The Cosmic Computer Read online

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  +--------------------------------------------------------------+| Transcriber's Note: || || Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the || U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. |+--------------------------------------------------------------+

  THE COSMIC COMPUTERbyH BEAM PIPER

  "There are incredible things stillundiscovered; most of the important installations were built induplicate as a precaution against space attack. I know where all ofthem are.

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

  Nevertheless the leading men of the planet didn't believe him. Theycouldn't, for the search for Merlin had become their abidingobsession. Merlin meant everything to them: power, pleasures, andprofits unlimited.

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

  _H. BEAM PIPER_ is rather enigmatic where his personal statistics areconcerned. It may be stated that he lives in Williamsport,Pennsylvania, that he is an expert on the history and use of handweapons, that he has been writing and selling science-fiction for manyyears to the leading magazines, and that he is highly rated amongreaders for his skill and imagination. He has had several novelspublished, including mysteries and juveniles.

  His previous appearances in Ace Books include two novels written incollaboration with John J. McGuire: CRISIS IN 2140 (D-227) and APLANET FOR TEXANS (D-299), and a longer entirely self-authored novelSPACE 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 theship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass mustfeel with the sand slowly draining out.

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

  Thirty minutes to Litchfield.

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

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

  "Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir," the first officer repeated, andgave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two;trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flickerof anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the wholeinfernal 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 onthe lower deck." He dismissed them as mere cargo. "Litchfield's theend 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 lotof 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 havinglabor trouble now?"

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

  "Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to thelower 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, dressedlike farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns intheir 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 crewand passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the matesaid. "You heard about the _Harriet Barne_, didn't you?"

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

  "They didn't pirate her, did they?"

  The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There wasjust a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the AirPatrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody's everseen 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. Andthere hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city limits ofStorisende," 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, thefields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They hadbeen green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and thewine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the cropin early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were stillharvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below wasgoing to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lotof cask staves going aboard at Storisende.

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

  That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the SeventhCentury, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told that--SurromanticistMovement, when they were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old GenjiGartner, the scholarly and half-piratical space-rover whose ship hadbeen the first to enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to theromantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planetsof the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta fromSpenser's _Faerie Queene_, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Ofcourse, the camp village at his first landing site on this one hadbeen called Storisende.

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

  Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; themanufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer finda profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei,on Britomart and Calidor
e, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruelclosed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the officesemptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wildgame came back.

  Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert ofcrumbling concrete--landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracksand toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements andmissile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated fromPoictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem hadbeen the advance base for the Third Fleet-Army Force, during theSystem States War.

  It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on orrouted through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened for warproduction. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piledup mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the worldcluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System StatesAlliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fellon Poictesme.

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

  The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, takingtheir riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remainedhad been living on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends thathis father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one whosearched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit ofuranium, 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. Twentyminutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn't know what he was going totell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; hejust didn't know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearingthrough thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glisteningredly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside itscurve. Six. Four. The _Countess Dorothy_ was losing speed andaltitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. TheAirlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. Theyellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. HighGarden Terrace; the Mall.

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

  The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could seecracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals,waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, butwhat 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 theUniversity.

  _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. TheTerran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated ascore, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System StatesAlliance from seceding. It hadn't been a victory. It had only been alesser defeat.

  There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody intopside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hairand plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced andbulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi, the mayor, well to thefront. Then he saw his father and mother, and his sister Flora, andwaved to them. They waved back, and then everybody was waving. Thegangway-port opened, and the Academy band struck up, enthusiasticallyif inexpertly, as he descended to the dock.

  His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut to the samepattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout curtain cloth.It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to acquire a permanentwrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol butt. His mother's dresswas new, and so was Flora's, made for the occasion. He couldn't besure just which of the Federation Armed Forces had provided thematerial, 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 veryfew, gray threads in his father's mustache; a few more squint-wrinklesaround the eyes. His mother's hair was all gray, now, and she washeavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he'd grown afew inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised thatFlora 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 lefthand 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 topractice medicine until the year after he'd gone to Terra.

  "Oh, emergency," Flora said. "Obstetrical case; that won't wait onanything. 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 gladwe all are to see him back.... Now, Franz, put away the recorder; savethe 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 ProfessorDolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he wondered, because hewas Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how muchbecause of what they hoped he'd tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging himaside, was the first to speak of it.

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

  He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareffapproaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and theyounger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born onPoictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he camefrom, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble onHathor twenty years ago; the losers had had to get off-planet in ahurry to dodge firing squads. Klem Zareff never was reticent about hispast. He came from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and hehad commanded a regiment, and finally a division that had been blasteddown to less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He alwayswore 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'vearranged a little celebration for you. We'll start it with a dinner atSenta's."

  "You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'dhave 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, andhave a little drink and a talk together."

  "You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked. There was an oddundernote 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 wasspeaking to his wife, interrupting himself to shout instructions tosome laborers who were bringing up a contragravity skid. Conn turnedto Colonel Zareff.

  "Good melon crop this year?" he asked.

  The old Rebel cursed. "Gehenna of a big crop; we're up to our necks inmelons. 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 adrink of Poictesme brandy on Terra."

  "This isn't Terra, and we aren't selling it
by the drink," ColonelZareff said. "We're selling it at Storisende Spaceport, for what thefreighter captains pay us. You've been away too long, Conn. You'veforgotten 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 thewide 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 theyellow trefoil of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed redstar of Ordnance. Cases of rifles; square boxes of ammunition; cratedauto-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 wascleaned out years ago. Well, always take a second look at thesethings everybody knows. Ten to one they're not so. It always botheredme that nobody found any underground attack-shelters. I took a secondlook, and sure enough, I found them, right underneath, mined out ofthe solid rock. Conn, you'd be surprised at what I found there."

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

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

  The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504submachine guns. Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing forpacking weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less thana good cafe on Terra got for one drink of Poictesme brandy.