THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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It was so simple that nobody had ever guessed it. Below, back of the
Commander-in-chief's office, there was a closet, fifteen feet by twenty.
They had found it empty except for some bits of discarded office-gear,
and had used it as a catch-all for everything they wanted out of the
way. Shanlee went to where four thick steel columns rose from 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 the floor 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 and
patched it up a little. There's a sheet of collapsium-plate under the
floor. Your scanners simply couldn't detect anything from below."

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Confident that Merlin would decree its own destruction, Shanlee gave his