ment aboard the _Helen O'Loy_," he said.
"That shouldn't be unloaded here; we'll take the ship out to Force
Command and unload it there."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw, a lurking reporter snatch the
handphone off his radio and begin talking; it would be stated
authoritatively that Merlin was at Force Command and would be
uncovered as soon as special equipment from Koshchei arrived.

Everybody at the long table was shouting at everybody else. The Jurgen
and Janicot Companies wanted to buy ships from Koshchei Exploitation &
Development. The Alpha-Interplanetary director, who was also a
vice-president of Transcontinent & Overseas, opposed that; another
director of A-I, who was also board chairman of Koshchei Exploitation
& Development, wanted to sell ships to anybody who had the price, the
Transcontinent & Overseas man was calling him a traitor to the
company, and one of the stockbrokers, who was also a vice-president of
Trisystem Investments and a director of Trisystem & Interstellar
Spacelines, was wanting to know which company. And a banker who was
stockholder in all the companies was shouting that they were all a
gang of crooks, and J. Fitzwilliam Sterber was declaring that anybody
who called him a crook could continue the discussion through seconds.

Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal on
Poictesme. He wondered how many duels this meeting was going to hatch.

The next afternoon the _Helen O'Loy_ was unloaded, all but the mining
equipment; Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley Gatworth and a few
others took her out to Force Command. They were met by Klem Zareff's
armed airboats two hundred and fifty miles from the mesa, and they
found the place in more of a state of siege than when the Badlands had
been full of outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have been
moved in from Barathrum Spaceport, and Zareff had more men and
firepower than he had ever commanded during the System States War. If
Minister-General Murchison was convinced that the Merlin excitement
was a cover for some seditious plot against the Federation, this ought
to give him food for thought.

There was still work, mostly boring lateral shafts for echo shots,
going on at the butte, under the relay station. That was Leibert, who
was still insisting that that was where Merlin was buried. There was
also some work on top of the mesa, by those who were convinced that
that was where Merlin was to be found. Kurt Fawzi was ta