Free The Goliath Stone by Larry Niven, Matthew Joseph Harrington Page A

said.
    Yellowhorse was crying. Silently, head high, but crying.
    Toby recalled that Connors had been a widower.

 
    XI
I see war as that insane enterprise wherein men dig up the riches of the earth and hurl them at one another.
—ATTRIBUTED TO JOSEPH DANIEL HARRINGTON

 
    Wieland had armor and weapons.
    Set had more support and possession of the Voice, and operators began coming back to life and attacking Wieland’s adherents.
    Socrates had everyone who thought that the war was madness, which was almost every entity. They disabled the receivers on operators, took them into themselves, and cornered the market on power production. The combatants soon had to subsist on what they could collect for themselves.
    Wieland and Set found common cause and drilled into the reactor for the fuel. The manipulators that were extended into the core had aluminum frames, and suddenly defeating Socrates was a very low priority. Alpha particles struck aluminum nuclei and produced phosphorus and neutrons, and the fuel absorbed the neutrons, heated up through faster decay, and melted. The mass of the asteroid was slight, but enough to make the dense molten metal seep toward its center.
    Internal mass shifted position. Naturally occurring actinides were bound to the silica of the asteroid; only a few parts per million, but that came to many tons. The ore, already warmer than its surroundings, softened and followed the reactor fuel down. Iron accumulated around molten fuel, making an excellent reflector to keep the reaction from spreading to the local material, but that developed a slow reaction of its own once enough had gathered. Fission products oozed out through the iron layer, which gave Target One a molten core as they decayed. The first crack appeared in Target One’s surface within days.
    Wieland devised manipulators that would ignore the content of the coating of the chambers. The entities took those apart, along with the linear motor they had built, and remade the material into a network of cables to hold the asteroid together.
    Fear had been discovered.
    It was Set who proposed resuming the mission to reach Earth. The analysts of the Library had learned why it had been included: to provide information for humans who came to collect the stuff of the asteroid. It was nothing like the entirety of human knowledge, merely what had been deemed useful enough to have nearby. If humans were going to use the asteroid for supplies, obviously they must be able to deal with such situations safely.
    Target One was too fragile now for the original design to be used without tearing it apart.
    But the Library had other designs in it.
    *   *   *
    Getting across the concept of fiction nearly started another war all by itself, but there were references to events such as, e.g., the expansion of the Sun into giant phase, which had obviously not happened yet. Still, some of the ideas looked feasible … though a few diehards never did quit looking for the Dean Drive.
    The rest began looking for another rock.
    And, what the hell: they found one.
    There remained only the pushing and pulling. It would take longer, but they hadn’t been set a time limit.

 
    XII
Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

 
    When Toby logged on to send e-mail to proudrobot, he found one waiting for him.
    Subject: Start reading for content, dammit!
    The body of the message was blank. There was just the signature:
“Details of my evil plan are available in the brochures at the front desk.”
    May looked at that, then said, “I picture an international conspiracy of avaricious psychiatrists, who turned him loose on the world to drum up business.”
    Toby nodded, signed off, and went to the little antique writing desk in the entry hall. Behind the writing paper in the middle drawer was indeed a stack of brochures printed on pale blue paper. He