"Not yet. I wanted to tell you about it first."

He looked at his watch. Only four hours had pa.s.sed since the newscast; why, that seemed like months, ago, now.

"All right, Tom; we"ll go talk to him. Where"s the Colonel?"

Zareff was surrounded by a dozen screens, keeping in touch with the _Lester Dawes_ and the gunboats and combat cars, and the gun 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 Ledue, and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton, who were just sitting around wishing there was something to do to help. They gave Franz Veltrin and Sylvie Jacquemont the job of keeping the representatives of the press amused. Then they went down to the room in which General Mike Shanlee was held under guard.

Shanlee, wearing a bathrobe and nothing else, was lying on a cot, sleeping peacefully; three of Zareff"s men were sitting on chairs, watching him narrowly.

"All right; you can go," Conn told them. "We"ll take care of him."

Shanlee woke instantly; he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the cot.

"You have my name and rank," he said, and his voice no longer quavered. "My serial number is--" He recited a string of figures. "And that"s all you"re getting out of me."

"We"ll get anything we want out of you," Conn 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."

Kellton began to protest. "Conn, you can"t do a thing like that!"

"A mind-probe is utterly illegal; why, it"s a capital offense!" Ledue exclaimed. "Conn I forbid you...."

"Judge, don"t make me call those guards and have you removed," Conn said.

"You can stop bluffing," Shanlee told him. "Where would you get a mind-probe?"

"Out of the Chief of Intelligence"s office, here in his headquarters.

I should imagine it was to be used in interrogating Alliance prisoners, during the War. I think Colonel Zareff would enjoy helping to use it on you. He used to be an Alliance officer."

Shanlee was silent. Conn sat down in one of the chairs, at the small table.

"General Shanlee, would you describe General Foxx Travis as a man of honor and integrity? And would you so describe yourself?" Shanlee said nothing. "Yet both of you have lied, deliberately and repeatedly, to conceal the existence of Merlin. And we found that bomb in your room.

You were willing to blow up this headquarters and everybody, yourself included, in it, to keep us from getting at Merlin. Well, you know that we can make you tell us the truth, maybe when it"s too late, and you know that we are going to get Merlin. We"re cutting the collapsium off that thing above now."

Shanlee laughed. "You"re supposed to be a computerman. You think that little thing could be Merlin?"

"The controls and programming machine for Merlin." He turned to Kurt Fawzi. "You always claimed that Merlin was here in Force Command. You had it backward. Force Command is inside Merlin."

"What do you mean, Conn?"

"The walls; the fifty-foot walls, shielded inside and out. Merlin--the circuitry, the memory-bank, the relays, everything--was installed inside them. What"s up above is only what was needed to operate the computer. Isn"t that true, General?"

Shanlee had stopped his derisive laughter. He sat on the edge of the cot, tensing as though for a leap at Conn"s throat.

"That won"t help, either. If you try it, we won"t shoot you. We"ll just overpower you and start mind-probing right away. Now; you feel that suppressing Merlin was worth any sacrifice. We"re not unreasonable. If you can convince us that Merlin ought not to be brought to light.... Well, you can"t do any harm by talking, and you may do some good. You may even accomplish your mission."

"He can"t talk us out of it," Kurt Fawzi seemed determined to spoil things by saying. "Conn, I"m coming around to Klem"s way of thinking.

They just don"t want anybody else to have it."

"No, we don"t," Shanlee said. "We don"t want the whole Federation breaking up into b.l.o.o.d.y anarchy, and that"s what"ll happen if you dig that thing up and put it into operation."

n.o.body said anything except Fawzi, who began an indignant contradiction and then subsided. Tom Brangwyn lit a cigarette.

"Would you mind letting me have one of those?" Shanlee said. "I haven"t had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn"t have been in character."

Brangwyn took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, and gave it to Shanlee with his left hand, his right ready to strike.

Shanlee laughed in real amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Oh, Brother!" he reproved, in his former pious tones. "You distrust your fellow man; that is a sin."

He rose slowly, the bathrobe flapping at his bare shins, and sat down across the table from Conn.

"All right," he said. "I"ll tell you about it. I"ll tell you the truth, which will be something of a novelty all around."

Shanlee puffed for a moment at the cigarette; it must really have tasted good after his long abstinence.

"You know, we were really caught off balance when the War ended. It even caught Merlin short; information lag, of course. The whole Alliance caved in all at once. Well, we fed Merlin all the data available, and a.n.a.lyzed the situation. Then we did something we really weren"t called upon to do, because that was policy-planning and wasn"t our province, but we were going to move an occupation army into System States planets, and we didn"t want to do anything that would embarra.s.s the Federation Government later. We fed Merlin every sc.r.a.p of available information on political and economic conditions everywhere in the Federation, and set up a long-term computation of the general effects of the War.

"The extrapolation was supposed to run five hundred years in the future. It didn"t. It stopped, at a point a trifle over two hundred years from now, with a statement that no computation could be made further because at that point the Terran Federation would no longer exist."

The others, who had taken chairs facing him, looked at him blankly.

"No more Federation?" Judge Ledue asked incredulously. "Why, the Federation, the Federation...."

The Federation would last forever. Anybody knew that. There just couldn"t be no more Federation.

"That"s right," Shanlee said. "We had trouble believing it, too.

Remember, we were Federation officers. The Federation was our religion. Just like patriotism used to be, back in the days of nationalism. We checked for error. We made detail a.n.a.lyses. We ran it all over again. It was no use.

"In two hundred years, there won"t be any Terran Federation. The Government will collapse, slowly. The s.p.a.ce Navy will disintegrate.

Planets and systems will lose touch with Terra and with one another.

You know what it was like here, just before the War? It will be like that on every planet, even on Terra. Just a slow crumbling, till everything is gone; then every planet will start sliding back, in isolation, into barbarism."

"Merlin predicted that?" Kurt Fawzi asked, shocked.

If Merlin said so, it had to be true.

Shanlee nodded. "So we ran another computation; we added the data of publication of this prognosis. You know, Merlin can"t predict what you or I would do under given circ.u.mstances, but Merlin can handle large-group behavior with absolute accuracy. If we made public Merlin"s prognosis, the end would come, not in two centuries but in less than one, and it wouldn"t be a slow, peaceful decay; it would be a bomb-type reaction. Rebellions. Overthrow of Federation authority, and then revolt and counterrevolt against planetary authority.

Division along sectional or cla.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 b.l.o.o.d.y shambles, and there would be a Galactic night of barbarism for no one knows how many thousand years."

"We don"t want anything like that to happen!" Tom Brangwyn said, in a frightened voice.

"Then pull everybody out of here and blow the place up, Merlin along with it," Shanlee said.

"No! We"ll not do that!" Fawzi shouted. "I"ll shoot the man dead who tries it!"