 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mark Nelson. The Cosmic Computer by H. B. Piper. Chapter 17 There were no bands or speeches when they came in this time. A lot of contra-gravity 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 gun-boats were making tight circles above, and on the dock were more vehicles and a horde of police guards. When Rodney Maxwell came across the bridge from the dock after they opened the airlocks, he was followed by a dozen Barton Massara private police, as villainous looking a collection of ruffians as Khan 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 Storescenda was supposed to be an orderly place where nobody needed to go armed. More than anything else, that told Khan approximately what had been going on while he had been on Koshai. Shipguard, his father told Eves Jackmont. 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. Jackmont nodded. I know the drill. I've been in Poto Berth on Venus and Skorvan on Loki. Any law we want, we make for ourselves. That's about it. I'll see you there. Khan, I wish you'd come with me. Somebody here wants to talk to you. He wondered if his mother, or flora, had come to Storescenda. 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-canon began pom-pomming. Khan took one quick look in the direction in which it was firing, saw an air-car 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 gun-boats 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 gun-boat was struggling to regain her equilibrium, and the air-car had vanished in a fire-ball. They both emerged, straightening. His father was brushing himself with his hands and saying something about always having to duck or 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 anymore. Pity, of course, but I'm glad they're in Litchfield. It's a little healthier there. 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. Con, 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, Con. 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 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, Con demanded. Tell them the truth? They'd lynch us and then go 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, Con asked? I've been too busy to keep in touch. I know there's been rioting and these crackpot sex, but... 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 Lucino Cerro, 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 Storacenda 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 Weichhoven or Sam Murchison. Murchison, Lucas hooded. 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 Clem Xerif's opposite number. He thinks this whole thing's a plot against the Federation. It's a good thing Clem didn't get around to repainting his combat vehicles, black and green, the way he did the home-guard stuff at Lichfield. I'd be more likely to think it was Weichhoven. Could be. Or it could be the Armageddonists, or human supremacy. I am ashamed to say that this Heil Merlin cyber-narcist gang are friendly to us. Or it could be some of the banking crowd, or some of these rival space companies. Barton Massara is trying to find out. Well, we have some of Wade's pet suspects at Interplanetary Building now. There's been a meeting going on 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 Massara private police. They looked even more villainous than 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 been hired with Barton Massara. The meeting was in a big conference room, six floors down. It had been going on uninterrupted for days, with all the interested companies representative standing watch and watch around the clock. Lester Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardis were there for L.E. and S. Transcontinent and Overseas was represented. There were people from Alpha into Planetary and bankers and financiers and people from the companies building the two ships at the spaceport. And J. Fitzwilliam Sturber, the lawyer. And reporters phoning stories in and getting audio-visual interviews of anybody who had 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. Jack Mott 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 Koshai arrived. Everybody at the long table was shouting at everybody else. The Jurgen and Janneco companies wanted to buy ships from Koshai Exploitation and Development. The Alpha Interplanetary Director, who was also a Vice President of Transcontinent and Overseas, opposed that. Another Director of AI, who was also Board Chairman of Koshai Exploitation and Development, wanted to sell ships to anybody who had the price. The Transcontinent and 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 and 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 Sturber was declaring that anybody who called him a crook could continue the discussion through seconds. Khan suddenly realized that dueling had never been illegal on Poitaine. 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. Khan and Eves Jackmont and Charlie Gatworth and a few others took her out to force command. They were met by Clem Zareff's armed air-boats 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 armaments seemed to have been moved in from Barathrum spaceport. And Zareff had more men and firepower than he had ever commanded during the System State's 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 Liebert, 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 Dolph Kelton sided with Liebert, and Fawzi's office clique had split into two factions. Judge Ledoux 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 Brangman 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 Bombs somebody had launched at us the day we brought the ships in, didn't you? Yes, and we heard about the Nocero girl too, Brangman said. But hasn't it ever occurred to you or your dad that this fellow that calls himself Liebert might be mixed up with a gang that did that? You suspect him too? Brangman nodded. I took a few audio visuals 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 audio visuals, 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 Storsenda, 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 Genneco Industries Limited. They're going to specialize in chemical products. The other company has a charter now, too. They're going to operate on Jurgen and Horvendil. We'll sell them the ships, and Alpha Interplanetary will put on scheduled trips to all three planets and also Koshai. We're getting along very nicely with them. Except that everybody is competing for technicians and skilled labor. We have two hundred more people signed up for Koshai. 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 Storsenda. 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. We're getting things really started. Yes. The only trouble is, his father frowned. I don't understand these people, Khan. Everybody ought to be making millions out of this by this time next year. But all any of them, even these Storsenda bankers, can talk about as how soon we're going to find Merlin. I wish we could stop that somehow. Listen, I have it. Merlin never was on Poitem. 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 planet-buster insider. 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 be just the end of the war all over again. Khan, 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 XVIII Jerry Rivas, Mac Vibert, and Luther Chen Wong have been keeping things running on Koshai. Work on the interplanetary ship at Port Carpenter had stopped when the Sickle Mountain ships had been found. It had never been resumed. When Khan returned, he found work started on the Ouroboros II. Some of the two hundred newcomers who came in on the Heleneau Loi had special skills needed on the hypership. Most of them went with Clyde Nichols and Charlie Gatworth to Sickle Mountain to train his 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 space training 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 saleable 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 at Storsen to college because the professors had been virtually shanghide. Kahn found himself losing touch with affairs on Poitem. Ships had landed on both Janneko and Horvendiel and were sending back claims to abandoned factories. By that time they had all the decks into the Orborus too, and he was working aboard, getting the astrogational and hyperspace instruments put in place. The hypership Andromeda 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 and salvage opened a huge munitions depot and combat equipment, once almost unsaleable, was selling as fast as it came out. The government was buying some, but by no means all of it. Kahn, can you come back here to Poitem for a while, his father asked? Things are turning 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 Poitem was a needed rest. He felt refreshed when he got off at Stores and a 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. Kahn, I'm scared, his father said. I'm beginning to think there really is a Merlin after all. 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 Pinerge found? They were looking for the plant that fabricated the elements for Merlin, weren't they? Yes, they found it. My Barton Massara operatives got to some of the crew. This place had been turning out material for a computer of absolutely unconventional design. The two computer men they had with them could 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, Kahn started to say. No, Project Merlin was something they made computer parts for. Dolph Kelton'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 a half a dozen things like that. Telling 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 feet thick and a hundred across, armored in Collapsium. It's directly over what used to be Fox 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, Con, 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 Fox Travis told me, categorically, that there was no Merlin project, Con 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, goo! 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 Fox 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 some time I'm going to invite Clems Zaref to kick my pant seat. Sam Murchison, the Terran Federation Minister General. How did you get that? Barton Miserra 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 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 Armageddonists 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 Miserra believe, but they can't prove, that Human Supremacy launched that robo-bom at us, that time at the spaceport. Have you done anything with those audio-visuals of Liebert? Gave them to Barton Miserra. They haven't gotten anything yet. So we have to admit that Clem 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 Fawzy and his covey of Merlinilators are just before digging it up. Your job is to see that whatever it is doesn't get loose. The trouble was, if he started giving orders around force command, he'd stop being a brilliant young man and become a half-baked kid, and one word from him and the older and wiser heads would do just what they pleased. He wondered if the pro-Liebert and anti-Liebert 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 Fawzy, with whom he talked, was almost incoherent with excitement. At least he was reasonably sure that none of Clem's serifs trigger happy mercenaries which shoot him down coming in. 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 collapsing roof of whatever it was they had found. It wasn't the top of the headquarters itself. The micro-ray scanning showed that. It was a drum-shaped superstructure, a sort of underground penthouse. And there they were stopped. You didn't cut colapsium with a cold chisel, or even an atomic torch. He began to see how he was going to be able to take charge here. You haven't found any passage leading into it, he asked, when they gathered in Fawzy's, formerly Fox Travis's, office. Nivolheim know if we had we'd be inside now, Tom Brangwen swore. And we've been all over the ceiling in here, and we can't find anything but vitrified rock and then the colapsium shielding. Sure. There are colapsium cutters at Port Carpenter on Koshai. They do it with cosmic rays. But colapsium will stop cosmic rays, Zeraph objected. Stop them from penetrating, yes. A colapsium cutter doesn't penetrate, it abrades. It throws out a rotary beam and then works like a grinding wheel or a buzz saw. Well, could you get one down that hole, Judge Ladoux 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 done in a chamber the size of a 50-gallon barrel, made of colapsium and weighing about 100 tons. Then you have to have a pseudo-graph field to impart rotary motion to your cosmic ray beam and the generated door that would lift 10 ships the size of the Lester Dawes. Then you need another 50 to 100 tons of colapsium 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 five centisole piece. Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Liebert stated that divine power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention. Liebert'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 were going to dig the whole blasted top off, cleared down to where that thing is, Zareff said. That'll take a year. Oh no, maybe a couple of weeks after we get started, Khan 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 Koshai, 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 Liebert 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 Liebert had gone out. He's moved into the chaplain's quarters, back of the pan-denominational chapel on the fourth level down. Always keeps his door locked, too. 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, Clem Zaraf retorted. I'd like to see inside those rooms of his. He called Eve's Jackmott at Port Carpenter after dinner. When he told Jackmott what he wanted and why, the engineer remarked that it was a pity screens couldn't be fitted with olfactory sensors, so he could smell Khan'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? Has 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 reentry heat? Eve's Jackmott was silent for a good deal longer than the interplanetary time lag warranted. Finally he nodded. I get it, Khan. 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 Auroboros, though. Let Auroboros wait. We are going to dig up Merlin, and then everybody is going to be rich and happy and live happily forever after. Jackmott 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, Jackmott hadn't been cleared yet for the awful truth about Merlin. 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, Eve's. Maybe after we get this thing open, I'll know. To give himself a margin of safety, Jackmott 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 Khan saw screen views of her he understood why, was finished and the clapsium cutter and two big mining machines were aboard. Evidently nobody on Koshai had done a stroke of work on anything else. Sylvie's coming along with her, so are Jerry Rivas and Ann Staws 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, Jackmott 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 christened irons for them, he advised. They may need them here. Depending, of course, on what they found when they opened that clapsium 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 the Harriet Barn on her second trip to Koshai. Everybody at Force Command was anxious and excited. Carl Liebert 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 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 Menardis had emptied his warehouse of everything over a year old, so had most of the other distillers up and down the Gordon Valley. Mellon 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' 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. Kahn was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on Koshai, running around with a monkey wrench in one hand and a textbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to do while they were doing it. Poitem 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 contra-gravity 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 contra-gravity and settled into place. The thing lifted, still carrying the clapsium cutting equipment, and came to rest on the brush-grown flat beyond out of the way. If Eve's jack-mot had overestimated the time required to get the equipment loaded and lifted off from Koshai, Kahn had been over-optimistic 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 store senda had caused an acute shortage of vehicles. One by one the members of the old Fawzi's office gang came drifting in, Lorenzo Menardis, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes. None of them had any skills to contribute, but they brought plenty of enthusiasm. Rodney Maxwell came whizzing out from store senda now and then to watch the progress of the work. Of all the crowd, he and Kahn watched the two steel giants strip away the table-and with apprehension instead of hope. No, there was a third. Carl Liebert had stopped secluding himself in his quarters. He still talked rapturously about the miracles Merlin would work, but now and then Kahn saw him when he thought he was unobserved. His face was the face of a condemned man. The Oroboros too was finished. The whole planet saw, by screen, the ship lift out, watched from the ship the dwindling away of Koshai and saw Poitem grow ahead of her. Twelve hours before she landed, work at force command stopped. Everybody was going to store senda. Sylvie, whose father would command her on her voyage to Balder, Morgan Gatworth, whose son would be first officer and astrogator, everybody, except Carl Liebert. Then I'm not going either, Clemserov decided. Somebody's got to stay here and keep an eye on that snake. No, nor me, Tom Brangwen said, and if he starts praying again, I'm going to go and pray along with him. Kahn stayed too, and so did Jerry Rivas and Ann Staws. 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, Kahn saw his sister Flora clinging to Wade Lucas' 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 Kahn feel better even than watching the ship itself lift away from store senda. End of Chapter 18 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mark Nelson. The Cosmic Computer by H. B. Piper Chapter 19 When Sylvie returned from store senda, she had Flora with her. Kahn'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 Kahn. It won't be any harder than making up with Wade was. How did that happen, by the way, Kahn asked? Your girlfriend, Flora said. She came to the house and practically forced me into a car and flew me into store senda, 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 day and doing nothing, nothing. And when you were coming home, I was expecting you to tell them there was no Merlin and go to work and do something for yourselves. 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 to 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. I'd leased 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 Fawzy 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 Koshai. I want to keep people like Fawzy 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 Fawzy 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 Storys and the stock exchange. It could have been an intelligence evaluator, or an enemy intentions predictor. But it seems small even for that. It would be something like a 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 Liebert 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 collapseium-covered structure was uncovered, and the excavation had been leveled out wide enough to accommodate all the massive paraphernalia of the collapseium cutter. They put the thing on to counter-gravity 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 Pan-Federation Spaceline 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 Fox Travis, now living at the advanced age of 114 on Luna. General Travis, who commanded the 3rd Fleet Army Force here during the war, categorically denied that there had ever existed any supercomputer of the sort. We bring you now a recorded interview with General Travis made on Luna. For an instant, Khan 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 Khan had talked two years before. And through an open segment of dome roof behind him the full earth shone, the contents of the western hemisphere plainly distinguishable. A young woman in starchy nurses' 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 Khan talked to him, but there was something missing. Oh yes, the comparative youngster of 70's some. Mike Shanley, my aide de camp on Poitem, now he thinks he's my keeper. He wasn't in evidence, and he should be. Then Khan knew where and when he had seen the man who claimed to be a preacher named Carl Liebert. 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 Khan could distinguish was Liebert's Shanley's voice, screaming, Can it be a lie? Is there no great computer? Then Kurt Fawzi 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 Poitem telling people there is, he's lying to them and taking advantage of their credulity. There never was anything called Project Merlin. Ha! Who's a liar now, Clemser have shouted. Dolph, what did your people find in the library? Why, that's right, Professor Kelton 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 Khan. He has created false hopes. He has given us faith and 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. Khan, you didn't tell us you 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 denied there was a Merlin if he was sitting on top of it, Khan declared. He wants the credit for winning the war, not for letting Merlin win it for him. I don't blame Khan, Clemser have said. If he told us that then, some of us might have believed it. And look what we found, Kurt Fawzi added, pointing at the ceiling. Is that Merlin up there or isn't it? That little thing, Shanley cried scornfully, how could that be Merlin? I'm going to my chamber to pray for forgiveness for this wretch. He turned and started for the door. Stop him, Tom, Khan said, and Tom Brangwyn put himself in front of the older man, gripping his right arm. Shanley 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 Weltren, who'd been Liebert'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, Khan said. Weren't you, General Shanley? It took almost a minute before they stopped yelling for an explanation and allowed him to make one. He caught Clem 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, Khan said, picking his way carefully between fact and fiction. After I went back to Montevideo, he and this aid 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 Tara and off Poitem. When I turned it down and took the Mazar home, Travis sent Shanley after me. He must have grown that beard and that page-boy bob on the way out. I suppose he contacted Murchison as soon as he landed. Wait a minute. He went to the communications screen and punched out a combination. A girl appeared and sing-songed, Barton Massara, Investigation and Protection. Khan Maxwell here. We gave you some audio-visuals of a man with a white beard, alias Carl Liebert, he began. Just a sec, Mr. Maxwell. She spoke quickly into a hand-phone. The screen flickered and she was replaced by a hard-faced young man in dark clothes. Hello, Mr. Maxwell. Joe Massara. We haven't found anything on Liebert yet. Are any of the officers of the Andromeda where you can contact them? Let them see those audio-visuals. I'll bet that beard was grown aboard ship coming out from Tara. Bedlam broke out suddenly. Shanley, who had been standing passively, his right arm loosely grasped by Tom Brangwen, came down on Brangwen's instep with a heel of his left foot and hit Brangwen under the chin with a heel of his left palm. Wrenching his arm free, he started for the door. Sylvie Jackmott 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 Brangwen 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. Massara 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 Guardian newscast. Merlin exists, and we've found it. We'll have it open inside of thirty hours at most. That was the line he was going to take with everybody. As soon as he had Massara 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 Clem Zareff shouting orders into one of the inside communication screens. General turnout, everything on combat ready, 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 Clem 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 Shanley in a chair, and shouted to him, Jerry, turn out the workman. Start cutting the can open right away. He turned back to his father. Clem'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? Khan repeated the line he had taken already. His father nodded. All right, I'll call you later, if I can. Just keep things going at your end. A dozen of Clem's Arabs 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 poisoned or other suicide means. He's to be questioned later. As soon as Rodney Maxwell was off the screen there was a call signal. It was one of the new services wanting a statement. I'll take it, Gatworth said and began talking. This statement of General Travis's is completely false. There is a Merlin and we 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 Clem's Arabs 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 help. They had a good thing. They were willing to fight to keep it. Merlin or no Merlin. Con 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 colapsium 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 colapsium simply couldn't have been imagined? Con 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 Storacenda and a dozen other places. He saw, on a news screen, a mob raging in front of the executive palace. Yellow-shirted cyber-narcists were battling with city police and planetary troops. Armageddonists and human supremacy-leaders 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. Xarev'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 Sturber called. Rodney Maxwell had been arrested on a Farago of fraud charges. I don't know who he's supposed to have defrauded. The planetary government is the sole complainant. And Bale was being illegally denied. Sturber'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 too... Apparently Sturber 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 tri-system investments people and some of the bankers. We're going to try and brace the market as long as we can. Nobody who keeps his head is going to lose anything in the long run. Luther Chen Wang called from Port Carpenter on Koshai. He and Clyde Nichols and a young mathematics professor named Simon McQuart had been running the colony in Kahn's absence and since Eves Jackmott had gone to space in the Ouroboros too. 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 too. I don't suppose it's advisable to send any more ships in to store Ascenda for a while. 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 need to operate a thing like Merlin. Yes, Luther, I'm sure we have found Merlin. Chen Wang 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 Liebert's Shanley's rooms, he said. We found a bomb. What kind of 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 travelling bag under his bed. And you know how it was to be fired? With a regular 40mm 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 rifle powder. 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. 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? Zaref 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 Lidoux and Kurt Fawzi and Dolph Kelton, who were just sitting around wishing there was something to do to help. They gave Franz Veltrin and Sylvie Jackmott the job of keeping the representatives of the press amused. Then they went down to the room in which General Mike Shanley was held under guard. Shanley, wearing a bathrobe and nothing else, was lying on a cot, sleeping peacefully. Three of Zaref's men were sitting on chairs, watching him narrowly. All right, you can go, Khan told them. We'll take care of him. Shanley woke instantly. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the cot. You can have my name and rank, he said, and his voice no longer quavered. My serial number is—he receded a string of figures. And that's all you're getting out of me. We'll get anything we want out of you, Khan 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 be, too, when we're through with you. But before then, you'll have given us everything you know. Kelton began to protest. Khan, you can't do a thing like that. A mind probe is utterly illegal. Why, it's a capital offense, Lidu exclaimed. Khan, I forbid you. Judge, don't make me call those guards and have you removed, Khan said. You can stop bluffing, Shanley 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 Zarif would enjoy helping to use it on you. He used to be an alliance officer. Shanley was silent. Khan sat down in one of the chairs at the small table. General Shanley, would you describe General Fox Travis as a man of honor and integrity? And would you so describe yourself? Shanley 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. Shanley laughed. You're supposed to be a computer man. You think that little thing could be Merlin? The controls and programming machine for Merlin. He turned to Kurt Fawzy. You always claimed that Merlin was here in Force Command. You had it backward. Force Command is inside Merlin. What do you mean, Khan? 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 we needed to operate the computer. Isn't that true, General? Shanley had stopped his derisive laughter. He sat on the edge of the cot, tensing as though for a leap at Khan'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, Khan, I'm coming around a cleanse way of thinking. They just don't want anybody else to have it. No, we don't, Shanley 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 Brangwin lit a cigarette. Would you mind letting me have one of those, Shanley said? I haven't had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn't have been in character. Brangwin took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, and gave it to Shanley with his left hand. He is right ready to strike. Shanley 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 Khan. 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. Shanley 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 State's 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 500 years in the future. It didn't. It stopped, at a point at trifle over 200 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 Lidoux 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, Shanley 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 detailed analysis. We ran it all over again. It was no use. In 200 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. Shanley 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, but 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 counter revolt 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 Brangwood said, in a frightened voice. Then pull everybody out of here and blow the place up, Merlin along with it, Shanley 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, Khan asked? We 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 Poitain. And when we found out that you'd been getting into the records of the Third Force, I took the next ship I could, the miserable little freighter, and when I landed and found out what was happening, I contacted Merchison and scared the life out of him with stories about a secessionist conspiracy. All this Armageddonist human supremacy Merlin as the devil stuff that's been going on was started by Merchison. And he succeeded in scaring Vaikovin with the cyber-narcists, too. This computation on the future of the Federation is still in the back-work file, Khan asked? Shanley 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 Ledoux 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 we cannot accept your parole. Is there anything you want in the meantime? Khan asked. I would like something to smoke and some clothes, General Shanley said. And a shave and a haircut. End of Chapter 20. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Mark Nelson. The Cosmic Computer by H. Beam Piper. 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, marvelling 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 Storacenda 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 Storacenda to be installed as arbiter of the government. Merlin the monster was destroying the planet. Merlin the devil was unchained. Kahn and Kurt Fawzy and Dolph Kelton and Judge Lidue and Tom Brangwen clustered together, talking in whispers. They had told nobody yet of the interview with Shanley. You think it would make all that trouble, Kelton was asking anxiously, hoping that the others would convince him that it wouldn't? Maybe we had better destroy it, Judge Lidue faltered. You see what it's done already, the whole planets in anarchy, if we let this go on. We can't decide anything like that, just the five of us, Brangwen 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, Kahn 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 Fawzy said, his voice deadly calm. You won't do it while I'm alive. But Kurt Lidue expostulated. You know why these people here at Storesend 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. Generals Shanley was right. Don't destroy the hope that keeps them sane. We don't need to do that, Kurt Fawzy argued. We can use Merlin to solve our 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, Lidue said. Let's not try to decide it ourselves, Kahn 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, Lidue 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 Brangwen asked? Fawzy gulped. Yes. If Merlin says we ought to, we'll have to do it. Toward noon a telecast went out from Koshai on a dozen different wavelengths. Kahn, half asleep in a chair in the Commander-in-Chief's office, saw Simon Macquart, the young mathematics professor from Storsen to College, who had become one of the leaders of the colony, appear on the screen. The next moment he was fully awake, shocked by Macquart's words. This is not a threat. This is a solemn, even 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, rest 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 Koshai, to build such a world on Poitem. 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 Ashma Dai, and Belfagor, 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 Poitem, 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 Storsenda, 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, Khan 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 Menardis was asking. Khan, you know these people. They wouldn't, really. Don't depend on it, Lorenzo, Clemserov 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 do it or not, Khan said. What I'm worrying about is how many people will believe they will. Apparently a good many people did. Zarev's combat vehicles began reporting a cessation of fighting. The newscasts, repeating the ultimatum from Koshai, told of fewer and fewer disorders in the city or elsewhere. By mid-afternoon, the rioting had stopped. By that time too, Rodney Maxwell was on screen. He was, Khan 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 pinned up here at the Executive Palace. They're practically keeping me in the safe. I wish our people on Koshai hadn't mentioned me in their ultimatum. Jake Fikehoven's afraid to let me run around loose for fear some lunatic shoots me and starts the planet-busters 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 will be safe. Khan 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 Shanley or about the last computation which Merlin made. If we sent 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 mothers 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, Khan, is prove that you weren't lying about Merlin, Sylvie told him. The Lester Dawes didn't make it from force command to store Sendin 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 Khan 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 will be all right. We'll show your mother that it wasn'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. Khan 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? Khan told him about Shanley. He repeated, almost word for word, the story Shanley had told. Do you believe that, his father asked? Don't you? You were in store Sendin when the Travis statement came out. You saw how people reacted. If this story gets out, people will be acting the same way on every planet in the Federation. Not just places like Poitem, planets like Terra and Balder 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, Khan, 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 Macquart and Luther Chen Wang 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 Shanley. 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 Khan had seen in the dome-house on Luna. Well, you got it open, he said, climbing down from the air jeep that had brought him. Now, what are you going to do with it? We can't make up our minds, Khan said. We're going to let the computer tell us what to do with it. Shanley 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. Khan and his father, Kurt Fawzi, Jerry Rivas, then Shanley 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 Shanley 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, Khan said. And then asked Shanley if there were inspection screens. When Shanley 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. Khan 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. Shanley 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. Shanley 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 collapse plate under the floor. Your scanners simply couldn't detect anything from below. Confident that Merlin would decree its own destruction, Shanley 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 Xarev soldiers or Brangwen'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 Khan's return a year and a half ago. A few others, Anstaws, Jerry Rivas, and five computer men Khan had trained on Koshai had to be trusted. Khan insisted on letting Sylvie Jackmont 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. Khan 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 Merlinilators. 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, Khan 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 Shanley. I don't know why you people didn't think of that. Shanley looked at him in surprise. Why, now that you mention it, neither do I, he admitted. We just didn't. Then, Khan 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. Will do like any fortune teller, 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 Koshai 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 cyber-narcists and armageddonists and human supremacy-leaders, the 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, interestingly, watching the broadcast views of it. The banks were still closed, but discrete backdoor 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 Portem to even greater and more splendid prosperity. Khan'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, Khan, 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 Khan. 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 break-up. 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 Portem 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 electromathematical language of computers and fed in. Khan and Sylvie and General Shanley and the three men and two women Khan had taught on Koshai worked and rested briefly and worked again. Finally it was finished. General, you're the oldest Merlin hand, Khan said, gesturing to the red button at the main control panel. You do it. You do it, Khan. 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. Khan 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 world 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. Khan pushed another button. The second information request went in. What is the best course to be followed under these conditions by the people of Poitem? 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. Buildup 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 reeducation of natives. We can't begin to handle this without Merlin, Khan 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 Poitem, Shanley 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. Khan, 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, Khan 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 Lidoux 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 Khan. 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 Storesunda and taken the Countess Dorothy home to Lichfield. 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 to-day. All top-level Lichfield seemed to have turned out. And there were guests from Storesunda and even a few who had made the trip from Koshai to be there. Simon McQuart, the president of Koshai Tech. Khan could always remember him in the screen threatening a whole planet with devastation. Luther Chen Wang, the chief executive of Koshai Colony. Clyde Nichols, the president of Koshai Airlines. He almost bumped into Eve's Jackmott, coming in from the hall. Jackmott's beard had been trimmed down to a small imperial and he was wearing the uniform of tri-system and interstellar space lines. Nothing at all like a Federation space-navy uniform. He was laughing about something. He threw an arm over Khan's shoulder and they went into the front parlor together. Oh, go henna of a big crop! he heard Clemseriff's voice chuckling happily above the babble in the room. You wouldn't believe it! Why we had to build six new vats! The thin-faced, white-haired man in the chair beside him said something. Mike Shanley and Clemseriff, old enemies, were now fast friends. Shanley had come in from force command with Khan that morning. He had stayed on Poitin 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, Zeriff 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 stalls a day. Why, they're even organizing a union. There were feminine shrieks from across the room and a stampede. The house-cleaning robot had come in, running its vacuum-cleaning hose around and brandishing its mobs. He saw his mother break away from a group of older ladies and shout, Oscar! the robot stopped dead. Yeshem, a voice came out of it, Sheshen accented. Get out, his mother commanded. Go to the kitchen, stay there. Yeshem, the robot floated out the door to the hall. His mother rejoined her friends, probably telling them for the thousandth time that her boy Khan fixed up the sound receptors and voice for Oscar. Or harping on how Khan 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, Khan, 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 Jackmont said. And you'd better start rehearsing for your own wedding before long. The Genji will be ready to hype her out in another month and I don't want to be at space when my only daughter gets married. They pushed through the crowd, dragging Khan'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 dare not 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, Khan 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 Balder, from which he had returned, and the one to Ermansoul with a cargo of arms, machine tools and contra-gravity 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 Balder, which had been brought back on the Orboros too. 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. 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 Storsunda people. One of the latter was vociferating. Jake Fykovans 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, and 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 went for president, another Storsunda 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 Khan to Tara 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. Khan was sure he heard his father add, goo, what a narrow escape. Then he and Sylvie began chanting in unison, we want Fawzi, we want Fawzi. End of The Cosmic Computer by H. B. Piper. Read by Mark Nelson. This has been a LibriVox recording. 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