The Cosmic Computer

Nevertheless the leading men of the planet didn't believe him. They couldn't, for the search for Merlin had become their abiding obsession. Merlin meant everything to them: powe...

He interrupted: "Excuse me, Colonel. The point I was trying to make is that, with all I was able to learn, I could find nothing, not one single word, about any giant strategic p...

"Now wait a minute, Mother. You're talking to a computerman now." Professional authority was something his mother oughtn't to question. "A computer like Merlin isn't intelligent...

"Conn, you mentioned an underground duplicate of Travis's general headquarters," Zareff said. "They thought we'd possibly send a fleet here to blitz Poictesme, or they wouldn't...

"Gehenna with what the Government likes!" the old Rebel swore. "If they'd put a few of those ships into commission, they could wipe out these outlaws and a private company would...

The camp they had set up on top of the mesa was used, that night, only by Klem Zareff's guards. Everybody else was inside, eating cold rations when hungry and, when they could k...

There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning, and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. It was a tunnel two miles long, running in...

The snooper popped out of the shaft, onto a gallery that had been cut into the solid rock, fifty feet high and a hundred and fifty across, with a low parapet on the outside and...

"I really didn't understand how much good this would do," he said. "I wouldn't have spoken so forcefully against it if I had. I thought it was nothing but this Merlin thing--"

"You know what happened?" he said. "When this gang bugged out, back in 854, they left the power on. Now the conversion mass is all gone, and the plutonium's all spent. We'll hav...

The mobile trash-bin went zooming up to the ceiling, reversed within twenty feet of it and came circling back to the ground, to go zooming up again. It had gone crazy, literally...

The voyage back to Koshchei had been a week-long nightmare. When she had been the pride and budget-wrecker of Transcontinent & Overseas Airline, the _Harriet Barne_ had accommod...

And reporters, phoning stories in and getting audiovisual interviews of anybody who would hold still long enough. They converged in a rush as Conn and his father and Lucas came in.

One by one, the members of the old Fawzi's Office gang came drifting in--Lorenzo Menardes, Morgan Gatworth, Lester Dawes. None of them had any skills to contribute, but they bro...

"General Shanlee, would you describe General Foxx Travis as a man of honor and integrity? And would you so describe yourself?" Shanlee said nothing. "Yet both of you have lied,...

More lies; lies without end. And now he'd have a machine to do his lying for him, a dummy computer that wouldn't compute anything. And all he'd wanted, to begin with, had been a...