re's a Merlin."

Maybe he didn't have to tell her the truth.

When they returned to the house, his mother greeted him:

"Conn, your father's been trying to get you ever since you went out.
Call him, right away; Ritz-Gartner Hotel, in Storisende. It's
something about a ship."

It look a little time to get his father on-screen. He was excited and
happy.

"Hi, Conn; we have one," he said.

"What kind of a ship?"

"You know her. The _Harriet Barne_."

That he hadn't expected. Something off Mothball Row that would have to
be flown to Barathrum and torn down and completely rebuilt, but not
the one that was there already, partly finished.

"How the dickens did you wangle that?"

"Oh, it was Yves' idea, to start with. He knew about her; the T. &
O.'s been losing money on her for years. He said if they had to pay
prize-money on her and then either restore her to original condition
or finish the job and build a spaceship they didn't want, it would
almost bankrupt the company. They got up as high as fifty thousand
sols for prize-money and we just laughed at them. So we made a
proposition of our own.

"We proposed organizing a new company, subsidiary to both L. E. & S.
and T. & O., to engage in interplanetary shipping; both companies to
assign their equity in the _Harriet Barne_ to the new company, the
work of completing her to be done at our spaceport and the labor cost
to be shared. This would give us our spaceship, and get T. & O. off
the hook all around. Everybody was for it except the president of T. &
O. Know anything about him?"

Conn shook his head. His father continued:

"Name's Jethro Sastraman. He could play Scrooge in _Christmas Carol_
without any makeup at all. He hasn't had a new idea since he got out
of college, and that was while the War was still going on.
'Preposterous; utterly visionary and impractical,'" his father
mimicked. "Fortunately, a majority of the big stockholders didn't
agree; they finally bullied him into agreeing. We're calling the new
company Alpha-Interplanetary, we have an application for charter in,
and that'll go through almost automatically."

"Who's going to be the president of this new company?"

"You know him. Character named Rodney Maxwell. Yves is going to be
vice-president in charge of operations; he's flying to Barathrum
tomorrow or the next day with a gang of technicians we're recruiting.
T. & O. are giving us Clyde Nichols and Mack Vibart, and a lot of men
from the