Shanlee looked at him, startled. "You mean, you're going to have Merlin judge itself and decide its own fate?" he asked. "You'll get the same result we did."
They let a ladder down the hole and descended—Conn and his father, Kurt Fawzi, Jerry Rivas, then Shanlee and his two guards, then others—until a score of them were crowded in the room at the bottom, their flashlights illuminating the circular chamber, revealing ceiling-high metal cabinets, banks of button- and dial-studded control panels, big keyboards. It was Shanlee who found the lights and put them on.
"Powered from the central plant, down below," he said. "The main cables are disguised as the grounding-outlet. If this thing had been on when you put on the power, you'd have had an awful lot of power going nowhere, apparently."
Rodney Maxwell was disappointed. "I know this stuff looks awfully complex, but I'd have expected there to be more of it."
"Oh, I didn't get a chance to tell you about that. This is only the operating end," Conn said, and then asked Shanlee if there were inspection-screens. When Shanlee indicated them, he began putting them on. "This is the real computer."
They all gave the same view, with minor differences—long corridors, ten feet wide, between solid banks of steel cabinets on either side. Conn explained where they were, and added:
"Kurt and the rest of them were sitting here, all this time, wondering where Merlin was; it was all around them."
"Well, how did you get up here?" Fawzi asked. "We couldn't find anything from below."
"No, you couldn't." Shanlee was amused. "Watch this."
It was so simple that nobody had ever guessed it. Below, back of the Commander-in-chief's office, there was a closet, fifteen feet by twenty. They had found it empty except for some bits of discarded office-gear, and had used it as a catch-all for everything they wanted out of the way. Shanlee went to where four thick steel columns rose from floor to ceiling in a rectangle around a heavy-duty lifter, pressing a button on a control-box on one of them. The lifter, and the floor under it, rose, with a thick mass of vitrified rock underneath. The closet, full of the junk that had been thrown into it, followed.