The crackpots were getting into the act, now, too. A spirit medium on the continent of Acaire, to the north, had produced a communication purporting to originate with a deceased Third Force Staff officer, now in the Spirit World. There was considerable detail, all ludicrous to Conn's professional ear. And a fanatic in one of the small towns on the west coast was quoting the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavadgita to prove that if Merlin were ever found, Divine vengeance in a spectacular form would fall not only on Poictesme but on the entire Galaxy. The spaceship that was building at Storisende got into the news; on-screen, it appeared that the work was progressing rapidly. So was the work of demolishing a block of empty buildings to get girders for the second ship, on which work had not yet been started. The one under construction seemed to be of cruciform design, like an old-fashioned pre-contragravity winged airplane. The design puzzled everybody at Barathrum. Yves Jacquemont thought that perhaps there would be decks in the cross-arm which would be used when the ship was running on combined lift and drive. "Well, till we can get a shipyard going on Koshchei and build some real spaceships, there are going to be some rare-looking objects traveling around the Alpha System. I wonder what the next one's going to look like--a flying sky-scraper?" Conn said. "What I wonder," Yves Jacquemont replied, "is where all the old interplanetary ships got to. There must have been hundreds of them running back and forth from here to Janicot and Koshchei and Jurgen and Horvendile during the War. They must have gone somewhere." "Couldn't they all have been fitted with Dillingham hyperdrive engines and used in the evacuation?" "Possible. But the average interplanetary ship isn't very big; five hundred to seven-fifty feet in diameter. One of those things couldn't carry more than a couple of hundred people, after you put in all the supplies and the hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats and so on for a four- to six-month voyage. I can't see the economy of altering anything that small for interstellar work. Why, the smallest of these tramp freighters that come in here will run about fifteen hundred feet." They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure. And there certainly weren't any of them left on Poictesme. He puzzled over it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things to think about. In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work, everything he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had not given to anything since cramming for examinations at the University. There was a lot of it.