"Would you mind letting me have one of those?" Shanlee said. "I haven't had a smoke since I came here. It wouldn't have been in character."
Brangwyn took one out of the pack, lit it at the tip of his own, and gave it to Shanlee with his left hand, his right ready to strike. Shanlee laughed in real amusement.
"Oh, Brother!" he reproved, in his former pious tones. "You distrust your fellow man; that is a sin."
He rose slowly, the bathrobe flapping at his bare shins, and sat down across the table from Conn.
"All right," he said. "I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you the truth, which will be something of a novelty all around."
Shanlee puffed for a moment at the cigarette; it must really have tasted good after his long abstinence.
"You know, we were really caught off balance when the War ended. It even caught Merlin short; information lag, of course. The whole Alliance caved in all at once. Well, we fed Merlin all the data available, and analyzed the situation. Then we did something we really weren't called upon to do, because that was policy-planning and wasn't our province, but we were going to move an occupation army into System States planets, and we didn't want to do anything that would embarrass the Federation Government later. We fed Merlin every scrap of available information on political and economic conditions everywhere in the Federation, and set up a long-term computation of the general effects of the War.
"The extrapolation was supposed to run five hundred years in the future. It didn't. It stopped, at a point a trifle over two hundred years from now, with a statement that no computation could be made further because at that point the Terran Federation would no longer exist."
The others, who had taken chairs facing him, looked at him blankly.
"No more Federation?" Judge Ledue asked incredulously. "Why, the Federation, the Federation...."