THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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out, somewhere, that Conn had been the originator of the municipal
face-lifting project. He was tempted, briefly, to tell her a little, if
not all, of the truth about the Maxwell Plan, then decided against it.
The way to keep a secret was to confide it to nobody; every time you
did, you doubled, maybe even squared, the chances of exposure.

He told his father, when Rodney Maxwell came in from the dig, about his
talk with Klem Zareff.

"How long's he been like that, anyhow?" he asked.

"As long as I've known him. When it comes to melons and wine and bossing
tramp labor and taking care of his money and coming in out of the rain,
Klem Zareff's as sane as I am. But on the subject of the Terran
Federation, he's crazy as a bedbug. What is a bedbug, anyhow?"

"They have them on Terra, in places like Tramptown. They have places