ping me in the safe. I wish our people on
Koshchei hadn't mentioned me in their ultimatum; Jake Vyckhoven's
afraid to let me run around loose for fear some lunatic shoots me and
starts the planetbusters coming in. Jake did one good thing, though.
He ordered the Stock Exchange closed, and declared a five-day bank
holiday. By that time, you ought to have Merlin opened and working,
and then the market'll be safe."

Conn simply replied, "I hope so." There was no telling what kind of
taps there might be on the screen his father was using; he couldn't
risk telling him about Shanlee, or about the last computation which
Merlin had made. "If we send the _Lester Dawes_ in, do you think you
might talk them into letting you come out here?"

"I can try."

Flora arrived at Force Command that afternoon.

"I would have come sooner," she said, "but Mother's had a complete
collapse. It happened last evening; she's in the hospital. I was with
her until just an hour and a half ago. She's still unconscious."

"You mean she's in danger?"

"I don't know. They think she's all right, except for the shock. It
was the Travis statement that did it."

"Think I ought to go to her?"

Flora shook her head. "Just keep on with what you're doing here. There
isn't anything you can do for her now."

"The best thing you can do for her, Conn, is prove that you weren't
lying about Merlin," Sylvie told him.

The _Lester Dawes_ didn't make it from Force Command to Storisende and
back until after dark, and the green and white and red and orange
lights were rising in folds and waves. Rodney Maxwell had heard about
his wife's condition; it was the first thing he spoke of when Conn
and Flora and Sylvie met him as he got off the ship.

"There isn't anything we can do, Father," Flora said. "They'll call us
when there's any change."

He said the same thing Sylvie had said. "The only thing we can do is
get that infernal thing uncovered. Once we do this, everything'll be
all right. We'll show your mother that it isn't a fake and it isn't
anything dangerous; we'll put a stop to all these horror-stories about
mechanical devils and living machines...."

Conn drew his father off where the girls couldn't overhear.

"This is something worse," he said. "This is a bomb that could blow up
the whole Federation."

"Are you going nuts, too?" his father demanded.

Conn told him about Shanlee; he repeated, almost word for word, the
story Shanlee had told.

"Do