t I was trying to make is
that, with all I was able to learn, I could find nothing, not one
single word, about any giant strategic planning computer called
Merlin, or any Merlin Project."

There! He'd gotten that out. Now go on and tell them about the old man
in the dome-house on Luna. The room was silent, except for the small
insectile hum of the electric clock. Then somebody set a glass on the
table, and it sounded like a hammer blow.

"Nothing, Conn?"

Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue's hand shook as though palsied
as he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at the
drink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The others
found their voices, one by one.

"Of course, it was the most closely guarded secret ..."

"But after forty years ..."

"Hah, don't tell me about security!" Colonel Zareff barked. "You
should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on
Mephistopheles ..."

"But there _was_ a computer code-named Merlin," Judge Ledue was
insisting, to convince himself more than anybody else. "Its
memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning
all its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations,
and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce new
facts, and predicting future events, and ..."

And if you'd asked such a computer, "Is there a God?" it would have
simply answered, "Present."

"We'd have won the War, except for Merlin," Zareff was declaring.

"Conn, from what you've learned of computers generally, how big would
Merlin have to be?" old Professor Kellton asked.

"Well, the astrophysics computer at the University occupied a volume
of a hundred thousand cubic feet. For all Merlin was supposed to do,
I'd say something of the order of three million to five million.

"Well, it's a cinch they didn't haul that away with them," Lester
Dawes, the banker, said.

"Oh, lots of places on Poictesme where they could have hid a thing
like that," Tom Brangwyn said. "You know, a planet's a mighty big
place."

"It doesn't have to be on Poictesme, even," Morgan Gatworth pointed
out. "It could be anywhere in the Trisystem."

"You know where I'd have put it?" Lorenzo Menardes asked. "On one of
the moons of Pantagruel."

"But that's in the Gamma System, three light years away," Kurt Fawzi
objected. "There isn't a hypership on this planet, and it would take
half a lifetime to get there on normal-space driv