XX
Klem Zareff's guardsmen were mercenaries. A little over a year agothey had, at best, been homeless drifters, and not a few had beenoutlaws. Now they were soldiers, well fed, clothed, quartered andequipped, and well and regularly paid. They had a good thing; theywere willing to fight to keep it, Merlin or no Merlin. Conn left themto their commander. He did gather the workmen for a short harangue,but that wasn't really necessary. They had a good thing, too, and mostof them realized that they were working toward a better thing. Theycould be depended upon, too.
They came crowding out and manned lifters; they got the heavycollapsium-cutter maneuvered into place and the shielding down aroundthe cutting-head. After that, there were only four men who could work,each in his own heavily shielded cabin. In spite of the shielding thatcovered the actual work, there was an awesome display of multicoloredlight; it was like being in the middle of an aurora borealis. What wasgoing on where that tiny rotating beam of cosmic rays was grinding atthe collapsium simply couldn't have been imagined.
Conn would have liked to stay outside; he could not. Too many thingswere 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. Hesaw, on a news-screen, a mob raging in front of the Executive Palace;yellow-shirted Cybernarchists were battling with city police andPlanetary troops, Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers werefighting both and one another. Above all the confused noise ofshouting and shooting, an amplifier was braying: "_It's a lie! It's alie! Merlin has been found!_" Newsmen began arriving--Zareff's menhad orders to pass them through the cordon that had been put up aroundForce 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 afarrago of fraud charges--"I don't know who he's supposed to havedefrauded; the Planetary Government is the sole complainant"--and bailwas being illegally denied. Sterber's lawyerly soul was outraged, buthe was grimly elated. "You wait till things quiet down a little. We'regoing to start a false-arrest suit--"
"If you're alive to." Apparently Sterber hadn't thought of that. "Whatdo 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 foreseensomething like this. He gave me instructions, and instructed a fewmore people." He named some of the Trisystem Investments people andsome of the bankers. "We're going to try to brace the market as longas we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in thelong run."
Luther Chen-Wong called from Port Carpenter, on Koshchei. He and ClydeNichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon Macquarte hadbeen running the colony, in Conn's absence and since Yves Jacquemonthad gone to space in the _Ouroboros II_.
"Well, they caught up with you," he said. Evidently he had figured outwhat the search for Merlin was all about, too. "What do we do aboutit?"
"Well, we are just before finding Merlin, here. I hope we find itbefore things get too bad." He told Luther the situation of themoment. "Have you people started on another hypership yet?"
"We're getting organized to. I don't suppose it's advisable to sendany more ships in to Storisende for a while? And are you sure thisthing you've found is Merlin?"
"I don't know what it is. It's only big enough for the apparatusthey'd need to operate a thing like Merlin--Yes, Luther. I am sure wehave found Merlin."
Chen-Wong looked at him curiously. "I hope so. I can't think ofanything 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 fissionablesby taking apart a couple of light tactical missiles; the whole thing'spacked inside a hundred-pound power-cartridge case. It was in atraveling-bag under his bed. And you know how it was to be fired? Witha regular 40-mm flare-pistol, welded into the end of the bomb. Theflare-powder had been taken out of the cartridge, and it had beenreloaded with a big charge of rifle-powder. I suppose it would blowone subcritical mass into another. But the only way he could havefired the bomb would have been by pulling the trigger."
And blowing himself up along with it. He must have wanted Merlindestroyed pretty badly.
"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 positionswith 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 leavenow. There's a report of a number of aircraft approaching from thewest now...."
They found Judge Ledue, and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton, who were justsitting around wishing there was something to do to help. They gaveFranz Veltrin and Sylvie Jacquemont the job of keeping therepresentatives of the press amused. Then they went down to the roomin 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 ofthe cot.
"You have my name and rank," he said, and his voice no longerquavered. "My serial number is--" He recited a string of figures. "Andthat's all you're getting out of me."
"We'll get anything we want out of you," Conn told him. "You know whata mind-probe is? You should; your accomplices used one on my father'ssecretary. She's a hopeless imbecile now. You'll be, too, when we'rethrough with you. But before then, you'll have given us everything youknow."
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!" Ledueexclaimed. "Conn I forbid you...."
"Judge, don't make me call those guards and have you removed," Connsaid.
"You can stop bluffing," Shanlee told him. "Where would you get amind-probe?"
"Out of the Chief of Intelligence's office, here in his headquarters.I should imagine it was to be used in interrogating Allianceprisoners, during the War. I think Colonel Zareff would enjoy helpingto use it on you. He used to be an Alliance officer."
Shanlee was silent. Conn sat down in one of the chairs, at the smalltable.
"General Shanlee, would you describe General Foxx Travis as a man ofhonor and integrity? And would you so describe yourself?" Shanlee saidnothing. "Yet both of you have lied, deliberately and repeatedly, toconceal the existence of Merlin. And we found that bomb in your room.You were willing to blow up this headquarters and everybody, yourselfincluded, in it, to keep us from getting at Merlin. Well, you knowthat we can make you tell us the truth, maybe when it's too late, andyou know that we are going to get Merlin. We're cutting the collapsiumoff that thing above now."
Shanlee laughed. "You're supposed to be a computerman. You think thatlittle thing could be Merlin?"
"The controls and programming machine for Merlin." He turned to KurtFawzi. "You always claimed that Merlin was here in Force Command. Youhad it backward. Force Command is inside Merlin."
"What do you mean, Conn?"
"The walls; the fifty-foot walls, shielded inside and out. Merlin--thecircuitry, the memory-bank, the relays, everything--was installedinside them. What's up above is only what was needed to operate thecomputer. Isn't that true, General?"
Shanlee had stopped his derisive laughter. He sat on the edge of thecot, tensing as though for a leap at Conn's throat.
"Tha
t won't help, either. If you try it, we won't shoot you. We'lljust overpower you and start mind-probing right away. Now; you feelthat suppressing Merlin was worth any sacrifice. We're notunreasonable. If you can convince us that Merlin ought not to bebrought to light.... Well, you can't do any harm by talking, and youmay do some good. You may even accomplish your mission."
"He can't talk us out of it," Kurt Fawzi seemed determined to spoilthings 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 Federationbreaking up into bloody anarchy, and that's what'll happen if you digthat thing up and put it into operation."
Nobody said anything except Fawzi, who began an indignantcontradiction and then subsided. Tom Brangwyn lit a cigarette.
"Would you mind letting me have one of those?" Shanlee said. "Ihaven't had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn't have been incharacter."
Brangwyn took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, andgave 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 distrustyour fellow man; that is a sin."
He rose slowly, the bathrobe flapping at his bare shins, and sat downacross the table from Conn.
"All right," he said. "I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you thetruth, which will be something of a novelty all around."
Shanlee puffed for a moment at the cigarette; it must really havetasted good after his long abstinence.
"You know, we were really caught off balance when the War ended. Iteven caught Merlin short; information lag, of course. The wholeAlliance caved in all at once. Well, we fed Merlin all the dataavailable, and analyzed the situation. Then we did something we reallyweren't called upon to do, because that was policy-planning and wasn'tour province, but we were going to move an occupation army into SystemStates planets, and we didn't want to do anything that would embarrassthe Federation Government later. We fed Merlin every scrap ofavailable information on political and economic conditions everywherein the Federation, and set up a long-term computation of the generaleffects of the War.
"The extrapolation was supposed to run five hundred years in thefuture. It didn't. It stopped, at a point a trifle over two hundredyears from now, with a statement that no computation could be madefurther because at that point the Terran Federation would no longerexist."
The others, who had taken chairs facing him, looked at him blankly.
"No more Federation?" Judge Ledue asked incredulously. "Why, theFederation, the Federation...."
The Federation would last forever. Anybody knew that. There justcouldn't be no more Federation.
"That's right," Shanlee said. "We had trouble believing it, too.Remember, we were Federation officers. The Federation was ourreligion. Just like patriotism used to be, back in the days ofnationalism. We checked for error. We made detail analyses. We ran itall over again. It was no use.
"In two hundred years, there won't be any Terran Federation. TheGovernment 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 likethat on every planet, even on Terra. Just a slow crumbling, tilleverything is gone; then every planet will start sliding back, inisolation, 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 ofpublication of this prognosis. You know, Merlin can't predict what youor I would do under given circumstances, but Merlin can handlelarge-group behavior with absolute accuracy. If we made publicMerlin's prognosis, the end would come, not in two centuries but inless than one, and it wouldn't be a slow, peaceful decay; it would bea 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 inignorance of the future, people would go on trying to make do withwhat they had. But if they found out that the Federation was doomed,everybody would be trying to snatch what they could, and end bysmashing everything. Left in ignorance, there might be a planet hereand there that would keep enough of the old civilization to serve, infive or so centuries, as a nucleus for a new one. Informed in advanceof the doom of the Federation, they would all go down together in thesame bloody shambles, and there would be a Galactic night of barbarismfor no one knows how many thousand years."
"We don't want anything like that to happen!" Tom Brangwyn said, in afrightened voice.
"Then pull everybody out of here and blow the place up, Merlin alongwith it," Shanlee said.
"No! We'll not do that!" Fawzi shouted. "I'll shoot the man dead whotries 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 werepart of it. We couldn't. Besides, there was a chance that it mightsurvive the Federation; when a new civilization arose, it would beuseful. We just sealed it. There were fewer than a hundred of us whoknew about it. We all took an oath of secrecy. We spent the rest ofour lives trying to suppress any mention of Merlin or the MerlinProject. You have no idea how shocked both General Travis and I werewhen 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 theThird Force, I took the next ship I could, a miserable littlefreighter, and when I landed and found out what was happening, Icontacted Murchison and scared the life out of him with stories abouta secessionist conspiracy. All this Armageddonist, Human Supremacy,Merlin-is-the-Devil, stuff that's been going on was started byMurchison. And he succeeded in scaring Vyckhoven with theCybernarchists, too."
"This computation on the future of the Federation is still in theback-work file?" Conn asked.
Shanlee nodded. "We were criminally reckless; I can see that, now. Letme beg, again, that you destroy the whole thing."
"We'll have to talk it over among ourselves," Judge Ledue said. "Thefive of us, here, cannot presume to speak for everybody. We will, ofcourse, have to keep you confined; I hope you will understand that wecannot accept your parole."
"Is there anything you want in the meantime?" Conn asked.
"I would like something to smoke, and some clothes," General Shanleesaid. "And a shave and a haircut."