f them are directly
descended from members of Genji Gartner's original crew."

"You don't anticipate any trouble about getting the charter?"

"Not exactly. And Lester Dawes is in Storisende now, trying to find us
a contragravity ship. There are about a dozen in the hands of
receivers for bankrupt shipping companies; he might find one that's
still airworthy. Oh; you remember how I insisted on absolute secrecy
about our Merlin objective? That's working out better than my fondest
expectations. It's leaking like a machine-gunned water tank, and
everybody it leaks to is positive that we know exactly where Merlin is
or we wouldn't be trying to keep it a secret."

Three days later, Conn hitched a ride on a freight-scow to Litchfield.
From the air, he could see a haze of bonfire smoke over High Garden
Terrace, and a gang of men at work. There were more men at work on the
Mall and along the streets on either side. He went up from the yard
below the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found his
mother in the living room watching a screen play with one eye and
keeping the other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravity
tank, which was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and taking
swipes at the furniture with a rotary dustmop. She was glad to see
him, and then became troubled.

"Conn, when Flora comes home, you won't argue with her, will you?"

"Only in self-defense." That was the wrong thing to say. He changed it
to, "No; I won't argue with her at all," and then quoted Wade Lucas
quoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple of
times that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that it
wouldn't get loose and hurt anybody if he did find it.

In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, the
housecleaning-robot began knocking things off the top of a table.

"Oscar! You stop that!" his mother yelled.

Oscar, deaf as the adder, kept on. Conn yelled at his mother to use
her control; she remembered that she had one, a thing like an
old-fashioned pocket watch, around her neck on a chain, and got the
robot stopped.

No wonder she was afraid of Merlin.

He took advantage of the interruption to get to his room and change
clothes, then went up to the hangar and got out an air-cavalry mount.
About fifty men were working on High Garden Terrace, pruning and
trimming and leveling the lawns. There was a big vitrifier on the
Mall--even at five hundred feet he co