John Brunner - To Conquer Chaos

Beyond that screen of leaves and stems, though, there was this half-godlike, half-demonic master of the Station’s fate: the organochemic cortex. What must it be like? Something which thought, presumably, after a fashion of its own. In his commonest visions he had encountered machines endowed not only with mobility but even with the ability to make decisions, designed to save their masters the trouble of attending to repetitive tasks varying only in minor detail. Conrad had no idea how such a machine could be arranged, yet it was comparatively easy to accept the concept if one had already agreed that it was possible to walk to other worlds. And even the knowledgeable Yanderman had been forced to give in on that score.

So-the heart of the problem. Conrad stared with aching eyes at the masking foliage, hardly seeing that members of the daily working party were approaching from the southern side, spotting the deadly blackish forms of the plants’ seed-masses and either reaching up with long poles to smash them or trying to burn them with the feeble power available to the heatbeams.

The thinking machine hidden in there … what must it be like? Anything like an ordinary human brain? Why not? Consider the long poles with which that working party was destroying the seed-masses. You want to reach something further away than you can grasp it, so you pick up a stick; your arm is a little like a stick, long and straight, so what you’re doing is making your arm longer. You want to go somewhere faster than you can walk; you get on a horse, which has four legs to your two and is stronger into the bargain. You start by looking for something which already does the same job, but more efficiently. If it comes to the job of thinking, why not start with the human brain as a pattern? Nothing else would be handy which was better at the job …

Conrad gasped. For one ultimately shocking instant he had had the impression that he was no longer here, sitting on a chunk of scrap and staring at the dome, but in the dome and aware of looking at Conrad, and at Yanderman, and at Maxall, and at Nestamay and Keefe and Egrin and everybody and at the same time aware of what he was seeing and what Yanderman was seeing and Maxall and Nestamay and Keefe and Egrin and not only that but aware of things in the dome and beyond the dome not in any ordinary direction but as though the interior of the dome had become the mouth of an infinity of tunnels-help me! — reaching to an infinity of hells- help me! — through which a lost soul wandered-HELP ME!

HELP ME!

HELP ME!

HELP ME!

The moment wasn’t over. The moment was as infinite as that countless cluster of tunnels-through-nowhere, stretching forward and dominating his thinking as though a mould had been placed on his mind and squeezed tight for an infinitesimal quantum of time, leaving him helplessly altered. Subjectively it was like being tossed leafwise on a torrential river, battered by waves of concepts and impressions and deafened by a shriek saying HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME!

Conrad moaned and clutched his temples, crazily fearing the blasting of the mental imagery now overwhelming him might smash physically out through the thin bones of his skull, smearing him black to his shoulders as Jasper had been smeared, condemning him to death in torment or death in the next second. The moan welled up and took the form of the inaudible scream echoing around his head. He was on his feet, swaying, and his throat was raw as he gave words to the mental message.

“Help me! Help me! He-e-elp me! ”

But before the startled members of the nearby working party could reach him, he had fallen headlong-not into unconsciousness, but into a kind of hall of mirrors of delusion, in which the mirrors were whole human personalities, myriad in number, between which the blinding images reflected, reflected, reflected, and at eternally long last began to seem familiar, recognisable, interpretable into words.

His eyes snapped open. He was lying on the rough bed where he had spent last night. Above him a curiously misshapen and discoloured form with pinkish bars crossing it-a hand holding a cloth. Nestamay’s hand holding a wet cloth with which she had been wiping his fever-hot face. She saw him come to himself and bit her lower lip in a seeming frenzy of worry.

“He’s awake,” she said after a pause.

The room swirled. Conrad found himself sitting up, not having formulated the intention, and was looking past the girl at her grandfather and Yanderman, who had been studying more of the old man’s treasured documents and now turned like two sections of a single unit to look and frame questions. There was no time for questions. There was only urgent actions.

“Conrad! Are you-?” Yanderman began.

“Listen!” Conrad exclaimed. “I have it now, but we’ve got to be quick.” He was scrambling up from the bed, twisting into a kneeling position facing them. “Do you hear me? I know what’s wrong and I know what has to be done! Maxall, you have to cut the power off-I mean … Well, stop it getting to the cortex but not completely, just hold it down to a sort of trickle and-”

He stopped, aware that he wasn’t making sense to his listeners. A bead of sweat ran down his face like an insect.

“Get a grip on yourself, Conrad,” Yanderman advised, moving close in an effort at reassurance. “You’ve had some kind of a shock, and-”

“I know, I know!” Conrad clutched at his arm. “it’s because I’ve seen what’s got to be done! You were wrong about the visions people like me get-they’re not memories, they’re messages, and I’ve had a message that tells me what to do! We’ve got to cut back the power to the cortex.”

“But this is impossible!” Maxall snapped. “We depend on it-it runs everything. If we cut off its power we starve, we freeze, we’re done for.”

“But We’ve got to cut back the power. Not shut it off, just keep it low. Ohhh!” Conrad’s frantic words dissolved in a moan of desperation. “Look, is a madman crazy when he’s asleep?”

“What?” Yanderman jerked his head.

“Is a madman crazy when he’s asleep? I don’t think so. And he’s not dead, either, so it’s not killing him to make him sleep.” Conrad stared up at the low ceiling. “I almost have it all, you see, but I’m still-still arranging it. I think there’s a way of ensuring that only a trickle of power gets to the cortex, enough to keep the automatic things going like the heating and foodmaking, but not enough to-Oh, no wonder you don’t understand.” He slapped his thigh. “The most important thing is what I haven’t said.

“Look, this-this thinking machine inside the dome. It’s laid out like a human brain. There’s a level which attends to routine matters, comparable to breathing, and this never stops or goes wrong and uses only a little power. But there’s another level, responsible for big decisions, which uses all the power it can get and when the power is low is-is unconscious.

“And on this level the cortex has been hopelessly insane, with brief lucid intervals, for four hundred and sixty years, ever since it was infected with the disease against which the barrenland was created …”

There was a stunned silence. Maxall broke it, shifting his weight with a scuffling sound as he spoke.

“How do you know? I mean-how do you think you know?”

Conrad felt an overwhelming wave of relief. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall of the hovel.

“I’ll try and tell you, but it’s got to be quick, because there isn’t much time. It’s sunny today and the stored power is building up rapidly. My head’s full of pictures which I scarcely understand, all jammed in together in a single instant …” He pressed his fingers hard against his forehead. In a slow, effortful voice, with many hesitations, repetitions and gropings for words, he pieced out the explanation which had come to him.