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.
"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 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.
"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?"
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. "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 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 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 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 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 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?"