lin to show us how to get some prosperity here; bring things back
to what they were before Poictesme went broke."

"And that's what Father and I are trying to do. You're going into the
woods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax." Fawzi looked
at him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better of
it. "If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss of
markets. If we find Merlin, and tape it with everything that's
happened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tell
us where to find new markets. But the markets won't come to us. We'll
have to do our own exporting, and we'll need ships. Now, you men have
been studying about Merlin, and hunting for Merlin, all your lives. I
can't add anything to what you know, and neither can my father. You
find Merlin, and we'll have the ships ready when you do find it."

"Kurt, I think he has a point," somebody said.

"You're blasted well right he has," Klem Zareff put in. "If it wasn't
for Conn Maxwell, you know where we'd be? Back in Litchfield, sitting
around in Kurt's office, talking about how wonderful things'll be when
we find Merlin, and doing nothing to find it."

"Kurt, I believe Conn is entitled to an apology," Judge Ledue ruled.
"How close we are to finding Merlin I don't know, but it is due to him
that we have any hope of finding it at all."

"Conn, I'm sorry," Fawzi said. "I oughtn't to have said some of the
things I did. But we're all on edge; we've been having so much
trouble.... Conn, it's right there at Force Command; I know it is.
We've been all over the place. We have shafts sunk at each of the
corners; we've used scanners, and put off echo shots. Nothing. We
looked for additional passages out of the headquarters; there aren't
any. But it has to be somewhere around. It just _has_ to be!"

"Maybe if I go out to Force Command with you, I might see something
you've overlooked. And if I can't, I'll try to scrape up some stuff on
Koshchei for you. Deep-vein scanners, that sort of thing, from the
mines."

They took the _Lester Dawes_ out at a little past noon and turned
south and east. Everybody aboard was happy--except Conn Maxwell. He
was thinking of the years and years ahead of these trusting, hopeful
old men, each year the grave of another expectation. Two hundred miles
from Force Command, the _Goblin_ met them, her sides still spalled and
dented from the hits she had taken in Barathrum Spaceport. When they
came