s what'll happen if you dig
that thing up and put it into operation."

Nobody said anything except Fawzi, who began an indignant
contradiction and then subsided. Tom Brangwyn lit a cigarette.

"Would you mind letting me have one of those?" Shanlee said. "I
haven't had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn't have been in
character."

Brangwyn took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, and
gave it to Shanlee with his left hand, his right ready to strike.
Shanlee laughed in real amusement.

"Oh, Brother!" he reproved, in his former pious tones. "You distrust
your fellow man; that is a sin."

He rose slowly, the bathrobe flapping at his bare shins, and sat down
across the table from Conn.

"All right," he said. "I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you the
truth, which will be something of a novelty all around."

Shanlee puffed for a moment at the cigarette; it must really have
tasted good after his long abstinence.

"You know, we were really caught off balance when the War ended. It
even caught Merlin short; information lag, of course. The whole
Alliance caved in all at once. Well, we fed Merlin all the data
available, and analyzed the situation. Then we did something we really
weren't called upon to do, because that was policy-planning and wasn't
our province, but we were going to move an occupation army into System
States planets, and we didn't want to do anything that would embarrass
the Federation Government later. We fed Merlin every scrap of
available information on political and economic conditions everywhere
in the Federation, and set up a long-term computation of the general
effects of the War.

"The extrapolation was supposed to run five hundred years in the
future. It didn't. It stopped, at a point a trifle over two hundred
years from now, with a statement that no computation could be made
further because at that point the Terran Federation would no longer
exist."

The others, who had taken chairs facing him, looked at him blankly.

"No more Federation?" Judge Ledue asked incredulously. "Why, the
Federation, the Federation...."

The Federation would last forever. Anybody knew that. There just
couldn't be no more Federation.

"That's right," Shanlee said. "We had trouble believing it, too.
Remember, we were Federation officers. The Federation was our
religion. Just like patriotism used to be, back in the days of
nationalism. We checked for error. We made detail analyses. We ran it
all