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 screen-and-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. Everybody 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, sub-terrial--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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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