him; he took his time with his toilet and dressed carefully and slowly. Finally, he zipped up the short waist-length jacket and went out.

His father and mother and Flora were at the table, and the serving-robot was floating around a few inches off the floor, steam trailing from its coffee urn and its tray lid up to offer food. He greeted everybody and sat down at his place, and the robot came around to him. His mother had selected all the things he’d been most fond of six years ago: shovel-snout bacon, hotcakes, starberry jam, things he hadn’t tasted since he had gone away. He filled his plate and poured a cup of coffee.

“You don’t want to bother coming out to the dig with me this morning, do you?” his father was saying. “I’ll be back here for lunch, and we’ll go to the meeting in the afternoon.”

“Meeting?” Flora asked. “What meeting?”

“Oh, we didn’t have time to tell you,” Rodney Maxwell said. “You know, Conn brought back a lot of information on locations of supply depots and things like that. An amazing list of things that haven’t been discovered yet. It’s going to be too much for us to handle alone; we’re organizing a company to do it. We’ll need a lot of labor, for one thing; jobs for some of these Tramptowners.”

“That’s going to be something awfully big,” his mother said dubiously. “You never did anything like that before.”

“I never had the kind of a partner I have now. It’s Maxwell & Son, from now on.”

“Who’s going to be in this company?” Flora wanted to know.

“Oh, everybody around town; Kurt and the Judge and Klem, and Lester Dawes. All that crowd.”

“The Fawzis’ Office Gang,” Flora said disparagingly. “I suppose they’ll want Conn to take them right to where Merlin is, the first thing.”

“Well, not the first thing,” Conn said. “Merlin was one thing I couldn’t find out anything about on Terra.”

“I’ll bet you couldn’t!”

“The people at Armed Forces Records would let me look at everything else, and make microcopies and all, but not one word about computers. Forty years, and they still have the security lid welded shut on that.”

Flora looked at him in shocked surprise. “You don’t mean to tell me you believe in that thing?”

“Sure. How do you think they fought a war around a perimeter of close to a thousand light-years? They couldn’t do all that out of their heads. They’d have to have computers, and the one they’d use to correlate everything and work out grand-strategy plans would have to be a dilly. Why, I’d give anything just to look at the operating panels for that thing.”

“But that’s just a silly story; there never was anything like Merlin. No wonder you couldn’t find out about it. You were looking for something that doesn’t exist, just like all these old cranks that sit around drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin’s going to do for them, and never doing anything for themselves.”

“Oh, they’re going to do something, now, Flora,” his father told her. “When we get this company organized⁠—”

“You’ll dig up a lot of stuff you won’t be able to sell, like that stuff you’ve been bringing in from Tenth Army, and then you’ll go looping off chasing Merlin, like the rest of them. Well, maybe that’ll be a little better than just sitting in Kurt Fawzi’s office talking about it, but not much.”

It kept on like that. Conn and his father tried several times to change the subject; each time Flora ignored the effort and returned to her diatribe. Finally, she put her plate and cup on the robot’s tray and got to her feet.

“I have to go,” she said. “Maybe I can do something to keep some of these children from growing up to be Merlin-worshipers like their parents.”

She flung out of the room angrily. Mrs. Maxwell looked after her in distress.

“And I thought it was going to be so nice, having breakfast together again,” she lamented.

Somehow the breakfast wasn’t quite as good as he’d thought it was at first. He wondered how many more breakfasts like that he was going to have to sit through. He and his father finished quickly and got up, while his mother started the robot to clearing the table.

“Conn,” she said, after his father had gone out, “you shouldn’t have gotten Flora started like that.”

“I didn’t get Flora started; she’s equipped with a self-starter. If she doesn’t believe in Merlin, that’s her business. A lot of these people do, and I’m going to help them hunt for it. That’s why they all chipped in to send me to school on Terra; remember?”

“Yes, I know.” Her voice was heavy with distress. “Conn, do you really believe there is a⁠ ⁠… that thing?” she asked.

“Why, of course.” He was mildly surprised at how sincerely and straightforwardly he said it. “I don’t know where it is, but it’s somewhere on Poictesme, or in the Alpha System.”

“Well, do you think it would be a good thing to find it?”

That surprised him. Everybody knew it would be, and his mother didn’t share his