"You can say that again, Kurt." That was one of the distillery people;
he'd remember the name in a moment. "When this new crop gets pressed
and fermented...."
"I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat mine till it
ferments," Klem Zareff said.
"Or why," another planter added. "Lorenzo, what are you going to be
paying for wine?"
Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he was
worrying about what he'd be able to get for brandy.
"Oh, please," Fawzi interrupted. "Not today; not when our boy's home
and is going to tell us how we can solve all our problems."
"Yes, Conn." That was Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer. "You did find out
where Merlin is, didn't you?"
That set them all off. He was still holding his drink; he downed it in
one gulp, barely tasting it, and handed the glass to Tom Brangwyn for
a refill, and caught a frown on his father's face. One did not gulp
drinks in Kurt Fawzi's office.
Well, neither did one blast everybody's hopes with half a dozen words,
and that was what he was trying to force himself to do. He wanted to
blurt out the one quick sentence and get it over with, but the words
wouldn't come out of his throat. He lowered the second drink by half;
the brandy was beginning to warm him and dissolve the cold lump in his
stomach. Have to go easy, though. He wasn't used to this kind of
drinking, and he wanted to stay sober enough to talk sense until he'd
told them what he had to.
"I hope," he said, "that you don't expect me to show you the cross on
the map, where the computer is buried."
All the eyes around him began to look troubled. Most of them had been
expecting precisely that. His father was watching him anxiously.
"But it's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?" one of the melon
planters asked. "They didn't take it away with them?"
"Most of you gentlemen," he said, "contributed to sending me to school
on Terra, to study cybernetics and computer theory. It wouldn't do us
any good to find Merlin if none of us could operate it. Well, I've
done that. I can use any known type of computer, and train assistants.
After I graduated, I was offered a junior instructorship to computer
physics at the University."
"You didn't mention that, son," his father said.
"The letter would have come on the same ship I did. Besides, I didn't
think it was very important."
"I think it is." There was a catch in old Dolf Kellton's voice. "One
of my boys from the Academy offered a place on the faculty of the
University of Montevideo, on Terra!" He finished his drink and held
out his glass for more, something he almost never did.
"Conn means," Kurt Fawzi explained, "that it had nothing to do with
Merlin."
All right; now tell them the truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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