erplanetary is going to
start a training program here at Storisende; you'd better leave one of
your ships for them to work on, and send back as many ships as you can
find officers and crews for."

"We're getting things really started."

"Yes. The only trouble is...." His father frowned. "I don't understand
these people, Conn. Everybody ought to be making millions out of this
by this time next year, but all any of them, even these Storisende
bankers, can talk about is how soon we're going to find Merlin."

"I wish we could stop that, somehow. Listen; I have it. Merlin never
was on Poictesme; Merlin was a space-station a few thousand miles
off-planet; there was a crew of operators aboard, and they
communicated with Force Command by radio. When the War ended, they
took it outside the system and shot off a planetbuster inside her. No
more Merlin. How would that be?"

His father shook his head. "Wouldn't do. If anybody believed it, which
I doubt, they'd just quit. The market would collapse, everybody would
be broke, it would just be the end of the War all over again. Conn, we
can't let it stop now. We're going too fast to stop; if we tried it,
we'd smash up and break our necks."

XVIII

Jerry Rivas, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping things
running on Koshchei. Work on the interplanetary ship at Port
Carpenter, had stopped when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found;
it had never been resumed. When Conn returned, he found work started
on the _Ouroboros II_. Some of the two hundred newcomers who came in
on the _Helen O'Loy_ had special skills needed on the hypership; most
of them went with Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to Sickle
Mountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. Some of them,
it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. Sylvie, who had
been one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping him
with the long lists of needed materials, some of which had to be
brought from other places as much as a thousand miles away. Jerry
Rivas went back to exploring; Nichols had to drop his space-training
work temporarily to organize a fleet of air-freighters; usually, the
men best able to operate them were urgently needed on some job at the
construction dock.

Ships lifted out almost daily from Sickle Mountain. They tried to get
some kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselves
of what they needed for themselves. Some of the ships came bac