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 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[pg 177] 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.

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[pg 178] 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.

"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.[pg 179]

"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 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;[pg 180] it was the first thing he spoke of when conn and flora and sylvie met him as he got off the ship.

"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.

"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?"[pg 181]

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, 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 dial-studded control panels, big keyboards. it was shanlee who found the lights and put them on.

"powered from the central plant, down below," he said.[pg 182] "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 heavy-duty 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 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[pg 183] 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 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[pg 184] 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 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[pg 185] 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 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 braille-like 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[pg 186] symbols a computer would find comprehensible; the answer, at great length, emerged in two minutes eight seconds. retranslating it took five hours.

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 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[pg 187] 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?"