THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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"We bring you, now, a recorded interview with General Travis, made on
Luna...."

For an instant, Conn felt the room around him whirling dizzily, and then
he caught hold of himself. Everybody else was shouting in sudden
consternation, and then everybody was hushing everybody else and making
twice as much noise. The screen flickered; the commentator vanished, and
instead, seated in the deep-cushioned chair, was the thin and frail old
man with whom Conn had talked two years before, and through an open
segment of the dome-roof behind him the full Earth shone, the continents
of the Western Hemisphere plainly distinguishable. A young woman in
starchy nurse's white bent forward solicitously from beside the chair,
handing him a small beaker from which he sipped some stimulant. He
looked much as he had when Conn had talked to him. But there was
something missing....

Oh, yes. The comparative youngster of seventy-some?"Mike Shanlee ... my