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Most of the officers' quarters were similarly unused, but here and there some
had been occupied. A sloppily made bed. A used cake of soap in the bathroom.
An empty bottle in a closet. Officers' commissary stores had been used from
and replaced; the officers' mess hall and kitchen had been in constant use,
and the officers' club had a comfortably scuffed and lived-in look. There had
been a few people there all the time of the War.
"Men and women, all officers or civilians," Klem Zareff said. "Didn't even
have enlisted men to cook for them. And we haven't found a scrap of paper with
writing on it, or an inch of recorded sound-tape or audiovisual film. Remember
those big wire baskets, down at the mass-energy converters? Before they left,
they disintegrated every scrap of writing or recording. This is where Merlin
is; they were the people who worked with it."
And above, offices. General Staff. War Planning, with an incredibly complex
star-map of the theater of war. Judge Advocate General. Inspector General.
Service of Supply. They were full of computers, each one firing the hopes of
people like Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and Judge Ledue, but they were only
special-purpose machines, the sort to be found in any big business office.
The Storisende Stock Exchange probably had much bigger ones.
Then they found big ones, rank on rank of cabinets, long consoles studded with
lights and buttons, programming machines.
"It's Merlin!" Fawzi almost screamed. "We've found it!"
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One of the reporters who had followed them in snatched his radio handphone
from his belt and jabbered, then, realizing that the collapsium shielding kept
him from getting out with it, he replaced it and bolted away.
"Hold it!" Conn yelled at the others, who were also becoming hysterical. "Wait
till I take a look at this thing."
They managed to calm themselves. After all, he should know what it was; wasn't
that why he'd gone to school on Terra? They followed him from machine to
machine, first hopefully and then fearfully. Finally he turned, shaking his
head and feeling like the doctor in a film show, telling the family that
there's no hope for Grandpa.
"This is not Merlin. This is the personnel-file machine. It's taped for the
records and data of every man and woman in the Third Force for the whole War.
It's like the student-record machine at the University."
"Might have known it; this section in here's marked G-1 all over everything;
that's personnel. Wouldn't have Merlin in here," Klem Zareff was saying.
"Well, we'll just keep on hunting for it till we do find it," Kurt Fawzi said.
"It's here somewhere. It has to be."
The next level up was much smaller. Here were the offices of the top echelons
of the Force Command Staff. They, unlike the ones below, had been used; from
them, too, every scrap of writing or film or record-tape had vanished.
Finally, they entered the private office of ForceGeneral Foxx Travis. It had
not only been used, it was
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er.txt in disorder. Ashtrays full, many of the forty-year-old cigarette ends
lipstick tinted. Chairs shoved around at random. Three bottles on the desk,
with Terran bourbon labels; two empty and one with about an inch of whisky
left in it. But no glasses.
That bothered Conn. Somehow, he couldn't quite picture the commander and staff
of the Third FleetArmy Force passing bottles around and drinking from the
neck. Then he noticed that the wall across the room was strangely scarred and
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scratched. Dropping his eye to the floor under it, he caught the twinkle of
broken glass. They had gathered here, and talked for a long time. Then they
had risen, for a final toast, and when it was drunk, they had hurled their
glasses against the wall and smashed them.
Then they had gone out, leaving the broken glass and the empty bottles;
knowing that they would never return.
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VIII
BEFORE THEY returned to the lower level into which the lateral tunnel entered,
Matsui and his gang had the power plant going; the ventilator fans were
humming softly, and whenever they pressed a starting button, the escalators
began to move. They got the pumps going, and the oxygen-generators, and the
sewage disposal system. Until the communication center could be checked and
the relay station found, they ran a cable out to the Lester Dawes, landed in
the canyon, and used her screenand-radio equipment. Before the Claims Office
in Storisende closed, Rodney Maxwell had transmitted in recorded views of the
interior, and enough of a description for a final claim. They also received
teleprint copies of the Storisende papers. The first story, in an extra
edition of the Herald-Guardian, was headlined, MERLIN FOUND! That would have
been the reporter who bolted off prematurely when they first saw the personnel
record machines. Conn wondered if he still had a job. A later edition
corrected this, but was full of extravagant accounts of what had been
discovered. Merlin or no Merlin, Force Command Duplicate was the biggest
abandoned-property discovery since the Third Force left the Trisystem.
The camp they had set up on top of the mesa was used, that night, only by Klem
Zareff's guards. Every
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body else was inside, eating cold rations when hungry and, when they could
keep awake no longer, bedding down on piles of blankets or going up to the
barracks rooms above.
The next day they found the relay station which rebroadcast signals from the
buried aerial-or wouldn't one say, subterrial?-on top of the mesa. As Conn had
expected, it was on top of a high butte three and a half miles to the south;
it had been so skillfully camouflaged that none of the outlaw bands who roamed
the Badlands had found it. After that, Force Command Duplicate was in
communication with the rest of Poictesme.
They moved into the staff headquarters at the top; Foxx Travis's office,
tidied up, became the headquarters for the company officials and chief
supervisors. The workmen quartered themselves in the enlisted barracks,
helping themselves liberally to anything they found. The crowds of sightseers
kept swarming in, giving Tom Brangwyn's police plenty to do. Tom himself
turned the marshal's office in Litchfield over to his chief deputy. Klem
Zareff insisted on more men for his guard force. A dozen gunboats, eighty-foot
craft mounting one 90-mm gun, several smaller auto-cannon and one
missilelauncher, had been found; he took them over immediately, naming them
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er.txt for capital ships of the old System States Navy. It took some argument
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