THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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gravely.

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

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

They ran off the computations Merlin had made forty years before, and
rechecked them. There had been no error. The Terran Federation,
overextended, had been cracking for a century before the War; the strain
of that conflict had started an irreversible breakup. Two centuries for
the[Pg 185] Federation as such; at most, another century of irregular
trade and occasional war between independent planets, Galaxy full of
human-populated planets as poor as Poictesme at its worst. Or, aware of
the future, sudden outbursts of desperate violence, then anarchy and
barbarism.