Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

He dropped his pen again and went to the bathroom and took his temperature. It was up, 102.6. He lay down. He was thinking of the statements that could confuse the Phalanx unless all parts were satisfied: A.B, A+B, A/B, A→B, A=B . . . They couldn’t do it.' How describe a smile in clear and unambiguous language? The Phalanx couldn’t be unmanned. Nor could it be manned in the usual sense. The Phalanx and its offspring were to be the call boxes, like the police telephones that were spaced all over cities. Imagine, he told himself, what it would be like if the call box on the corner not only alerted the precinct station, but watched suspicious characters, measured and weighed them, analyzed them, noted what weapons they carried, made countless other observations about them, came to a decision that they were okay, or not okay, and if not, then apprehended them, or killed them. Imagine that. What if it made a mistake and burned down a city block in error? Sorry ’ bout that.

But if they could make it work, wouldn’t it be good? Wouldn’t it be better than armies over the face of the earth? Good, good, good . . .

Dan Thornton couldn’t lift his arm because they had pinned gold braid on it. Real gold. They got the other arm and he wanted to beg off, but they insisted, refusing to hear his pleas. With the fastening of the braid on his other arm all he could do was stand, trying not to sway, knowing the weight would topple him if he swayed. He was paralyzed from goodness, he thought.

They had this old brain hanging around, see. The guy died on the operating table, abdominal surgery, and his head was intact, going to waste. So they put the brain in this jar of nice warm nutrients and fed it now and then and it went on ticking away, thinking its own thoughts. Then they put electrodes in it, this is the sight center, this the kinesthetic . . . And they put return wires and hooked them to an EEG and they watched the pens go up and down, up and down, and they kept getting cuter with it until they could get that little old brain to tell them what was on its mind. Not much, as it turned out. You see, that little old brain had gone crazy as a bedbug from the various things they had done to it, but still those pens went up and down, up and down, and it couldn’t stop, couldn’t refuse to cooperate, couldn’t do anything but soak up the nutrients and sit there ticking away.

“Doesn’t he look natural, like he might get up and talk to us any minute.”

But don’t look behind that eyeball, ma’am. Empty behind it. That one too, and that.

Most of them go mad, if not immediately, then as soon as they are hooked to the computer that is sending messages at the rate of a million bits a second. They had time, and psycho-modular units to work with. They found a unit that did not go mad when they linked it to a computer. It was a simple computer, however.

If chips are black and white, and this object is green, then this object is not a chip. If tiles are red and blue, and this object is green, then this object is not a tile. And so on, and on, and on, at the rate of one million bits a second. The brain ticked away and did not go mad. They made it more complex. The object was green and round. Then more complex: green, round, and weighs n grams . . . The brain did not go mad. Yet. They hooked it to the Phalanx, and the brain went mad.

Dan Thornton stood with his arms dangling, paralyzed by his own goodness and the heavy gold braid that testified to the goodness and watched the brain go mad. How they could tell it was going mad was by the way it made the pens go up and down, up and down. It was drawing paper dolls, all joined at feet and hands.

We stare at each other across a roomful of people and somehow we come together without either of us moving. I hold her tight against me and murmur into her hair that smells of sea winds and sunshine, and my murmur has no words, but says that I love her. “It’s been a long time, Dan,” she says. Her eyes are shining and I feel that she is happy to see me. Again she is different. The wild girl is deeper, harder to find now, but still there. She says, “Let’s go somewhere else.” We walk the streets, her hand in mine, our steps matched, even though she has to take long strides to keep up. We walk for hours, see the night out, watch silently when the last star is lost in a lightening sky.

We talk and I find myself defending my father. She stops me with cool fingers pressed against my lips. “You are shocked that you can love someone who is capable of evil,” she says, as if surprised at me. “We are all capable, it’s just that most of us never get the chance to do more than small evil things.” I argue that he wasn’t evil, that he never hurt anyone in his life. She is skipping at my side, not listening, and I know she thinks I am foolish. I am angry with her, almost as angry as when she said she would not marry me. I ask her again and she shakes her head. I ask her what she is doing, how she is living and she is amused that I don’t know of her. She puts a slim book into my hand, says I should not open it until she is gone again, and that won’t be until Monday.

The weekend is an agony of pleasure, and on Monday she is gone. The book is poetry that I cannot understand. They say she is brilliant, a genius, that she is the eyes and ears of the world. And I can’t understand her poetry.

Two weeks later I marry Ethel and we plan to have three children right away.

“Doctor Thornton, if you’ll just raise your hips a bit. That’s right.”

He was being taken somewhere on a stretcher on wheels. It was too hard to try to understand, so he let himself be carried and cared for, and sometime later he knew that he had the pneumonia that was to release him and send him home. After the serious part of it passed and he was told to take it easy and soak up sun on the wind-protected sunporch, he thought about the project, and he knew he wouldn’t ask to be relieved from it. The Institute brought in Carl Brundage, an old friend of his to substitute for him until he was well enough to resume a full schedule. Carl stopped in to talk when he had time, and that helped the slow days along.

“The major mistake is in the lack of selectivity in the psycho-modular units they are forced to use. Most of them belong to enlisted men, untrained minds that probably never used a tenth of their potential. You have to think of that one unit as pre-programmed, you see. It can accept no new training, can’t learn anything, can’t develop any of its potential; it is the coordinator, that’s all. The mistake lies in thinking that it is more than that. But that’s all it needs to be,” he added, deep thought furrows aging his face for a moment. Something . . . ? Whatever the thought had been, it had not come to consciousness, however, and he shrugged. It would. He knew the workings of his own brain, knew that he might feel twinges of this sort off and on for a while, then a new idea would hit him and the twinges would go away until another new idea was born.

“Are you going to be allowed to watch the first test on Monday?” Carl asked.

“Sure. But it will be a failure.” Moodily he repeated that to himself after Carl had left to do the work that he, Thornton, was supposed to be doing.

He rested over the weekend, sleeping deeply and heavily under massive sedation. Monday was clear and warm with high cirrus clouds forming milky streaks in a perfect sky. The wind velocity was five to ten miles an hour, air temperature a mild 71. Thornton rode in a jeep to the demonstration site, twelve miles from the Institute building, in a narrow gouged-out valley, where spring was arriving later than on the more exposed hillsides. Pale green spears of unfolded leaves tipped the trees and the dogwoods still bore tiers of snowy flat blossoms.