ks trying
to make copies of voice-tapes. I think it's some of these other
Merlin-chasing companies, trying to find out how close we are to it.
Klem Zareff is recruiting more guards. But how soon are you going to
get that ship built?"

"We're working on it. That's all I know, now."

He went back to work getting a classroom ready for his students. If
he'd accepted that instructorship at Montevideo, he wouldn't be a full
professor now, but none of the rest of this would be happening,
either.

That night, he had the dream about starting the big machine and not
being able to stop it again.

There was street-fighting in Storisende between the Cybernarchists and
Government troops. There was a pitched battle in the west between the
Armageddonists (Merlin-is-Satan) and the Human Supremacy League
(Merlin-is-the-Golem), with heavy losses and claims of victory on both
sides. President Vyckhoven proclaimed planet-wide martial law, and
then discovered that he had nothing to enforce it with.

Luther Chen-Wong screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice was
almost inaudibly low at first.

"Conn, I just had a call from Jerry and Clyde. I think we can knock
off work on that ship we're building now. We won't need it."

"Have they found a ship?" If they had, it would be the first one
anybody had found. "Where?"

"They haven't found _a_ ship, Conn; they've found all of them. All the
ships in the Alpha System except the _Harriet Barne_ and the two
they're building at Storisende. The place is marked on the map as
Sickle Mountain Naval Observatory. It's just a bitty little dot, but
the map was made before the evacuation started. It's where most of the
troops in the system were embarked on hyperships, I think. Wait till I
show you the views."

Conn put on another screen; the first view was from an altitude of
five miles. He didn't need Luther's voice to identify Sickle Mountain;
a long curve, with a spur at right angles to one end, the name must
have suggested itself to whoever saw it first. The observatory had
been built where the handle of the sickle joined the blade; as the
ship from which the view had been taken had approached, the details
grew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plain
inside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like
tinsel dust on red-brown velvet.

"Great Ghu, are those all ships?"

"That's right. Look at this one, now."

The view changed. The aircraft was down, now,