ded at his decision, then
continued.

[Illustration]

"So you thought you had me safely out of the way. Breaking my spirit
under the guise of 'giving me a little background in the Corps'
activities.' In this sense your plan failed. Something else happened
instead. I nosed through the files and found them most interesting.
Particularly the C & M setup--the Categorizer and Memory. That building
full of machinery that takes in and digests news and reports from all
the planets in the galaxy, indexes it to every category it can possibly
relate, then files it. Great machine to work with. I had it digging out
spaceship info for me, something I have always been interested in--"

"You should be," Inskipp interrupted rudely. "You've stolen enough of
them in your time."

I gave him a hurt look and went on--slowly. "I won't bore you with all
the details, since you seem impatient, but eventually I turned up this
plan." He had it out of my fingers before it cleared my wallet.

"What are you getting at?" he mumbled as he ran his eyes over the
blueprints. "This is an ordinary heavy-cargo and passenger job. It's no
more a Warlord battleship than I am."

* * * * *

It is hard to curl your lips with contempt and talk at the same time,
but I succeeded. "Of course. You don't expect them to file warship plans
with the League Registry, do you? But, as I said, I know more than a
little bit about ships. It seemed to me this thing was just too big for
the use intended. Enough old ships are fuel-wasters, you don't have to
build new ones to do that. This started me thinking and I punched for a
complete list of ships that size that had been constructed in the past.
You can imagine my surprise when, after three minutes of groaning, the C
& M only produced six. One was built for self-sustaining colony attempt
at the second galaxy. For all we know she is still on the way. The other
five were all D-class colonizers, built during the Expansion when large
populations were moved. Too big to be practical now.

"I was still teased, as I had no idea what a ship this large could be
used for. So I removed the time interlock on the C & M and let it pick
around through the entire history of space to see if it could find a
comparison. It sure did. Right at the Golden Age of Empire expansion,
the giant Warlord battleships. The machine even found a blueprint for
me."

Inskipp grabbed again and began comparing the two prints