"You think it would make all that trouble?" Kellton was asking anxiously, hoping that the others would convince him that it wouldn't.
"Maybe we had better destroy it," Judge Ledue faltered. "You see what it's done already; the whole planet's in anarchy. If we let this go on...."
"We can't decide anything like that, just the five of us," Brangwyn was insisting. "We'll have to get the others together and see what they think. We have no right to make any decision like this for them."
"They're no more able to make the decision than we are," Conn said.
"But we've got to; they have a right to know...."
"If you decide to destroy Merlin, you'll have to decide to kill me, first," Kurt Fawzi said, his voice deadly calm. "You won't do it while I'm alive."
"But, Kurt," Ledue expostulated. "You know why these people here at Storisende are rioting? It's because they've lost hope, because they're afraid and desperate. The Terran Federation is something everybody feels they have to have, for peace and order and welfare. If people thought it was breaking up, they'd be desperate, too. They'd do the same insane things these people here on this planet are doing. General Shanlee was right. Don't destroy the hope that keeps them sane."
"We don't need to do that," Kurt Fawzi argued. "We can use Merlin to solve our own problems; we don't need to tell the whole Federation what's going to happen in two hundred years."
"It would get out; it couldn't help getting out," Ledue said.
"Let's not try to decide it ourselves," Conn said. "Let's get Merlin into operation, and run a computation on it."