t of information on locations of supply depots
and things like that. An amazing list of things that haven't been
discovered yet. It's going to be too much for us to handle alone;
we're organizing a company to do it. We'll need a lot of labor, for
one thing; jobs for some of these Tramptowners."

"That's going to be something awfully big," his mother said dubiously.
"You never did anything like that before."

"I never had the kind of a partner I have now. It's Maxwell & Son,
from now on."

"Who's going to be in this company?" Flora wanted to know.

"Oh, everybody around town; Kurt and the Judge and Klem, and Lester
Dawes. All that crowd."

"The Fawzis' Office Gang," Flora said disparagingly. "I suppose
they'll want Conn to take them right to where Merlin is, the first
thing."

"Well, not the first thing," Conn said. "Merlin was one thing I
couldn't find out anything about on Terra."

"I'll bet you couldn't!"

"The people at Armed Forces Records would let me look at everything
else, and make microcopies and all, but not one word about computers.
Forty years, and they still have the security lid welded shut on
that."

Flora looked at him in shocked surprise. "You don't mean to tell me
you believe in that thing?"

"Sure. How do you think they fought a war around a perimeter of close
to a thousand light-years? They couldn't do all that out of their
heads. They'd have to have computers, and the one they'd use to
correlate everything and work out grand-strategy plans would have to
be a dilly. Why, I'd give anything just to look at the operating
panels for that thing."

"But that's just a silly story; there never was anything like Merlin.
No wonder you couldn't find out about it. You were looking for
something that doesn't exist, just like all these old cranks that sit
around drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin's going to do
for them, and never doing anything for themselves."

"Oh, they're going to do something, now, Flora," his father told her.
"When we get this company organized--"

"You'll dig up a lot of stuff you won't be able to sell, like that
stuff you've been bringing in from Tenth Army, and then you'll go
looping off chasing Merlin, like the rest of them. Well, maybe that'll
be a little better than just sitting in Kurt Fawzi's office talking
about it, but not much."

It kept on like that. Conn and his father tried several times to
change the subject; each time Flora ignored the effort and