prisoner-interrogation tricks in the book, and that's always been one
of the best."

"Then why did he act the way he did at the meeting? All he did there
was cut himself off from learning anything more from any of us. In his
place, would you have done that? No; you'd have tried to take the lead
in hunting for Merlin yourself. Now wouldn't you?"

Zareff was silent, first puzzled, and then hurt. Now he would have to
tear the whole idea down and build it over.

Flora was quite friendly when she came home from school. She'd found
out, somewhere, that Conn had been the originator of the municipal
face-lifting project. He was tempted, briefly, to tell her a little,
if not all, of the truth about the Maxwell Plan, then decided against
it. The way to keep a secret was to confide it to nobody; every time
you did, you doubled, maybe even squared, the chances of exposure.

He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, about
his talk with Klem Zareff.

"How long's he been like that, anyhow?" he asked.

"As long as I've known him. When it comes to melons and wine and
bossing tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out of
the rain, Klem Zareff's as sane as I am. But on the subject of the
Terran Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"

"They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have places
like Tramptown on Terra, too."

"Uhuh. I suppose, in Klem's boots, I'd be just as crazy as he is,"
Rodney Maxwell said. "One minute, he had a wife and two children in
Kindelburg, on Ashmodai, and the next minute Kindelburg was a puddle
of radioactive slag."

"That was in '51, wasn't it? I read about it," Conn said. "It was a
famous victory."

That was from a poem, too.

Rodney Maxwell flew to Storisende early the next morning. Conn rode
back to Tenth Army on an empty scow and pitched into the job of
getting the stores and equipment out of the underground shelters. More
farm-tramps arrived, and had to be pounded into obedience and taught
the work. At the same time, Litchfield was getting a steady influx of
job-seekers, and a secondary swarm of thugs, grifters and gangsters
who followed them. Klem Zareff, having gotten all his melons pressed,
came out to Tenth Army, where he selected fifty of the best men from
the work-gangs and began drilling them as soldiers to guard the next
operation. The manual of arms, drill and salute he taught them was, of
course, System States