"I always hated that Merlin thing," Flora burst out. "All those old men in Fawzi's office, dreaming about the wonderful things Merlin was going to do, with everything crumbling around them and everybody getting poorer every year, and doing nothing, nothing! And when you were coming home, I was expecting you to tell them there was no Merlin and to go to work and do something for themselves. But you didn't, and I couldn't see what you were trying to do. And then when Wade joined you and Father, I thought he was either helping you put over some kind of a swindle or else he'd started believing in Merlin himself. I should have seen what you were trying to do from the beginning. At least, from when you talked them into cleaning the town up and fixing the escalators and getting the fountains going again." So the fountains weren't dusty any more. "How's Mother taking things now?" Flora looked distressed. "She goes around wringing her hands. Honestly. I never saw anybody doing that outside a soap opera. Half the time she thinks you and Father are a pair of unprincipled scoundrels, and the other half she thinks you're going to let Merlin destroy the world." "I'm beginning to be afraid of something like that myself." "Huh? But Merlin's just a big fake, isn't it? You're using it to make these people do something they wouldn't do for themselves, aren't you?" "It started that way. What do you think all this is about?" he asked, gesturing toward the excavation and the two giant mining machines digging and blasting and pounding away at the rock. "Well, to keep Kurt Fawzi and that crowd happy, I suppose. It seems like an awful waste of time, though." "I'm afraid it isn't. I'm afraid Merlin, or something just as bad, is down there. That's why I'm here, instead of on Koshchei. I want to keep people like Fawzi from doing anything foolish with it when they find it." "But there _can't_ be a Merlin!" "I'm afraid there is. Not the sort of a Merlin Fawzi expects to find; that thing's too small for that. But there's something down there...." The question of size bothered him. That drum-shaped superstructure couldn't even hold the personnel-record machine they had found here, or the computers at the Storisende Stock Exchange. It could have been an intelligence-evaluator, or an enemy-intentions predictor, but it seemed small even for that. It would be something _like_ a computer; that was as far as he was able to go. And it could be something completely outside the reach of his imagination. At the back of his mind, the suspicion grew that Carl Leibert knew exactly what it was. And he became more and more convinced that he had seen the self-styled preacher before.