THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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where all the trouble on the east coast comes from. Now, outlaws are
sure-thing players. They want to be alive to spend their loot, and they
won't tackle anything that's too tough for them. A lot of guards and
combat equipment may look like a loss on the books, but the books won't
show how much of a loss you might take if you didn't have them. I want
this operation armed till it'll be too much for all the outlaws on the
planet to tackle."

That made sense. It also made sense out of the billions of sols the
Federation had spent preparing for an invasion that never came. If it
had come and found them unprepared, the loss might have been the war itself.

The scows and the newly hired workers began arriving a little after
noon. The scows had been borrowed from plantations[Pg 48] where the crop
had been gotten in; there were melon leaves and bits of vine in the
bottoms. The workers were a bleary-eyed and unsavory lot; Conn had a
suspicion, which Brangwyn's deputy confirmed, that they had been