His father and mother and Flora were at the table, and the serving-robot was floating around a few inches off the floor, steam trailing from its coffee urn and its tray lid up to offer food. He greeted everybody and sat down at his place, and the robot came around to him. His mother had selected all the things he'd been most fond of six years ago: shovel-snout bacon, hotcakes, starberry jam, things he hadn't tasted since he had gone away. He filled his plate and poured a cup of coffee. "You don't want to bother coming out to the dig with me this morning, do you?" his father was saying. "I'll be back here for lunch, and we'll go to the meeting in the afternoon." "Meeting?" Flora asked. "What meeting?" "Oh, we didn't have time to tell you," Rodney Maxwell said. "You know, Conn brought back a lot of information on locations of supply depots and things like that. An amazing list of things that haven't been discovered yet. It's going to be too much for us to handle alone; we're organizing a company to do it. We'll need a lot of labor, for one thing; jobs for some of these Tramptowners." "That's going to be something awfully big," his mother said dubiously. "You never did anything like that before." "I never had the kind of a partner I have now. It's Maxwell & Son, from now on." "Who's going to be in this company?" Flora wanted to know. "Oh, everybody around town; Kurt and the Judge and Klem, and Lester Dawes. All that crowd." "The Fawzis' Office Gang," Flora said disparagingly. "I suppose they'll want Conn to take them right to where Merlin is, the first thing." "Well, not the first thing," Conn said. "Merlin was one thing I couldn't find out anything about on Terra." "I'll bet you couldn't!" "The people at Armed Forces Records would let me look at everything else, and make microcopies and all, but not one word about computers. Forty years, and they still have the security lid welded shut on that." Flora looked at him in shocked surprise. "You don't mean to tell me you believe in that thing?" "Sure. How do you think they fought a war around a perimeter of close to a thousand light-years? They couldn't do all that out of their heads. They'd have to have computers, and the one they'd use to correlate everything and work out grand-strategy plans would have to be a dilly. Why, I'd give anything just to look at the operating panels for that thing." "But that's just a silly story; there never was anything like Merlin. No wonder you couldn't find out about it. You were looking for something that doesn't exist, just like all these old cranks that sit around drinking brandy and mooning about what Merlin's going to do for them, and never doing anything for themselves." "Oh, they're going to do something, now, Flora," his father told her. "When we get this company organized--"