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 analyses. 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 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.
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 circumstances, 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 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 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!”
“Why didn’t you people blow Merlin up?” Conn asked.
“We’d built it; we’d worked with it. It was part of us, and we 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 Poictesme. And when we found that you’d been getting into the records of the Third Force, I took the next ship I could, a miserable little freighter, and when I landed and found out what was happening, I contacted Murchison and scared the life out of him with stories about a secessionist conspiracy. All this Armageddonist, Human Supremacy, Merlin-is-the-Devil, stuff that’s been going on was started by Murchison. And he succeeded in scaring Vyckhoven with the Cybernarchists, too.”
“This computation on the future of the Federation is still in the back-work file?” Conn asked.
Shanlee 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 Ledue 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 that we cannot accept your parole.”
“Is there anything you want in the meantime?” Conn asked.
“I would like something to smoke, and some clothes,” General Shanlee said. “And a shave and a haircut.”
XXI
All through the night, a shifting blaze of many-colored light rose and dimmed the stars above the mesa. They stared in awe, marveling 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 Storisende 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 Storisende to be installed as arbiter of the government. Merlin the Monster was destroying the planet. Merlin the Devil was unchained.
Conn and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and Judge Ledue and Tom Brangwyn clustered together, talking in whispers. They had told nobody, yet, of the interview with Shanlee.
“You think it would make all that trouble?” Kellton was asking anxiously, hoping that the others would convince him that it wouldn’t.
“Maybe we had better destroy it,” Judge Ledue faltered. “You see what it’s done already; the whole planet’s in anarchy. If we let this go on …”
“We can’t decide anything like that, just the five of us,” Brangwyn 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,” Conn 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 Fawzi said, his voice deadly calm. “You won’t do it while I’m alive.”
“But, Kurt,” Ledue expostulated. “You know why these people here at Storisende are rioting? It’s because they’ve lost hope,
