"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."
"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.
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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."