THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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It went on like that, after they went down to Foxx Travis's?now
Fawzi's?office, where there were silver-stoppered decanters instead of
the old green-glass pitcher, and gold-plated ashtrays, and thick carpets
on the floor. The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi's office gang look
frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no idea what a
computer could or couldn't do. Anybody who could build a computer of the
sort he thought Merlin was wouldn't need it, he /would/ be God.

As he talked, Conn began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition.
He'd seen this Carl Leibert before, somewhere, and somehow he was sure
that the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren't part of the
picture. That puzzled him. He doubted if he'd have remembered Leibert
from six years ago, almost seven, now, though a lot of itinerant
evangelists showed up in Litchfield. That might have been it.

"I tell you, the Great Computer is there, in the heart of the butte,"
Leibert was insisting, now. "It has been revealed to me in a dream. It