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lin has been found!_" Newsmen began arriving--Zareff's men had orders to pass them through the cordon that had been put up around Force Command--and they took up his time. It was worth it, though. They could tell him what was going on. J. Fitzwilliam Sterber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested, on a farrago of fraud charges--"I don't know who he's supposed to have defrauded; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"--and bail was being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged, but he was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We're going to start a false-arrest suit--" "If you're alive to." Apparently Sterber hadn't thought of that. "What do you think's going to happen when the Stock Exchange opens?" "It's going to be bad. But don't worry; your father must have foreseen something like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a few more people." He named some of the Trisystem Investments people and some of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace the market as long as we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in the long run." Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and Clyde Nichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte had been running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemont had gone to space in the _Ouroboros II_. "Well, they caught up with you," he said. Evidently he had figured out what, the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do about it?" "Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find it before things get too bad." He told Luther the situation of the moment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?" "We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to send any more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure this thing you've found is Merlin?" "I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatus they'd need to operate a thing like Merlin--Yes, Luther. I am sure we have found Merlin." Chen-Wong looked at him curiously. "I hope so. I can't think of anything else that can stop this business." Tom Brangwyn was in the room when he turned from the screen. "We searched Leibert's--Shanlee's--rooms," he said. "We found a bomb." "What kind of a bomb?" "Vest-pocket thermonuclear. He seems to have gotten the fissionables by taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing's packed inside
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