THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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"He's crazy!" Jacquemont swore. "Paranoid; megalomaniac. He talks of
organizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band and
making himself king. He's heard that there are Space Navy superweapons
on Koshchei?I suppose there are, at that?and he wants to get a lot of
planetbusters and hellburners and annihilators." He lowered his voice.
"Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that'd blow the
/Harriet Barne/ up as soon as he got her out of atmosphere."

He talked for a while to Jacquemont and his daughter Sylvie, and to
Nichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vibart. There was
evidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could be
built, but there were foundries and rolling-mills and a collapsed-matter
producer. The /Harriet Barne/ was gutted, half torn down, and half
armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. It might be possible to
continue the work on her and take her to space.

Then the two scows floated over the top of the pit and began letting