The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

Conn used his flashlight and found the power unit for the room lights; all the overhead lights were wired to one unit, if wired were the word for gold-leaf circuits cemented to the walls and covered with insulating paint. For the heavy stuff, like the ventilator fans, they’d have to find the central power plant. He looked around the big room, poking into some of the closets that lined it. Radiation-proof clothing. Tools. Arms and ammunition. First-aid kits. Emergency rations. All the vehicles were plated in shimmering collapsium.

The crowd started coming in: the work-gangs selected for the first exploration work, most of them old hands of Rodney Maxwell’s; the engineers they had recruited; Mohammed Matsui⁠—he had a gang of his own, the same one he had been using in tearing down the converter at Tenth Army; the stockholders and officials; the press. And everybody else Tom Brangwyn’s police hadn’t been able to keep out.

The power plant was at the extreme bottom; Matsui began looking it over at once. Above it they found the service facilities⁠—air-and-water plant; pumps for the artesian well; sewage disposal. Then repair ships, and a laboratory, and laundries and kitchens above that.

“Where do you suppose it is?” Kurt Fawzi was asking. “Up at the very top, I suppose. Let’s go up and work down; I can’t wait till we’ve found it.”

Like a kid on Christmas Eve, Conn thought. And there was no Santa Claus, and Christmas had been abolished.

The place was built in concentric circles, level above level. Combat equipment nearest the tunnel exit and nearest the vertical shaft, and ambulances and decontamination units and equipment for relief and rebuilding next. Storerooms, mile on circular mile of them. Not the hasty packrat cramming he’d seen at Tenth Army; everything had been brought in in order, carefully piled or racked, and then left. More stores for the next three levels up; then living quarters. Enlisted men’s and women’s quarters, no signs of occupancy. Enlisted kitchens and mess halls, untouched.

Most of the officers’ quarters were similarly unused, but here and there some had been occupied. A sloppily made bed. A used cake of soap in the bathroom. An empty bottle in a closet. Officers’ commissary stores had been used from and replaced; the officers’ mess hall and kitchen had been in constant use, and the officers’ club had a comfortably scuffed and lived-in look. There had been a few people there all the time of the War.

“Men and women, all officers or civilians,” Klem Zareff said. “Didn’t even have enlisted men to cook for them. And we haven’t found a scrap of paper with writing on it, or an inch of recorded sound-tape or audiovisual film. Remember those big wire baskets, down at the mass-energy converters? Before they left, they disintegrated every scrap of writing or recording. This is where Merlin is; they were the people who worked with it.”

And above, offices. General Staff. War Planning, with an incredibly complex star-map of the theater of war. Judge Advocate General. Inspector General. Service of Supply. They were full of computers, each one firing the hopes of people like Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and Judge Ledue, but they were only special-purpose machines, the sort to be found in any big business office. The Storisende Stock Exchange probably had much bigger ones.

Then they found big ones, rank on rank of cabinets, long consoles studded with lights and buttons, programming machines.

“It’s Merlin!” Fawzi almost screamed. “We’ve found it!”

One of the reporters who had followed them in snatched his radio handphone from his belt and jabbered, then, realizing that the collapsium shielding kept him from getting out with it, he replaced it and bolted away.

“Hold it!” Conn yelled at the others, who were also becoming hysterical. “Wait till I take a look at this thing.”

They managed to calm themselves. After all, he should know what it was; wasn’t that why he’d gone to school on Terra? They followed him from machine to machine, first hopefully and then fearfully. Finally he turned, shaking his head and feeling like the doctor in a film show, telling the family that there’s no hope for Grandpa.

“This is not Merlin. This is the personnel-file machine. It’s taped for the records and data of every man and woman in the Third Force for the whole War. It’s like the student-record machine at the University.”

“Might have known it; this section in here’s marked G-1 all over everything; that’s personnel. Wouldn’t have Merlin in here,” Klem Zareff was saying.

“Well, we’ll just keep on hunting for it till we do find it,” Kurt Fawzi said. “It’s here somewhere. It has to be.”

The next level up was much smaller. Here were the offices of the top echelons of the Force Command Staff. They, unlike the ones below, had been used; from them, too, every scrap of writing or film or record-tape had vanished.

Finally, they entered the private office of Force-General Foxx Travis. It had not only been used, it was in disorder. Ashtrays full, many of the forty-year-old cigarette ends lipstick tinted. Chairs shoved around at random. Three bottles on the desk, with Terran bourbon labels; two empty and one with about an inch of whisky left in it. But no glasses.

That bothered Conn. Somehow, he couldn’t quite picture the commander and staff of the Third Fleet-Army Force passing bottles around and drinking from the neck. Then he noticed that the wall across the room was strangely scarred and scratched. Dropping his eye to the floor under it, he caught the twinkle of broken glass. They had gathered here, and talked for a long time. Then they had risen, for a final toast, and when it was drunk, they had hurled their glasses against the wall and smashed them.

Then they had gone out, leaving the broken glass and the empty bottles; knowing that they would never return.

Before they returned to the lower level into which the lateral tunnel entered, Matsui and