XIX

When Sylvie returned from Storisende, she had Flora with her. Conn"s sister greeted him embarra.s.sedly; 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 Conn. It won"t be any harder than making up with Wade was."

"How did that happen, by the way?" Conn asked.

"Your girlfriend," Flora said. "She came to the house and practically forced me into a car and flew me into Storisende, 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 year, and doing nothing, nothing! And when you were coming home, I was expecting you to tell them there was no Merlin and to go to work and do something for themselves. 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 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. At least, 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 Fawzi 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 Koshchei. I want to keep people like Fawzi 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 Fawzi 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 the Storisende Stock Exchange. It could have been an intelligence-evaluator, or an enemy-intentions predictor, but it seemed 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 Leibert 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 collapsium-covered structure was uncovered, and the excavation had been leveled out wide enough to accommodate all the ma.s.sive paraphernalia of the collapsium-cutter. They put _The Thing_ onto contragravity 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes, 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 s.p.a.celines 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 Foxx Travis, now living, at the advanced age of a hundred and fourteen, on Luna. General Travis, who commanded the Third Fleet-Army Force here during the War, categorically denied that there had ever existed any super-computer of the sort.

"We bring you, now, a recorded interview with General Travis, made on Luna...."

For an instant, Conn 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 Conn had talked two years before, and through an open segment of the dome-roof behind him the full Earth shone, the continents of the Western Hemisphere plainly distinguishable. A young woman in starchy nurse"s 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 Conn had talked to him. But there was something missing....

Oh, yes. The comparative youngster of seventy-some--"Mike Shanlee ...

my _aide-de-camp_ on Poictesme ... now he thinks he"s my keeper...."

He wasn"t in evidence, and he should be. Then Conn knew where and when he had seen the man who claimed to be a preacher named Carl Leibert.

"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 Conn could distinguish was Leibert"s--Shanlee"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 Poictesme telling people there is, he"s lying to them and taking advantage of their credulity.

There never was anything called Project Merlin...."

"Hah, who"s a liar now?" Klem Zareff shouted. "Dolf, what did your people find in the Library?"

"Why, that"s right!" Professor Kellton 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 Conn. "He has created false hopes; he has given us faith in 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...."

"Conn, you didn"t tell us you"d 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"d deny there was a Merlin if he was sitting on top of it," Conn declared. "He wants the credit for winning the War, not for letting Merlin win it for him."

"I don"t blame Conn," Klem Zareff said. "If he"d 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!" Shanlee cried scornfully. "How could that be Merlin? I am going to my chamber, to pray for forgiveness for this wretch."

He turned and started for the door.

"Stop him, Tom!" Conn said, and Tom Brangwyn put himself in front of the older man, gripping his right arm. Shanlee 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 Veltrin, who had been "Leibert"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," Conn said. "Weren"t you, General Shanlee?"

It took almost a minute before they stopped yelling for an explanation and allowed him to make one. He caught Klem 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," Conn said, picking his way carefully between fact and fiction. "After I went back to Montevideo, he and this aide 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 Terra and off Poictesme. When I turned it down and took the _Mizar_ home, Travis sent Shanlee after me. He must have grown that beard and that pageboy bob on the way out. I suppose he contacted Murchison as soon as he landed. Wait a minute."