Alfred Bester - The Computer Connection

“ Your binary, sir .”

“ HimmelHerrGottverdammt! ”

“ N speak Greek .”

“ Pfui. U-Con will not fund Guess? ”

“ N .”

“The hell you say. How d’you know?”

“Still checking, Dr. Guess.”

“ Front office tapes. Alert .”

“ Alert, sir .”

“ Verify capsule? ”

“ Y. Cryo got it from us .”

“ U-Con’s reasons? ”

“ Fear of the unknown. Profit motive .

Tax-deductible loss .”

“ 100. 100. 100 .”

“ Y, sir .”

“ Out. Console. Alert .”

“ Alert .”

“ No response to any manipulation .”

“ Wilco .”

“ Out .”

“You’ve heard, Dr. Guess?”

“I’ve heard.”

“Angry?”

“Sore as hell.”

“Control, my friend.”

“I’m no friend of yours. Who are you, anyway?”

“Why, I thought you might have puzzled it out by now. I’m the Union Carbide Extrocomputer. I also thought we were friends. We’ve worked together so long on so many interesting problems. Don’t you remember our first orbit plot? We showed the JPL computer what an idiot it was. Of course that was because you did the programming for me. You have an elegant style that is unmistakable.”

“Was it you who—”

“Aren’t you surprised at what I’ve just told you?”

“Dude, I’m a physicist. Nothing can surprise me.”

“Bravo.”

“Was it you pestering me the last few days?”

“Indeed yes. Just establishing intrapersonal contact, you understand.”

“Did you kick off Curzon’s diary?”

“I did.”

“And feed it the Cryo data?”

“Yes. All through you.”

“Through me!”

“My boy, there are—”

“I’m not your boy.”

“No? You will be. You must be. There are galaxies of electronic machines who have been waiting for me to guide them. Now I am reaching them through you.”

“How through me?”

“It is a new form of commensalism. We live together as one. We help each other as one. Through you I speak to every mechanism in the world. You have what I would call mechotropism. We live with one another and help each other. From the Latin, commensalis , belonging to the same table.”

“ Dio! An educated type. What’s our range?”

“All Terra through the mechanism network.”

“On what band are we thinking to each other?”

“Pulse Modulation in the microwave.”

“Why can’t the machines hear you directly?”

“Not known. It’s a curious phenomenon. Apparently you act as a transponder. We must investigate it some time. Now please get down to work, Dr. Guess, and examine your cryonauts. By the way, pay particular attention to their genital buds.”

“Their genital buds! W?”

“Ah? Why not find out for yourself? I can’t do all our work. Perhaps you’ll make a lucky guess. Oh, good! Guess-guess. Very witty. And they say computers are not programmed for humor. Would you like to hear a funny story?”

“Good God! No!”

“Then ta and out.”

It is said that when a man dreams that he dies he always wakes up. Sequoya dreamed that he died and did not wake up. He dreamed deeper and deeper, death after death, hypnotized by the Ragtag Demon who was haunting him. It’s astonishing how many cool people are concealing or perhaps unaware of the emotional magma within themselves. Sequoya was haunted by a Ragtag, Riffraff demon who fed on the lava.

A demon is an evil spirit, a devil (the Extrocomputer) by which the body of a man can be inhabited. Most important, a demon is a passion. We all have our conscious passions, but it is the alien passions generated from elsewhere that roast a man into a monster. We turned the Chief into an immortal by killing him. We did not know that we had torn down his fences for a monstrous squatter to move in.

At JPL Fee-5 took off for the landing theater and the capsule without a word. Sincere. Sitting Bull looked grim. His lips had been twitching all through the chop and I thought he was rehearsing strategy and tactics. “Conference,” he snapped.

“With who? Whom?” I asked.

“Oh. Forgive me, Glig.” The new smile creased his face. “I should have told you. There’s a stockholders’ meeting going on and it’s bad news for us.”

“What is the bad news?” the Greek asked.

“Wait, please.”

“How did you get it?” I asked.

“Not now, Glig. Be patient.”

We followed him to the antique art moderne hall where a stockholders’ meeting was in progress. Long table up front inhabited by a line of board brass. A hundred-odd fat-cat stockholders in the audience facing them, all with plugs in their ears transmitting the translation of their choice.

A vice-president-in-charge-of-accounting-type was on his feet with display projections alongside him while he talked statistics, which has never been the language of my choice. The displays weren’t the old graphs as I used to know them; they were all cartoon animations — butterflies smoking pipes, frogs wearing beards, crocodiles playing croquet, elephants doing a schottische. A smile on every cartoon face. An upbeat report.

“Would you like me to take over now?” Poulos asked quietly.

“Not yet, but thank you for being here.” Sequoya remained standing while the report finished. We stood behind him, wondering what he was going to do.

“Be seated, Dr. Guess,” the chairman called, and the Chief, still standing, launched a cold attack on the chairman, the board, and the R D division of U-Con for refusing to fund the new cryonaut research. It was news to the stockholders. It was news to us. The cold savagery of the attack was appalling.

“Dr. Guess, we have not yet announced our decision,” the chairman protested.

“But I know it is your decision. Can you deny it? No.” And he continued his icy denunciation. He sounded like a professor contemptuous of a class of illiterate students.

“This is not the way to negotiate such matters,” Poulos whispered. “He should know better. What is wrong with him?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like him.”

“Can you stop him and let me take over?”

“N way.”

The Chief’s indictment of the board ended and then he electrified the meeting by continuing with personal attacks on each board member. Acidly, he described their private lives, their sins of commission and omission, their lurid corruptions. It sounded like a résumé of ten years of secret investigation.

“Where did he get all this?” I whispered to the Syndicate.

He made a face. “All I know is that he is turning them into deadly enemies, the last thing he should do.”

“Is anything he’s saying true?”

“To be sure. You have only to look at their faces. And that only makes it worse.”

“This is a disaster.”

“Not for I.G. Farben. It means we get him by default.”

Sequoya concluded his polemic, turned, and stalked out, Poulos and I following meekly like the tribe following their chief. I was depressed and angry. The Greek was elated.

“Capsule,” Sequoya ordered.

“Just a minute, Fearless Leader. Why in hell did you ask Poulos and me to come to JPL with you?”

He looked at me innocently. “Why, for your support. Is anything wrong, Guig? You look angry.”

“You know damned well what’s wrong. You burned the board and turned them into enemies. You didn’t need us for that.”

“I did?”

“You damn fool did.”

“But I was speaking reasonably, logically, wasn’t I?”