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