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The Cosmic Computer

Henry Beam Piper

Published: 1963 Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction Source: http://www.gutenberg.org

About Piper: Henry Beam Piper (March 23, 1904 – c. November 6, 1964) was an American science fiction author. He wrote many short stories and several novels. He is best known for his extensive Terro-Human Future History series of stories and a shorter series of "Paratime" alternate history tales. He wrote under the name H. Beam Piper. Another source gives his name as "Horace Beam Piper" and a different date of death. His gravestone says "Henry Beam Piper". Piper himself may have been the source of part of the confusion; he told people the H stood for Horace, encouraging the assumption that he used the initial because he disliked his name. Source: Wikipedia Also available on Feedbooks Piper: • Little Fuzzy (1962) • Time Crime (1955) • Four-Day Planet (1961) • Genesis (1951) • A Slave is a Slave (1962) • Murder in the Gunroom (1953) • Last Enemy (1950) • Omnilingual (1957) • Time and Time Again (1947) • Police Operation (1948) Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+50. Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes.

Chapter

1

Thirty minutes to Litchfield. Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck, watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath the ship, ten thousand feet down. He thought he knew how an hourglass must feel with the sand slowly draining out. It had been six months to Litchfield when the Mizar lifted out of La Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been two months to Litchfield when he boarded the City of Asgard at the port of the same name on Odin. It had been two hours to Litchfield when the Countess Dorothy rose from the airship dock at Storisende. He had had all that time, and now it was gone, and he was still unprepared for what he must face at home. Thirty minutes to Litchfield. The words echoed in his mind as though he had spoken them aloud, and then, realizing that he never addressed himself as sir, he turned. It was the first mate. He had a clipboard in his hand, and he was wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about a dozen regulation-changes, ago. Once Conn had taken that sort of thing for granted. Now it was obtruding upon him everywhere. "Thirty minutes to Litchfield, sir," the first officer repeated, and gave him the clipboard to check the luggage list. Valises, two;

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trunks, two; microbook case, one. The last item fanned a small flicker of anger, not at any person, not even at himself, but at the whole infernal situation. He nodded. "That's everything. Not many passengers left aboard, are there?" "You're the only one, first class, sir. About forty farm laborers on the lower deck." He dismissed them as mere cargo. "Litchfield's the end of the run." "I know. I was born there." The mate looked again at his name on the list and grinned. "Sure; you're Rodney Maxwell's son. Your father's been giving us a lot of freight lately. I guess I don't have to tell you about Litchfield." "Maybe you do. I've been away for six years. Tell me, are they having labor trouble now?" "Labor trouble?" The mate was surprised. "You mean with the farm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble." "Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to the lower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just pistols, either." "Oh. That's on account of pirates." "Pirates?" Conn echoed. "Well, I guess you'd call them that. A gang'll come aboard, dressed like farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns in their bindles. When the ship's airborne and out of reach of help, they'll break out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crew and passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the mate said. "You heard about the Harriet Barne, didn't you?" She was Transcontinent & Overseas, the biggest contragravity ship on the planet.

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"They didn't pirate her, did they?" The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There was just a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the Air Patrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody's ever seen ship, officers, crew or passengers since." "Well, great Ghu; isn't the Government doing anything about it?" "Sure. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive. And there hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city limits of Storisende," he added solemnly. The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon ahead, and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks. Below, the fields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They had been green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the crop in early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were still harvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was going to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lot of cask staves going aboard at Storisende. Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six years ago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that had been melon fields recently, among the new forests that had grown up in the past forty years. The few stands of original timber towered above the second growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planet had been colonized. That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told that—Surromanticist Movement, when they were rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and halfpiratical space-rover whose ship had been the first to enter the

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Trisystem, had been devoted to the romantic writers of the PreAtomic Era. He had named all the planets of the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from Spenser'sFaerie Queene, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republic in the Terran Federation. The other planets were uninhabitable except in airtight dome cities, but they were rich in minerals. Companies had been formed to exploit them. No food could be produced on any of them except by carniculture and hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper to produce it naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century. Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; the manufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer find a profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei, on Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruel closed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the offices emptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wild game came back. Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert of crumbling concrete—landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracks and toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements and missile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated from Poictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem had been the advance base for the Third FleetArmy Force, during the System States War. It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on or routed through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened

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for war production. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piled up mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the world cluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System States Alliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fell on Poictesme. The Federation armies departed. They took the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons, and a few souvenirs. Everything else was abandoned. Even the most expensive equipment had been worth less than the cost of removal. The people who had grown richest out of the War had followed, taking their riches with them. For the next forty years, those who remained had been living on leavings. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector, leaving them to interpret that as one who searched, say, for uranium. Rodney Maxwell found quite a bit of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles. Now he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; ahead the misty Gordon Valley sloped and widened to the north. Twenty minutes to Litchfield, now. He still didn't know what he was going to tell the people who would be waiting for him. No; he knew that; he just didn't know how. The ship swept on, ten miles a minute, tearing through thin puffs of cloud. Ten minutes. The Big Bend was glistening redly in the sunlit haze, but Litchfield was still hidden inside its curve. Six. Four. TheCountess Dorothy was losing speed and altitude. Now he could see it, first a blur and then distinctly. The Airlines Building, so thick as to look squat for all its height. The yellow block of the distilleries under their plume of steam. High Garden Terrace; the Mall. Moment by moment, the stigmata of decay became more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended

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and choked with wild growth; blank-staring windows, walls splotched with lichens. At first, he was horrified at what had happened to Litchfield in six years. Then he realized that the change had been in himself. He was seeing it with new eyes, as it really was. The ship came in five hundred feet above the Mall, and he could see cracked pavements sprouting grass, statues askew on their pedestals, waterless fountains. At first he thought one of them was playing, but what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was a thing about dusty fountains, some poem he'd read at the University. The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams; The hinges are rusty, they swing with tiny screams. Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire. The Terran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated a score, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System States Alliance from seceding. It hadn't been a victory. It had only been a lesser defeat. There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody in topside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above everybody else. Kurt Fawzi, the mayor, well to the front. Then he saw his father and mother, and his sister Flora, and waved to them. They waved back, and then everybody was waving. The gangway-port opened, and the Academy band struck up, enthusiastically if inexpertly, as he descended to the dock. His father was wearing a black suit with a long coat, cut to the same pattern as the one he had worn six years ago. Blackout curtain cloth. It was fairly new, but the coat had begun to acquire a permanent wrinkle across the right hip, over the pistol butt. His

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mother's dress was new, and so was Flora's, made for the occasion. He couldn't be sure just which of the Federation Armed Forces had provided the material, but his father's shirt was Med Service sterilon. Ashamed to be noticing things like that, he clasped his father's hand, kissed his mother, embraced his sister. There were a few, but very few, gray threads in his father's mustache; a few more squint-wrinkles around the eyes. His mother's hair was all gray, now, and she was heavier. She seemed shorter, but that would be because he'd grown a few inches in the last six years. For a moment, he was surprised that Flora actually looked younger. Then he realized that to seventeen, twenty-three is practically middle age, but to twenty-three, twenty-nine is almost contemporary. He noticed the glint on her left hand and caught it to look at the ring. "Hey! Zarathustra sunstone! Nice," he said. "Where is he, Sis?" He'd never met her fiancé; Wade Lucas hadn't come to Litchfield to practice medicine until the year after he'd gone to Terra. "Oh, emergency," Flora said. "Obstetrical case; that won't wait on anything. In Tramptown, of course. But he'll be at the party… . Oops, I shouldn't have said that; that's supposed to be a surprise." "Don't worry; I'll be surprised," he promised. Then Kurt Fawzi was pushing forward, holding out his hand. Thinner, and grayer, but just as effusive as ever. "Welcome home, Conn. Judge, shake hands with him and tell him how glad we all are to see him back… . Now, Franz, put away the recorder; save the interview for theChronicle till later. Ah, Professor Kellton; one pupil Litchfield Academy can be proud of!" He shook hands with them: Judge Ledue, Franz Veltrin, old Professor Dolf Kellton. They were all happy; how much, he wondered, because he was Conn Maxwell, Rodney Maxwell's son, home from Terra, and how much because of what they hoped he'd

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tell them. Kurt Fawzi, edging him aside, was the first to speak of it. "Conn, what did you find out?" he whispered. "Do you know where it is?" He stammered, then saw Tom Brangwyn and Colonel Klem Zareff approaching, the older man tottering on a silver-headed cane and the younger keeping pace with him. Neither of them had been born on Poictesme. Tom Brangwyn had always been reticent about where he came from, but Hathor was a good guess. There had been political trouble on Hathor twenty years ago; the losers had had to get off-planet in a hurry to dodge firing squads. Klem Zareff never was reticent about his past. He came from Ashmodai, one of the System States planets, and he had commanded a regiment, and finally a division that had been blasted down to less than regimental strength, in the Alliance Army. He always wore a little rosette of System States black and green on his coat. "Hello, boy," he croaked, extending a hand. "Good to see you again." "It sure is, Conn," the town marshal agreed, then lowered his voice. "Find out anything definite?" "We didn't have much time, Conn," Kurt Fawzi said, "but we've arranged a little celebration for you. We'll start it with a dinner at Senta's." "You couldn't have done anything I'd have liked better, Mr. Fawzi. I'd have to have a meal at Senta's before I'd really feel at home." "Well, it'll be a couple of hours. Suppose we all go up to my office, in the meantime. Give the ladies a chance to fix up for the party, and have a little drink and a talk together." "You want to do that, Conn?" his father asked. There was an odd undernote of anxiety, or reluctance, in his voice.

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"Yes, of course. I'd like that." His father turned to speak to his mother and Flora. Kurt Fawzi was speaking to his wife, interrupting himself to shout instructions to some laborers who were bringing up a contragravity skid. Conn turned to Colonel Zareff. "Good melon crop this year?" he asked. The old Rebel cursed. "Gehenna of a big crop; we're up to our necks in melons. This time next year we'll be washing our feet in brandy." "Hold onto it and age it; you ought to see what they charge for a drink of Poictesme brandy on Terra." "This isn't Terra, and we aren't selling it by the drink," Colonel Zareff said. "We're selling it at Storisende Spaceport, for what the freighter captains pay us. You've been away too long, Conn. You've forgotten what it's like to live in a poor-house." The cargo was coming off, now. Cask staves, and more cask staves. Zareff swore bitterly at the sight, and then they started toward the wide doors of the shipping floor, inside the Airlines Building. Outgoing cargo was beginning to come out; casks of brandy, of course, and a lot of boxes and crates, painted light blue and bearing the yellow trefoil of the Third Fleet-Army Force and the eight-pointed red star of Ordnance. Cases of rifles; square boxes of ammunition; crated auto-cannon. Conn turned to his father. "This our stuff?" he asked. "Where did you dig it?" Rodney Maxwell laughed. "You know the old Tenth Army Headquarters, over back of Snagtooth, in the Calders? Everybody knows that was cleaned out years ago. Well, always take a second look at these things everybody knows. Ten to one they're not so. It always bothered me that nobody found any underground attackshelters. I took a second look, and sure enough, I found them,

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right underneath, mined out of the solid rock. Conn, you'd be surprised at what I found there." "Where are you going to sell that stuff?" he asked, pointing at a passing skid. "There's enough combat equipment around now to outfit a private army for every man, woman and child in Poictesme." "Storisende Spaceport. The freighter captains buy it, and sell it on some of the planets that were colonized right before the War and haven't gotten industrialized yet. I'm clearing about two hundred sols a ton on it." The skid at which he had pointed was loaded with cases of M504 submachine guns. Even used, one was worth fifty sols. Allowing for packing weight, his father was selling those tommy guns for less than a good café on Terra got for one drink of Poictesme brandy.

Chapter

2

He had been in Kurt Fawzi's office before, once or twice, with his father; he remembered it as a dim, quiet place of genteel conviviality and rambling conversation. None of the lights were bright, and the walls were almost invisible in the shadows. As they entered, Tom Brangwyn went to the long table and took off his belt and holster, laying it down. One by one, the others unbuckled their weapons and added them to the pile. Klem Zareff's cane went on the table with his pistol; there was a sword inside it. That was something else he was seeing with new eyes. He hadn't started carrying a gun when he had left for Terra, and he was wondering, now, why any of them bothered to. Why, there wouldn't be a shooting a year in Litchfield, if you didn't count the Tramptowners, and they stayed south of the docks and off the top level. Or perhaps that was just it. Litchfield was peaceful because everybody was prepared to keep it that way. It certainly wasn't because of anything the Planetary Government did to maintain order. Now Brangwyn was setting out glasses, filling a pitcher from a keg in the corner of the room. The last time Conn had been here, they'd given him a glass of wine, and he'd felt very grown-up because they didn't water it for him.

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"Well, gentlemen," Kurt Fawzi was saying, "let's have a toast to our returned friend and new associate. Conn, we're all anxious to hear what you've found out, but even if you didn't learn anything, we're still happy to have you back with us. Gentlemen; to our friend and neighbor. Welcome home, Conn!" "Well, it's wonderful to be back, Mr. Fawzi," he began. "Here, none of this mister foolishness; you're one of us, now, Conn. And drink up, everybody. We have plenty of brandy, if we don't have anything else." "You can say that again, Kurt." That was one of the distillery people; he'd remember the name in a moment. "When this new crop gets pressed and fermented… ." "I don't know where in Gehenna I'm going to vat mine till it ferments," Klem Zareff said. "Or why," another planter added. "Lorenzo, what are you going to be paying for wine?" Lorenzo Menardes; that was the name. The distiller said he was worrying about what he'd be able to get for brandy. "Oh, please," Fawzi interrupted. "Not today; not when our boy's home and is going to tell us how we can solve all our problems." "Yes, Conn." That was Morgan Gatworth, the lawyer. "You did find out where Merlin is, didn't you?" That set them all off. He was still holding his drink; he downed it in one gulp, barely tasting it, and handed the glass to Tom Brangwyn for a refill, and caught a frown on his father's face. One did not gulp drinks in Kurt Fawzi's office. Well, neither did one blast everybody's hopes with half a dozen words, and that was what he was trying to force himself to do. He wanted to blurt out the one quick sentence and get it over with, but the words wouldn't come out of his throat. He lowered the second drink by half; the brandy was beginning to warm him and

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dissolve the cold lump in his stomach. Have to go easy, though. He wasn't used to this kind of drinking, and he wanted to stay sober enough to talk sense until he'd told them what he had to. "I hope," he said, "that you don't expect me to show you the cross on the map, where the computer is buried." All the eyes around him began to look troubled. Most of them had been expecting precisely that. His father was watching him anxiously. "But it's still here on Poictesme, isn't it?" one of the melon planters asked. "They didn't take it away with them?" "Most of you gentlemen," he said, "contributed to sending me to school on Terra, to study cybernetics and computer theory. It wouldn't do us any good to find Merlin if none of us could operate it. Well, I've done that. I can use any known type of computer, and train assistants. After I graduated, I was offered a junior instructorship to computer physics at the University." "You didn't mention that, son," his father said. "The letter would have come on the same ship I did. Besides, I didn't think it was very important." "I think it is." There was a catch in old Dolf Kellton's voice. "One of my boys from the Academy offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo, on Terra!" He finished his drink and held out his glass for more, something he almost never did. "Conn means," Kurt Fawzi explained, "that it had nothing to do with Merlin." All right; now tell them the truth. "I was also to find out anything I could about a secret giant computer used during the War by the Third Fleet-Army Force, code-named Merlin. I went over all the records available to the public; I used your letter, Professor, and the head of our Modern History department secured me access to non-public material,

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some of it still classified. For one thing, I have locations and maps and plans of every Federation installation built here between 842 and 854, the whole period of the War." He turned to his father. "There are incredible things still undiscovered; most of the important installations were built in duplicate, sometimes triplicate, as a precaution against space attack. I know where all of them are." "Space attack!" Klem Zareff was indignant. "There never was a time we could have attacked Poictesme. Even if we'd had the ships, we were fighting a purely defensive war. Aggression was no part of our policy—" He interrupted: "Excuse me, Colonel. The point I was trying to make is that, with all I was able to learn, I could find nothing, not one single word, about any giant strategic planning computer called Merlin, or any Merlin Project." There! He'd gotten that out. Now go on and tell them about the old man in the dome-house on Luna. The room was silent, except for the small insectile hum of the electric clock. Then somebody set a glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer blow. "Nothing, Conn?" Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue's hand shook as though palsied as he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at the drink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The others found their voices, one by one. "Of course, it was the most closely guarded secret … " "But after forty years … " "Hah, don't tell me about security!" Colonel Zareff barked. "You should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on Mephistopheles … " "But there was a computer code-named Merlin," Judge Ledue was insisting, to convince himself more than anybody else. "Its

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memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning all its /> Tom Brangwyn ran him down the next morning in the dining room. "Conn, I wish you'd come along with me," he said. "Some of us are up in Kurt's suite; we'd all like to talk to you." Somehow, he was acting as though he were making an arrest. That might have been nothing but professional habit. Conn went up to Fawzi's suite, and found Fawzi and Judge Ledue and Dolf Kellton and close to a dozen others there. "I'm glad you could come, Conn," the Judge greeted him. Now that the defendant had arrived, the trial could begin. "I wish your father could have gotten here. I asked him to come, but he had a prior engagement. A meeting with some of the financial people here, about some company he's interested in." "That's right; Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines." "Interstellar!" Kurt Fawzi almost howled. "Great Ghu! Now it isn't enough to go out to Koshchei; he wants to go clear out of the Trisystem. That's what we wanted to talk about; all this nonsense you and your father are in. Merlin's right here on Poictesme. It's right at Force Command, and if your father hadn't robbed us of all our best men, like Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes, we'd have found it by now. I don't think you and your father care a hoot if we ever find Merlin or not!" "Kurt, that's a dreadful thing to say," Dolf Kellton objected in a shocked voice. "It's a dreadful thing to have to say," Fawzi replied, "but you tell me what Conn Maxwell or Rodney Maxwell are doing to help find it." "Who showed you where Force Command was?" Klem Zareff asked. Nobody could think of any good quick comeback to that.

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Conn took advantage of the pause to ask, "Why do you want to find Merlin?" "Why do we … " Fawzi spluttered indignantly. "If you don't know… ." "I know why I do. I want to see if you do. Do you?" "Merlin would answer so many questions," Dolf Kellton told him gently. "Questions I can't answer for myself." "With Merlin, we could set up a legal code and a system of jurisprudence that would give everybody absolute justice," Judge Ledue said. As if absolute justice wasn't the last thing anybody in his right senses would want; a robot-judge would have the whole planet in jail inside a month. "We have a man who joined us after you went off to Koshchei, Conn," Franz Veltrin said. "A Mr. Carl Leibert. He's some kind of a clergyman, from over Morven way. He says that Merlin could formulate an entirely new religion, which would regenerate humanity." "Well, I don't have any such lofty ideas," Fawzi said. "I just want Merlin to show us how to get some prosperity here; bring things back to what they were before Poictesme went broke." "And that's what Father and I are trying to do. You're going into the woods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax." Fawzi looked at him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better of it. "If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss of markets. If we find Merlin, and tape it with everything that's happened in the forty years since it was shut down, Merlin will tell us where to find new markets. But the markets won't come to us. We'll have to do our own exporting, and we'll need ships. Now, you men have been studying about Merlin, and hunting for Merlin, all your lives. I can't add anything to what

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you know, and neither can my father. You find Merlin, and we'll have the ships ready when you do find it." "Kurt, I think he has a point," somebody said. "You're blasted well right he has," Klem Zareff put in. "If it wasn't for Conn Maxwell, you know where we'd be? Back in Litchfield, sitting around in Kurt's office, talking about how wonderful things'll be when we find Merlin, and doing nothing to find it." "Kurt, I believe Conn is entitled to an apology," Judge Ledue ruled. "How close we are to finding Merlin I don't know, but it is due to him that we have any hope of finding it at all." "Conn, I'm sorry," Fawzi said. "I oughtn't to have said some of the things I did. But we're all on edge; we've been having so much trouble… . Conn, it's right there at Force Command; I know it is. We've been all over the place. We have shafts sunk at each of the corners; we've used scanners, and put off echo shots. Nothing. We looked for additional passages out of the headquarters; there aren't any. But it has to be somewhere around. It just has to be!" "Maybe if I go out to Force Command with you, I might see something you've overlooked. And if I can't, I'll try to scrape up some stuff on Koshchei for you. Deep-vein scanners, that sort of thing, from the mines." They took the Lester Dawes out at a little past noon and turned south and east. Everybody aboard was happy—except Conn Maxwell. He was thinking of the years and years ahead of these trusting, hopeful old men, each year the grave of another expectation. Two hundred miles from Force Command, the Goblin met them, her sides still spalled and dented from the hits she had taken in Barathrum Spaceport. When they came in sight of it, the mesatop was deserted. Fawzi began wondering where in Nifflheim all the drilling rigs, and the seismo-trucks, were. Somebody with a

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pair of binoculars called attention to activity on the side of the high butte on top of which the relay station was located. Fawzi began swearing exasperatedly. "Might be something Mr. Leibert thought of," Franz Veltrin suggested. "Then why in blazes didn't he screen us about it?" "Who is this Leibert?" Conn asked. "Somebody mentioned him this morning, I think." "He joined us after you left, Conn," Dolf Kellton said. "He's a clergyman from Morven. No regular denomination; he has a sect of his own." "Yah, he would!" Klem Zareff rumbled. "Pious fraud!" "He's really a good man, Conn; Klem's prejudiced. He says we ought to use Merlin to show us the true nature of God, and how to live in accordance with the Divine Will. He says Merlin can teach us a new religion." A new religion, based on Merlin; that would be good. And then the fanatics who thought Merlin was the Devil would start a holy war to wipe out the servants of Satan, and with all the combat equipment that was lying around on this planet… . For the first time since this business started, he began to feel really frightened. An aircar came bulleting away from the butte and landed on the mesa as the Lester Dawes set down. The man who met them at the head of the vertical shaft wore Federation fatigues—baggy trousers, ankle boots and long smock, dyed black. He was bareheaded, and his white hair was almost shoulder-long. He had a white beard. "Welcome, Brothers," he greeted, a hand raised in benediction. "And who is this with you?" His voice was high and quavery; not a good pulpit voice, Conn thought.

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Kurt Fawzi introduced Conn, and Leibert grasped his hand with a grip that was considerably stronger than his voice. "Bless you, young man! It is to you alone that we owe our thanks that we are about to find the Great Computer. Every sapient being in the Galaxy will honor your name for a thousand years." "Well, I hadn't counted on quite that much, Mr. Leibert. If it'll only help a few of these people to make a decent living I'll be satisfied." Leibert shook his head sadly. "You think entirely in material terms, young man," he reproved. "Forget these things; acquire the higher spiritual values. The Great Computer must not be degraded to such uses; we should let it show us how to lift ourselves to a high spiritual plane… ." It went on like that, after they went down to Foxx Travis's—now Fawzi's—office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters instead of the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thick carpets on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi's office gang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no idea what a computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build a computer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn't need it, he would be God. As he talked, Conn began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition. He'd seen this Carl Leibert before, somewhere, and somehow he was sure that the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren't part of the picture. That puzzled him. He doubted if he'd have remembered Leibert from six years ago, almost seven, now, though a lot of itinerant evangelists showed up in Litchfield. That might have been it. "I tell you, the Great Computer is there, in the heart of the butte," Leibert was insisting, now. "It has been revealed to me in a

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dream. It is completely buried. After it was made, no human touched it. The men who were here and used it in the War communicated with it only by radio." That could be so. There were fully robotic computers, intended for use in places where no human could go and live. There was a big one on Nifflheim, armored against the fluorine atmosphere and the hydrofluoric-acid rains. But there was no point in that here, the things were enormously complicated, and military engineering of any sort emphasized simplicity—Aaaagh! Was he beginning to believe this balderdash himself? Klem Zareff fell in with him as they were going to dinner. "Revealed in a dream!" the old Rebel snorted. "One thing you can always get away with lying about is what you dream." "You think he's lying? I think he's just crazy." "That's what he wants you to think. Look, Conn, he knows Merlin is here; he's trying to keep us from it. That's why he shifted all that equipment over on the butte. He's working for Sam Murchison." "I thought your theory was that the Federation had lost Merlin." "It was, at first. It doesn't look that way to me now. It's right here at Force Command, somewhere. They don't want it found, and they're going to do everything they can to stop us. I oughtn't to have left this fellow Leibert here alone; well, I won't do that again. Get Tom Brangwyn to help me."

Chapter

16

The voyage back to Koshchei had been a week-long nightmare. When she had been the pride and budget-wrecker of Transcontinent & Overseas Airline, the Harriet Barne had accommodated two hundred first-class and five hundred lower-deck passengers, but the conversion to a spaceship had drastically reduced her capacity. The three hundred men and women who had been recruited for the Koshchei colony had been crammed into her with brutal disregard for comfort, privacy or anything else except the ability of the air-recyclers to keep them breathing. When Captain Nichols set her down at the administration building at Port Carpenter, a few had had to be carried off, but they were all alive, which made the trip an unqualified success. The dozen leaders of the expedition were congratulating themselves on that in one of the executive offices after the first dinner at Port Carpenter. Rodney Maxwell, in Storisende, had joined them in screen-image; he was mostly listening, and sometimes contributing a remark apropos of something the rest of them had said five minutes ago. "Our hypership," Conn was saying, "is going to have to be item two on the agenda. The first thing we need is a ship for the Poictesme-Koshchei run. By this time next year, we ought to have

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a thousand to fifteen hundred people here at the least. We can't haul them all on that flying sardine can." "We'll need supplies, too. What was left here won't last forever," Nichols added. "And you're going to have to run this at a profit," Luther ChenWong, who had come along for first hand experience and to help with administrative work, added. "You have a big payroll to meet, and you'll have to keep the stockholders happy. People like Jethro Sastraman and some of these Storisende bankers aren't going to be satisfied with promises and long-term prospects; they'll want dividends." "We'll have to get claims staked on something besides Port Carpenter, too. Those ships that are building at Storisende will be finished before long," Jerry Rivas said. "If we don't get some more things claimed, the first thing you know, we'll own Port Carpenter and nothing else." "Well, let's see what we can find in the way of a big airboat, or a small ship," Conn said. "Jerry, you can pick a party for exploring. Just zigzag around the planet and transmit in locations and views of whatever you find, and we'll send it on to Storisende." "And don't pick anybody for your exploring party that can't be spared from anything here," Jacquemont added. "We don't want to have to chase you halfway around the world to bring back the only specialist in something yesterday at the latest." "Are you going to come along, Conn?" Rivas asked. "Oh, Lord, no! I'm going to be doing fifteen things at once here." All the computer work. Finding materials to make astrogational equipment and robo-pilots. Studying hyperspace theory—fortunately, there was an excellent library here—and setting up classes, and teaching school. And keeping in touch with his father, on

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Poictesme. It was making him nervous not to know what sort of foolishness the older and wiser heads might be getting into. The next morning, they began organizing work-gangs and setting up committees. Three men, two girls and about twenty robots got an open-pit iron mine started; as soon as the steel mill was ready, ore started coming in. Anse Dawes had a gang looking for something they could build a 350-foot interplanetary ship out of; Jacquemont and Mack Vibart were getting plans and specifications and making lists of needed materials. Conn gathered a dozen men and women and started classes in computer theory and practice; at the same time, he and Charley Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatial astrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into some everythingless noplace outside normal space-time, and then pulling her out again by her bootstraps at some other place in the normal continuum, light-years away. Roughly, it compared to shooting hummingbirds on the wing, blindfolded, with a not particularly accurate pistol, from a mile-aminute merry-go-round. That was something you could only do with a computer. A human, with a slide rule, a pencil and pad, could figure it out, of course—if he had fifty-odd thousand years to do it. A good computer did it in thirty seconds. That was one difference between people and computers. The other difference was that the desirability of making a hyperspace jump would never occur to a computer, unless somebody pushed a button and taped in instructions. They found a three-hundred-foot globular skeleton, probably the nucleus of a big hyperspace ship, and decided that was big enough for what they wanted. The entire colony got to work on it.

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Photoprinted plans and specifications poured out as Jacquemont and a couple of draftsmen got them up. Steel came out of the steel mill at one end while ore came in at the other. A swarm of big contragravity machines, some robotic and some human-operated, clustered around the skeletal hull like hornets building a nest. Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines was chartered; the lawyers reported having to overcome a little more resistance than usual from the Government about that. And the bill to nationalize Merlin, which had died in committee, was resuscitated and was being debated hotly on the floor of Parliament. The Administration was now supporting it. "Are they completely crazy?" Conn wanted to know, when he heard about that. "They pass that bill and nobody's going to look for Merlin if they know the Government will snatch it as soon as they find it." "That is precisely Jake Vyckhoven's idea," his father replied. "I told you he was afraid of Merlin. He's getting more afraid of it every day." He had reason to. There was a growing sentiment in favor of turning the entire Government over to the computer as soon as it was found. To his horror, Conn heard himself named as chairman of a committee that should be set up to operate it. The moderates, who had merely wanted Merlin used in an advisory capacity, were dropping out; the agitation was coming from extremists who wanted Merlin to be the whole Government, and now the extremists were developing an extreme wing of their own, who called themselves Cybernarchists and started wearing colored-shirt uniforms and greeting each other with an archaic stiff-arm salute, and the words, "Hail Merlin!" And the followers of the gospel-shouter on the west coast were now cropping up all over the mainland, and on the continent of

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Acaire to the north, and another cult, non-religious, was convinced that Merlin was a living machine, with conscious intelligence of its own and awesome psi-powers, a sort of super-Golem, which, if found and awakened, would enslave the whole Galaxy. Fortunately, these two hated each other as venomously as both did the Cybernarchists, and spent most of their energies attacking each other's meetings. The news-services were beginning to publish casualty lists, some heavy enough for outpost fighting between a couple of regular armies. One thing, it helped the employment situation. Everybody was hiring mercenaries. "But what," Conn asked, "are the sane people doing?" "You ought to know," his father told him. "I suspect that you have all of them on Koshchei now." The sane people, if that was what they were, were being busy. They were putting a set of Abbott lift-and-drive engines together, and Conn's computer class was estimating the mass of the finished ship and the amount of energy needed to overcome gravitation and give it constant acceleration from Koshchei to Poictesme. They were learning, by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudograv engines. And they were putting together a hundred and one other things, all of which was good training for the time they'd be ready to start work on Ouroboros II. Jerry Rivas had found a contragravity craft which seemed to have been used by some top official for business and inspection trips, had gathered a crew of non-specialists who weren't urgently needed at Port Carpenter, and set out to circumnavigate the planet. It worked just the reverse of expectation. He found a big uranium mine, with an isotope-separation plant and a battery of plutonium-breeders; that meant that Mohammed Matsui and half

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a dozen other nuclear-power people had to get into another boat and speed after him to see what he had really found. As soon as they landed, Rivas took off again to discover a copper mine and a complex of smelters and processing plants. That took a few more experts, or reasonable facsimiles, away from Port Carpenter. And then he found a whole city that manufactured nothing but computers and robo-controls and things like that. Conn loaded his whole computer-theory class onto a freightscow and took them there. By the time he landed, his father was screening him from Storisende. "When are you going to get the ship finished?" he was asking. "Kurt Fawzi's pestering the daylights out of me. He wants that equipment you promised him." "We're working on it. What's happened, has Carl Leibert had another revelation?" "I don't know about that. Kurt's sure Merlin is directly under Force Command. And speaking about Leibert, Klem Zareff's been after me about him. You know I've contracted for the full-time and exclusive services of this Barton-Massarra detective agency. Well, Klem wants me to put them to work investigating Leibert." "Yes, I know; Leibert's a Terran Federation spy. Why do you need the full-time services of the biggest private detective agency on Poictesme?" "There have been some odd things happening. People have been trying to bribe and intimidate some of my office help. I have found microphones and screen-pickups planted around. I caught one of our clerks trying to make copies of voice-tapes. I think it's some of these other Merlin-chasing companies, trying to find out how close we are to it. Klem Zareff is recruiting more guards. But how soon are you going to get that ship built?" "We're working on it. That's all I know, now."

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He went back to work getting a classroom ready for his students. If he'd accepted that instructorship at Montevideo, he wouldn't be a full professor now, but none of the rest of this would be happening, either. That night, he had the dream about starting the big machine and not being able to stop it again. < hr size="2" /> There was street-fighting in Storisende between the Cybernarchists and Government troops. There was a pitched battle in the west between the Armageddonists (Merlin-is-Satan) and the Human Supremacy League (Merlin-is-the-Golem), with heavy losses and claims of victory on both sides. President Vyckhoven proclaimed planet-wide martial law, and then discovered that he had nothing to enforce it with. Luther Chen-Wong screened him from Port Carpenter. His voice was almost inaudibly low at first. "Conn, I just had a call from Jerry and Clyde. I think we can knock off work on that ship we're building now. We won't need it." "Have they found a ship?" If they had, it would be the first one anybody had found. "Where?" "They haven't found a ship, Conn; they've found all of them. All the ships in the Alpha System except the Harriet Barne and the two they're building at Storisende. The place is marked on the map as Sickle Mountain Naval Observatory. It's just a bitty little dot, but the map was made before the evacuation started. It's where most of the troops in the system were embarked on hyperships, I think. Wait till I show you the views." Conn put on another screen; the first view was from an altitude of five miles. He didn't need Luther's voice to identify Sickle

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Mountain; a long curve, with a spur at right angles to one end, the name must have suggested itself to whoever saw it first. The observatory had been built where the handle of the sickle joined the blade; as the ship from which the view had been taken had approached, the details grew plainer. At the same time, it became evident that the plain inside the curve of the sickle was powdered with tiny sparkles, like tinsel dust on red-brown velvet. "Great Ghu, are those all ships?" "That's right. Look at this one, now." The view changed. The aircraft was down, now, below the crest of the mountain, circling slowly above the plain. Hundreds, no, over a thousand, of them; two- and three-and five-hundred-footers, and here and there a thousand-footer that could have been converted into a hypership if anybody had wanted to take the trouble. The view changed again; this time from an aircar dropped from the ship, he supposed; it was down almost to the tops of the ships, and he could read names and home ports:Pixie, Chloris; Helen O'Loy, Anaïtis. They were from Jurgen. Sky-Rover, Port Saunders; she was from Horvendile. Ships from Storisende, and Yellowmarsh on Janicot, and… . "Now we know where they all went." It was logical, of course. Most of the hyperships used in the evacuation had been built here. It had been less trouble to lead the troops and the civilian workers from Poictesme and the other planets onto small normal-space ships and bring them here than to take the big ships away on short interplanetary runs to the other planets. "Have you screened my father yet?" "Yes. This is going to knock the bottom out of the companies that are building those ships at Storisende, I'm afraid." "Their tough luck."

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"It could be everybody's tough luck. Both those companies have been issuing stock, and there's been a lot of speculation in it. This market's so inflated now that a puncture at one place might blow the whole thing out." He knew that. He shrugged. "Father will have to think of something. Tell him I'll screen him from Sickle Mountain." Then he went back to his classroom. "All right, class dismissed," he said. "You have twenty minutes to get your bags packed. We're going to work for real, now." Airboats and airships flocked to Sickle Mountain; some of them hastened back to Port Carpenter for loads of food, for there was none in the storehouses at the embarkation camp. They inspected ship after ship, and chose two three-hundred-footers. They sent airships and freight-scows to the dozen-odd cities and industrial centers that had been already explored, to gather cargo, as far as possible the items in shortest supply on Poictesme. "Don't worry about a market smash," his father told him. "We have that taken care of. Trisystem Investments has just bought up a lot of stock in both of those companies, and we've set up agreements with them—informally, of course; we'll have to get them voted on by our own companies—to sell them ships from Koshchei. In return, the company that's building the ship out of four air-freighters will go to Janicot, and the company that's building a ship out of the old Leitzenring Building will go to Jurgen, and they'll both stay off Koshchei. Sterber, Flynn & ChenWong will probably be defending antitrust suits till the end of time. The Planetary Government has stopped liking us, you know." "Then we'll have to get one that will like us. There'll be an election about this time next year, won't there?"

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His father nodded. "To use one of your expressions, we're working on it. How soon can you get your ships in?" "Well be loaded and ready to lift off in a week. Another week for the trip." "Well, don't forget that equipment you promised Kurt Fawzi." "We'll have that on. Jerry Rivas is gathering it up now." "How are you fixed for arms on Koshchei?" "Arms? Why, there are some. There was a pretty big force of Space Marines on duty here, and they left everything they couldn't carry in their hands. Why? The Armageddonists and the Cybernarchists and Human Supremacy bought all you had on hand?" "They're buying, but I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking that your crews might need something to argue their way off the ships at Storisende with. Things are getting just slightly rugged here, now."

Chapter

17

There were no bands or speeches when they came in this time. A lot of contragravity vehicles circled widely around the spaceport, but except for a few news-service cars, the police were keeping them back of a two-mile radius around the landing-pits. A couple of gunboats were making tight circles above, and on the dock were more vehicles and a horde of police and guards. When Rodney Maxwell came across the bridge from the dock after they opened the airlocks, he was followed by a dozen BartonMassarra private police, as villainous-looking a collection of ruffians as Conn had ever seen. He was wearing a new suit, with a waist-length jacket instead of the long coat he usually wore, and there was a holstered automatic on each hip. In Litchfield, he never carried more than one pistol, and Storisende was supposed to be an orderly place where nobody needed to go armed. More than anything else, that told Conn approximately what had been going on while he had been on Koshchei. "Ship-guard," his father told Yves Jacquemont. "All your crew can come off; they'll take care of things. Get your people in that troop carrier over there. Everybody will stay at Interplanetary Building. None of the hotels are safe, not even the Ritz-Gartner. And be sure everybody's well armed when they come off the ship."

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Jacquemont nodded. "I know the drill; I've been in Port Oberth on Venus and Skorvann on Loki. Any law we want, we make for ourselves." "That's about it. I'll see you there. Conn, I wish you'd come with me. Somebody here wants to talk to you." He wondered if his mother, or Flora, had come to Storisende. When he asked his father as they crossed onto the dock, there was a brief twinge of pain in Rodney Maxwell's face. "No, they're not having anything to do—Duck; quick!" Then his father was diving under a lifter-truck that stood empty on the dock. The private police were scattering for cover, and an auto-cannon began pom-pomming. Conn took one quick look in the direction in which it was firing, saw an aircar that had broken through the police line and was rushing toward them, and dived under the lifter after his father. As he did, he saw a missile flash out from one of the gunboats like a thrown knife. Then he huddled beside his father and put his arms over his head. He felt the heat and shock of the explosion and, an instant later, heard the roar. When nothing immediately disastrous happened after he had counted fifteen seconds, he stuck his head out and looked up. The gunboat was struggling to regain her equilibrium, and the aircar had vanished in a fireball. They both emerged, straightening. His father was brushing himself with his hands and saying something about always having to duck under something when he had a new suit on. "Robot control, probably; could have been launched from anywhere in town. Why, no; your mother and Flora aren't speaking to either of us, any more. Pity, of course, but I'm glad they're in Litchfield. It's a little healthier there."

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They walked to the slim recon-car and climbed in, pulling the door shut after them. Wade Lucas was waiting for them at the controls. "There, you see!" he began, as soon as he had the car lifting. "What I've been telling you. We'll have to stop this." "Conn, meet our new partner. I told him everything you told me, out on the Mall, the day you came home. I had to," his father hastened to add. "He'd figured most of it out for himself. The only thing to do was admit him to the lodge and give him the oath." "I didn't know about General Travis; I didn't even know he was still alive," Lucas said. "But the rest of it was pretty obvious, once I stopped jumping to conclusions and did a little thinking. You know, ever since I came here I've been preaching to these people to stop looking for Merlin and do something to help themselves. You're smarter than I am, Conn; instead of opposing them, you're guiding them." "Did you tell Flora?" Lucas shook his head. "I tried to explain what you're trying to do, but she wouldn't listen. She just told me I'd gotten to be as big a crook as you two." He had the car up to fifty thousand; putting it into a wide circle around the city, he locked the controls and got out his cigarettes. "Rod, we've got to stop this. You were just lucky this time. Some of these days your luck's going to run out." "How can we stop?" Conn demanded. "Tell them the truth? They'd lynch us, and then go on hunting for Merlin." "Worse than that; it'd be a smash worse than the one when the War ended. I was only ten then, but I can remember that very plainly. We can't stop it, and we wouldn't dare stop it if we could." "What's been going on here in the last month?" Conn asked. "I've been too busy to keep in touch. I know there's been rioting, and these crackpot sects, but… ."

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"I think this is personal to us. There have been some ugly things happening. There were four attempts to burglarize our offices. I told you about some of the other stuff, the microphones we found, and so on. The worst thing was Lucy Nocero, my secretary. She just vanished, a couple of weeks ago. Three days later, the police found her wandering in a park, a complete imbecile. Somebody who either didn't know how to use one or didn't care what happened had used a mind-probe on her. It's twenty to one she'll never recover." "It's this Storisende financial crowd," Wade Lucas said. "They had things all their own way till Alpha-Interplanetary was organized. Now they're getting shoved into the background, and they don't like it." "They're making more money than they ever did, and they just love it," Rodney Maxwell said. "I'd think it was either Jake Vyckhoven or Sam Murchison." "Murchison!" Lucas hooted. "Why, he's nobody! Federation Minister-General; all the authority of the Terran Federation, and nothing to enforce it with. He doesn't have a position, here; he has a disease. Sleeping sickness." "He certainly doesn't believe there is a Merlin, does he?" Conn asked. "I don't know what he believes, but he's getting to be Klem Zareff's opposite number. He thinks this whole thing's a plot against the Federation. It's a good thing Klem didn't get around to repainting his combat vehicles black and green, the way he did the Home Guard stuff at Litchfield." "I'd be more likely to think it was Vyckhoven." "Could be. Or it could be the Armageddonists, or Human Supremacy; I am ashamed to say that this heil-Merlin Cybernarchist gang are friendly to us. Or it could be some of the banking crowd,

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or some of these rival space-companies. Barton-Massarra is trying to find out. Well, we have some of Wade's pet suspects at Interplanetary Building now. There's been a meeting going for the last week to partition the Alpha Gartner System." The Interplanetary Building had been a medium-class residence hotel at the time of the War. Junior staff officers and civilian technicians and their families had lived there. It had been vacant ever since the disastrous outbreak of peace. Now it had a big new fluorolite sign, and housed the offices of all the Maxwell companies. There was a truculent display of anti-vehicle weapons on the top landing stage, and more Barton-Massarra private police. They looked even more villainous then the ones at the spaceport. Conn recalled having heard that most of the Blackie Perales gang had been discharged for lack of evidence; he wondered how many of them had hired with Barton-Massarra. The meeting was in a big conference room six floors down; it had been going on uninterrupted for days, with all the interested companies' representatives standing watch-and-watch around the clock. Lester Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes were there for L. E. & S.; Transcontinent & Overseas was represented; there were people from Alpha-Interplanetary, and bankers and financiers, and people from the companies building the two ships at the spaceport. And J. Fitzwilliam Sterber, the lawyer. And reporters, phoning stories in and getting audiovisual interviews of anybody who would hold still long enough. They converged in a rush as Conn and his father and Lucas came in. "No statement, gentlemen!" Rodney Maxwell shouted, above the babble of their questions. "When we have anything to release, it will be released to all of you."

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Jacquemont and Nichols had already arrived; Lucas went to them and began talking about stevedores and lifters to get off the cargoes from the ships. Conn hastened to join them. "The scanning and mining equipment aboard the Helen O'Loy," he said. "That shouldn't be unloaded here; we'll take the ship out to Force Command and unload it there." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw, a lurking reporter snatch the handphone off his radio and begin talking; it would be stated authoritatively that Merlin was at Force Command and would be uncovered as soon as special equipment from Koshchei arrived. Everybody at the long table was shouting at everybody else. The Jurgen and Janicot Companies wanted to buy ships from Koshchei Exploitation & Development. The Alpha-Interplanetary director, who was also a vice-president of Transcontinent & Overseas, opposed that; another director of A-I, who was also board chairman of Koshchei Exploitation & Development, wanted to sell ships to anybody who had the price, the Transcontinent & Overseas man was calling him a traitor to the company, and one of the stockbrokers, who was also a vice-president of Trisystem Investments and a director of Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines, was wanting to know which company. And a banker who was stockholder in all the companies was shouting that they were all a gang of crooks, and J. Fitzwilliam Sterber was declaring that anybody who called him a crook could continue the discussion through seconds. Conn suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal on Poictesme. He wondered how many duels this meeting was going to hatch. The next afternoon the Helen O'Loy was unloaded, all but the mining equipment; Conn and Yves Jacquemont and Charley

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Gatworth and a few others took her out to Force Command. They were met by Klem Zareff's armed airboats two hundred and fifty miles from the mesa, and they found the place in more of a state of siege than when the Badlands had been full of outlaws. A lot of heavy armament seemed to have been moved in from Barathrum Spaceport, and Zareff had more men and firepower than he had ever commanded during the System States War. If Minister-General Murchison was convinced that the Merlin excitement was a cover for some seditious plot against the Federation, this ought to give him food for thought. There was still work, mostly boring lateral shafts for echo shots, going on at the butte, under the relay station. That was Leibert, who was still insisting that that was where Merlin was buried. There was also some work on top of the mesa, by those who were convinced that that was where Merlin was to be found. Kurt Fawzi was taking the lead in that. Franz Veltrin and Dolf Kellton sided with Leibert, and Fawzi's office clique had split into two factions. Judge Ledue was maintaining strict impartiality, as befitted his judicial position. "Why hasn't your father gotten those detectives of his to work on this fake preacher?" Zareff wanted to know, when he and Tom Brangwyn were able to talk to Conn alone. "Well, they've been busy," Conn said. "Trying to keep him alive, for one thing. You heard about the robo-bomb somebody launched at us the day we brought the ships in, didn't you?" "Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl, too," Brangwyn said. "But hasn't it ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that calls himself Leibert might be mixed up with the gang that did that?" "You suspect him, too?"

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Brangwyn nodded. "I took a few audiovisuals of him, when he didn't know it; I sent them to some different law-enforcement people over in Morven, where he says he comes from. They never saw him before, and couldn't find anybody who did." "Well? He just doesn't have a police record, then." "He says he's a preacher. Preachers don't go off in the woods by themselves to preach; they get up in pulpits, in front of a lot of people. Those towns over in Morven are small enough for everybody to have known something about him. He's a fake, I tell you." "Let me have copies of those audiovisuals, Tom. I'll see what can be found out about him. I'm beginning to wonder about him myself. I'm sure I've seen him, somewhere… ." When he got back to Storisende, he found that the marathon conference on the sixth floor down at the Interplanetary Building had finally come to an end. Everybody seemed satisfied, and apparently nobody was going to have pistols and coffee with anybody else about it. "We have things fixed up," his father told him. "The gang who are building the ship out of four air-freighters are chartered as Janicot Industries, Ltd.; they're going to specialize in chemical products. The other company has a charter now, too. They're going to operate on Jurgen and Horvendile. We'll sell them ships, and Alpha-Interplanetary will put on scheduled trips to all three planets and also Koshchei. We're getting along very nicely with them, except that everybody's competing for technicians and skilled labor. We have two hundred more people signed up for Koshchei. What you want to do is train as many of them as you can for ship-operation. Alpha-Interplanetary is going to start a training program here at Storisende; you'd better leave one of your ships for them to work on, and send back as many ships as you can find officers and crews for."

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"We're getting things really started." "Yes. The only trouble is… ." His father frowned. "I don't understand these people, Conn. Everybody ought to be making millions out of this by this time next year, but all any of them, even these Storisende bankers, can talk about is how soon we're going to find Merlin." "I wish we could stop that, somehow. Listen; I have it. Merlin never was on Poictesme; Merlin was a space-station a few thousand miles off-planet; there was a crew of operators aboard, and they communicated with Force Command by radio. When the War ended, they took it outside the system and shot off a planetbuster inside her. No more Merlin. How would that be?" His father shook his head. "Wouldn't do. If anybody believed it, which I doubt, they'd just quit. The market would collapse, everybody would be broke, it would just be the end of the War all over again. Conn, we can't let it stop now. We're going too fast to stop; if we tried it, we'd smash up and break our necks."

Chapter

18

Jerry Rivas, Mack Vibart and Luther Chen-Wong had been keeping things running on Koshchei. Work on the interplanetary ship at Port Carpenter, had stopped when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found; it had never been resumed. When Conn returned, he found work started on the Ouroboros II. Some of the two hundred newcomers who came in on the Helen O'Loy had special skills needed on the hypership; most of them went with Clyde Nichols and Charley Gatworth to Sickle Mountain to train as normal-space officers and crewmen. Some of them, it was hoped, would later qualify for hyperspace work. Sylvie, who had been one of the star pupils in the computer class, was now helping him with the long lists of needed materials, some of which had to be brought from other places as much as a thousand miles away. Jerry Rivas went back to exploring; Nichols had to drop his spacetraining work temporarily to organize a fleet of air-freighters; usually, the men best able to operate them were urgently needed on some job at the construction dock. Ships lifted out almost daily from Sickle Mountain. They tried to get some kind of salable cargo for each one, without depriving themselves of what they needed for themselves. Some of the ships came back loaded with provisions and bringing new recruits—for instance, the teaching of physics and mathematics almost stopped

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at Storisende College because the professors had been virtually shanghaied. Conn found himself losing touch with affairs on Poictesme. Ships had landed on both Janicot and Horvendile and were sending back claims to abandoned factories. By that time they had all the decks into the Ouroboros II, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogational and hyperspace instruments put in place. The hypershipAndromeda was back from the Gamma System; there was close secrecy about what the expedition had found, but the newscasts were full of conjectures about Merlin, and the market went into another dizzy upward spiral. Litchfield Exploration & Salvage opened a huge munitions depot, and combat equipment, once almost unsalable, was selling as fast as it came out. The Government was buying some, but by no means all of it. "Conn, can you come back here to Poictesme for a while?" his father asked. "Things have turned serious. I don't like to talk about it by screen—too many people know our scrambler combinations. But I wish you were here." He started to object; there were millions, well, a couple of hundred, things he had to attend to. The look on his father's face stopped him. "Ship leaving Sickle Mountain tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll be aboard." The voyage back to Poictesme was a needed rest. He felt refreshed when he got off at Storisende Spaceport and was met by his father and Wade Lucas in one of the slim recon-cars. They greeted him briefly and took the car up and away from the city, where it was safe to talk. "Conn, I'm scared," his father said. "I'm beginning to think there really is a Merlin, after all."

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"Oh, come off it! I know it's contagious, but I thought you'd been vaccinated." "I'm beginning to think so, too," Lucas said. "I don't like it at all." "You know what that gang who took the Andromeda to Panurge found?" "They were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements for Merlin, weren't they?" "Yes. They found it. My Barton-Massarra operatives got to some of the crew. This place had been turning out material for a computer of absolutely unconventional design; the two computermen they had with them couldn't make head or tail of half of it. And every blueprint, every diagram, every scrap of writing or recording, had been destroyed. But they found one thing, a big empty fiber folder that had fallen under something and been overlooked. It was marked: TOP SECRET. PROJECT MERLIN." "Project Merlin could have been anything," Conn started to say. No. Project Merlin was something they made computer parts for. "Dolf Kellton's research crew, at the Library here, came across some references to Project Merlin, too. For instance, there was a routine division court-martial, a couple of second lieutenants, on a very trivial charge. Force Command ordered the court-martial stopped, and the two officers simply dropped out of the Third Force records, it was stated that they were engaged in work connected with Project Merlin. That's an example; there were half a dozen things like that." "Tell him what Kurt Fawzi and his crew found," Wade Lucas said. "Yes. They have a fifty-foot shaft down from the top of the mesa almost to the top of the underground headquarters. They found something on top of the headquarters; a disc-shaped mass, fifty

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feet thick and a hundred across, armored in collapsium. It's directly over what used to be Foxx Travis's office." "That's not a tenth big enough for anything that could even resemble Merlin." "Well, it's something. I was out there day before yesterday. They're down to the collapsium on top of this thing; I rode down the shaft in a jeep and looked at it. Look, Conn, we don't know what this Project Merlin was; all this lore about Merlin that's grown up since the War is pure supposition." "But Foxx Travis told me, categorically, that there was no Merlin Project," Conn said. "The War's been over forty years; it's not a military secret any longer. Why would he lie to me?" "Why did you lie to Kurt Fawzi and the others and tell them there was a Merlin? You lied because telling the truth would hurt them. Maybe Travis had the same reason for lying to you. Maybe Merlin's too dangerous for anybody to be allowed to find." "Great Ghu, are you beginning to think Merlin is the Devil, or Frankenstein's Monster?" "It might be something just as bad. Maybe worse. I don't think a man like Foxx Travis would lie if he didn't have some overriding moral obligation to." "And we know who's been making most of the trouble for us, too," Lucas added. "Yes," Rodney Maxwell said, "we do. And sometime I'm going to invite Klem Zareff to kick my pants-seat. Sam Murchison, the Terran Federation Minister-General." "How'd you get that?" "Barton-Massarra got some of it; they have an operative planted in Murchison's office. And some of our banking friends got the rest. This Human Supremacy League is being financed by somebody. Every so often, their treasurer makes a big deposit at

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one of the banks here, all Federation currency, big denomination notes. When I asked them to, they started keeping a record of the serial numbers and checking withdrawals. The money was paid out, at the First Planetary Bank, to Mr. Samuel S. Murchison, in person. The Armegeddonists are getting money, too, but they're too foxy to put theirs through the banks. I believe they're the ones who mind-probed Lucy Nocero. Barton-Massarra believe, but they can't prove, that Human Supremacy launched that robobomb at us, that time at the spaceport." "Have you done anything with those audiovisuals of Leibert?" "Gave them to Barton-Massarra. They haven't gotten anything, yet." "So we have to admit that Klem wasn't crazy after all. What do you want me to do?" "Go out to Force Command and take charge. We have to assume that there may be a Merlin, we have to assume that it may be dangerous, and we have to assume that Kurt Fawzi and his covey of Merlinolators are just before digging it up. Your job is to see that whatever it is doesn't get loose." < hr size="2" /> The trouble was, if he started giving orders around Force Command he'd stop being a brilliant young man and become a halfbaked 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.

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The well, fifty feet in diameter, went straight down from 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 how he was going to be able to take charge here. < hr size="2" /> "You haven't found any passage leading into it?" he asked, when they were gathered in Fawzi's—formerly Foxx Travis's—office. "Nifflheim, no! If we had, we'd be inside now." Tom Brangwyn swore. "And we've been all over the ceiling in here, and we can't find anything but vitrified rock and then the collapsium shielding." "Sure. There are collapsium-cutters, at Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. They do it with cosmic rays." "But collapsium will stop cosmic rays," Zareff objected. "Stop them from penetrating, yes. A collapsium-cutter doesn't penetrate; it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like a grinding-wheel, or a buzz-saw." "Well, could you get one down that hole?" Judge Ledue asked. He laughed. "No. The thing is rather too large. In the first place, there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. With them, you produce negamatter—atoms with negatively charged protons and positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them into contact with normal positive-matter—That's

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done in a chamber the size of a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about a hundred tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impart rotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door that would lift ten ships the size of the Lester Dawes. Then you need another fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield your cutting-head. The cutting-head alone weighs three tons. The rotary beam that does the cutting," he mentioned as an afterthought, "is about the size of a silver fivecentisol piece." Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated that Divine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert's stock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in the butte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of Force Command. "Means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down to where that thing is," Zareff said. "That'll take a year." "Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started," Conn told them. "It'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauled here than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened." He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on Koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going to take charge here. He had just been unanimously elected Indispensable Man. "Bless you, young man!" Carl Leibert cried. "At last, the Great Computer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of the Age of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks in prayer." "He's been doing a lot of praying lately," Tom Brangwyn remarked, after Leibert had gone out. "He's moved into the chaplain's quarters, back of the pandenominational chapel on the fourth level down. Always keeps his door locked, too."

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"Well, if he wants privacy for his devotions, that's his business. Maybe we could all do with a little prayer," Veltrin said. "Probably praying to Sam Murchison by radio," Klem Zareff retorted. "I'd like to see inside those rooms of his." He called Yves Jacquemont at Port Carpenter after dinner. When he told Jacquemont what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was a pity screens couldn't be fitted with olfactory sensors, so that he could smell Conn's breath. "I am not drunk. I am not crazy. And I am not exercising my sense of humor. I don't know what Fawzi and his gang have here, but if it isn't Merlin it's something just as hot. We want at it, soonest, and we'll have to dig a couple of hundred feet of rock off it and open a collapsium can." "How are we going to get that stuff on a ship?" "Anything been done to that normal-space job we started since I saw it last? Can you find engines for it? And is there anything about those mining machines or the cutter that would be damaged by space-radiation or re-entry heat?" Yves Jacquemont was silent for a good deal longer than the interplanetary time-lag warranted. Finally he nodded. "I get it, Conn. We won't put the things in a ship; we'll build a ship around them. No; that stuff can all be hauled open to space. They use things like that at space stations and on asteroids and all sorts of places. We'll have to stop work on Ouroboros, though." "Let Ouroboros wait. We are going to dig up Merlin, and then everybody is going to be rich and happy, and live happily forever after." Jacquemont looked at him, silent again for longer than the usual five and a half minutes. "You almost said that with a straight face." After all, Jacquemont hadn't been cleared yet for the Awful Truth About Merlin,

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but, like his daughter, he'd been doing some guessing. "I wish I knew how much of this Merlin stuff you believe." "So do I, Yves. Maybe after we get this thing open, I'll know." To give himself a margin of safety, Jacquemont had estimated the arrival of the equipment at three weeks. A week later, he was on-screen to report that the skeleton ship—they had christened her The Thing, and when Conn saw screen views of her he understood why—was finished and the collapsium-cutter and two big mining machines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshchei had done a stroke of work on anything else. "Sylvie's coming along with her; so are Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and Ham Matsui and Gomez and Karanja and four or five others. They'll be ready to go to work as soon as she lands and unloads," Jacquemont added. That was good; they were all his own people, unconnected with any of the Merlin-hunting factions at Force Command. In case trouble started, he could rely on them. "Well, dig out some shootin'-irons for them," he advised. "They may need them here." Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened that collapsium can on top of Force Command, and how the people there reacted to it. The Thing took a hundred and seventy hours to make the trip; conditions in the small shielded living quarters and control cabin were apparently worse than on theHarriet Barne on her second trip to Koschchei. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. Carl Leibert kept to his quarters most of the time, as though he had to pray the ship across space. At the same time, reports of the near completion of Ouroboros II were monopolizing the newscasts, to distract public attention

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from what was happening at Force Command. Cargo was being collected for her; instead of washing their feet in brandy, next year people would be drinking water. Lorenzo Menardes had emptied his warehouses of everything over a year old; so had most of the other distillers up and down the Gordon Valley. Melon and tobacco planters were talking about breaking new ground and increasing their cultivated acreage for the next year. Agricultural machinery was in demand and bringing high prices. So were stills, and tobacco-factory machinery. It began to look as though the Maxwell Plan was really getting started. It was decided to send the hypership to Baldur on her first voyage; that was Wade Lucas's suggestion. He was going with her himself, to recruit scientific and technical graduates from his alma mater, the University of Paris-on-Baldur, and from the other schools there. Conn was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on Koshchei, running around with a monkeywrench in one hand and a textbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to do while they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long on the leavings of wartime production; too few people had bothered learning how to produce anything. The Thing finally settled onto the mesa-top. It looked like something from an old picture of the construction work on one of the Terran space-stations in the First Century. Immediately, every piece of contragravity equipment in the place converged on her; men dangled on safety lines hundreds of feet above the ground, cutting away beams and braces with torches. The two giant mining machines, one after the other, floated free on their own contragravity and settled into place. The Thing lifted, still carrying the collapsium-cutting equipment, and came to rest on the brushgrown flat beyond, out of the way.

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If Yves Jacquemont had overestimated the time required to get the equipment loaded and lifted off from Koshchei, Conn had been overoptimistic about the speed with which the top of the mesa could be stripped off. Digging away the rubble with which the pit had been filled, and even the solid rock around it, was easier than getting the stuff out of the way. Farm-scows came in from all over, as fast as they and pilots for them could be found; the rush to get brandy and tobacco to Storisende had caused an acute shortage of vehicles. One by one, the members of the old Fawzi's Office gang came drifting in—Lorenzo Menardes, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes. None of them had any skills to contribute, but they brought plenty of enthusiasm. Rodney Maxwell came whizzing out from Storisende now and then to watch the progress of the work. Of all the crowd, he and Conn watched the two steel giants strip away the tableland with apprehension instead of hope. No, there was a third. Carl Leibert had stopped secluding himself in his quarters; he still talked rapturously about the miracles Merlin would work, but now and then Conn saw him when he thought he was unobserved. His face was the face of a condemned man. The Ouroboros II was finished. The whole planet saw, by screen, the ship lift out; watched from the ship the dwindling away of Koshchei and saw Poictesme grow ahead of her. Twelve hours before she landed, work at Force Command stopped. Everybody was going to Storisende—Sylvie, whose father would command her on her voyage to Baldur, Morgan Gatworth, whose son would be first officer and astrogator, everybody. Except Carl Leibert. "Then I'm not going either," Klem Zareff decided. "Somebody's got to stay here and keep an eye on that snake."

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"No, nor me," Tom Brangwyn said. "And if he starts praying again, I'm going to go and pray along with him." Conn stayed, too, and so did Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes. They watched the newscast of the lift-out, a week later. It was peaceful and harmonious; everybody, regardless of their attitudes on Merlin, seemed agreed that this was the beginning of a new prosperity for the planet. There were speeches. The bands played "Genji Gartner's Body," and the "Spaceman's Hymn." And, at the last, when the officers and crew were going aboard, Conn saw his sister Flora clinging to Wade Lucas's arm. She was one of the small party who went aboard for a final farewell. When she came off, along with Sylvie, she was wiping her eyes, and Sylvie was comforting her. Seeing that made Conn feel better even than watching the ship itself lift away from Storisende.

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When Sylvie returned from Storisende, she had Flora with her. Conn's sister greeted him embarrassedly; Sylvie led both of them out of the crowd and over to the edge of the excavation. "Go ahead, Flora," she urged. "Make up with Conn. It won't be any harder than making up with Wade was." "How did that happen, by the way?" Conn asked. "Your girlfriend," Flora said. "She came to the house and practically forced me into a car and flew me into Storisende, and then made me keep quiet and listen while Wade told me the truth." "I wasn't completely sure what the truth was myself till Wade opened up," Sylvie admitted. "I had a pretty good idea, though." "I always hated that Merlin thing," Flora burst out. "All those old men in Fawzi's office, dreaming about the wonderful things Merlin was going to do, with everything crumbling around them and everybody getting poorer every year, and doing nothing, nothing! And when you were coming home, I was expecting you to tell them there was no Merlin and to go to work and do something for themselves. But you didn't, and I couldn't see what you were trying to do. And then when Wade joined you and Father, I thought he was either helping you put over some kind of a swindle or else he'd started believing in Merlin himself. I should have seen what you were trying to do from the beginning. At least,

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from when you talked them into cleaning the town up and fixing the escalators and getting the fountains going again." So the fountains weren't dusty any more. "How's Mother taking things now?" Flora looked distressed. "She goes around wringing her hands. Honestly. I never saw anybody doing that outside a soap opera. Half the time she thinks you and Father are a pair of unprincipled scoundrels, and the other half she thinks you're going to let Merlin destroy the world." "I'm beginning to be afraid of something like that myself." "Huh? But Merlin's just a big fake, isn't it? You're using it to make these people do something they wouldn't do for themselves, aren't you?" "It started that way. What do you think all this is about?" he asked, gesturing toward the excavation and the two giant mining machines digging and blasting and pounding away at the rock. "Well, to keep Kurt Fawzi and that crowd happy, I suppose. It seems like an awful waste of time, though." "I'm afraid it isn't. I'm afraid Merlin, or something just as bad, is down there. That's why I'm here, instead of on Koshchei. I want to keep people like Fawzi from doing anything foolish with it when they find it." "But there can't be a Merlin!" "I'm afraid there is. Not the sort of a Merlin Fawzi expects to find; that thing's too small for that. But there's something down there… ." The question of size bothered him. That drum-shaped superstructure couldn't even hold the personnel-record machine they had found here, or the computers at the Storisende Stock Exchange. It could have been an intelligence-evaluator, or an

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enemy-intentions predictor, but it seemed small even for that. It would be something likea computer; that was as far as he was able to go. And it could be something completely outside the reach of his imagination. At the back of his mind, the suspicion grew that Carl Leibert knew exactly what it was. And he became more and more convinced that he had seen the self-styled preacher before. Finally, the whole top of the hundred-foot collapsium-covered structure was uncovered, and the excavation had been leveled out wide enough to accommodate all the massive paraphernalia of the collapsium-cutter. They put The Thing onto contragravity again, and brought her down in place; the work of lifting off the reactor and the converter and the rest of it, piece by piece, began. Finally, everything was set up. A dozen and a half of them were gathered in the room that had become their meeting-place, after dinner. They were all too tired to start the cutting that night, and at the same time excited and anxious. They talked in disconnected snatches, and then somebody put on one of the telecast screens. A music program was just ending; there was a brief silence, and then a commentator appeared, identifying his news-service. He spoke rapidly and breathlessly, his professional gravity cracking all over. "The hypership City of Asgard, from Aton, has just come into telecast range," he began. "We have received an exclusive Interworld News Service story, recently brought to Aton on the PanFederation Spacelines ship Magellanic, from Terra. "News of revived interest in the Third Force computer, Merlin, having reached Terra by way of Odin, representatives of Interworld News, to which this service subscribes, interviewed retired Force-General Foxx Travis, now living, at the advanced age of a hundred and fourteen, on Luna. General Travis, who commanded

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the Third Fleet-Army Force here during the War, categorically denied that there had ever existed any super-computer of the sort. "We bring you, now, a recorded interview with General Travis, made on Luna… ." For an instant, Conn felt the room around him whirling dizzily, and then he caught hold of himself. Everybody else was shouting in sudden consternation, and then everybody was hushing everybody else and making twice as much noise. The screen flickered; the commentator vanished, and instead, seated in the deep-cushioned chair, was the thin and frail old man with whom Conn had talked two years before, and through an open segment of the dome-roof behind him the full Earth shone, the continents of the Western Hemisphere plainly distinguishable. A young woman in starchy nurse's white bent forward solicitously from beside the chair, handing him a small beaker from which he sipped some stimulant. He looked much as he had when Conn had talked to him. But there was something missing… . Oh, yes. The comparative youngster of seventy-some—"Mike Shanlee … my aide-de-camp on Poictesme … now he thinks he's my keeper… ." He wasn't in evidence, and he should be. Then Conn knew where and when he had seen the man who claimed to be a preacher named Carl Leibert. "There is absolutely no truth in it, gentlemen," Travis was saying. "There never was any such computer. I only wish there had been; it would have shortened the War by years. We did, of course, use computers of all sorts, but they were all the conventional types used by business organizations… ." The rest was lost in a new outburst of shouting: General Travis, in the screen, continued in dumb-show. The only thing Conn could distinguish was Leibert's—Shanlee's—voice, screaming: "Can it be a lie? Is there no Great Computer?" Then Kurt Fawzi

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was pounding on the top of the desk and bellowing, "Shut up! Listen!" "Frankly, I'm surprised," Travis was continuing. "Young Maxwell talked to me, here in this room, a couple of years ago; I told him then that nothing of the sort existed. If he's back on Poictesme telling people there is, he's lying to them and taking advantage of their credulity. There never was anything called Project Merlin… ." "Hah, who's a liar now?" Klem Zareff shouted. "Dolf, what did your people find in the Library?" "Why, that's right!" Professor Kellton exclaimed. "My students did find a dozen references to Project Merlin. He couldn't be ignorant of anything like that." "This youth has been lying to us all along!" the old man with the beard cried, pointing an accusing finger at Conn. "He has created false hopes; he has given us faith in a delusion. Why, he is the wickedest monster in human history!" "Well, thank you, General Travis," another voice, from the screen-speaker, was saying. The only calm voice in the room. "That was a most excellent statement, sir. It should… ." "Conn, you didn't tell us you'd talked to General Travis," Morgan Gatworth was saying. "Why didn't you?" "Because I never believed anything he told me. You were in Kurt Fawzi's office the day I came home; you know how shocked everybody was when I told you I hadn't been able to learn anything positive. Why should I repeat his lies and discourage everybody that much more? Why, he'd deny there was a Merlin if he was sitting on top of it," Conn declared. "He wants the credit for winning the War, not for letting Merlin win it for him." "I don't blame Conn," Klem Zareff said. "If he'd told us that then, some of us might have believed it."

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"And look what we found," Kurt Fawzi added, pointing at the ceiling. "Is that Merlin up there, or isn't it?" "That little thing!" Shanlee cried scornfully. "How could that be Merlin? I am going to my chamber, to pray for forgiveness for this wretch." He turned and started for the door. "Stop him, Tom!" Conn said, and Tom Brangwyn put himself in front of the older man, gripping his right arm. Shanlee tried, briefly, to resist. "Seems to me you lost faith in Merlin awfully quick," the former town marshal of Litchfield said. "You knew there was a Merlin all along, and you never wanted us to find it." Franz Veltrin, who had been "Leibert's" most enthusiastic adherent, had also lost faith suddenly; he was shouting vituperation at the Prophet of Merlin. "Knock it off, Franz; he was only doing his duty," Conn said. "Weren't you, General Shanlee?" It took almost a minute before they stopped yelling for an explanation and allowed him to make one. He caught Klem Zareff's comment: "Must be pretty hot, if they have to send a general to handle it." "I talked to Travis, yes. He gave me the same story he just repeated on that interview," Conn said, picking his way carefully between fact and fiction. "After I went back to Montevideo, he and this aide of his must have been afraid I didn't believe it, which I didn't. When I was ready to graduate, I got this offer of an instructorship; that was a bribe to keep me on Terra and off Poictesme. When I turned it down and took the Mizar home, Travis sent Shanlee after me. He must have grown that beard and that pageboy bob on the way out. I suppose he contacted Murchison as soon as he landed. Wait a minute."

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He went to the communication screen and punched out a combination. A girl appeared and singsonged: "Barton-Massarra, Investigation and Protection." "Conn Maxwell here. We gave you some audiovisuals of a man with a white beard, alias Carl Leibert," he began. "Just a sec, Mr. Maxwell." She spoke quickly into a handphone. The screen flickered, and she was replaced by a hard-faced young man in dark clothes. "Hello, Mr. Maxwell; Joe Massarra. We haven't anything on Leibert yet." "Are any of the officers of the Andromeda where you can contact them? Let them see those audiovisual. I'll bet that beard was grown aboard ship coming out from Terra." Bedlam broke out suddenly. Shanlee, who had been standing passively, his right arm loosely grasped by Tom Brangwyn, came down on Brangwyn's instep with the heel of his left foot and hit Brangwyn under the chin with the heel of his left palm. Wrenching his arm free, he started for the door. Sylvie Jacquemont snatched a chair and threw it along the floor; it hit the fleeing man's ankles and brought him down. Half a dozen men piled on top of him, and Brangwyn was yelling to them not to choke him to death till he could answer some questions. "Hey, what's going on?" the detective-agency man in the screen was asking. "Need help? We'll start a car right away." "Everything's under control, thank you." Massarra hesitated for a moment. "What's the dope on this statement that was on telecast a few minutes ago?" he asked. "Travis doesn't want us to find Merlin. What you just heard was one of his people, planted here at Force Command. We're going to question him when we have time. But there isn't a word of truth in that statement you just heard on the Herald-

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Guardian newscast. Merlin exists, and we've found it. We'll have it opened inside of thirty hours at most." That was the line he was going to take with everybody. As soon as he had Massarra off the screen, he was punching the combination of his father's private screen at Interplanetary Building. It took five interminable minutes before Rodney Maxwell came on. He could hear Klem Zareff shouting orders into one of the inside communication screens—general turnout, everything on combatready; guards to come at once to the office. "How close are you to digging that thing out?" his father asked as soon as he appeared. "We're down to it; we can start cutting the collapsium any time now." "Start cutting it ten minutes ago," his father told him. "And don't leave Force Command till you have it open. How many men and vehicles does Klem have for defense?You'll need all of them in a couple of hours. Everybody here is stunned, now; they'll come out of it inside an hour, and they'll come out fighting." "You'd better come out here." He turned, saw Jerry Rivas helping hold Shanlee in a chair, and shouted to him: "Jerry! Turn out the workmen. Start cutting the can open right away." He turned back to his father. "Klem's just ordered all his force out. Are you coming here?" "I can't. In about an hour, everything's going up with a bang. I have to be here to grab a few of the pieces." "You'll do a lot of good in jail, or on the end of a rope." "Chance I have to take," his father replied. "I think I'll have a couple of hours. If anybody from the press calls you, what are you going to tell them?" Conn repeated the line he had taken already. His father nodded.

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"All right. I'll call you later. If I can. Just keep things going at your end." A dozen of Klem Zareff's men were crowding into the room. "This man's under close arrest," the old soldier was telling them. "He is very important and very dangerous. Take him out somewhere, search him to the skin, take his clothes away from him and give him a robe. He's to be watched every second; make sure he hasn't poison or other suicide means. He's to be questioned later." As soon as Rodney Maxwell was off the screen, there was a callsignal. It was one of the news-services, wanting a statement. "I'll take it," Gatworth said, and then began talking: "This statement of General Travis's is completely false. There is a Merlin, and we've found it… ." They found something that might be good-enough Merlin for the next thirty hours. That superstructure was just big enough for the manually operated parts of a computer like Merlin; the input and output, and the programming machines.

Chapter

20

Klem Zareff's guardsmen were mercenaries. A little over a year ago they had, at best, been homeless drifters, and not a few had been outlaws. Now they were soldiers, well fed, clothed, quartered and equipped, and well and regularly paid. They had a good thing; they were willing to fight to keep it, Merlin or no Merlin. Conn left them to their commander. He did gather the workmen for a short harangue, but that wasn't really necessary. They had a good thing, too, and most of them realized that they were working toward a better thing. They could be depended upon, too. They came crowding out and manned lifters; they got the heavy collapsium-cutter maneuvered into place and the shielding down around the cutting-head. After that, there were only four men who could work, each in his own heavily shielded cabin. In spite of the shielding that covered the actual work, there was an awesome display of multicolored light; it was like being in the middle of an aurora borealis. What was going on where that tiny rotating beam of cosmic rays was grinding at the collapsium simply couldn't have been imagined. Conn would have liked to stay outside; he could not. Too many things were happening in too many places, and it was all coming in by screen. Rioting had broken out in Storisende and in a dozen other places. He saw, on a news-screen, a mob raging in front of

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the Executive Palace; yellow-shirted Cybernarchists were battling with city police and Planetary troops, Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers were fighting both and one another. Above all the confused noise of shouting and shooting, an amplifier was braying: "It's a lie! It's a lie! Merlin has been found!" Newsmen began arriving—Zareff's men had orders to pass them through the cordon that had been put up around Force Command—and they took up his time. It was worth it, though. They could tell him what was going on. J. Fitzwilliam Sterber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested, on a farrago of fraud charges—"I don't know who he's supposed to have defrauded; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"—and bail was being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged, but he was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We're going to start a false-arrest suit—" "If you're alive to." Apparently Sterber hadn't thought of that. "What do you think's going to happen when the Stock Exchange opens?" "It's going to be bad. But don't worry; your father must have foreseen something like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a few more people." He named some of the Trisystem Investments people and some of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace the market as long as we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in the long run." Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and Clyde Nichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte had been running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemont had gone to space in the Ouroboros II.

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"Well, they caught up with you," he said. Evidently he had figured out what, the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do about it?" "Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find it before things get too bad." He told Luther the situation of the moment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?" "We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to send any more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure this thing you've found is Merlin?" "I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatus they'd need to operate a thing like Merlin—Yes, Luther. I am sure we have found Merlin." Chen-Wong looked at him curiously. "I hope so. I can't think of anything else that can stop this business." Tom Brangwyn was in the room when he turned from the screen. "We searched Leibert's—Shanlee's—rooms," he said. "We found a bomb." "What kind of a bomb?" "Vest-pocket thermonuclear. He seems to have gotten the fissionables by taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing's packed inside a hundred-pound power-cartridge case. It was in a traveling-bag under his bed. And you know how it was to be fired? With a regular 40-mm flare-pistol, welded into the end of the bomb. The flare-powder had been taken out of the cartridge, and it had been reloaded with a big charge of riflepowder. I suppose it would blow one subcritical mass into another. But the only way he could have fired the bomb would have been by pulling the trigger." And blowing himself up along with it. He must have wanted Merlin destroyed pretty badly.

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"Have you questioned him yet?" "Not yet. I wanted to tell you about it first." He looked at his watch. Only four hours had passed since the newscast; why, that seemed like months, ago, now. "All right, Tom; we'll go talk to him. Where's the Colonel?" Zareff was surrounded by a dozen screens, keeping in touch with the Lester Dawes and the gunboats and combat cars, and the gun positions with which he had ringed Force Command. It was only a little army, maybe, but he was a busy commander-in-chief. "You take care of it. Tell me what you get from him. I can't leave now. There's a report of a number of aircraft approaching from the west now… ." They found Judge Ledue, and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton, who were just sitting around wishing there was something to do to help. They gave Franz Veltrin and Sylvie Jacquemont the job of keeping the representatives of the press amused. Then they went down to the room in which General Mike Shanlee was held under guard. Shanlee, wearing a bathrobe and nothing else, was lying on a cot, sleeping peacefully; three of Zareff's men were sitting on chairs, watching him narrowly. "All right; you can go," Conn told them. "We'll take care of him." Shanlee woke instantly; he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the cot. "You have my name and rank," he said, and his voice no longer quavered. "My serial number is—" He recited a string of figures. "And that's all you're getting out of me." "We'll get anything we want out of you," Conn told him. "You know what a mind-probe is? You should; your accomplices used one on my father's secretary. She's a hopeless imbecile now. You'll

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be, too, when we're through with you. But before then, you'll have given us everything you know." Kellton began to protest. "Conn, you can't do a thing like that!" "A mind-probe is utterly illegal; why, it's a capital offense!" Ledue exclaimed. "Conn I forbid you… ." "Judge, don't make me call those guards and have you removed," Conn said. "You can stop bluffing," Shanlee told him. "Where would you get a mind-probe?" "Out of the Chief of Intelligence's office, here in his headquarters. I should imagine it was to be used in interrogating Alliance prisoners, during the War. I think Colonel Zareff would enjoy helping to use it on you. He used to be an Alliance officer." Shanlee was silent. Conn sat down in one of the chairs, at the small table. "General Shanlee, would you describe General Foxx Travis as a man of honor and integrity? And would you so describe yourself?" Shanlee said nothing. "Yet both of you have lied, deliberately and repeatedly, to conceal the existence of Merlin. And we found that bomb in your room. You were willing to blow up this headquarters and everybody, yourself included, in it, to keep us from getting at Merlin. Well, you know that we can make you tell us the truth, maybe when it's too late, and you know that we are going to get Merlin. We're cutting the collapsium off that thing above now." Shanlee laughed. "You're supposed to be a computerman. You think that little thing could be Merlin?" "The controls and programming machine for Merlin." He turned to Kurt Fawzi. "You always claimed that Merlin was here in Force Command. You had it backward. Force Command is inside Merlin."

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"What do you mean, Conn?" "The walls; the fifty-foot walls, shielded inside and out. Merlin—the circuitry, the memory-bank, the relays, everything—was installed inside them. What's up above is only what was needed to operate the computer. Isn't that true, General?" Shanlee had stopped his derisive laughter. He sat on the edge of the cot, tensing as though for a leap at Conn's throat. "That won't help, either. If you try it, we won't shoot you. We'll just overpower you and start mind-probing right away. Now; you feel that suppressing Merlin was worth any sacrifice. We're not unreasonable. If you can convince us that Merlin ought not to be brought to light… . Well, you can't do any harm by talking, and you may do some good. You may even accomplish your mission." "He can't talk us out of it," Kurt Fawzi seemed determined to spoil things by saying. "Conn, I'm coming around to Klem's way of thinking. They just don't want anybody else to have it." "No, we don't," Shanlee said. "We don't want the whole Federation breaking up into bloody anarchy, and that's what'll happen if you dig that thing up and put it into operation." Nobody said anything except Fawzi, who began an indignant contradiction and then subsided. Tom Brangwyn lit a cigarette. "Would you mind letting me have one of those?" Shanlee said. "I haven't had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn't have been in character." Brangwyn took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, and gave it to Shanlee with his left hand, his right ready to strike. Shanlee laughed in real amusement. "Oh, Brother!" he reproved, in his former pious tones. "You distrust your fellow man; that is a sin." He rose slowly, the bathrobe flapping at his bare shins, and sat down across the table from Conn.

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"All right," he said. "I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you the truth, which will be something of a novelty all around." Shanlee puffed for a moment at the cigarette; it must really have tasted good after his long abstinence. "You know, we were really caught off balance when the War ended. It even caught Merlin short; information lag, of course. The whole Alliance caved in all at once. Well, we fed Merlin all the data available, and analyzed the situation. Then we did something we really weren't called upon to do, because that was policy-planning and wasn't our province, but we were going to move an occupation army into System States planets, and we didn't want to do anything that would embarrass the Federation Government later. We fed Merlin every scrap of available information on political and economic conditions everywhere in the Federation, and set up a long-term computation of the general effects of the War. "The extrapolation was supposed to run five hundred years in the future. It didn't. It stopped, at a point a trifle over two hundred years from now, with a statement that no computation could be made further because at that point the Terran Federation would no longer exist." The others, who had taken chairs facing him, looked at him blankly. "No more Federation?" Judge Ledue asked incredulously. "Why, the Federation, the Federation… ." The Federation would last forever. Anybody knew that. There just couldn't be no more Federation. "That's right," Shanlee said. "We had trouble believing it, too. Remember, we were Federation officers. The Federation was our religion. Just like patriotism used to be, back in the days of nationalism. We checked for error. We made detail analyses. We ran it all over again. It was no use.

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"In two hundred years, there won't be any Terran Federation. The Government will collapse, slowly. The Space Navy will disintegrate. Planets and systems will lose touch with Terra and with one another. You know what it was like here, just before the War? It will be like that on every planet, even on Terra. Just a slow crumbling, till everything is gone; then every planet will start sliding back, in isolation, into barbarism." "Merlin predicted that?" Kurt Fawzi asked, shocked. If Merlin said so, it had to be true. Shanlee nodded. "So we ran another computation; we added the data of publication of this prognosis. You know, Merlin can't predict what you or I would do under given circumstances, but Merlin can handle large-group behavior with absolute accuracy. If we made public Merlin's prognosis, the end would come, not in two centuries but in less than one, and it wouldn't be a slow, peaceful decay; it would be a bomb-type reaction. Rebellions. Overthrow of Federation authority, and then revolt and counterrevolt against planetary authority. Division along sectional or class lines on individual planets. Interplanetary wars; what we fought the Alliance to prevent. Left in ignorance of the future, people would go on trying to make do with what they had. But if they found out that the Federation was doomed, everybody would be trying to snatch what they could, and end by smashing everything. Left in ignorance, there might be a planet here and there that would keep enough of the old civilization to serve, in five or so centuries, as a nucleus for a new one. Informed in advance of the doom of the Federation, they would all go down together in the same bloody shambles, and there would be a Galactic night of barbarism for no one knows how many thousand years."

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"We don't want anything like that to happen!" Tom Brangwyn said, in a frightened voice. "Then pull everybody out of here and blow the place up, Merlin along with it," Shanlee said. "No! We'll not do that!" Fawzi shouted. "I'll shoot the man dead who tries it!" "Why didn't you people blow Merlin up?" Conn asked. "We'd built it; we'd worked with it. It was part of us, and we were part of it. We couldn't. Besides, there was a chance that it might survive the Federation; when a new civilization arose, it would be useful. We just sealed it. There were fewer than a hundred of us who knew about it. We all took an oath of secrecy. We spent the rest of our lives trying to suppress any mention of Merlin or the Merlin Project. You have no idea how shocked both General Travis and I were when you told us that the story was still current here on Poictesme. And when we found that you'd been getting into the records of the Third Force, I took the next ship I could, a miserable little freighter, and when I landed and found out what was happening, I contacted Murchison and scared the life out of him with stories about a secessionist conspiracy. All this Armageddonist, Human Supremacy, Merlin-is-the-Devil, stuff that's been going on was started by Murchison. And he succeeded in scaring Vyckhoven with the Cybernarchists, too." "This computation on the future of the Federation is still in the back-work file?" Conn asked. Shanlee nodded. "We were criminally reckless; I can see that, now. Let me beg, again, that you destroy the whole thing." "We'll have to talk it over among ourselves," Judge Ledue said. "The five of us, here, cannot presume to speak for everybody. We will, of course, have to keep you confined; I hope you will understand that we cannot accept your parole."

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"Is there anything you want in the meantime?" Conn asked. "I would like something to smoke, and some clothes," General Shanlee said. "And a shave and a haircut."

Chapter

21

All through the night, a shifting blaze of many-colored light rose and dimmed the stars above the mesa. They stared in awe, marveling at the energy that was pouring out of the converters into a tiny spot that inched its way around the collapsium shielding. It must have been visible for hundreds of miles; it was, for there was a new flood of rumors circulating in Storisende and repeated and denied by the newscasts, now running continuously. Merlin had been found. Merlin had been blown up by Government troops. Merlin was being transported to Storisende to be installed as arbiter of the Government. Merlin the Monster was destroying the planet. Merlin the Devil was unchained. Conn and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and Judge Ledue and Tom Brangwyn clustered together, talking in whispers. They had told nobody, yet, of the interview with Shanlee. "You think it would make all that trouble?" Kellton was asking anxiously, hoping that the others would convince him that it wouldn't. "Maybe we had better destroy it," Judge Ledue faltered. "You see what it's done already; the whole planet's in anarchy. If we let this go on… ." "We can't decide anything like that, just the five of us," Brangwyn was insisting. "We'll have to get the others together and see

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what they think. We have no right to make any decision like this for them." "They're no more able to make the decision than we are," Conn said. "But we've got to; they have a right to know… ." "If you decide to destroy Merlin, you'll have to decide to kill me, first," Kurt Fawzi said, his voice deadly calm. "You won't do it while I'm alive." "But, Kurt," Ledue expostulated. "You know why these people here at Storisende are rioting? It's because they've lost hope, because they're afraid and desperate. The Terran Federation is something everybody feels they have to have, for peace and order and welfare. If people thought it was breaking up, they'd be desperate, too. They'd do the same insane things these people here on this planet are doing. General Shanlee was right. Don't destroy the hope that keeps them sane." "We don't need to do that," Kurt Fawzi argued. "We can use Merlin to solve our own problems; we don't need to tell the whole Federation what's going to happen in two hundred years." "It would get out; it couldn't help getting out," Ledue said. "Let's not try to decide it ourselves," Conn said. "Let's get Merlin into operation, and run a computation on it." "You mean, ask Merlin to tell us whether it ought to be destroyed or not?" Ledue asked incredulously. "Let Merlin put itself on trial, and sentence itself to destruction?" "Merlin is a computer; computers deal only in facts. Computers are machines; they have no sense of self-preservation. If Merlin ought to be destroyed, Merlin will tell us so." "You willing to leave it up to Merlin, Kurt?" Tom Brangwyn asked.

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Fawzi gulped. "Yes. If Merlin says we ought to, we'll have to do it." Toward noon, a telecast went out from Koshchei, on a dozen different wave-lengths. Conn, half asleep in a chair in the commander-in-chief's office, saw Simon Macquarte, the young mathematics professor from Storisende College who had become one of the leaders of the colony, appear in the screen. The next moment, he was fully awake, shocked by Macquarte's words: "This is not a threat; this is a solemn, even a prayerful, warning. We do not want to use genocidal weapons of mass destruction against the world of our birth. But whether we do or not rests solely with you. "We came here with a dream of a better world, a world of happiness and plenty for all. We have been working, on Koshchei, to build such a world on Poictesme. Now you are smashing that dream. When it is gone, we will have nothing to live for—except revenge. And we will take that revenge, make no mistake. "We have the weapons with which to take it. Remember, this was a Federation naval base and naval arsenal during the War. Here the Federation Navy built their super-missiles, the missiles which devastated Ashmodai, and Belphegor, and Baphomet, and hundreds of these weapons are here. We have them, ready for launching. Once they are launched, with the robo-pilots set for targets on Poictesme, you will have a hundred and sixty hours, at the most, to live. "We will launch them immediately if there is another attack made upon Force Command Duplicate HQ, or upon Interplanetary Building in Storisende, or if Rodney Maxwell is killed, no matter by whom or under what circumstances.

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"We beg you, earnestly and prayerfully, not to force us to do this dreadful thing. We speak to each one of you, for each one of you holds the fate of the planet in his own hands." The image faded from the screen. As it did, Conn was looking from one to another of the people in the room with him. All were dumbfounded, most of them frightened. "They wouldn't do it, would they?" Lorenzo Menardes was asking. "Conn, you know those people. They wouldn't really?" "Don't depend on it, Lorenzo," Klem Zareff said. "It's hard for a lot of people to shoot somebody ten feet away with a pistol. But just sending off a missile; that's nothing but setting a lot of dials and then pushing a button." "I'm not worrying about whether they'd do it or not," Conn said. "What I'm worrying about is how many people will believe they will." Apparently a good many people did. Zareff's combat vehicles began reporting a cessation of fighting. The newscasts, repeating the ultimatum from Koshchei, told of fewer and fewer disorders in the city or elsewhere; by midafternoon, the rioting had stopped. By that time, too, Rodney Maxwell was on-screen. He was, Conn noticed, wearing his pistols again. "What happened?" he asked. "They let you out on bail?" Maxwell shook his head. "Charges dismissed; they didn't have anything to charge me with in the first place. But they haven't let me out yet." "You're wearing your guns." "Yes, but they still have me penned up here at the Executive Palace; they're practically keeping me in the safe. I wish our people on Koshchei hadn't mentioned me in their ultimatum; Jake Vyckhoven's afraid to let me run around loose for fear some

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lunatic shoots me and starts the planetbusters coming in. Jake did one good thing, though. He ordered the Stock Exchange closed, and declared a five-day bank holiday. By that time, you ought to have Merlin opened and working, and then the market'll be safe." Conn simply replied, "I hope so." There was no telling what kind of taps there might be on the screen his father was using; he couldn't risk telling him about Shanlee, or about the last computation which Merlin had made. "If we send the Lester Dawes in, do you think you might talk them into letting you come out here?" "I can try." Flora arrived at Force Command that afternoon. "I would have come sooner," she said, "but Mother's had a complete collapse. It happened last evening; she's in the hospital. I was with her until just an hour and a half ago. She's still unconscious." "You mean she's in danger?" "I don't know. They think she's all right, except for the shock. It was the Travis statement that did it." "Think I ought to go to her?" Flora shook her head. "Just keep on with what you're doing here. There isn't anything you can do for her now." "The best thing you can do for her, Conn, is prove that you weren't lying about Merlin," Sylvie told him. The Lester Dawes didn't make it from Force Command to Storisende and back until after dark, and the green and white and red and orange lights were rising in folds and waves. Rodney Maxwell had heard about his wife's condition; it was the first thing he spoke of when Conn and Flora and Sylvie met him as he got off the ship.

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"There isn't anything we can do, Father," Flora said. "They'll call us when there's any change." He said the same thing Sylvie had said. "The only thing we can do is get that infernal thing uncovered. Once we do this, everything'll be all right. We'll show your mother that it isn't a fake and it isn't anything dangerous; we'll put a stop to all these horror-stories about mechanical devils and living machines… ." Conn drew his father off where the girls couldn't overhear. "This is something worse," he said. "This is a bomb that could blow up the whole Federation." "Are you going nuts, too?" his father demanded. Conn told him about Shanlee; he repeated, almost word for word, the story Shanlee had told. "Do you believe that?" his father asked. "Don't you? You were in Storisende when the Travis statement came out; you saw how people acted. If this story gets out, people will be acting the same way on every planet in the Federation. Not just places like Poictesme; planets like Terra and Baldur and Marduk and Odin and Osiris. It would be the end of everything civilized, everywhere." "Why didn't they use Merlin to save the Federation?" "It's past saving. It's been past saving since before the War. The War was what gave it the final shove. If they could have used Merlin to reverse the process, they wouldn't have sealed it away." "But you know, Conn, we can't destroy Merlin. If we did, the same people who went crazy over the Travis statement would go crazy all over again, worse than ever. We'd be destroying everything we planned for, and we'd be destroying ourselves. That bluff young Macquarte and Luther Chen-Wong and Bill Nichols made wouldn't work twice. And if they weren't bluffing… ." His father shuddered.

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"And if we don't, how long do you think civilization will last here, if it blows up all over the rest of the Federation?" The big machine cut on, a little spot of raw energy grinding away the collapsium, inch by inch; the undulating curtains of colored light illuminated the Badlands for miles around. Then, when the first hint of dawn came into the east, they went out. The steady roar of the generators that had battered every ear for over twenty-four hours stopped. There was unbelieving silence, and then shouts. The workmen swarmed out to man lifters. Slowly the heavy apparatus—the reactor and the converters, the cutting machine, and the shielding around it—was lifted away. Finally, a lone lifter came in and men in radiation-suits went down to hook on grapples, and it lifted away, carrying with it a ten-foot-square sheet of thin steel that weighed almost thirty tons. When they had battered a hole in the vitrified rock underneath, guards brought up General Shanlee. Somebody almost up to professional standards had given him a haircut; the beard was gone, too. A Federation Army officer's uniform had been found reasonably close to his size, and somebody had even provided him with the four stars of his retirement rank. He was, again, the man Conn had seen in the dome-house on Luna. "Well, you got it open," he said, climbing down from the airjeep that had brought him. "Now, what are you going to do with it?" "We can't make up our minds," Conn said. "We're going to let the computer tell us what to do with it." Shanlee looked at him, startled. "You mean, you're going to have Merlin judge itself and decide its own fate?" he asked. "You'll get the same result we did." They let a ladder down the hole and descended—Conn and his father, Kurt Fawzi, Jerry Rivas, then Shanlee and his two guards,

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then others—until a score of them were crowded in the room at the bottom, their flashlights illuminating the circular chamber, revealing ceiling-high metal cabinets, banks of button- and dialstudded control panels, big keyboards. It was Shanlee who found the lights and put them on. "Powered from the central plant, down below," he said. "The main cables are disguised as the grounding-outlet. If this thing had been on when you put on the power, you'd have had an awful lot of power going nowhere, apparently." Rodney Maxwell was disappointed. "I know this stuff looks awfully complex, but I'd have expected there to be more of it." "Oh, I didn't get a chance to tell you about that. This is only the operating end," Conn said, and then asked Shanlee if there were inspection-screens. When Shanlee indicated them, he began putting them on. "This is the real computer." They all gave the same view, with minor differences—long corridors, ten feet wide, between solid banks of steel cabinets on either side. Conn explained where they were, and added: "Kurt and the rest of them were sitting here, all this time, wondering where Merlin was; it was all around them." "Well, how did you get up here?" Fawzi asked. "We couldn't find anything from below." "No, you couldn't." Shanlee was amused. "Watch this." It was so simple that nobody had ever guessed it. Below, back of the Commander-in-chief's office, there was a closet, fifteen feet by twenty. They had found it empty except for some bits of discarded office-gear, and had used it as a catch-all for everything they wanted out of the way. Shanlee went to where four thick steel columns rose from floor to ceiling in a rectangle around a heavyduty lifter, pressing a button on a control-box on one of them. The lifter, and the floor under it, rose, with a thick mass of vitrified

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rock underneath. The closet, full of the junk that had been thrown into it, followed. "That's it," he said. "We just tore out the controls inside that and patched it up a little. There's a sheet of collapsium-plate under the floor. Your scanners simply couldn't detect anything from below." Confident that Merlin would decree its own destruction, Shanlee gave his parole; the others accepted it. The newsmen were admitted to the circular operating room and encouraged to send out views and descriptions of everything. Then the lift controls were reinstalled, the lid was put back on top, and the only access to the room was through the office below. The entrance to this was always guarded by Zarel's soldiers or Brangwyn's police. There were only a score of them who could be let in on the actual facts. For the most part, they were the same men who had been in Fawzi's office on the afternoon of Conn's return, a year and a half ago. A few others—Anse Dawes, Jerry Rivas, and five computermen Conn had trained on Koshchei—had to be trusted. Conn insisted on letting Sylvie Jacquemont in on the revised Awful Truth About Merlin. They spent a lot of their time together, in Travis's office, for the most part sunk in dejection. They had finally found Merlin; now they must lose it. They were trying to reconcile themselves and take comfort from the achievement, empty as it was. They could see no way out. If Merlin said that Merlin had to be destroyed, that was it. Merlin was infallible. Conn hated the thought of destroying that machine with his whole being, not because it was an infallible oracle, but because it was the climactic masterpiece of the science he had spent years studying. To destroy it was an even worse sacrilege to him than it was to the Merlinolators. And Rodney Maxwell was thinking of the

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public effects. What the Travis statement had started would be nothing by comparison. "You know, we can keep the destruction of Merlin a secret," Conn said. "It'll take some work down at the power plant, but we can overload all the circuits and burn everything out at once." He turned to Shanlee. "I don't know why you people didn't think of that." Shanlee looked at him in surprise. "Why, now that you mention it, neither do I," he admitted. "We just didn't." "Then," Conn continued, "we can tinker up something in the operating room that'll turn out what will look like computation results. As far as anybody outside ourselves will know, Merlin will still be solving everybody's problems. We'll do like any fortuneteller; tell the customer what he wants to believe and keep him happy." More lies; lies without end. And now he'd have a machine to do his lying for him, a dummy computer that wouldn't compute anything. And all he'd wanted, to begin with, had been a ship to haul some brandy to where they could get a fair price for it. Peace had returned. At first, it had been a frightened and uneasy peace. The bluff—he hoped that was what it had been—by the Koshchei colonists had shocked everybody into momentary inaction. In the twenty-four hours that had followed, the forces of sanity and order had gotten control again. Merlin existed and had been found. As for Travis's statement, the old general had been bound by a wartime oath of secrecy to deny Merlin's existence. The majority relaxed, ashamed of their hysterical reaction. As for the Cybernarchists and Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers, government and private police, vastly augmented by volunteers, speedily rounded up the leaders; their followers

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dispersed, realizing that Merlin was nothing but a lot of dials and buttons, and interestedly watching the broadcast views of it. The banks were still closed, but discreet back-door withdrawals were permitted to keep business going; so was the Stock Exchange, but word was going around the brokerage offices that Trisystem Investments was in the market for a long list of securities. Nobody was willing to do anything that might upset the precarious balance; everybody was talking about the bright future, when Merlin would guide Poictesme to ever greater and more splendid prosperity. Conn's father and sister flew to Litchfield; Flora stayed with her mother, and Rodney Maxwell returned to Force Command, shaking his head gravely. "She's still unconscious, Conn," he said. "She just lies there, barely breathing. The doctors don't know… . I wish Wade hadn't gone on the ship." The price of what he had wanted to do was becoming unendurably high for Conn. They ran off the computations Merlin had made forty years before, and rechecked them. There had been no error. The Terran Federation, overextended, had been cracking for a century before the War; the strain of that conflict had started an irreversible breakup. Two centuries for the Federation as such; at most, another century of irregular trade and occasional war between independent planets, Galaxy full of human-populated planets as poor as Poictesme at its worst. Or, aware of the future, sudden outbursts of desperate violence, then anarchy and barbarism. It took a long time to set up the new computation. Forty years of history for almost five hundred planets had to be abstracted and summarized and translated from verbal symbols to the electro-mathematical language of computers and fed in. Conn and

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Sylvie and General Shanlee and the three men and two women Conn had taught on Koshchei worked and rested briefly and worked again. Finally, it was finished. "General; you're the oldest Merlin hand," Conn said, gesturing to the red button at the main control panel, "You do it." "You do it, Conn. None of us would be here except for you." "Thank you, General." He pressed the button. They all stood silently watching the output slot. Even a positronic computer does not work instantaneously. Nothing does. Conn took his eyes from the slot from which the tape would come, and watched the second-hand of the clock above it. The wait didn't seem like hours to him; it only seemed like seventy-five seconds, that way. Then the bell rang, and the tape began coming out. It took another hour and a half of button-punching; the Braillelike symbols on the tape had to be retranslated, and even Merlin couldn't do that for itself. Merlin didn't think in human terms. It was the same as before. In ignorance, the peoples of the Federation worlds would go on, striving to keep things running until they wore out, and then sinking into apathetic acceptance. Deprived of hope, they would turn to frantic violence and smash everything they most wanted to preserve. Conn pushed another button. The second information-request went in: What is the best course to be followed under these conditions by the people of Poictesme? It had taken some time to phrase that in symbols a computer would find comprehensible; the answer, at great length, emerged in two minutes eight seconds. Retranslating it took five hours.

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In the beginning and for the first ten years, it was, almost item for item, the Maxwell Plan. Export trade, specialized in luxury goods. Brandies and wines, tobacco; a long list of other exportable commodities, and optimum markets. Reopening of industrial plants; establishment of new industries. Attainment of economic self-sufficiency. Cultural self-sufficiency; establishment of universities, institutes of technology, research laboratories. Then the Maxwell Plan became the Merlin Plan; the breakup of the Federation was a fact that entered into the computation. Build-up of military strength to resist aggression by other planetary governments. Defense of the Gartner Trisystem. Lists of possible aggressor planets. Revival of interstellar communications and trade; expeditions, conquest and re-education of natives… . "We can't begin to handle this without Merlin," Conn said. "If that means blowing up the Federation, let it blow. We'll start a new one here." "No; if there's a general, violent collapse of the Federation, it'll spread to Poictesme," Shanlee told him. "Let's ask Merlin the big question." Merlin took a good five minutes to work that one out. The question had to include a full description of Merlin, and a statement of the information which must be kept secret. The answer was even more lengthy, but it was summed up in the first word: Falsification. "So Merlin's got to be a liar, too, along with the rest of us!" Sylvie cried. "Conn, you've corrupted his morals!" The rest of it was false data which must be taped in, and lists of corrections which must be made in evaluating any computation into which such data might enter. There was also a statement that, after fifty years, suppression of the truth and circulation of

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falsely optimistic statements about the Federation would no longer have any importance. "Well, that's it," Conn said. "Merlin thought himself out of a death sentence." They crowded into the lift and went down to the office below. Everybody who knew what had been going on upstairs was there. Most of them were nursing drinks; almost everybody was smoking. All of them were silent, until Judge Ledue took his cigar from his mouth. "Has the jury reached a verdict?" he asked, clinging with courtroom formality to his self-control. "Yes, your Honor. We find the defendant, Merlin, not guilty as charged." In the uproar his words released, Rodney Maxwell got to his feet and came quickly to Conn. "Flora called just a while ago. Your mother is conscious; she's asking for us. Flora says she seems perfectly normal." "We'll go right away; take a recon-car. General, will you explain things till I get back? Sylvie, do you want to come with us?"

Chapter

22

It was autumn again, the second autumn since he had landed from the City of Asgard at Storisende and taken the Countess Dorothy home to Litchfield. Again the fields were bare and brown; all up and down the Gordon Valley the melons were harvested, and the wine-pressing was ready to start. The house was crowded today. All top-level Litchfield seemed to have turned out, and there were guests from Storisende, and even a few who had made the trip from Koshchei to be there, Simon Macquarte, the president of Koshchei Tech; Conn would always remember him in the screen threatening a whole planet with devastation. Luther Chen-Wong, the chief executive of Koshchei Colony. Clyde Nichols, the president of Koshchei Airlines. He almost bumped into Yves Jacquemont, coming in from the hall. Jacquemont's beard had been trimmed down to a small imperial, and he was wearing the uniform of Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines, nothing at all like a Federation Space Navy uniform. He was laughing about something; he threw an arm over Conn's shoulder, and they went into the front parlor together. "Oh, Gehenna of a big crop!" he heard Klem Zareff's voice, chuckling happily, above the babble in the room. "You wouldn't believe it. Why, we had to build six new vats… ."

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The thin-faced, white-haired man in the chair beside him said something. Mike Shanlee and Klem Zareff, old enemies, were now fast friends. Shanlee had come in from Force Command with Conn that morning. He had stayed on Poictesme as nominal head of Project Merlin, and intended to remain there for the rest of his life. "Oh, there aren't any more farm-tramps," Zareff replied. "Everybody's getting factory jobs off-planet. I have an awful time getting help, and what I can get won't work for less than ten sols a day. Why, they're even organizing a union… ." There were feminine shrieks from across the room, and a stampede. The housecleaning-robot had come in, running its vacuumcleaning hose around and brandishing its mops. He saw his mother break away from a group of older ladies and shout: "Oscar!" The robot stopped dead. "Yash'm?" a voice came out of it, Sheshan-accented. "Go out!" his mother commanded. "Go to kitchen. Stay there." "Yash'm." The robot floated out the door to the hall. His mother rejoined her friends. Probably telling them, for the thousandth time, that her boy Conn fixed up the sound receptors and voice for Oscar. Or harping on how Conn had been telling everybody the truth, all along, and people wouldn't believe him. Sylvie came up to him and caught his arm. "Come on, Conn; they're going to start the rehearsal," she said. "They've been going to start it for an hour," her father told her. "Well, they're really going to start it now." "All right. You two run along," Yves Jacquemont said. "And you'd better start rehearsing for your own wedding before long. The Genji will be ready to hyper out in another month, and I don't want to be at space when my only daughter gets married."

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They pushed through the crowd, dragging Conn's mother with them toward the big living room beyond. On the way, Mrs. Maxwell stopped to try to drag Judge Ledue out of a chair. "Judge, the rehearsal is starting; they can't do it without you." Ledue clung to his chair. "They daren't do it with me, Mrs. Maxwell. If I get into it, it won't be a rehearsal; they'll be really married, and then there won't be any point in having a wedding tomorrow." "Oh, Morgan!" Conn called across the room to Gatworth. "You've just been appointed temporary judge for the wedding rehearsal!" There was a big crowd around Wade Lucas, in the next room; he was telling them about the voyage to Baldur, from which he had returned, and the one to Irminsul, with a cargo of arms, machine tools and contragravity vehicles, on which he and his bride would go for their honeymoon. There was another crowd around Flora; she was telling them about the new fashions on Baldur, which had been brought back on the Ouroboros II. "Where's your father?" his mother was asking him. "He has to rehearse giving the bride away." "Probably in his office. I'll go get him." "You'll get into an argument with somebody and forget to come back," his mother said. "Sylvie, you go with him, and bring both of them back." "When'll we have our wedding, Sylvie?" he asked as they went off together. "Well, before Dad goes to Aditya with the Genji. That'll have to be in a month." "Two weeks? That ought to be plenty of time to get ready, and let people recover from this one."

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"Everybody's here now. Let's make it a double wedding tomorrow," she suggested. He hadn't been prepared for that. "Well, I hadn't expected… . Sure! Good idea!" he agreed. There was a crowd in Rodney Maxwell's little office—Fawzi and some others, and some Storisende people. One of the latter was vociferating: "Jake Vyckhoven's no good, and he never was any good!" "Well, you have to admit, if he hadn't ordered the banks and the Stock Exchange closed that time, we'd have had a horrible panic—" "Admit nothing of the kind! Jethro, you were there, you'll bear me out. About a dozen of us were at Executive Palace for hours, bullying him into that. Why, we almost had to twist one of his arms while he was signing the order with the other. And now he has the gall to run for re-election on the strength of his heroic actions at the time of the Travis Hoax!" "I know who we want for President!" another Storisende man exclaimed. "He's right here in this room!" "Yes!" Rodney Maxwell almost bellowed, before the other man could say anything else. "Here he is!" He grabbed Kurt Fawzi by the arm and yanked him to his feet. "Here's the man most responsible for finding Merlin; the man who first suggested sending my son Conn to Terra to school, the man who, more than anyone else, devoted his life to the search for Merlin, the man whose inextinguishable faith and indomitable courage kept that search alive through its darkest hours. Everybody, get a drink; a toast to our next President, Kurt Fawzi!" Conn was sure he heard his father add: "Ghu, what a narrow escape!"

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Then he and Sylvie began chanting, in unison, "We want Fawzi! We want Fawzi!"

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