"Interstellar!" Kurt Fawzi almost howled. "Great Ghu! Now it isn't enough to go out to Koshchei; he wants to go clear out of the Trisystem. That's what we wanted to talk about; all this nonsense you and your father are in. Merlin's right here on Poictesme. It's right at Force Command, and if your father hadn't robbed us of all our best men, like Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, we'd have found it by now. I don't think you and your father care a hoot if we ever find Merlin or not!" "Kurt, that's a dreadful thing to say," Dolf Kellton objected in a shocked voice. "It's a dreadful thing to have to say," Fawzi replied, "but you tell me what Conn Maxwell or Rodney Maxwell are doing to help find it." "Who showed you where Force Command was?" Klem Zareff asked. Nobody could think of any good quick comeback to that. Conn took advantage of the pause to ask, "Why do you want to find Merlin?" "Why do we ..." Fawzi spluttered indignantly. "If you don't know...." "I know why I do. I want to see if you do. Do you?" "Merlin would answer so many questions," Dolf Kellton told him gently. "Questions I can't answer for myself." "With Merlin, we could set up a legal code and a system of jurisprudence that would give everybody absolute justice," Judge Ledue said. As if absolute justice wasn't the last thing anybody in his right senses would want; a robot-judge would have the whole planet in jail inside a month. "We have a man who joined us after you went off to Koshchei, Conn," Franz Veltrin said. "A Mr. Carl Leibert. He's some kind of a clergyman, from over Morven way. He says that Merlin could formulate an entirely new religion, which would regenerate humanity." "Well, I don't have any such lofty ideas," Fawzi said. "I just want Merlin to show us how to get some prosperity here; bring things back to what they were before Poictesme went broke." "And that's what Father and I are trying to do. You're going into the woods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax." Fawzi looked at him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better of it. "If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss of markets. If we find Merlin, and tape it with everything that's happened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tell us where to find new markets. But the markets won't come to us. We'll have to do our own exporting, and we'll need ships. Now, you men have been studying about Merlin, and hunting for Merlin, all your lives. I can't add anything to what you know, and neither can my father. You find Merlin, and we'll have the ships ready when you do find it." "Kurt, I think he has a point," somebody said. "You're blasted well right he has," Klem Zareff put in. "If it wasn't for Conn Maxwell, you know where we'd be? Back in Litchfield, sitting around in Kurt's office, talking about how wonderful things'll be when we find Merlin, and doing nothing to find it."