lin has been found!_" Newsmen began arriving--Zareff's men
had orders to pass them through the cordon that had been put up around
Force Command--and they took up his time. It was worth it, though.
They could tell him what was going on.

J. Fitzwilliam Sterber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested, on a
farrago of fraud charges--"I don't know who he's supposed to have
defrauded; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"--and bail
was being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged, but
he was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We're
going to start a false-arrest suit--"

"If you're alive to." Apparently Sterber hadn't thought of that. "What
do you think's going to happen when the Stock Exchange opens?"

"It's going to be bad. But don't worry; your father must have foreseen
something like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a few
more people." He named some of the Trisystem Investments people and
some of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace the market as long
as we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in the
long run."

Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and Clyde
Nichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte had
been running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemont
had gone to space in the _Ouroboros II_.

"Well, they caught up with you," he said. Evidently he had figured out
what, the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do about
it?"

"Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find it
before things get too bad." He told Luther the situation of the
moment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?"

"We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to send
any more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure this
thing you've found is Merlin?"

"I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatus
they'd need to operate a thing like Merlin--Yes, Luther. I am sure we
have found Merlin."

Chen-Wong looked at him curiously. "I hope so. I can't think of
anything else that can stop this business."

Tom Brangwyn was in the room when he turned from the screen.

"We searched Leibert's--Shanlee's--rooms," he said. "We found a bomb."

"What kind of a bomb?"

"Vest-pocket thermonuclear. He seems to have gotten the fissionables
by taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing's
packed inside