Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“ ‘Let it go,’ Hubert cried. ‘I can afford the penalty.’ “ ‘You’ve forgotten, Hubert. Oh!’ Lila refrained from scratching but the effort hurt. ‘Congress amended the penalty clause when you were overseas. It carries a jail sentence now. Optional with the IRS, but it is there.’

“ ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make it out the way I used to.’

“ ‘I’ll have to let you.'

“He kissed her—a beautiful and reverential kiss. A smile curved her mouth. She murmured, ‘I think I can open my eye a little way.’

“Hubert took a week’s leave without pay from his office. He worked nineteen hours out of the twenty-four. At noon on April 15 every complexity in the forms had had full attention. The return was checked. Double-checked. Lila bloomed like a rose. For the first time Hubert could knock off and think of himself for a moment. His right ear had an ache that had crept up on him while he worked the desk computer.

“Lila was all sympathy. She gathered up the bills that proved their medical expenses were legitimately deductible. She filed these neatly with their financial records, with Hubert’s vouchers dealing with his expense account, with the canceled monthly checks to her indigent cousin who was classed as .7002 of a dependent. Then she tried what her sister Helen had used under curiously similar conditions. The trouble switched to his left ear.

“She tried remedies used by her friends. Finally a combination of honey, wine vinegar, and ground-up cardamon revived Hubert—somewhat. When Lila added hot olive oil to the mixture, his pain subsided to occasional twinges. When he took tranquilizers every hour on the hour around the clock, he became again his healthy, heroic self.

“But a mind like Hubert’s had not been idle. He made an old-fashioned door-to-door survey of the block with an old-fashioned pen and notebook. Everything was written since he could hardly hear. Then he tabulated results. He enlarged his field, tabulated again and came up with a startling hypothesis. Symptoms like his and Lila’s were subject to seasonal maxima—intensest in the first half of April. An income tax connection was the inescapable conclusion. Everyone was allergic to the income tax!

“He brought his study to the attention of doctors and scientists. He expected ridicule. But everywhere Hubert commanded respect. He postulated that the condition of half the population of the United States went from bad to worse during most of the year. Exceptions were sections of the country where it was customary for husbands and wives to work together on their tax forms. Symptoms in these places were less severe but more widespread. The Army, he found, was seriously concerned for fear not enough continuously healthy men could be found to put a force of any size in the field, if it should ever again be necessary.

“Hubert knew opportunity when he met it. With top personnel, civil and military, of the Defense Department supporting him, not to mention the AMA, he felt he could spearhead a movement to abolish Income Tax returns. Since he and Lila shared each other’s every thought, he hurried home to tell his wife.

“ ‘Hubert,’ she cried, exalted, ‘run for President with this as your platform.’

“Hubert realized he was working for the whole nation. He enjoyed every minute of his campaign, for his heart was wide enough to stretch from sea to shining sea. His slogan was simple, ‘Down with ITA (Income Tax Allergy).’ His campaign speech was short: ‘Supercomputers check our returns, now let them prepare returns.’ He swept the sixty-seven states. The Thirtieth Constitutional Amendment, enacted by House and Senate with the speed of fight and ratified in weeks, put Hubert in office on November 10. That let him begin immediately on the Great Repeal.

“In a few short weeks, the land blossomed with carefree minds in sound bodies. Every man, woman, and tax consultant with old records dumped statistics hugger-mugger into the hands of computer-tenders who fed them into giant machines. IBM trebled in size. Government demand for new computers was so overwhelming, it affected the entire economy. No one remembered anything like the computer boom except a few sesquicentenarians who recalled the heyday of the major automobile companies.

“The one cloudlet on the horizon was the occasional malfunctioning of a machine at some critical point. Not till half the output of the machines showed errors due to internal faults did anyone take notice. Soon horrible blotches appeared on answer tapes though nothing had been wrong when the paper was put in. Bonded connections gave way—and again investigation showed nothing amiss originally. Circuits got fouled up. Snafus multiplied. Manufacturers even went back to old models with a couple of hundred components long ago made obsolete by a single chip. But the condition failed to improve.

“ ‘Do you think,’ the President asked the First Lady, ‘that our machines are grow—’ He cleared his throat. ‘They couldn’t be developing allergies?’

“ ‘Oh no,’ she said in alarm.

“Four days after that the first machine in industrial history had its rustproof metal apparently rust out. One of those things that couldn’t be. But was.

“The President addressed a special joint session of Congress. ‘If our supersensitive, highly educated machines are suffering to the destruction point,’ he told the legislators, ‘we must revise our policy. Men and women, even occasional children, will have to work on their income tax blanks.’

“One lone and unidentified voice interrupted, ‘Mr. President, don’t be absurd.’

“ ‘Of course I hope such a drastic measure will be unnecessary. I hardly believe in the possibility of a suffering machine. But if such a thing can be, if we are putting more on our machines than machines can bear, if we are treating intelligent entities as chattels, i hereby solemnly swear by the Constitution of the United States that I shall declare our computers wards of the Government. I shall do all in my power to protect them. I shall call on my country to protect them. I shall call for sacrifice.’

“The Senate tried io stifle its laughter. Members of the House openly hissed.

“No change came over the President’s dedicated face.

“The Speaker of the House said thickly, ‘Has anybody ever considered the welfare of a machine, Mr. President? Why should you?’

“ ‘Because my vision has grown to match my office,” Hubert said simply.

“The Machine Test was arranged on the South Balcony of the White House. A nation watched on its omniviz screens. It saw a megatruckload of data brought on and stacked beside the shrouded computer in the center. It saw the President and his wife come, escorted by double the usual number of security guards. Occasionally the screens of the omnivizes showed the crowds outside, the marchers, the placards with wisecracks, the placards with threats.

“Gradually a tense seriousness gripped the watching and sovereign state. Perhaps it was the President’s expression of high courage and deep gravity. Perhaps it was the slight trembling of Lila’s hands. They appeared for just a moment, monumental in their enlargement but not their repose. Everyone felt that once again the President was making history.

“Yet it was all very simple. The hidden computer had been equipped with a voice box. Inventors said it could not talk and express independent opinions. A few fanatics, including the President, disagreed.

“Then, dramatically, the Head of the FBI and the nation’s top-ranking electronics expert threw back the computer’s plastic hood. The machine gleamed with a beauty of its own. Data were read into it. The country, to its horror, saw the clean metal of the mechanical calculator start to spot with irregular patches: crimson, pea-green, mauve, chrome yellow. Their tints and sizes varied before the eyes of the audience.