Flora shook her head. "Just keep on with what you're doing here. There isn't anything you can do for her now." "The best thing you can do for her, Conn, is prove that you weren't lying about Merlin," Sylvie told him. The _Lester Dawes_ didn't make it from Force Command to Storisende and back until after dark, and the green and white and red and orange lights were rising in folds and waves. Rodney Maxwell had heard about his wife's condition; it was the first thing he spoke of when Conn and Flora and Sylvie met him as he got off the ship. "There isn't anything we can do, Father," Flora said. "They'll call us when there's any change." He said the same thing Sylvie had said. "The only thing we can do is get that infernal thing uncovered. Once we do this, everything'll be all right. We'll show your mother that it isn't a fake and it isn't anything dangerous; we'll put a stop to all these horror-stories about mechanical devils and living machines...." Conn drew his father off where the girls couldn't overhear. "This is something worse," he said. "This is a bomb that could blow up the whole Federation." "Are you going nuts, too?" his father demanded. Conn told him about Shanlee; he repeated, almost word for word, the story Shanlee had told. "Do you believe that?" his father asked. "Don't you? You were in Storisende when the Travis statement came out; you saw how people acted. If this story gets out, people will be acting the same way on every planet in the Federation. Not just places like Poictesme; planets like Terra and Baldur and Marduk and Odin and Osiris. It would be the end of everything civilized, everywhere." "Why didn't they use Merlin to save the Federation?" "It's past saving. It's been past saving since before the War. The War was what gave it the final shove. If they could have used Merlin to reverse the process, they wouldn't have sealed it away." "But you know, Conn, we can't destroy Merlin. If we did, the same people who went crazy over the Travis statement would go crazy all over again, worse than ever. We'd be destroying everything we planned for, and we'd be destroying ourselves. That bluff young Macquarte and Luther Chen-Wong and Bill Nichols made wouldn't work twice. And if they weren't bluffing...." His father shuddered. "And if we don't, how long do you think civilization will last here, if it blows up all over the rest of the Federation?" The big machine cut on, a little spot of raw energy grinding away the collapsium, inch by inch; the undulating curtains of colored light illuminated the Badlands for miles around. Then, when the first hint of dawn came into the east, they went out. The steady roar of the generators that had battered every ear for over twenty-four hours stopped. There was unbelieving silence, and then shouts.