“Perhaps. And perhaps it’s what Dena has to say about him.”

“Dena!” Grober sniffed. “An infatuated child with wild ideas.”

“All right But even if I grant you that, too, there are the flags.”

“Flags?” Now there was puzzlement in Dr. Taigher’s voice. “What flags?”

The woman answered, pensively. “Peter is referring to the flags the townsmen have been putting up in all the local boroughs. You know, Old Glory? The Stars and Stripes? You should get out more, Ed. Get a feel for what the people are thinking. I’ve never seen anything stir the villagers up like this, even before the war.”

There was another long silence before anyone spoke again. Then Grober said, softly, “I wonder what Joseph thinks of all this.”

Gordon frowned. He recognized all the voices inside as senior Servants of Cyclops whom he had met. But he didn’t remember being introduced to anyone named Joseph.

“Joseph went to bed early, I think,” Taigher said. “And that’s where I’m headed now. We’ll discuss this again later, when we can go about it rationally.”

Gordon hurried down the hall as footsteps approached the door. He didn’t much mind being forced to leave his eavesdropping spot. The opinions of the people in the room were of no importance, anyway. No importance at all.

There was only one voice he wanted to hear right now, and he headed straight to where he had listened to it last.

He ducked around a corner and found himself in the elegant hallway where he had first met Herb Kalo. The passage was dim now, but that did not keep him from picking the conference room lock with pathetic ease. Gordon’s mouth was dry as he slipped into the chamber, closing the door behind him. He stepped forward, fighting the urge to walk on tiptoes.

Beyond the conference table, soft light shone on the gray cylinder on the other side of the glass wall.

“Please,” he wished, “let me be wrong.”

If he was, then surely Cyclops itself would be amused by his chain of faulty deduction. How he longed to share a laugh over his foolish paranoia.

He approached the great glass barrier dividing the room, and the speaker at the end of the table. “Cyclops?” he whispered, stepping closer, clearing his tight throat. “Cyclops, it’s me, Gordon.”

The glow in the pearly lens was subdued. But the row of little lights still flashed — a complex pattern that repeated over and over like an urgent message from a distant ship in some lost code — ever, hypnotically, the same.

Gordon felt a frantic dread rise within him, as when, during his boyhood, he had encountered his grandfather lying perfectly still on the porch swing, and feared to find that the beloved old man had died.

The pattern of lights repeated, over and over.

Gordon wondered. How many people would recall, after the hell of the last seventeen years, that the parity displays of a great computer never repeated themselves? Gordon remembered a cyberneticist friend telling him that the patterns of lights were like snowflakes, none ever the same as any other.

“Cyclops,” he said evenly. “Answer me! I demand you answer — in the name of decency! In the name of the United St—”

He stopped. He couldn’t bring himself to meet this lie with another. Here, the only living mind he would fool would be himself.

The room was warmer than it had seemed during his interview. He looked for, and found, the little vents through which cool air could be directed at a visitor seated in the guest chair, giving an impression of great cold just beyond the glass wall.

“Dry ice,” he muttered. “To fool the citizens of Oz.”

Dorothy herself could not have felt more betrayed. Gordon had been willing to lay down his life for what had seemed to exist here. And now he knew it was nothing but a cheat. A way for a bunch of surviving sophisticates to fleece their neighbors of food and clothing, and have them be grateful for the privilege.

By creating the myth of the “Millennium Project” and a market for salvaged electronics, they had managed to convince the locals that the old electric machines were of great value. All through the lower Willamette Valley, people now hoarded home comps, appliances, and toys — because Cy-clops would accept them in trade for its advice.

The “Servants of Cyclops” had arranged it so that canny people like Herb Kalo hardly even counted the tithe of food and other goods that were added for the Servants themselves.

The scientists ate well, Gordon remembered. And none of the farmers ever complained.

“It’s not your fault,” he told the silent machine, softly. “You really would have designed the tools, made up for all the lost expertise — helped us find the road back. You and your kind were the greatest thing we had ever done…”

He choked, remembering the warm, wise voice in Minneapolis, so long ago. His vision blurred and he looked down.

“You are right, Gordon. It is nobody’s fault”

Gordon gasped. In a flash, molten hope burned that he had been mistaken! It was the voice of Cyclops!

But it had not come from the speaker grille. He turned quickly, and saw — that a thin old man sat in the shadowed back corner of the room, watching him.

“I often come here, you know.” The aged one spoke with the voice of Cyclops — a sad voice, filled with regret. “I come to sit with the ghost of my friend, who died so long ago, right here in this room.”

The old man leaned forward a little. Pearly light shone on his face. “My name is Joseph Lazarensky, Gordon. I built Cyclops, so many years ago.” He looked down at his hands. “I oversaw his programming and education. I loved him as I would my own son.

“And like any good father, I was proud to know that he would be a better, kinder, more human being than I had been.”

Lazarensky sighed. “He really did survive the onset of the war, you know. That part of the story is true. Cyclops was in his Faraday cage, safe from the battle pulses. And he remained there while we fought to keep him alive.

“The first and only time I ever killed a man was on the night of the Anti-Tech riots. I helped defend the powerhouse, shooting like somebody crazed.

“But it was no use. The generators were destroyed, even as the militia finally arrived to drive the mad crowds back… too late. Minutes, years too late.”

He spread his hands. “As you seem to have figured out, Gordon, there was nothing to do after that… nothing but to sit with Cyclops, and watch him die.”

Gordon remained very still, standing in the ghostly ashlight. Lazarensky went on.

“We had built up great hopes, you know. Before the riots we had already conceived of the Millenium Plan. Or I should say Cyclops conceived of it. He already had the outlines of a program for rebuilding the world. He needed a couple of months, he said, to work out the details.”

Gordon felt as if his face were made of stone. He waited silently.

“Do you know anything about quantum-memory bubbles, Gordon? Compared to them, Josephson junctions are made of sticks and mud. The bubbles are as light and fragile as thought. They allow mentation a million times faster than neurons. But they must be kept supercold to exist at all. And once destroyed, they cannot be remade.

“We tried to save him, but we could not.” The old man looked down again. “I would rather have died myself, that night.”

“So you decided to carry out the plan on your own,” Gordon suggested dryly.

Lazarensky shook his head. “You know better, of course. Without Cyclops the task was impossible. All we could do was present a shell. An illusion.

“It offered a way to survive in the coming dark age. All around us was chaos and suspicion. The only leverage we poor intellectuals had was a weak, flickering thing called Hope,”

“Hope!” Gordon laughed bitterly. Lazarensky shrugged.

“Petitioners come to speak with Cyclops, and they speak with me. It isn’t hard, usually, to give good advice, to look up simple techniques in books, or to mediate disputes with common sense. They believe in the impartiality of the computer where they would never trust a living man.”