The Cosmic Computer

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| Transcriber's Note: |
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| Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the |
| U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. |
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THE COSMIC COMPUTER
by
H BEAM PIPER

"There are incredible things still
undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in
duplicate as a precaution against space attack. I know where all of
them are.

"But I could find nothing, not one single word, about any giant
strategic planning computer called Merlin!"

Nevertheless the leading men of the planet didn't believe him. They
couldn't, for the search for Merlin had become their abiding
obsession. Merlin meant everything to them: power, pleasures, and
profits unlimited.

Conn had known they'd never believe him, and so he had a trick or two
up his space-trained sleeve that might outwit even their fabled Cosmic
Computer ... if they dared accept his challenge.

_H. BEAM PIPER_ is rather enigmatic where his personal statistics are
concerned. It may be stated that he lives in Williamsport,
Pennsylvania, that he is an expert on the history and use of hand
weapons, that he has been writing and selling science-fiction for many
years to the leading magazines, and that he is highly rated among
readers for his skill and imagination. He has had several novels
published, including mysteries and juveniles.

His previous appearances in Ace Books include two novels written in
collaboration with John J. McGuire: CRISIS IN 2140 (D-227) and A
PLANET FOR TEXANS (D-299), and a longer entirely self-authored novel
SPACE VIKING (F-225).

THE COSMIC COMPUTER

(Original Title: Junkyard Planet)

H. BEAM PIPER

ACE BOOKS, INC.

1120 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10036

THE COSMIC COMPUTER (JUNKYARD PLANET)

Copyright, 1963, by H. Beam Piper

An Ace Book, by arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons

All Rights Reserved

Printed in U.S.A.

I

Thirty minutes to Litchfield.

Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck,
watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath the
ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass must
feel with the sand slowly draining out.

It had been six months to Litchfield when the _Mizar_ lifted out of La
Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been two
months to Litchfield when he boarded the _City of Asgard_ at the port
of the same name on Odin. It had been two hours to Litchfield when the
_Countess Dorothy_ rose from the airship dock at Storisende. He had
had all that time, and now it was gone, and he was still unprepared
for what he must face at home.

Thirty minutes to Litchfield.

The words echoed in his mind as though he had spoken them aloud, and
then, realizing that he never addressed himself as sir, he turned. It
was the first mate.

He had a clipboard in his hand, and he was wearing a Terran Federation
Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about a dozen regulation-changes,
ago. Once Conn had taken that sort of thing for granted. Now it was
obtruding upon him everywhere.

"Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir," the first officer repeated, and
gave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two;
trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flicker
of anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the whole
infernal situation. He nodded.

"That's everything. Not many passengers left aboard, are there?"

"You're the only one, first class, sir. About forty farm laborers on
the lower deck." He dismissed them as mere cargo. "Litchfield's the
end of the run."

"I know. I was born there."

The mate looked again at his name on the list and grinned.

"Sure; you're Rodney Maxwell's son. Your father's been giving us a lot
of freight lately. I guess I don't have to tell you about Litchfield."

"Maybe you do. I've been away for six years. Tell me, are they having
labor trouble now?"

"Labor trouble?" The mate was surprised. "You mean with the
farm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble."

"Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to the
lower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just pistols, either."

"Oh. That's on account of pirates."

"Pirates?" Conn echoed.

"Well, I guess you'd call them that. A gang'll come aboard, dressed
like farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns in
their bindles. When the ship's airborne and out of reach of help,
they'll break out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crew
and passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the mate
said. "You heard about the _Harriet Barne_, didn't you?"

She was Transcontinent & Overseas, the biggest contragravity ship on
the planet.

"They didn't pirate her, did they?"

The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There was
just a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the Air
Patrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody's ever
seen ship, officers, crew or passengers since."

"Well, great Ghu; isn't the Government doing anything about it?"

"Sure. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive. And
there hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city limits of
Storisende," he added solemnly.

The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon ahead,
and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks. Below, the
fields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They had
been green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and the
wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the crop
in early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were still
harvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was
going to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lot
of cask staves going aboard at Storisende.

Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six years
ago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that had been melon
fields recently, among the new forests that had grown up in the past
forty years. The few stands of original timber towered above the
second growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planet
had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Seventh
Century, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told that--Surromanticist
Movement, when they were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old Genji
Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical space-rover whose ship had
been the first to enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to the
romantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets
of the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of
course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one had
been called Storisende.

Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing
Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republic
in the Terran Federation. The other planets were uninhabitable except
in airtight dome cities, but they were rich in minerals. Companies had
been formed to exploit them. No food could be produced on any of them
except by carniculture and hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper
to produce it naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated on
agriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century.

Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; the
manufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer find
a profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei,
on Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruel
closed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the offices
emptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wild
game came back.

Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert of
crumbling concrete--landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracks
and toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements and
missile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated from
Poictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem had
been the advance base for the Third Fleet-Army Force, during the
System States War.

It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on or
routed through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened for war
production. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piled
up mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the world
cluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System States
Alliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fell
on Poictesme.

The Federation armies departed. They took the clothes they stood in,
their personal weapons, and a few souvenirs. Everything else was
abandoned. Even the most expensive equipment had been worth less than
the cost of removal.

The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, taking
their riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remained
had been living on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that
his father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one who
searched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit of
uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.

Now he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range;
ahead the misty Gordon Valley sloped and widened to the north. Twenty
minutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn't know what he was going to
tell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; he
just didn't know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearing
through thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glistening
redly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside its
curve. Six. Four. The _Countess Dorothy_ was losing speed and
altitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. The
Airlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. The
yellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. High
Garden Terrace; the Mall.

Moment by moment, the stigmata of decay became more evident. Terraces
empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild
growth; blank-staring windows, walls splotched with lichens. At first,
he was horrified at what had happened to Litchfield in six years. Then
he realized that the change had been in himself. He was seeing it with
new eyes, as it really was.

The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could see
cracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals,
waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, but
what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin.
There was a thing about dusty fountains, some poem he'd read at the
University.

_The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;
The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams._

Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire. The
Terran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated a
score, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System States
Alliance from seceding. It hadn't been a victory. It had only been a
lesser defeat.

There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody in
topside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair
and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and
bulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi, the mayor, well to the
front. Then he saw his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and
waved to them. They waved back, and then everybody was waving. The
gangway-port opened, and the Academy band struck up, enthusiastically
if inexpertly, as he descended to the dock.

His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut to the same
pattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout curtain cloth.
It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to acquire a permanent
wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol butt. His mother's dress
was new, and so was Flora's, made for the occasion. He couldn't be
sure just which of the Federation Armed Forces had provided the
material, but his father's shirt was Med Service sterilon.

Ashamed to be noticing things like that, he clasped his father's hand,
kissed his mother, embraced his sister. There were a few, but very
few, gray threads in his father's mustache; a few more squint-wrinkles
around the eyes. His mother's hair was all gray, now, and she was
heavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he'd grown a
few inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised that
Flora actually looked younger. Then he realized that to seventeen,
twenty-three is practically middle age, but to twenty-three,
twenty-nine is almost contemporary. He noticed the glint on her left
hand and caught it to look at the ring.

"Hey! Zarathustra sunstone! Nice," he said. "Where is he, Sis?"

He'd never met her fiance; Wade Lucas hadn't come to Litchfield to
practice medicine until the year after he'd gone to Terra.

"Oh, emergency," Flora said. "Obstetrical case; that won't wait on
anything. In Tramptown, of course. But he'll be at the party.... Oops,
I shouldn't have said that; that's supposed to be a surprise."

"Don't worry; I'll be surprised," he promised.

Then Kurt Fawzi was pushing forward, holding out his hand. Thinner,
and grayer, but just as effusive as ever.

"Welcome home, Conn. Judge, shake hands with him and tell him how glad
we all are to see him back.... Now, Franz, put away the recorder; save
the interview for the _Chronicle_ till later. Ah, Professor Kellton;
one pupil Litchfield Academy can be proud of!"

He shook hands with them: Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin, old Professor
Dolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he wondered, because he
was Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how much
because of what they hoped he'd tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging him
aside, was the first to speak of it.

"Conn, what did you find out?" he whispered. "Do you know where it
is?"

He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareff
approaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and the
younger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born on
Poictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he came
from, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble on
Hathor twenty years ago; the losers had had to get off-planet in a
hurry to dodge firing squads. Klem Zareff never was reticent about his
past. He came from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he
had commanded a regiment, and finally a division that had been blasted
down to less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He always
wore a little rosette of System States black and green on his coat.

"Hello, boy," he croaked, extending a hand. "Good to see you again."

"It sure is, Conn," the town marshal agreed, then lowered his voice.
"Find out anything definite?"

"We didn't have much time, Conn," Kurt Fawzi said, "but we've
arranged a little celebration for you. We'll start it with a dinner at
Senta's."

"You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'd
have to have a meal at Senta's before I'd really feel at home."

"Well, it'll be a couple of hours. Suppose we all go up to my office,
in the meantime. Give the ladies a chance to fix up for the party, and
have a little drink and a talk together."

"You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked. There was an odd
undernote of anxiety, or reluctance, in his voice.

"Yes, of course. I'd like that."

His father turned to speak to his mother and Flora. Kurt Fawzi was
speaking to his wife, interrupting himself to shout instructions to
some laborers who were bringing up a contragravity skid. Conn turned
to Colonel Zareff.

"Good melon crop this year?" he asked.

The old Rebel cursed. "Gehenna of a big crop; we're up to our necks in
melons. This time next year we'll be washing our feet in brandy."

"Hold onto it and age it; you ought to see what they charge for a
drink of Poictesme brandy on Terra."

"This isn't Terra, and we aren't selling it by the drink," Colonel
Zareff said. "We're selling it at Storisende Spaceport, for what the
freighter captains pay us. You've been away too long, Conn. You've
forgotten what it's like to live in a poor-house."

The cargo was coming off, now. Cask staves, and more cask staves.
Zareff swore bitterly at the sight, and then they started toward the
wide doors of the shipping floor, inside the Airlines Building.
Outgoing cargo was beginning to come out; casks of brandy, of course,
and a lot of boxes and crates, painted light blue and bearing the
yellow trefoil of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red
star of Ordnance. Cases of rifles; square boxes of ammunition; crated
auto-cannon. Conn turned to his father.

"This our stuff?" he asked. "Where did you dig it?"

Rodney Maxwell laughed. "You know the old Tenth Army Headquarters,
over back of Snagtooth, in the Calders? Everybody knows that was
cleaned out years ago. Well, always take a second look at these
things everybody knows. Ten to one they're not so. It always bothered
me that nobody found any underground attack-shelters. I took a second
look, and sure enough, I found them, right underneath, mined out of
the solid rock. Conn, you'd be surprised at what I found there."

"Where are you going to sell that stuff?" he asked, pointing at a
passing skid. "There's enough combat equipment around now to outfit a
private army for every man, woman and child in Poictesme."

"Storisende Spaceport. The freighter captains buy it, and sell it on
some of the planets that were colonized right before the War and
haven't gotten industrialized yet. I'm clearing about two hundred sols
a ton on it."

The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504
submachine guns. Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing for
packing weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less than
a good cafe on Terra got for one drink of Poictesme brandy.

II

He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office before, once or twice, with his
father; he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality
and rambling conversation. None of the lights were bright, and the
walls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they entered, Tom
Brangwyn went to the long table and took off his belt and holster,
laying it down. One by one, the others unbuckled their weapons and
added them to the pile. Klem Zareff's cane went on the table with his
pistol; there was a sword inside it.

That was something else he was seeing with new eyes. He hadn't started
carrying a gun when he had left for Terra, and he was wondering, now,
why any of them bothered to. Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year
in Litchfield, if you didn't count the Tramptowners, and they stayed
south of the docks and off the top level.

Or perhaps that was just it. Litchfield was peaceful because
everybody was prepared to keep it that way. It certainly wasn't
because of anything the Planetary Government did to maintain order.

Now Brangwyn was setting out glasses, filling a pitcher from a keg in
the corner of the room. The last time Conn had been here, they'd given
him a glass of wine, and he'd felt very grown-up because they didn't
water it for him.

"Well, gentlemen," Kurt Fawzi was saying, "let's have a toast to our
returned friend and new associate. Conn, we're all anxious to hear
what you've found out, but even if you didn't learn anything, we're
still happy to have you back with us. Gentlemen; to our friend and
neighbor. Welcome home, Conn!"

"Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi," he began.

"Here, none of this mister foolishness; you're one of us, now, Conn.
And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, if we don't have
anything else."

"You can say that again, Kurt." That was one of the distillery people;
he'd remember the name in a moment. "When this new crop gets pressed
and fermented...."

"I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat mine till it
ferments," Klem Zareff said.

"Or why," another planter added. "Lorenzo, what are you going to be
paying for wine?"

Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he was
worrying about what he'd be able to get for brandy.

"Oh, please," Fawzi interrupted. "Not today; not when our boy's home
and is going to tell us how we can solve all our problems."

"Yes, Conn." That was Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer. "You did find out
where Merlin is, didn't you?"

That set them all off. He was still holding his drink; he downed it in
one gulp, barely tasting it, and handed the glass to Tom Brangwyn for
a refill, and caught a frown on his father's face. One did not gulp
drinks in Kurt Fawzi's office.

Well, neither did one blast everybody's hopes with half a dozen words,
and that was what he was trying to force himself to do. He wanted to
blurt out the one quick sentence and get it over with, but the words
wouldn't come out of his throat. He lowered the second drink by half;
the brandy was beginning to warm him and dissolve the cold lump in his
stomach. Have to go easy, though. He wasn't used to this kind of
drinking, and he wanted to stay sober enough to talk sense until he'd
told them what he had to.

"I hope," he said, "that you don't expect me to show you the cross on
the map, where the computer is buried."

All the eyes around him began to look troubled. Most of them had been
expecting precisely that. His father was watching him anxiously.

"But it's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?" one of the melon
planters asked. "They didn't take it away with them?"

"Most of you gentlemen," he said, "contributed to sending me to school
on Terra, to study cybernetics and computer theory. It wouldn't do us
any good to find Merlin if none of us could operate it. Well, I've
done that. I can use any known type of computer, and train assistants.
After I graduated, I was offered a junior instructorship to computer
physics at the University."

"You didn't mention that, son," his father said.

"The letter would have come on the same ship I did. Besides, I didn't
think it was very important."

"I think it is." There was a catch in old Dolf Kellton's voice. "One
of my boys from the Academy offered a place on the faculty of the
University of Montevideo, on Terra!" He finished his drink and held
out his glass for more, something he almost never did.

"Conn means," Kurt Fawzi explained, "that it had nothing to do with
Merlin."

All right; now tell them the truth.

"I was also to find out anything I could about a secret giant computer
used during the War by the Third Fleet-Army Force, code-named Merlin.
I went over all the records available to the public; I used your
letter, Professor, and the head of our Modern History department
secured me access to non-public material, some of it still classified.
For one thing, I have locations and maps and plans of every Federation
installation built here between 842 and 854, the whole period of the
War." He turned to his father. "There are incredible things still
undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in
duplicate, sometimes triplicate, as a precaution against space attack.
I know where all of them are."

"Space attack!" Klem Zareff was indignant. "There never was a time we
could have attacked Poictesme. Even if we'd had the ships, we were
fighting a purely defensive war. Aggression was no part of our
policy--"

He interrupted: "Excuse me, Colonel. The point I was trying to make is
that, with all I was able to learn, I could find nothing, not one
single word, about any giant strategic planning computer called
Merlin, or any Merlin Project."

There! He'd gotten that out. Now go on and tell them about the old man
in the dome-house on Luna. The room was silent, except for the small
insectile hum of the electric clock. Then somebody set a glass on the
table, and it sounded like a hammer blow.

"Nothing, Conn?"

Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue's hand shook as though palsied
as he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at the
drink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The others
found their voices, one by one.

"Of course, it was the most closely guarded secret ..."

"But after forty years ..."

"Hah, don't tell me about security!" Colonel Zareff barked. "You
should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on
Mephistopheles ..."

"But there _was_ a computer code-named Merlin," Judge Ledue was
insisting, to convince himself more than anybody else. "Its
memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning
all its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations,
and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce new
facts, and predicting future events, and ..."

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