Kurt Fawzi was incredulous. Judge Ledue's hand shook as though palsied as he tried to relight his cigar. Dolf Kellton was looking at the drink in his hand as though he had no idea what it was. The others found their voices, one by one.
"Of course, it was the most closely guarded secret ..."
"But after forty years ..."
"Hah, don't tell me about security!" Colonel Zareff barked. "You should have seen the lengths our staff went to. I remember, once, on Mephistopheles ..."
"But there was a computer code-named Merlin," Judge Ledue was insisting, to convince himself more than anybody else. "Its memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning all its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations, and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce new facts, and predicting future events, and ..."
And if you'd asked such a computer, "Is there a God?" it would have simply answered, "Present."
"We'd have won the War, except for Merlin," Zareff was declaring.
"Conn, from what you've learned of computers generally, how big would Merlin have to be?" old Professor Kellton asked.
"Well, the astrophysics computer at the University occupied a volume of a hundred thousand cubic feet. For all Merlin was supposed to do, I'd say something of the order of three million to five million.
"Well, it's a cinch they didn't haul that away with them," Lester Dawes, the banker, said.