THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And Fred Karski, with
one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, was keeping up a routine
guard. All of them had heard about the formation of Alpha-Interplanetary
when Conn arrived.

The next day, Yves Jacquemont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, a
gang from the T. & O. shipyard, and a dozen engineers and construction
men whom he had recruited around Storisende. More workers arrived in the
next few days, including a number who had already worked on the ship as
slaves of the Perales gang.

It didn't take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in the
conversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere and
gravitation, the /Harriet Barne/ was long and narrow, like an old ocean
ship; more than anything else, she had originally resembled a huge
submarine. Spaceships, either interplanetary or interstellar, were
always spherical with a pseudogravity system at the center. This, of