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 massive 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-p