s to a high
spiritual plane...."

It went on like that, after they went down to Foxx Travis's--now
Fawzi's--office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters instead
of the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thick
carpets on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi's office
gang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no
idea what a computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build a
computer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn't need it, he
_would_ be God.

As he talked, Conn began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition.
He'd seen this Carl Leibert before, somewhere, and somehow he was sure
that the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren't part of the
picture. That puzzled him. He doubted if he'd have remembered Leibert
from six years ago, almost seven, now, though a lot of itinerant
evangelists showed up in Litchfield. That might have been it.

"I tell you, the Great Computer is there, in the heart of the butte,"
Leibert was insisting, now. "It has been revealed to me in a dream. It
is completely buried. After it was made, no human touched it. The men
who were here and used it in the War communicated with it only by
radio."

That could be so. There were fully robotic computers, intended for use
in places where no human could go and live. There was a big one on
Nifflheim, armored against the fluorine atmosphere and the
hydrofluoric-acid rains. But there was no point in that here, the
things were enormously complicated, and military engineering of any
sort emphasized simplicity--_Aaaagh!_ Was he beginning to believe this
balderdash himself?

Klem Zareff fell in with him as they were going to dinner. "Revealed
in a dream!" the old Rebel snorted. "One thing you can always get
away with lying about is what you dream."

"You think he's lying? I think he's just crazy."

"That's what he wants you to think. Look, Conn, he knows Merlin is
here; he's trying to keep us from it. That's why he shifted all that
equipment over on the butte. He's working for Sam Murchison."

"I thought your theory was that the Federation had lost Merlin."

"It was, at first. It doesn't look that way to me now. It's right here
at Force Command, somewhere. They don't want it found, and they're
going to do everything they can to stop us. I oughtn't to have left
this fellow Leibert here alone; well, I won't do that again. Get Tom
Brangwyn to help me."

XVI

The