Everybody at the long table was shouting at everybody else. The Jurgen and Janicot Companies wanted to buy ships from Koshchei Exploitation & Development. The Alpha-Interplanetary director, who was also a vice-president of Transcontinent & Overseas, opposed that; another director of A-I, who was also board chairman of Koshchei Exploitation & Development, wanted to sell ships to anybody who had the price, the Transcontinent & Overseas man was calling him a traitor to the company, and one of the stockbrokers, who was also a vice-president of Trisystem Investments and a director of Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines, was wanting to know which company. And a banker who was stockholder in all the companies was shouting that they were all a gang of crooks, and J. Fitzwilliam Sterber was declaring that anybody who called him a crook could continue the discussion through seconds. Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal on Poictesme. He wondered how many duels this meeting was going to hatch. The next afternoon the _Helen O'Loy_ was unloaded, all but the mining equipment; Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley Gatworth and a few others took her out to Force Command. They were met by Klem Zareff's armed airboats two hundred and fifty miles from the mesa, and they found the place in more of a state of siege than when the Badlands had been full of outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have been moved in from Barathrum Spaceport, and Zareff had more men and firepower than he had ever commanded during the System States War. If Minister-General Murchison was convinced that the Merlin excitement was a cover for some seditious plot against the Federation, this ought to give him food for thought. There was still work, mostly boring lateral shafts for echo shots, going on at the butte, under the relay station. That was Leibert, who was still insisting that that was where Merlin was buried. There was also some work on top of the mesa, by those who were convinced that that was where Merlin was to be found. Kurt Fawzi was taking the lead in that. Franz Veltrin and Dolf Kellton sided with Leibert, and Fawzi's office clique had split into two factions. Judge Ledue was maintaining strict impartiality, as befitted his judicial position. "Why hasn't your father gotten those detectives of his to work on this fake preacher?" Zareff wanted to know, when he and Tom Brangwyn were able to talk to Conn alone. "Well, they've been busy," Conn said. "Trying to keep him alive, for one thing. You heard about the robo-bomb somebody launched at us the day we brought the ships in, didn't you?" "Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl, too," Brangwyn said. "But hasn't it ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that calls himself Leibert might be mixed up with the gang that did that?" "You suspect him, too?"