of the equipment at three weeks. A week later, he was
on-screen to report that the skeleton ship--they had christened her
_The Thing_, and when Conn saw screen views of her he understood
why--was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big mining
machines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshchei had done a stroke
of work on anything else.

"Sylvie's coming along with her; so are Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and
Ham Matsui and Gomez and Karanja and four or five others. They'll be
ready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads," Jacquemont
added.

That was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any of
the Merlin-hunting factions at Force Command. In case trouble started,
he could rely on them.

"Well, dig out some shootin'-irons for them," he advised. "They may
need them here."

Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened that
collapsium can on top of Force Command, and how the people there
reacted to it.

_The Thing_ took a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip;
conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabin
were apparently worse than on the _Harriet Barne_ on her second trip
to Koschchei. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. Carl
Leibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had to
pray the ship across space.

At the same time, reports of the near completion of _Ouroboros II_
were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention from
what was happening at Force Command. Cargo was being collected for
her; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people would
be drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses of
everything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up and
down the Gordon Valley. Melon and tobacco planters were talking about
breaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for the
next year. Agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing high
prices. So were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery. It began to
look as though the Maxwell Plan was really getting started.

It was decided to send the hypership to Baldur on her first voyage;
that was Wade Lucas's suggestion. He was going with her himself, to
recruit scientific and technical graduates from his alma mater, the
University of Paris-on-Baldur, and from the other schools there. Conn
was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on
Koshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one