THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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"Merlin is a computer; computers deal only in facts. Computers are
machines; they have no sense of self-preservation. If Merlin ought to be
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 different
wave-lengths. Conn, half asleep in a chair in the commander-in-chief's
office, saw Simon Macquarte, the young mathematics professor from
Storisende College who had become one of the leaders of the colony,
appear in the screen. The next moment, he was fully awake, shocked by
Macquarte's words:

"This is not a threat; this is a solemn, even a prayerful, warning. We
do not want to use genocidal weapons of mass destruction against the