before they returned to the lower level into which the lateral tunnel entered, matsui and his gang had the power plant going; the ventilator fans were humming softly, and whenever they pressed a starting button, the escalators began to move. they got the pumps going, and the oxygen-generators, and the sewage disposal system. until the communication center could be checked and the relay station found, they ran a cable out to the lester dawes, landed in the canyon, and used her screen-and-radio equipment. before the claims office in storisende closed, rodney maxwell had transmitted in recorded views of the interior, and enough of a description for a final claim. they also received teleprint copies of the storisende papers. the first story, in an extra edition of the herald-guardian, was headlined, merlin found! that would have been the reporter who bolted off prematurely when they first saw the personnel record machines. conn wondered if he still had a job. a later edition corrected this, but was full of extravagant accounts of what had been discovered. merlin or no merlin, force command duplicate was the biggest abandoned-property discovery since the third force left the trisystem.[pg 64]
the camp they had set up on top of the mesa was used, that night, only by klem zareff's guards. everybody else was inside, eating cold rations when hungry and, when they could keep awake no longer, bedding down on piles of blankets or going up to the barracks rooms above.
the next day they found the relay station which rebroadcast signals from the buried aerial—or wouldn't one say, sub-terrial?—on top of the mesa. as conn had expected, it was on top of a high butte three and a half miles to the south; it had been so skillfully camouflaged that none of the outlaw bands who roamed the badlands had found it. after that, force command duplicate was in communication with the rest of poictesme.
they moved into the staff headquarters at the top; foxx travis's office, tidied up, became the headquarters for the company officials and chief supervisors. the workmen quartered themselves in the enlisted barracks, helping themselves liberally to anything they found. the crowds of sightseers kept swarming in, giving tom brangwyn's police plenty to do. tom himself turned the marshal's office in litchfield over to his chief deputy. klem zareff insisted on more men for his guard force. a dozen gunboats, eighty-foot craft mounting one 90-mm gun, several smaller auto-cannon and one missile-launcher, had been found; he took them over immediately, naming them for capital ships of the old system states navy. it took some argument to dissuade him from repainting all of them black and green. he kept them all in the air, with a swarm of smaller airboats and combat-cars, circling the underground headquarters at a radius of a hundred miles. these patrols reported a general exodus from the region. at least a dozen outlaw bands, all with fast contragravity, had been camped inside the zone. some fled at once; the rest needed only a few warning shots to send them away. other bands, looking like legitimate prospecting parties, began to filter into the badlands. zareff came to rodney maxwell—instead of kurt fawzi, the titular head of the company, which was significant—to find out what policy regarding them would be.
"well, we have no right to keep them out, as long as they stay outside our ten-mile radius," conn's father said. "and[pg 65] as we're the only thing that even looks like law around here, i'd say we have an obligation to give them protection. have your boats investigate them; if they're legitimate, tell them they can call on us for help if they need it."
conn protested, privately.
"there's a lot of stuff around here, in small caches," he said. "equipment for guerrilla companies, in event of invasion. when work slacks off here, we could pick that stuff up."
"conn, there's an old stock-market maxim: 'a bear can make money sometimes, and a bull can make money sometimes, but in the long run, a hog always loses.' let the other people find some of this; it'll all help the plan. fact is, i've been thinking of leaking some information, if i can do it without fawzi and that gang finding out. do you know a good supply depot or something like that, say over on acaire, or on the west coast? big enough to be important, and to start a second prospectors' rush away from us."
"how about one of those hospitals?"
"no; not a hospital. we might use them to talk wade lucas into joining us. a lot of medical stores would be a good bait for him. i'm afraid he's going to make trouble if we don't do something about him."
"well, how about engineering and construction equipment? i know where there's a lot of that, down to the southwest."
"that's farming country; that stuff'll be useful down there. i'll do that."
the next morning, rodney maxwell scorched the stratosphere to storisende in his recon-car. the day after he got back, there was a big discovery of engineering equipment to the southwest and, as he had anticipated, a second rush of prospectors. they had the vertical shaft clear now, and the lester dawes was shuttling back and forth between force command duplicate and storisende. other ships were coming in, now, mostly privately owned freighting ships. they bought almost anything, as fast as it came out.
the stock market had been paralyzed for a couple of days after the discovery of force command; nobody seemed to[pg 66] know what to sell and what to hold. now it was going perfectly insane. twenty or thirty new companies were being formed; unlike litchfield exploration & salvage, they were all offering their stock to the public. a week after the opening of force command, the stock exchange reported the first half-million-share day since the war. a week after that, there were two million-share days in succession.
some of the l. e. & s. stockholders who had come out on the first day began drifting back to litchfield. lester dawes was the first to defect; there was nothing he could do at force command, and a great deal that needed his personal attention at the bank. morgan gatworth and lorenzo menardes and one or two others followed. kurt fawzi, however, refused to leave. merlin was somewhere here at force command, he was sure of it, and he wasn't leaving till it was found. neither were franz veltrin or dolf kellton or judge ledue. tom brangwyn resigned as town marshal; klem zareff was too busy even to think of merlin; he had almost as many men under his command, and twice as much contragravity, as he had had when the system states alliance army had surrendered.
conn flew to litchfield, and found that the public works project had come to a stop at noon of the day when force command was entered, and that nothing had been done on it since. the cold vitrifier was still standing in the middle of the mall, and topside litchfield was littered in a dozen places with forsaken equipment and half-completed paving. there was no one in kurt fawzi's office in the airlines building, and the employment office was jammed with migratory workers vainly seeking jobs.
he hunted up morgan gatworth, the lawyer.
"can't some of you get things started again?" he wanted to know. "this place is worse than it was before they started cleaning up."
"yes, i know." gatworth walked to an open window and looked down on the littered mall. "but everybody just dropped everything as soon as you opened force command. kurt fawzi's not been back here since."
"well, you're here. lester dawes and lorenzo menardes[pg 67] are here. why don't you just take over. kurt fawzi couldn't care less what you do; he's forgotten he is mayor of litchfield. he's forgotten there is a litchfield."
"well, i don't like to just move into the mayor's office and take over...."
from somewhere below, a submachine gun hammered. there were yells, pistol shots, and the submachine gun hammered again, a couple of short bursts.
"some of the farm-tramps who can't get jobs, trying to steal something to eat, i suppose," conn commented. gatworth was frowning thoughtfully. he'd only need one more, very slight, push. "why don't you talk to wade lucas. he's got brains, and he's honest—nobody but an honest man would have made himself as unpopular as lucas has. if you pretend to be disillusioned with this merlin business it might help convince him."
"he was blaming you and your father for what's been going on here in the last two weeks. yes. he'd help get things straightened out."
at home, he found his mother simply dazed. she was happy to see him, and solicitous about his and his father's health. it seemed at times, though, as if he were somebody she had never met before. events had gotten so far beyond her that she wasn't even trying to catch up.
flora, returning from school, stopped short when she saw him.
"well! i hope you like what you've done!" she greeted him.
"for a start, yes."
"for a start! you know what you've done?"
"yes. i don't know what you think i've done, though. tell me."
"you've turned everything into a madhouse; you've sent this whole world merlin-crazy. look at the stock market...."
"you look at it. all i can see is a pack of lunatics playing russian roulette with five chambers loaded out of six. some of this so-called stock that's being peddled around isn't worth five millisols a share—seekers for merlin, ltd., closed today at a hundred and seventy. you notice, there isn't any l. e.[pg 68] & s. being traded. if you don't believe me, talk to lester dawes; he'll tell you what we think of this market."
"well, it's your fault!"
"in part it's my fault that any of these quarter-wits have any money to play the market with. they wouldn't have money enough to play a five-centisol slot machine if we hadn't gotten a little business started."
there was just a little truth to that, too. a few woolen socks were coming out from under mattresses, and a few tin cans were being exhumed in cellars, since the new flood of federation equipment and supplies had gotten on the market. he'd seen a freshly lettered sign on len yeniguchi's tailor shop: quarter price in federation currency.
that night, however, he had one of the nightmares he used to have as a child—a dream of climbing up onto a huge machine and getting it started, and then clinging, helpless and terrified, unable to stop it as it went faster and faster toward destruction.
klem zareff's patrols were encountering larger outlaw bands, the result of gang mergers. they were fighting with prospecting parties, and prospecting parties were fighting one another. much of this was making the newscasts. one battle, between two regularly chartered prospecting companies, lasted three days, with an impressive casualty list.
public demands were growing that the planetary government do something about the situation; the government was wondering what to do, or how. there were indignant questions in parliament. finally, the government dragged a couple of armed ships off mothball row—a combat freighter like the lester dawes, and a big assault transport—and began trying to get them into commission.
and, of course, the market boom was still on. the newscasts were full of that, too. he had started worrying about if a bust came; now he was worrying about what would happen when it did. another good reason for wanting to get to koshchei and getting a hypership built; when the bust came, he and his father would want one, very badly.
in any case, it was time to begin getting an expedition[pg 69] ready for barathrum spaceport. quite a few of the new companies had large contragravity craft, and the nascent planetary air navy was approaching a state of being. he wanted to get out there before anybody else did.
maybe if they got the hypership built soon enough, it would start a second, sound boom that would cushion the crash of the present speculative market when it came, as come it must.
he talked to klem zareff about borrowing a couple of the eighty-foot gunboats. zareff's attitude was automatically negative.
"we mustn't weaken our defense-perimeter; we'd be inviting disaster. why, this whole country in here is simply swarming with outlaws. they fired on one of our gunboats, the werewolf, yesterday."
he'd heard about that; somebody had launched a missile from the ground, and the werewolf had detonated it with a counter-missile. it had probably been some legitimate prospecting company who'd taken the l. e. & s. craft for a pirate.
"and there was a battle down in the devil's pigpen day before yesterday."
that had been outlaws; they had been annihilated by something calling itself seekers for merlin, ltd., whose stock was still skyrocketing on the exchange. he mentioned that.
"these other prospecting companies are doing a lot of our outlaw-fighting for us, and as long as the country's full of small independent parties, the outlaws go after them and leave us alone."
"yes, and i have my doubts about a lot of these prospecting companies, and a lot of the outlaws, too," zareff said. "i think a lot of both are federation agents; they're waiting till we find merlin, and then they'll all jump us."
"well," conn adjusted his argument to the old rebel's obsession, "i'll admit that, as a possibility. if so, we'll need heavier weapons than we have. this spaceport on barathrum might be just the place to get them."
"yes. it might. defense armament, and stored ships' weapons. say, if we grab that place and move all the heavy guns and missiles here, we could stand off anybody." the thought[pg 70] of a fight with minions of the terran federation seemed to have shaved ten years off his age in a twinkling. "you take the lester dawes, and, let's say, three of these gunboats. let me see. goblin, fred karski. and vampire, charley gatworth. and dragon, stefan jorisson. they're all good men. home guard; trained them myself."
"aren't you coming, colonel?"
"oh, i'd like to, conn, but i can't. i don't want to be away from here; no telling what might happen. but you keep in constant screen-contact; if you get into any trouble, i'll come with everything i can put into the air."
