Hal Clement - Answer

The whole unloading took less than a quarter of an hour. Wren rode the end of the chain down the shaft with the rest of the men, and found himself eventually in a chamber large enough to accommodate the whole cargo; a chamber that was evidently usable as an air-lock, for after sealing the door leading from the outside, one of the men pressed a green button beside it, and within a few seconds the gradual rise to audibility of a clanging bell betokened increased air pressure.

Wren removed his suit, with some assistance, as soon as he saw the others begin to do so; and as soon as he was rid of it approached one of the unloading crew.

“Can you tell me,” he asked, “how to locate Dr. Vainser? He should be expecting me; we have been communicating for some time.”

The man he had addressed looked down out of pale blue eyes from a height fully seven inches greater than the psychologist’s five feet nine.

“You must be Dr. Wren. Vainser told me you were probably on this rocket; I’ll take you to him shortly. My name is Rudd, by the way. Is any of this stuff yours?” He waved a hand toward the cases drifting around the great chamber — the other men were capturing them slowly and fastening them to the walls for more convenient opening. Wren gave an affirmative nod.

“I have several cubic yards of problem material somewhere in the lot. It’s all marked plainly enough, so there will be no trouble in identifying it. I say, don’t you spin this place to give centrifugal gravity? I’m still not quite sure of myself without weight.” The taller man laughed at the question.

“I suppose we could, though it would be hard to keep the screen spherical with anything like one gravity at its rim. It was decided long ago that the conveniences derived from spin were far more than offset by the nuisances; you’ll be weightless as long as you are here.” He sobered momentarily. “As a matter of fact, I doubt that Vainser could stand much acceleration. You’ll see why when you meet him.”

Wren had raised his eyebrows interrogatively at Rudd’s first remark; but the blond giant refused to amplify it further. He turned abruptly away from the psychologist, and left him without apology to assist in the anchoring of the last of the cases. This job took rather longer than the original unloading, and Wren was forced to curb his impatience and curiosity until it was completed.

At last, however, Rudd turned back to his guest, and without bothering to speak beckoned him to follow. He led the way through a circular doorway opposite the original entrance, and Wren found himself in a brightly lighted, metal-walled corridor apparently extending toward the center of the globular structure. Down this the two men glided for some distance; then Rudd led the way into another and yet another passage, all brightly lighted as the first. At last, however, he checked his flight before a closed door, on which he knocked — such conveniences as electric annunciators were taboo within the walls of the station.

The voice that sounded from behind the panel, bidding them enter, was the first intimation to Wren of the meaning that lay behind Rudd’s enigmatic remark of a few minutes before. It was a reedy, barely audible whisper, that reached their ears only because of the ventilating grill in the solid door. It suggested a speaker crushed under an unutterable load of illness, fatigue, old age; and hearing it, Wren was slightly prepared for the sight that greeted his eyes as Rudd swung the door open and the two men entered.

Vainser, indeed, could not have stood anything like the strain of Earth gravity. What must once have been strong, athletic body was shrunken until it could have weighed scarcely eighty pounds; skinny wrists and ankles, and a pipe-stem neck protruding from the man’s clothing left little doubt of his physical condition. Wren could not even imagine his probable age; great as it must have been, the eyes that peered steadily from the brown, wrinkled old face were as alert as those of man in his prime. On Earth, that body would have given out long before; but in the gravity-free environment of the station almost the only work required of the feeble heart was to keep a reasonable supply of blood circulating to the still keen brain.

Wren concealed his astonishment as best he could, and gave his attention to the whispered greeting that came from the lips of the ancient.

“You are Dr. Wren, I suppose. I feel that I know you quite well from our former communication, but I am glad to meet you in person. Your problem has interested me greatly, and I shall be more than glad to help in all possible ways to prepare your data for machine solution. Judging by what you have written me so far, it will be a long task.

“I have not yet mentioned your work to the others here, but I am sure we shall need assistance; so perhaps you will explain the nature of your study to Rudd, here, while I listen and perhaps learn more than you have already told me. By the time you have finished, your data cases should be in the office I am assigning to you, and we can start serious work whenever you wish.”

Wren expressed his agreement with this proposal, and relaxed where he was, as there were, of course, no chairs in the room. The others hung motionless as he began to speak, their silent attention displaying their interest in the psychologist’s words.

“My problem stems from a very old question, to which I do not even yet expect to get a complete answer. You are aware, unless you are imbedded even more deeply in the rut of your own profession than I am in mine, that many hypotheses have been advanced in the past few centuries on the nature of mind and thought. That is really the fundamental problem of my profession. The first scientific approaches to the problem were made in the late nineteenth century, by such men as Thorndike, Ebbinghaus, and Pavlov. Many theories were evolved; one of the earliest arose, I suppose, from Pavlov’s work, for it tried to explain learning and thought by the development and strengthening of interneural connections between stimuli and responses. It was claimed that the number of cells in the cerebral cortex was sufficiently large to permit enough different combinations to account for the reactions and ideas of a man’s life. I believe it was computed that the number of possible combinations of connection between and among those cells is something like ten to the three billionth power.”

Rudd raised his eyebrows at this. “If that figure is correct, then all the reactions and ideas of every creature that has lived on Earth since the planet was made could easily be included. That number shocks even me, and I’ve been fooling around with problems involving the number of electrons in the universe — a mere ten to the fortieth or fiftieth, as I recall. What’s wrong with the theory?”

“Mere forming of connections, and strengthening with use, doesn’t seem to be enough. If I were to have you hold your left hand against an electrode, and give you small but annoying electric shocks by means of it, preceding each shock by the ringing of a bell, you would in a very short time react to the bell by withdrawing your hand — a conditioned reflex, not beyond your conscious control, but certainly not dependent on it. If, that reflex established, I place your right hand against the electrode and sound the bell, which hand do you withdraw? The right, of course. Yet any ‘strengthened connection’ must have been formed between the sensory nerves in the left hand and the motor nerves in the same arm.

Evidently connectionism is not adequate, at least as first stated.

“Other theories have been developed — some express learning and knowledge in terms of behavior.

These explain nothing until one redefines ‘behavior’ to mean everything from social activity to peristalsis and food-oxidation in the body cells, which leaves us right where we started. Possibly some extremely complex neuron connection and reaction will explain everything from nightmares to Handel’s Messiah, but every time someone brings forth a new idea in that direction a lot of psychologists are tempted to become mystics. Nothing seems to be a complete answer. Maybe the brain or the whole nervous system or the whole physical body is not the person — maybe there is a spirit or something of that nature that our microscopes and other physical apparatus can’t get hold of. I am willing to entertain that idea as a possibility, but I am not religious enough to treat the concept as a certainty; and it leaves nothing to work on. Therefore I would like to try, using your machine, to learn whether or not a purely mechanical and/or chemical set of reactions can possibly explain the observed phenomena of the human mind. I am not too familiar with electric circuit diagrams, but I know they frequently become too complex for human minds to unravel, and that this machine of yours has been used in that connection. I suppose I was thinking in terms of an imperfect analogy, but I thought the similarity in problems might be great enough to give us a toehold for at least making a start on the problem. What is your opinion?”