t?"

"We can't make up our minds," Conn said. "We're going to let the
computer tell us what to do with it."

Shanlee looked at him, startled. "You mean, you're going to have
Merlin judge itself and decide its own fate?" he asked. "You'll get
the same result we did."

They let a ladder down the hole and descended--Conn and his father,
Kurt Fawzi, Jerry Rivas, then Shanlee and his two guards, then
others--until a score of them were crowded in the room at the bottom,
their flashlights illuminating the circular chamber, revealing
ceiling-high metal cabinets, banks of button- and dial-studded control
panels, big keyboards. It was Shanlee who found the lights and put
them on.

"Powered from the central plant, down below," he said. "The main
cables are disguised as the grounding-outlet. If this thing had been
on when you put on the power, you'd have had an awful lot of power
going nowhere, apparently."

Rodney Maxwell was disappointed. "I know this stuff looks awfully
complex, but I'd have expected there to be more of it."

"Oh, I didn't get a chance to tell you about that. This is only the
operating end," Conn said, and then asked Shanlee if there were
inspection-screens. When Shanlee indicated them, he began putting them
on. "This is the real computer."

They all gave the same view, with minor differences--long corridors,
ten feet wide, between solid banks of steel cabinets on either side.
Conn explained where they were, and added:

"Kurt and the rest of them were sitting here, all this time, wondering
where Merlin was; it was all around them."

"Well, how did you get up here?" Fawzi asked. "We couldn't find
anything from below."

"No, you couldn't." Shanlee was amused. "Watch this."

It was so simple that nobody had ever guessed it. Below, back of the
Commander-in-chief's office, there was a closet, fifteen feet by
twenty. They had found it empty except for some bits of discarded
office-gear, and had used it as a catch-all for everything they wanted
out of the way. Shanlee went to where four thick steel columns rose
from floor to ceiling in a rectangle around a heavy-duty lifter,
pressing a button on a control-box on one of them. The lifter, and the
floor under it, rose, with a thick mass of vitrified rock underneath.
The closet, full of the junk that had been thrown into it, followed.

"That's it," he said. "We just tore out the controls inside that and
patched it up a little. There's a sheet of collapsium-