THE COSMIC COMPUTER

Back Forward Menu

stop being a brilliant young man and become a half-baked kid, and one
word from him and the older and wiser heads would do just what they
pleased. He wondered if the pro-Leibert and anti-Leibert factions were
still squabbling; maybe if he went out of his way to antagonize one
side, he'd make allies of the other. He took the precaution of screening
in, first; Kurt Fawzi, with whom he talked, was almost incoherent with
excitement. At least, he was reasonably sure that none of Klem Zareff's
trigger-happy mercenaries would shoot him down coming in.

The well, fifty feet in diameter, went straight down from[Pg 155] the
top of the mesa; as the headquarters had been buried under loose rubble,
they'd had to vitrify the sides going down. He let down into the hole in
a jeep, and stood on the collapsium roof of whatever it was they had
found. It wasn't the top of the headquarters itself; the microray
scannings showed that. It was a drum-shaped superstructure, a sort of
underground penthouse. And there they were stopped. You didn't cut
collapsium with a cold chisel, or even an atomic torch. He began to see