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, because
they're afraid and desperate. The Terran Federation is something
everybody feels they have to have, for peace and order and welfare. If
people thought it was breaking up, they'd be desperate, too. They'd do
the same insane things these people here on this planet are doing.
General Shanlee was right. Don't destroy the hope that keeps them
sane."

"We don't need to do that," Kurt Fawzi argued. "We can use Merlin to
solve our own problems; we don't need to tell the whole Federation
what's going to happen in two hundred years."

"It would get out; it couldn't help getting out," Ledue said.

"Let's not try to decide it ourselves," Conn said. "Let's get Merlin
into operation, and run a computation on it."

"You mean, ask Merlin to tell us whether it ought to be destroyed or
not?" Ledue asked incredulously. "Let Merlin put itself on trial, and
sentence itself to destruction?"

"Merlin is a computer; computers deal only in facts. Computers are
machines; they have no sense of self-preservation. If Merlin ought to
be destroyed, Merlin will tell us so."

"You willing to leave it up to Merlin, Kurt?" Tom Brangwyn asked.

Fawzi gulped. "Yes. If Merlin says we ought to, we'll have to do it."

Toward noon, a telecast went out from Koshchei, on a dozen different
wave-lengths. Conn, half asleep in a chair in the commander-in-chief's
office, saw Simon Macquarte, the young mathematics professor from
Storisende College who had become one of the leaders of the colony,
appear in the screen. The next moment, he was fully awake, shocked by
Macquarte's words:

"This is not a threat; this is a solemn, even a prayerful, warning. We
do not want to use genocidal weapons of mass destruction against the
world of our birth. But whether we do or not rests solely with you.

"We came here with a dream of a better world, a wo