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

fifty-odd thousand years to do it. A good computer did it in thirty seconds. That was one difference between people and computers. The other difference was that the desirability of making a hyperspace jump would never occur to a computer, unless somebody pushed a button and taped in instructions.

They found a three-hundred-foot globular skeleton, probably the nucleus of a big hyperspace ship, and decided that was big enough for what they wanted. The entire colony got to work on it. Photoprinted plans and specifications poured out as Jacquemont and a couple of draftsmen got them up. Steel came out of the steel mill at one end while ore came in at the other. A swarm of big contragravity machines, some robotic and some human-operated, clustered around the skeletal hull like hornets building a nest.

Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines was chartered; the lawyers reported having to overcome a little more resistance than usual from the government about that. And the bill to nationalize Merlin, which had died in committee, was resuscitated and was being debated hotly on the floor of Parliament. The Administration was now supporting it.

“Are they completely crazy?” Conn wanted to know, when he heard about that. “They pass that bill and nobody’s going to look for Merlin if they know the government will snatch it as soon as they find it.”

“That is precisely Jake Vyckhoven’s idea,” his father replied. “I told you he was afraid of Merlin. He’s getting more afraid of it every day.”

He had reason to. There was a growing sentiment in favor of turning the entire government over to the computer as soon as it was found. To his horror, Conn heard himself named as chairman of a committee that should be set up to operate it. The moderates, who had merely wanted Merlin used in an advisory capacity, were dropping out; the agitation was coming from extremists who wanted Merlin to be the whole government, and now the extremists were developing an extreme wing of their own, who called themselves Cybernarchists and started wearing colored-shirt uniforms and greeting each other with an archaic stiff-arm salute, and the words, “Hail Merlin!”

And the followers of the gospel-shouter on the west coast were now cropping up all over the mainland, and on the continent of Acaire to the north, and another cult, non-religious, was convinced that Merlin was a living machine, with conscious intelligence of its own and awesome psi-powers, a sort of super-Golem, which, if found and awakened, would enslave the whole Galaxy. Fortunately, these two hated each other as venomously as both did the Cybernarchists, and spent most of their energies attacking each other’s meetings. The news-services were beginning to publish casualty lists, some heavy enough for outpost fighting between a couple of regular armies.

One thing, it helped the employment situation. Everybody was hiring mercenaries.

“But what,” Conn asked, “are the sane people doing?”

“You ought to know,” his father told him. “I suspect that you have all of them on Koshchei now.”

The sane people, if that was what they were, were being busy. They were putting a set of Abbott lift-and-drive engines together, and Conn’s computer class was estimating the mass of the finished ship and the amount of energy needed to overcome gravitation and give it constant acceleration from Koshchei to Poictesme. They were learning, by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudograv engines. And they were putting together a hundred and one other things, all of which was good training for the time they’d be ready to start work on Ouroboros II.

Jerry Rivas had found a contragravity craft which seemed to have been used by some top official for business and inspection trips, had gathered a crew of non-specialists who weren’t urgently needed at Port Carpenter, and set out to circumnavigate the planet. It worked just the reverse of expectation. He found a big uranium mine, with an isotope-separation plant and a battery of plutonium-breeders; that meant that Mohammed Matsui and half a dozen other nuclear-power people had to get into another boat and speed after him to see what he had really found. As soon as they landed, Rivas took off again to discover a copper mine and a complex of smelters and processing plants. That took a few more experts, or reasonable facsimiles, away from Port Carpenter. And then he found a whole city that manufactured nothing but computers and robo-controls and things like that.

Conn loaded his whole computer-theory class onto a freight-scow and took them there. By the time he landed, his father was screening him from Storisende.

“When are you going to get the ship finished?” he was asking. “Kurt Fawzi’s pestering the daylights out of me. He wants that equipment you promised him.”

“We’re working on it. What’s happened, has Carl Leibert had another revelation?”

“I don’t know about that. Kurt’s sure Merlin is directly under Force Command. And speaking about Leibert, Klem Zareff’s been after me about him. You know I’ve contracted for the full-time and exclusive services of this Barton-Massarra detective agency. Well, Klem wants me to put them to work investigating Leibert.”

“Yes, I know; Leibert’s a Terran Federation spy. Why do you need the full-time services of the biggest private detective agency on Poictesme?”

“There have been some odd things happening. People have been trying to bribe and intimidate some of my office help. I have found microphones and screen-pickups planted around. I caught one of our clerks trying to make copies of voice-tapes. I think it’s some of these other Merlin-chasing companies, trying to find out how close we are to it. Klem Zareff is recruiting more guards. But how soon are you going to get that ship built?”

“We’re working on it. That’s all I know, now.”

He went back to work getting a classroom ready for his students. If he’d accepted that instructorship at Montevideo, he wouldn’t be a full professor now, but none of the rest of this would be happening, either.

That night, he had the dream about starting the big machine and