The Cosmic Computer, H. Beam Piper [best sci fi novels of all time .TXT] 📗

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 Zarel’s soldiers or Brangwyn’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 Conn’s return, a year and a half ago. A few others⁠—Anse Dawes, Jerry Rivas, and five computermen Conn had trained on Koshchei⁠—had to be trusted. Conn insisted on letting Sylvie Jacquemont 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. Conn 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 Merlinolators. 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,” Conn 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 Shanlee. “I don’t know why you people didn’t think of that.”

Shanlee looked at him in surprise. “Why, now that you mention it, neither do I,” he admitted. “We just didn’t.”

“Then,” Conn 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. We’ll do like any fortuneteller; 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 Koshchei 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 Cybernarchists and Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers, 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 interestedly watching the broadcast views of it.

The banks were still closed, but discreet 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 Poictesme to ever greater and more splendid prosperity.

Conn’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, Conn,” 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 Conn.

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 breakup. 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 Poictesme 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 electro-mathematical language of computers and fed in. Conn and Sylvie and General Shanlee and the three men and two women Conn had taught on Koshchei worked and rested briefly and worked again. Finally, it was finished.

“General; you’re the oldest Merlin hand,” Conn said, gesturing to the red button at the main control panel, “You do it.”

“You do it, Conn. 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. Conn 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 worlds would go on, striving to keep things running until they wore out, and then sinking into apathetic acceptance. Deprived of hope, they