Star Science Fiction 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  Yet he was allowed to continue in one of the most responsible positions in our industry. This will seem even more baffling when I explain that we had the most comprehensive loyalty checks that had ever been devised.

  It was called the decimal security system. One man in every ten was an agent of the plant who kept a check on the other nine employees in his group. He was watched, in turn, by another security officer who checked on the activities of the ten agents in his division. And so on up. The ten top security officers reported to Central Military Intelligence in the Hexagon Building in Washington. (The building originally had five sides but another had to be added to house the files which contained the most minute information on all of us—who our friends were, what we talked about, what periodicals we read, etc.) None of us knew, of course, who was an agent and who wasn’t. The expert who devised the system had wisely foreseen that the more insecure each of us felt the more secure we were as a whole. I still ponder how Martin Smith managed to slip through this web, and I can only conclude that his unconventional ways were looked upon as the eccentricities of a mechanical genius.

  While the 1976 computer model may seem primitive to us today, at the time Smith designed it, the machine was far in advance of any previous model in its capacity to produce instantaneous answers to the most complicated problems. Furthermore, over the past several years he had succeeded in reducing the size of the computer from the unwieldy giants the company had first put out. As a result, the market for the machines had expanded until there was scarcely an office or a classroom in the country that didn’t have one as part of its standard equipment. And as improvements came every year, old models were turned in for new ones as frequently as cars. Our public relations department had begun to concentrate on the family market and had come up with several catchy slogans like, “Why waste your brain? Let an O.M.S. computer think for you” and “Don’t let your neighbor out-think you. Buy our new model computer.” This promotion campaign was already having its effect, as many of the better homes were buying the machines on easy credit terms.

  * * * *

  I remember it was in the autumn of 1975 that I dropped in on Smith’s experimental wing of the plant and had my first glimpse of the next year’s model. It was streamlined, handsomely lacquered and no larger than a refrigerator. The hundreds of levers and dials were like miniatures of the earlier models. When I marveled at the ingenuity of a machine that could do such prodigious things within such a small case, Smith smiled and said, “Look at the size of our brain. Only a few cubic inches. Think what it does and what it still could do if we gave it half a chance.”

  I thought this remark a little odd coming from a man whose job it was to produce machines that could be sold on the basis of their superiority over the human brain, but I let it pass. At my request, he showed me some of the improvements over previous models. Then he said something that sounded innocent enough at the time but which, I realize in retrospect, should have struck an ominous note. He remarked that there were two or three features about the new machines he would rather not have publicized because they were highly experimental and he wasn’t sure exactly how they were going to work out.

  However, I had seen enough to convince me that next year would mark the biggest sale of computers in the company’s history, a prediction that turned out to be an underestimate. Operating in day and night shifts, our plant could hardly keep up with the orders that flooded in from all parts of the country and even from overseas.

  While the new model was universally praised for its appearance and efficiency, several months passed before there was any indication that the machines we were distributing so widely had certain sinister features unknown to any of us except the man who had designed them. It was late the following March that General Rufus Welford came to Columbia College to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree and to address the student body. He brought along the usual prepared speech out of the Madison Avenue files on how we must be ever-vigilant if we were going to safeguard our liberties. After the speech, which the students listened to with respect if not enthusiasm, there was a question and answer period. The general was not a very bright man except in his field which was biological warfare. (It was rumored he had managed to crossbreed typhus and cholera, but I am not certain of this. The information was classified.) Aware that students have a habit of asking tricky questions, he had one of the new model computers brought into the lecture room with full confidence that the machine would come to his rescue if any of the questions got too tough for him. The first query seemed innocent enough and was the sort of question a general might expect on such an occasion. I think I can remember the exact wording as it was reported back to the plant. “If both we and the enemy continue the production of nuclear weapons at the present rate, where will each of us be in 1986?”

  The general, beaming confidence, had his assistant feed the question, along with certain material he had brought along, into the machine. Dials turned, lights flashed on and off and a piece of paper was disgorged from the computer’s lips. The assistant turned pale and his hands trembled a little as he read aloud the answer which consisted of a single word—”dead.”

  A stunned silence fell over the room. Hardly able to believe his ears, the general snatched the slip of paper from the assistant’s hand, but there was no mistake. The word “dead” looked even deadlier when he read it in cold print. However, the general was not a man to panic at the first volley. He tried to pass it off as a joke, remarking that it was a hot day and no doubt the machine was a little out of sorts. The laughter which greeting this sally was not altogether convincing.

  They decided to try again. This time three assistants worked with the general, stuffing into the computer’s maw sheet after sheet of loaded headlines, carefully doctored statistics, half truths, angled news and mangled facts out of context—practically the entire contents of the general’s briefcase. Never before had a machine failed to respond to this sort of persuasion by coming up with the desired answer. But this computer obstinately refused to change its mind. With maddening persistence it kept repeating the laconic “dead . . . dead . . . dead.”

  The perspiring general glared at the offending machine as though he would tear it apart, bolt by bolt. But this would have been extremely rude; the computer belonged to the university and not to him. By this time the students were in full cry, like a pack of hounds closing in on a fox. One question led to another, each more embarrassing than the last. Having lost faith in the loyalty of the machine, the general tried to make up his own answers. The students would have none of them. They wanted the computer to give them the “lowdown” as they put it. And the machine was tireless in its effort to oblige them. With an infuriatingly smug “cluck-cluck” of its moving parts as they responded to the electronic impulses from its center “brain,” the computer seemed to take a delight in exploding every sacred assumption of the general’s profession. If the thermostatic war continues, can it be kept under control? No. Then if real war breaks out, is there an effective defense against atomic attack? None. How much strontium 90 is now in the earth’s atmosphere? Here the computer gave precise and alarming figures in percentages of radioactive poison to the other components of the atmosphere. By this time the flustered general was yelling “No, No!” at the top of his voice. But the students, angry themselves as well as frightened, paid no attention to his protests. They began spreading the questions into related fields like, “Who is paying for this nuclear arms race?” Again in its laconic mood, the machine answered, “You are.” The general could stand no more. Leaving behind his briefcase and his three bewildered assistants (all of them classified), he fled to Washington.

  * * * *

  In the meantime, the machine, aided and abetted by the rebellious students, continued its deadly assault on our cherished myths, some of which had come down to us from earliest times. One stabbing answer pierced the bubble of our “prosperity.” With irrefutable statistics the computer proved that most of us were deeply
in debt and, since we could not possibly repay these debts, obviously our creditors could not collect; hence, in actuality, we were all bankrupt. The next question followed inevitably. If none of us were solvent, what about the national debt? Who would pay this colossal sum and to whom? One of the students later told me—and I have no reason to disbelieve him—that the machine just chuckled. It refused to waste a single electronic impulse tilting with such an unsubstantial windmill.

  If only this miasma of truth could have been confined to that one room, quarantined so to speak!

  But it was out before anyone could stop it, racing through city streets and villages, down country lanes to remote farmhouses, leaping over mountains, rivers, and even crossing oceans. Thousands of machines were kept up all night and the next day as the anxious population indulged themselves in an orgy of wanting to know the worst. I heard of one machine that worked steadily and uncomplainingly for seventy-two hours without so much as a break for a drop of oil.

  You might wonder why the people were ready to accept the computers as oracles when the information that gushed out of them was so much at variance with almost everything they had been patiently taught. I think the main reason was the tendency of twentieth century man to trust machines more than he did human beings. When the most eminent scientists in the world warned of the danger from radioactive toxin in the air, people paid scant attention but, when the computers said the same thing, it never occurred to them to doubt the machines. Also there may be some slight validity in the theory of modern-day sociologists that many who were alive then had more misgivings about the prevailing shibboleths than they thought it prudent to admit. According to this school of thought, the computers merely touched off a vein of repressed awareness that ran like dry powder just under the surface of our conditioned responses.

  I want to say here that the authorities, both corporate and military, acted with commendable energy to put out the conflagration. A law was rushed through Congress making it a crime to ask the machines any more questions. Unfortunately, even our efficient security system broke down under the strain of trying to enforce it. There were not enough agents and informers to watch every machine and, alas, the security officers themselves were beginning to ask questions. The next order, coming directly from the Hexagon, was more drastic. Smash all the machines! But our company records showed that there were over five hundred thousand in the United States alone. How was it possible to force a half million consumers to smash the thing they had just purchased and, in most cases, hadn’t even paid for yet?

  And in all honesty I must admit our own company, one of the Big Twelve, secretly helped to sabotage the order in a misguided effort to protect their investment in the computers. Anyway, it was all too late. The cat was out of the bag or, more accurately, a million cats were out of a million bags. For soon word-of-mouth took over where the machines left off.

  The results were diverse but overwhelming. The majority of our people resigned themselves to the loss of their illusions and faced reality with calm stoicism; some even welcomed it. But the military and the financial communities were hard hit. In one week the thermostatic war was over and the Hexagon Building looked like a ghost town. What happened on Wall Street was even more awful. No matter at what price stocks were offered, there were simply no bidders. You couldn’t even call it a crash. When the words “peace perpetual” flashed over the tape, the ticker machine groaned out a few last quotations and died.

  The holocaust that followed has no parallel in human history.

  Since the records kept in this panicky period are not reliable, no one will ever know the number of men and women who took their lives rather than face living in a world which each day grew more unrecognizable. Suffice it to say that the number ran into the millions. It was the way I had imagined England during the time of the Black Death. Even in rural areas like ours there was scarcely a household that didn’t suffer a loss and sometimes whole families were wiped out. But this was nothing compared to what was happening in the great urban centers. Eyewitnesses who were in New York at that time told macabre tales of the streets so littered with bodies that it was next to impossible to pick your way through them. Lines of people formed in front of the upper windows in all the high office buildings. I heard of many cases where the line was so long that the intended suicide, while waiting his turn to jump, changed his mind and decided to live.

  But the uncounted multitudes who resorted to an overdose of the escape drugs rarely got a second chance because there were not enough doctors to give them first-aid even if they wanted it. For that fatal week the sales of the Pharmaceutical Super-Corporation soared to a new height. Officials of the company were momentarily encouraged to believe that they, at least, might weather the storm. But this hope was short-lived. The following week the drug stores had scarcely any customers at all. Most of those who had chosen this means of escape had sunk into a sleep from which no amount of benzedrine could arouse them.

  * * * *

  The last official act of the military was the arrest and execution of Martin Smith.

  From where I stand now I’m willing to admit that this was purely and simply a gesture of revenge which served no useful purpose. But when you consider the enormity of his deed and the atmosphere of hysteria, it was natural that the frustrated passions of our leaders should have demanded a victim whom they might have spared in calmer times.

  They gave him a brief hearing. In the same quiet, dispassionate voice he had used in talking to me about the new model computer, he confessed freely what he had done and gave his reasons. This was our first knowledge of the secret features he had added to the machine which has accomplished our downfall. The most ingenious one was a sort of second “brain”—a control center which carefully checked and sifted all the material which was fed into the machine. If the statistics were loaded, ever so slightly, to prove a desired point, the mechanical censor detected the error and corrected the figures before they were allowed to filter into the computing “brain” which produced the answer. If a news item was angled to bolster up a policy which might otherwise have been unpopular, the control mechanism penetrated the motive and straightened out the angle before admitting it into its calculations. If the question was framed in emotional or unsemantic terms, the computer’s censor rejected it altogether.

  What Smith had done, in brief, was to build into the machine his own skepticism.

  While up to then we had been free to fashion a fact into the image of what we wanted to believe or wanted others to believe, now the truth held us captive. For this betrayal Smith had to die. The last words he uttered, before ascending the hastily rigged scaffold, are engraved over the entrance of Humanities Hall which straddles Lower Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson— “You cannot hang the truth.”

  Smith’s famous computer is now a revered museum-piece, nothing more. Even his genius could not produce a machine that was omniscient. The computer was proof against us but not against time. After twenty years service, it showed definite signs of age; no longer certain of its answers, it began to repeat itself, became querulous and opinionated when questioned too closely. The truth was unfolding too fast for any machine to keep pace with it. The last Smith computer was tenderly taken apart and now rests in a glass case in the Smithsonian Institute. But as Smith predicted, the human brain proved more adaptable. Once it took up the pursuit of knowledge, there was no stopping it until now there is hardly a mystery left that man isn’t threatening to illuminate. Oldsters like me have dragged our feet, but it is no use. We are pulled along in spite of ourselves.

  So different is the world today that sometimes when I close my eyes and try to picture it as it was then, the images which come to mind seem more like illustrations for a fairy tale than anything that has actually happened.

  Take religion, for instance. In those early days you were free to do pretty much as you pleased so long as you observed certain rules and weren’t too obvious. If you were troubled with a conscience and want
ed to feel righteous, you could slip into a church and say a few propitiatory words or make a few gestures. This put you back in good standing so that you could begin all over again. What I’m trying to say is that the church was there to comfort you but it never interfered with your normal drives and instincts. And those instincts weren’t something we invented in the twentieth century—they had a long tradition behind them. You might say they were the rungs on the evolutionary ladder. Hadn’t we climbed out of the primaeval swamp by the long chain of accidents known as natural selection? Any individual existence was purely a matter of luck. Those who happened to be strong enough or cunning enough survived and bred strength and cunning into their descendants.