anything else." "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[Pg 15] 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. [Pg 15] "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
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