This is a sequel to H. Beam Piper's classic story, Cosmic Computer. The quest, to find the mythical supercomputer codenamed Merlin, that was used to win the ten year war against the System States Alliance, was successful but Merlin's terrible secret was also discovered. Now, ten years later, all of Merlin's careful plans to mitigate the inevitable economic and political decline of the Federation, are threatened by mysterious power players, who seek to embrace the chaos of a sudden and violent collapse of Civilization and may have a Merlin-type, supercomputer of their own, to help them do it. With the future of Civilization at stake, both sides make moves and counter-moves and the outcome will be decided on a little known planet called Tanith (which is a key planet in Piper's Space Viking). If you have not read Piper's Cosmic Computer, you can find a free copy of it, along with most of Piper's other works(including Space Viking and Little Fuzzy), which are now in the public domain, at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20727