ine to do his
lying for him, a dummy computer that wouldn't compute anything. And
all he'd wanted, to begin with, had been a ship to haul some brandy to
where they could get a fair price for it.

Peace had returned. At first, it had been a frightened and uneasy
peace. The bluff--he hoped that was what it had been--by the Koshchei
colonists had shocked everybody into momentary inaction. In the
twenty-four hours that had followed, the forces of sanity and order
had gotten control again. Merlin existed and had been found. As for
Travis's statement, the old general had been bound by a wartime oath
of secrecy to deny Merlin's existence. The majority relaxed, ashamed
of their hysterical reaction. As for the Cybernarchists and
Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers, government and private
police, vastly augmented by volunteers, speedily rounded up the
leaders; their followers dispersed, realizing that Merlin was nothing
but a lot of dials and buttons, and interestedly watching the
broadcast views of it.

The banks were still closed, but discreet back-door withdrawals were
permitted to keep business going; so was the Stock Exchange, but word
was going around the brokerage offices that Trisystem Investments was
in the market for a long list of securities. Nobody was willing to do
anything that might upset the precarious balance; everybody was
talking about the bright future, when Merlin would guide Poictesme to
ever greater and more splendid prosperity.

Conn's father and sister flew to Litchfield; Flora stayed with her
mother, and Rodney Maxwell returned to Force Command, shaking his head
gravely.

"She's still unconscious, Conn," he said. "She just lies there, barely
breathing. The doctors don't know.... I wish Wade hadn't gone on the
ship."

The price of what he had wanted to do was becoming unendurably high
for Conn.

They ran off the computations Merlin had made forty years before, and
rechecked them. There had been no error. The Terran Federation,
overextended, had been cracking for a century before the War; the
strain of that conflict had started an irreversible breakup. Two
centuries for the Federation as such; at most, another century of
irregular trade and occasional war between independent planets, Galaxy
full of human-populated planets as poor as Poictesme at its worst. Or,
aware of the future, sudden outbursts of desperate violence, then
anarchy and barbarism.

It took a long time to set up the new c