The Cosmic Computer

by H. Beam Piper

  XXI

  All through the night, a shifting blaze of many-colored light rose anddimmed the stars above the mesa. They stared in awe, marveling at theenergy that was pouring out of the converters into a tiny spot thatinched its way around the collapsium shielding. It must have beenvisible for hundreds of miles; it was, for there was a new flood ofrumors circulating in Storisende and repeated and denied by thenewscasts, now running continuously. Merlin had been found. Merlin hadbeen blown up by Government troops. Merlin was being transported toStorisende to be installed as arbiter of the Government. Merlin theMonster was destroying the planet. Merlin the Devil was unchained.

  Conn and Kurt Fawzi and Dolf Kellton and Judge Ledue and Tom Brangwynclustered together, talking in whispers. They had told nobody, yet, ofthe interview with Shanlee.

  "You think it would make all that trouble?" Kellton was askinganxiously, hoping that the others would convince him that it wouldn't.

  "Maybe we had better destroy it," Judge Ledue faltered. "You see whatit's done already; the whole planet's in anarchy. If we let this goon...."

  "We can't decide anything like that, just the five of us," Brangwynwas insisting. "We'll have to get the others together and see whatthey think. We have no right to make any decision like this for them."

  "They're no more able to make the decision than we are," Conn said.

  "But we've got to; they have a right to know...."

  "If you decide to destroy Merlin, you'll have to decide to kill me,first," Kurt Fawzi said, his voice deadly calm. "You won't do it whileI'm alive."

  "But, Kurt," Ledue expostulated. "You know why these people here atStorisende are rioting? It's because they've lost hope, becausethey're afraid and desperate. The Terran Federation is somethingeverybody feels they have to have, for peace and order and welfare. Ifpeople thought it was breaking up, they'd be desperate, too. They'd dothe same insane things these people here on this planet are doing.General Shanlee was right. Don't destroy the hope that keeps themsane."

  "We don't need to do that," Kurt Fawzi argued. "We can use Merlin tosolve our own problems; we don't need to tell the whole Federationwhat's going to happen in two hundred years."

  "It would get out; it couldn't help getting out," Ledue said.

  "Let's not try to decide it ourselves," Conn said. "Let's get Merlininto operation, and run a computation on it."

  "You mean, ask Merlin to tell us whether it ought to be destroyed ornot?" Ledue asked incredulously. "Let Merlin put itself on trial, andsentence itself to destruction?"

  "Merlin is a computer; computers deal only in facts. Computers aremachines; they have no sense of self-preservation. If Merlin ought tobe destroyed, Merlin will tell us so."

  "You willing to leave it up to Merlin, Kurt?" Tom Brangwyn asked.

  Fawzi gulped. "Yes. If Merlin says we ought to, we'll have to do it."

  Toward noon, a telecast went out from Koshchei, on a dozen differentwave-lengths. Conn, half asleep in a chair in the commander-in-chief'soffice, saw Simon Macquarte, the young mathematics professor fromStorisende College who had become one of the leaders of the colony,appear in the screen. The next moment, he was fully awake, shocked byMacquarte's words:

  "This is not a threat; this is a solemn, even a prayerful, warning. Wedo not want to use genocidal weapons of mass destruction against theworld of our birth. But whether we do or not rests solely with you.

  "We came here with a dream of a better world, a world of happiness andplenty for all. We have been working, on Koshchei, to build such aworld on Poictesme. Now you are smashing that dream. When it is gone,we will have nothing to live for--except revenge. And we will takethat revenge, make no mistake.

  "We have the weapons with which to take it. Remember, this was aFederation naval base and naval arsenal during the War. Here theFederation Navy built their super-missiles, the missiles whichdevastated Ashmodai, and Belphegor, and Baphomet, and hundreds ofthese weapons are here. We have them, ready for launching. Once theyare launched, with the robo-pilots set for targets on Poictesme, youwill have a hundred and sixty hours, at the most, to live.

  "We will launch them immediately if there is another attack made uponForce Command Duplicate HQ, or upon Interplanetary Building inStorisende, or if Rodney Maxwell is killed, no matter by whom or underwhat circumstances.

  "We beg you, earnestly and prayerfully, not to force us to do thisdreadful thing. We speak to each one of you, for each one of you holdsthe fate of the planet in his own hands."

  The image faded from the screen. As it did, Conn was looking from oneto another of the people in the room with him. All were dumbfounded,most of them frightened.

  "They wouldn't do it, would they?" Lorenzo Menardes was asking. "Conn,you know those people. They wouldn't really?"

  "Don't depend on it, Lorenzo," Klem Zareff said. "It's hard for a lotof people to shoot somebody ten feet away with a pistol. But justsending off a missile; that's nothing but setting a lot of dials andthen pushing a button."

  "I'm not worrying about whether they'd do it or not," Conn said. "WhatI'm worrying about is how many people will believe they will."

  Apparently a good many people did. Zareff's combat vehicles beganreporting a cessation of fighting. The newscasts, repeating theultimatum from Koshchei, told of fewer and fewer disorders in the cityor elsewhere; by midafternoon, the rioting had stopped.

  By that time, too, Rodney Maxwell was on-screen. He was, Conn noticed,wearing his pistols again.

  "What happened?" he asked. "They let you out on bail?"

  Maxwell shook his head. "Charges dismissed; they didn't have anythingto charge me with in the first place. But they haven't let me outyet."

  "You're wearing your guns."

  "Yes, but they still have me penned up here at the Executive Palace;they're practically keeping me in the safe. I wish our people onKoshchei hadn't mentioned me in their ultimatum; Jake Vyckhoven'safraid to let me run around loose for fear some lunatic shoots me andstarts the planetbusters coming in. Jake did one good thing, though.He ordered the Stock Exchange closed, and declared a five-day bankholiday. 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 oftaps there might be on the screen his father was using; he couldn'trisk telling him about Shanlee, or about the last computation whichMerlin had made. "If we send the _Lester Dawes_ in, do you think youmight 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 completecollapse. It happened last evening; she's in the hospital. I was withher 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. Itwas 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. Thereisn't anything you can do for her now."

  "The best thing you can do for her, Conn, is prove that you weren'tlying about Merlin," Sylvie told him.

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

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

  He said the same thing Sylvie had said. "The only thing we can do isget that infernal thing uncovered. Once we do this, everything'll beall right. We'll show your mother that it isn't a fake and it isn'tanything dangerous; we'll put a stop to all these horror-stories aboutmechanical 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 upthe whole Federation."

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

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

  "Do you believe that?" his father asked.

  "Don't you? You were in Storisende when the Travis statement came out;you saw how people acted. If this story gets out, people will beacting the same way on every planet in the Federation. Not just placeslike Poictesme; planets like Terra and Baldur and Marduk and Odin andOsiris. It would be the end of everything civilized, everywhere."

  "Why didn't they use Merlin to save the Federation?"

  "It's past saving. It's been past saving since before the War. The Warwas what gave it the final shove. If they could have used Merlin toreverse the process, they wouldn't have sealed it away."

  "But you know, Conn, we can't destroy Merlin. If we did, the samepeople who went crazy over the Travis statement would go crazy allover again, worse than ever. We'd be destroying everything we plannedfor, and we'd be destroying ourselves. That bluff young Macquarte andLuther Chen-Wong and Bill Nichols made wouldn't work twice. And ifthey weren't bluffing...."

  His father shuddered.

  "And if we don't, how long do you think civilization will last here,if it blows up all over the rest of the Federation?"

  The big machine cut on, a little spot of raw energy grinding away thecollapsium, inch by inch; the undulating curtains of colored lightilluminated the Badlands for miles around. Then, when the first hintof dawn came into the east, they went out. The steady roar of thegenerators that had battered every ear for over twenty-four hoursstopped. There was unbelieving silence, and then shouts.

  The workmen swarmed out to man lifters. Slowly the heavyapparatus--the reactor and the converters, the cutting machine, andthe shielding around it--was lifted away. Finally, a lone lifter camein and men in radiation-suits went down to hook on grapples, and itlifted away, carrying with it a ten-foot-square sheet of thin steelthat weighed almost thirty tons.

  When they had battered a hole in the vitrified rock underneath, guardsbrought up General Shanlee. Somebody almost up to professionalstandards had given him a haircut; the beard was gone, too. AFederation Army officer's uniform had been found reasonably close tohis size, and somebody had even provided him with the four stars ofhis retirement rank. He was, again, the man Conn had seen in thedome-house on Luna.

  "Well, you got it open," he said, climbing down from the airjeep thathad brought him. "Now, what are you going to do with it?"

  "We can't make up our minds," Conn said. "We're going to let thecomputer tell us what to do with it."

  Shanlee looked at him, startled. "You mean, you're going to haveMerlin judge itself and decide its own fate?" he asked. "You'll getthe same result we did."

  They let a ladder down the hole and descended--Conn and his father,Kurt Fawzi, Jerry Rivas, then Shanlee and his two guards, thenothers--until a score of them were crowded in the room at the bottom,their flashlights illuminating the circular chamber, revealingceiling-high metal cabinets, banks of button- and dial-studded controlpanels, big keyboards. It was Shanlee who found the lights and putthem on.

  "Powered from the central plant, down below," he said. "The maincables are disguised as the grounding-outlet. If this thing had beenon when you put on the power, you'd have had an awful lot of powergoing nowhere, apparently."

  Rodney Maxwell was disappointed. "I know this stuff looks awfullycomplex, but I'd have expected there to be more of it."

  "Oh, I didn't get a chance to tell you about that. This is only theoperating end," Conn said, and then asked Shanlee if there wereinspection-screens. When Shanlee indicated them, he began putting themon. "This is the real computer."

  They all gave the same view, with minor differences--long corridors,ten feet wide, between solid banks of steel cabinets on either side.Conn explained where they were, and added:

  "Kurt and the rest of them were sitting here, all this time, wonderingwhere Merlin was; it was all around them."

  "Well, how did you get up here?" Fawzi asked. "We couldn't findanything from below."

  "No, you couldn't." Shanlee was amused. "Watch this."

  It was so simple that nobody had ever guessed it. Below, back of theCommander-in-chief's office, there was a closet, fifteen feet bytwenty. They had found it empty except for some bits of discardedoffice-gear, and had used it as a catch-all for everything they wantedout of the way. Shanlee went to where four thick steel columns rosefrom floor to ceiling in a rectangle around a heavy-duty lifter,pressing a button on a control-box on one of them. The lifter, and thefloor under it, rose, with a thick mass of vitrified rock underneath.The closet, full of the junk that had been thrown into it, followed.

  "That's it," he said. "We just tore out the controls inside that andpatched it up a little. There's a sheet of collapsium-plate under thefloor. Your scanners simply couldn't detect anything from below."

  Confident that Merlin would decree its own destruction, Shanlee gavehis parole; the others accepted it. The newsmen were admitted to thecircular operating room and encouraged to send out views anddescriptions of everything. Then the lift controls were reinstalled,the lid was put back on top, and the only access to the room wasthrough the office below. The entrance to this was always guarded byZarel's soldiers or Brangwyn's police.

  There were only a score of them who could be let in on the actualfacts. For the most part, they were the same men who had been inFawzi's office on the afternoon of Conn's return, a year and a halfago. A few others--Anse Dawes, Jerry Rivas, and five computermen Connhad trained on Koshchei--had to be trusted. Conn insisted on lettingSylvie Jacquemont in on the revised Awful Truth About Merlin. Theyspent a lot of their time together, in Travis's office, for the mostpart sunk in dejection.

  They had finally found Merlin; now they must lose it. They were tryingto reconcile themselves and take comfort from the achievement, emptyas it was. They could see no way out. If Merlin said that Merlin hadto be destroyed, that was it. Merlin was infallible. Conn hated thethought of destroying that machine with his whole being, not becauseit was an infallible oracle, but because it was the climacticmasterpiece of the science he had spent years studying. To destroy itwas an even worse sacrilege to him than it was to the Merlinolators.And Rodney Maxwell was thinking of the public effects. What the Travisstatement had started would be nothing by comparison.

  "You know, we can keep the destruction of Merlin a secret," Conn said."It'll take some work down at the power plant, but we can overload allthe circuits and burn everything out at once." He turned to Shanlee."I don't know why you people didn't think of that."

  Shanlee looked at him in surprise. "Why, now that you mention it,neither do I," he admitted. "We just didn't."

  "Then," Conn continued, "we can tinker up something in the operatingroom that'll turn out what will look like computation results. As faras anybody outside ourselves will know, Merlin will still be solvingeverybody's problems. We'll do like any fortuneteller; tell thecustomer what he wants to believe and keep him happy."

  More lies; lies without end. And now he'd have a machine to do hislying for him, a dummy computer that wouldn't compute anything. Andall he'd wanted, to begin with, had been a ship to haul some brandy towhere they could get a fair price for it.

  Peace had returned. At first, it had been a frightened and uneasypeace. The bluff--he hoped that was what it had been--by the Koshcheicolonists had shocked everybody into momentary inaction. In thetwenty-four hours that had followed, the forces of sanity and orderhad gotten control again. Merlin existed and had been found. As forTravis's statement, the old general had been bound by a wartime oathof secrecy to deny Merlin's existence. The majority relaxed, ashamedof their hysterical reaction. As for the Cybernarchists andArmageddonists and Human Supremacy Leaguers, government and privatepolice, vastly augmented by volunteers, speedily rounded up theleaders; their followers dispersed, realizing that Merlin was nothingbut a lot of d
ials and buttons, and interestedly watching thebroadcast views of it.

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

  Conn's father and sister flew to Litchfield; Flora stayed with hermother, and Rodney Maxwell returned to Force Command, shaking his headgravely.

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

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

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

  It took a long time to set up the new computation. Forty yearsof history for almost five hundred planets had to be abstractedand summarized and translated from verbal symbols to theelectro-mathematical language of computers and fed in. Conn and Sylvieand General Shanlee and the three men and two women Conn had taught onKoshchei worked and rested briefly and worked again. Finally, it wasfinished.

  "General; you're the oldest Merlin hand," Conn said, gesturing to thered button at the main control panel, "You do it."

  "You do it, Conn. None of us would be here except for you."

  "Thank you, General."

  He pressed the button. They all stood silently watching the outputslot.

  Even a positronic computer does not work instantaneously. Nothingdoes. Conn took his eyes from the slot from which the tape would come,and watched the second-hand of the clock above it. The wait didn'tseem like hours to him; it only seemed like seventy-five seconds, thatway. Then the bell rang, and the tape began coming out.

  It took another hour and a half of button-punching; the Braille-likesymbols on the tape had to be retranslated, and even Merlin couldn'tdo that for itself. Merlin didn't think in human terms.

  It was the same as before. In ignorance, the peoples of the Federationworlds would go on, striving to keep things running until they woreout, and then sinking into apathetic acceptance. Deprived of hope,they would turn to frantic violence and smash everything they mostwanted to preserve. Conn pushed another button.

  The second information-request went in: _What is the best course to befollowed under these conditions by the people of Poictesme?_ It hadtaken some time to phrase that in symbols a computer would findcomprehensible; the answer, at great length, emerged in two minuteseight seconds. Retranslating it took five hours.

  In the beginning and for the first ten years, it was, almost item foritem, the Maxwell Plan. Export trade, specialized in luxury goods.Brandies and wines, tobacco; a long list of other exportablecommodities, and optimum markets. Reopening of industrial plants;establishment of new industries. Attainment of economicself-sufficiency. Cultural self-sufficiency; establishment ofuniversities, institutes of technology, research laboratories. Thenthe Maxwell Plan became the Merlin Plan; the breakup of the Federationwas a fact that entered into the computation. Build-up of militarystrength to resist aggression by other planetary governments. Defenseof the Gartner Trisystem. Lists of possible aggressor planets. Revivalof interstellar communications and trade; expeditions, conquest andre-education of natives....

  "We can't begin to handle this without Merlin," Conn said. "If thatmeans blowing up the Federation, let it blow. We'll start a new onehere."

  "No; if there's a general, violent collapse of the Federation, it'llspread to Poictesme," Shanlee told him. "Let's ask Merlin the bigquestion."

  Merlin took a good five minutes to work that one out. The question hadto include a full description of Merlin, and a statement of theinformation which must be kept secret. The answer was even morelengthy, but it was summed up in the first word: _Falsification_.

  "So Merlin's got to be a liar, too, along with the rest of us!" Sylviecried. "Conn, you've corrupted his morals!"

  The rest of it was false data which must be taped in, and lists ofcorrections which must be made in evaluating any computation intowhich such data might enter. There was also a statement that, afterfifty years, suppression of the truth and circulation of falselyoptimistic statements about the Federation would no longer have anyimportance.

  "Well, that's it," Conn said. "Merlin thought himself out of a deathsentence."

  They crowded into the lift and went down to the office below.Everybody who knew what had been going on upstairs was there. Most ofthem were nursing drinks; almost everybody was smoking. All of themwere silent, until Judge Ledue took his cigar from his mouth.

  "Has the jury reached a verdict?" he asked, clinging with courtroomformality to his self-control.

  "Yes, your Honor. We find the defendant, Merlin, not guilty ascharged."

  In the uproar his words released, Rodney Maxwell got to his feet andcame quickly to Conn.

  "Flora called just a while ago. Your mother is conscious; she's askingfor us. Flora says she seems perfectly normal."

  "We'll go right away; take a recon-car. General, will you explainthings till I get back? Sylvie, do you want to come with us?"