you believe that?" his father asked.

"Don't you? You were in Storisende when the Travis statement came out;
you saw how people acted. If this story gets out, people will be
acting the same way on every planet in the Federation. Not just places
like Poictesme; planets like Terra and Baldur and Marduk and Odin and
Osiris. It would be the end of everything civilized, everywhere."

"Why didn't they use Merlin to save the Federation?"

"It's past saving. It's been past saving since before the War. The War
was what gave it the final shove. If they could have used Merlin to
reverse the process, they wouldn't have sealed it away."

"But you know, Conn, we can't destroy Merlin. If we did, the same
people who went crazy over the Travis statement would go crazy all
over again, worse than ever. We'd be destroying everything we planned
for, and we'd be destroying ourselves. That bluff young Macquarte and
Luther Chen-Wong and Bill Nichols made wouldn't work twice. And if
they weren't bluffing...."

His father shuddered.

"And if we don't, how long do you think civilization will last here,
if it blows up all over the rest of the Federation?"

The big machine cut on, a little spot of raw energy grinding away the
collapsium, inch by inch; the undulating curtains of colored light
illuminated the Badlands for miles around. Then, when the first hint
of dawn came into the east, they went out. The steady roar of the
generators that had battered every ear for over twenty-four hours
stopped. There was unbelieving silence, and then shouts.

The workmen swarmed out to man lifters. Slowly the heavy
apparatus--the reactor and the converters, the cutting machine, and
the shielding around it--was lifted away. Finally, a lone lifter came
in and men in radiation-suits went down to hook on grapples, and it
lifted away, carrying with it a ten-foot-square sheet of thin steel
that weighed almost thirty tons.

When they had battered a hole in the vitrified rock underneath, guards
brought up General Shanlee. Somebody almost up to professional
standards had given him a haircut; the beard was gone, too. A
Federation Army officer's uniform had been found reasonably close to
his size, and somebody had even provided him with the four stars of
his retirement rank. He was, again, the man Conn had seen in the
dome-house on Luna.

"Well, you got it open," he said, climbing down from the airjeep that
had brought him. "Now, what are you going to do with i