hem. "He
is very important and very dangerous. Take him out somewhere, search
him to the skin, take his clothes away from him and give him a robe.
He's to be watched every second; make sure he hasn't poison or other
suicide means. He's to be questioned later."

As soon as Rodney Maxwell was off the screen, there was a call-signal.
It was one of the news-services, wanting a statement.

"I'll take it," Gatworth said, and then began talking:

"This statement of General Travis's is completely false. There is a
Merlin, and we've found it...."

They found something that might be good-enough Merlin for the next
thirty hours. That superstructure was just big enough for the manually
operated parts of a computer like Merlin; the input and output, and
the programming machines.

XX

Klem Zareff's guardsmen were mercenaries. A little over a year ago
they had, at best, been homeless drifters, and not a few had been
outlaws. Now they were soldiers, well fed, clothed, quartered and
equipped, and well and regularly paid. They had a good thing; they
were willing to fight to keep it, Merlin or no Merlin. Conn left them
to their commander. He did gather the workmen for a short harangue,
but that wasn't really necessary. They had a good thing, too, and most
of them realized that they were working toward a better thing. They
could be depended upon, too.

They came crowding out and manned lifters; they got the heavy
collapsium-cutter maneuvered into place and the shielding down around
the cutting-head. After that, there were only four men who could work,
each in his own heavily shielded cabin. In spite of the shielding that
covered the actual work, there was an awesome display of multicolored
light; it was like being in the middle of an aurora borealis. What was
going on where that tiny rotating beam of cosmic rays was grinding at
the collapsium simply couldn't have been imagined.

Conn would have liked to stay outside; he could not. Too many things
were happening in too many places, and it was all coming in by screen.
Rioting had broken out in Storisende and in a dozen other places. He
saw, on a news-screen, a mob raging in front of the Executive Palace;
yellow-shirted Cybernarchists were battling with city police and
Planetary troops, Armageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers were
fighting both and one another. Above all the confused noise of
shouting and shooting, an amplifier was braying: "_It's a lie! It's a
lie! Mer