Robot and the Man - [Adventures in Science Fiction 04] Read online

  “With the first appropriation to develop a Thinking Machine, as it is called by the layman, our problem was to switch from mathematics to semantics. In other words, instead of absolute figures, we had to change over to the fuzzy values of words and phrases. Instead of asking for the cube root to ten thousand places of minus two, we had to ask it what happens when a cat is shot through the head and have it answer that the cat dies. As simple as that.

  “To make the changeover, we had to select a language for it. We selected English and took out all variations which add little or nothing to connotation. We gave each sound a numerical value, and combined the numerical values into words. Then, into the expanded memory factor, we fed thousands of truisms. Naturally, with number-sound valuation, each truism became a formula ... an equation. Assume that we had fed into the memory factor the phrase, ‘Roses are red.’ The machine tucks it away as a numerical formula. Then we ask the machine, ‘What color are roses?’ It translates the question into an open-ended formula, digs into the memory chamber and says back to us, ‘Roses are red.’

  “Now we can ask a question based on any truism or proven statement that we have fed the machine, and we get the answer. We get it either written or spoken, though I personally consider the vocal attachments to be more toys than anything practical. The voice makes an impression on distinguished visitors, particularly when we permit the visitor to ask his own question. It is embarrassing when the question concerns a statement not previously fed to the memory factor. One congressman asked when his mother would die. The machine gave him a detailed definition of the word mother and a physiological explanation of the meaning of death—what happens when death occurs.

  “The next step was to teach the machine basic differentiations. We selected a quality—such as calorie content. Then we stored in the memory factor a complete list of caloric ratings of food. Now, if you ask it the calorie rating of a given food, it will answer, or if you ask it which of two foods has the highest rating, it will select the proper answer. We have fed the machine eighty thousand differentiation lists covering eighty thousand different methods of grading myriad items.

  “In addition,” he continued, “we have read to it philosophical concepts, records of phenomena, all types of data and information. At the present time we have a superabundance of response. Should you feed it just one word, such as ‘steel’ or ‘indigestion’ the machine will give you several volumes of data.”

  Kayden nodded. “All you’ve done, in other words, is build yourself an automatic library.”

  Zander’s eyes widened and narrowed quickly. “You are perceptive, Mr. Kayden. In effect, that is what we have. As yet we have no indication of the least creative impulse in the equipment, or how to initiate it. We have had hopes. At one time, in answering an astronomy question the machine faltered and then wrote, ‘The moon is ardium.’ We were excited and we speculated about new elements, until we discovered that it was merely a partial short in the wiring that had escaped the specialized equipment we have built for the sole purpose of diagnostics and repair.”

  “And what is the current program?”

  “We are feeding the machine more data each day. Each day we expand the memory factor. Our present theory is that eventually, under the pure mass of data given it, the machine itself will break down. Psychoneurosis on a mechanical plane if you will. The place and manner of the breakdown may in itself stimulate us to provide it with some form of intellectual selectivity.” He smiled woodenly. “We would all be very happy if the last words of the machine were, ‘The hell with it!’ “

  “But you keep giving it these problems.”

  “Quite right. The problems are our control. So long as the machine merely repeats back to man what man has fed into it, it will be a failure. So far, that is all that it does. The problems are our continual check to see if by any chance the machine has struck on any creative method.”

  “If the creative method isn’t built into it, how do you expect it to acquire it?”

  Zander’s smile was broader. “That, my young friend, was the problem which stopped your predecessor. And now it is your problem. If you want to come with me, I’ll show you the mechanics of the machine.”

  Kayden rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “No thanks. I’ll look at the woods from a distance and climb the individual trees later. I want some time to think about it.”

  Zander stood up, smirked. “What are your orders, sir?”

  Joseph Kayden looked at him in irritation. “Follow existing orders until they’re countermanded.”

  Zander sighed, smiled in a superior fashion and picking up some papers from his desk began to work.

  Outside Roger Wald said, “He . . . he’s a bit peculiar, Mr. ... I mean . . . Joe.”

  “O.K. I’m going to wander around. You get me fixed up with something to live in besides that shoebox with running water.” Wald hurried off.

  ~ * ~

  Kayden wandered around. He talked to watchmen, electricians, lab assistants, cooks, janitors. At six he was back in his room with his mind full of figures. Nearly nine hundred people lived and worked within the Project Area. Since its inception, the Project had used up over nine hundred millions. There was little chance of a complete cancellation of the Project, as no politician would be willing to take the chance of saying to the people that all that had gone before was a dead loss.

  He sat on his bed and stared out the window at the low, pale buildings. Someone had told him that he had an office, but he was too discouraged to even find it. Probably a secretary or two went with the office. “What are your orders, Mr. Kayden? What are you going to do next, Mr. Kayden?”

  Roger Wald came at six, eager and breathless. “Your place is ready, Mr. Kayden. I ordered a complete pre-fab, entirely equipped. The crew has offloaded it at the north end of the area.” Wald had one of the little cars used within the Project area waiting and he helped Joseph Kayden with his luggage.

  The pre-fab was small, but luxurious. Kayden felt better as soon as he walked in. He said, “All I need now is Jane.”

  “Jane?” Wald asked politely.

  “My wife.”

  “Oh, of course. Too bad she isn’t permitted.”

  “I’d like to take a run down to New York and get stinking,” Kayden said wistfully.

  Wald flapped his pale hands. “That isn’t allowed either.”

  Wald had dinner brought to the pre-fab and they ate together. After dinner he sat in front of the synthetic fire, after shooing Wald away, and began smoking jittery cigarettes.

  “Jail,” he muttered. “Prison! What am I accused of, judge? Joe Kayden, head of the Automatic Mechanical Library of Nonessential Information. I’d like to kick Zander’s fat head. What do they expect me to do? Hide inside the machine and give the right answers?”

  He walked nervously back and forth through the rooms, kicking petulantly at the furniture, scowling at the rugs. Jane might have a plan. Any plan. The whole thing seems wrong. The wrong slant. The wrong angle. A machine that thinks. What is thinking? Got to get basic about it. Very basic. They’re too loaded up with tubes and connections. Need Jane around.

  Slowly he felt the pressure of responsibility settling over him. Kayden, the fall guy. The stooge. When would he see Jane? Two months. And then it wouldn’t be like being with her. Chaperoned!

  He left the pre-fab and started to walk. The area was brilliantly floodlighted. After sixty steps a guard stopped him and sent him home. He told the guard that he was in charge of the place, but the guard rested a hand lightly on the deadly air gun and said that no exceptions were made and that the guard detail answered to the War Department, not to the Head of Project.

  ~ * ~

  Two weeks later and twelve pounds lighter, Joe Kayden sat at his big desk in the executive offices and wrote his fifth letter to Jane. It was the third time he had written the same letter. The first two versions had been returned because of matters touched on which concerned the Project. Jane’s letters
to him carried so little real news that he suspected that she was having the same trouble, but, of course, would not be permitted to say so in a letter.

  She was living in El Paso, where she had found an apartment, and she missed him and she was looking forward to seeing him in New York when he got his first leave.

  He puzzled over his letter, trying to find some acceptable way of telling her that he was getting no place on the Project. He watched the shaking of his own hands as he lit another cigarette. He wondered how long he would last—whether it would be better to fake a mental upset as soon as possible. But the thought of the shock treatments scared him. There might be a subsequent personality change which would alienate Jane.

  At last he wrote, “I’m very, very happy here, and things are going very, very well. I’m as happy as I told you I’d be when we parted.”

  The next morning he had her answer. “Darling, I’m so glad that you’re happy,” she wrote. And then she ignored the entire matter. She babbled away about how she felt that her letters were probably “engramatical,” about how she had played tennis and that the girl she met kept putting “lobes” over her head, about how she was enjoying the “frontal” apartment, about a new three-di movie she had seen about a “Woman of Syn,” about how she had been looking over some of her old school “thesis.”

  He felt a quick wave of pity. Jane was trying so hard to be gay in her letters, but he could see that she was going to pieces. Her spelling was usually perfect. He shoved her letter into the top drawer of the desk, and sat, brooding, cursing the fate that had stuck him into the Project.

  After lunch he re-read her letter. Its absurdity struck him again. Surely Jane knew how to spell “sin.” Jane had a fine neurological education and had had two years of advanced psychiatric nursing.

  As he read the letter he took a pencil and circled the obvious errors in spelling. Wald came in and said, “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, the wife wrote me and I think she’s going to pieces. Look at the mistakes.”

  Wald picked the letter up and glanced at the circled words. He frowned. “Joe, does she know any neurology?”

  “Why, yes! Why?”

  “Look at this. Engram. Know what this is? A lasting trace left in an organism by psychic experience. And look at this! Frontal. And over here is lobe. Add syn to thesis and you have synthesis. Hey, this is a code, Mr. Kayden!”

  Joe snatched the letter. “What?”

  “I’ll have to report this to security, Joe.”

  Kayden glanced up at him. There was no trace of expression on Roger Wald’s gray face. “You will?”

  “Certainly. I’m going to write a detailed report. I certainly hope I won’t forget to send it over to them. Would you like me to get you a good text on neurology?”

  Kayden saw the flicker in the gray eyes. He grinned. “You’re O.K., Roger. Yes. Get me a text.”

  ~ * ~

  At three in the morning, Kayden finished the book and tossed it aside, turned out his light. But he couldn’t sleep. Jane had been the first one to make sense. She had guided him to the heart of the problem. A mechanical approach to thinking. When he did fall asleep, it was to dream of her.

  ~ * ~

  Dr. Zander stood up behind his desk and said firmly: “It is unthinkable, Mr. Kayden! An absurdity!”

  “You just work here, Doc. I know what I want.”

  “You want to run a kindergarten, yes?”

  “Possibly. I said to turn off the juice to all your gimmicks. Now listen to what I have to say. What are the two processes in the human mind that we’re trying to duplicate? We’re trying to build engrams, habitual pathways through the mind. Also, we’re trying to create a process of synthesis. Do you agree?”

  Zander sat down and said, sullenly: “If you say so, Mr. Kayden.”

  Kayden suddenly leaned across the desk and fluttered a paper out of the line of Zander’s vision. Zander turned his head quickly.

  “You see what you did? When you saw motion out of the corner of your eye, your nerves told the muscles of your neck to turn your head. You didn’t think about it. That’s an engram, an habitual pattern a mile wide. It would take conscious and hard thought to keep you from turning your head. Does an infant? No. The engram is developed. Listen to me—and stop acting so sullen and superior.

  “Take synthesis. In cases of anxiety neurosis, the patient can make no decisions. He thinks of all possible eventualities and they frighten him. Some psychopaths think of no related fact except the one they have in their mind at the moment. In the first place, there is too much synthesis. In the second place there is too little.

  “Combine those two factors. Suppose you had a machine into which you built, through varying strengths of electrical current across a field, varying factors of resistance, the faculty of being able to find a path of least resistance depending on the circuit where the electrical impulse started. If your chemists could devise some sort of molecular memory factor, you would have a continually decreasing resistance across this hypothetical field for certain standard questions. In other words, engrams! Don’t you see? Habitual thought patterns! Any new item would have to find its own way across, but the old ones would have an established channel.”

  Zander looked faintly interested. He said: “I think I see what you mean, but-”

  “Now add the quality of synthesis. I can think of one way to do it. Use a shifting ratio. Each fact stored in the machine’s memory is given a ratio number. Through a sliding value scale, you can alter the ratio numbers in the same way that they affect the problem at hand. For example, the machine may know something about rabbits. If the question you ask the machine, the task you set for it, concerns the orbit of Uranus, then rabbits would get a ratio number of zero. If you’re talking about waltzing mice, rabbits might have a distant bearing and get a very small ratio number. If you’re talking about lettuce, rabbits might have a high ratio number. You people should be able to figure out some method of making the ratio numbers plus and minus. Then, in effect, the machine could add up the pro side, the con side, and arrive at a decision. The decision arrived at would set up the beginning of an habitual pattern across this field I was talking about, thus eliminating some of the processes when a related question is asked. Tell me this, Zander: Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  Zander examined his pink, dimpled knuckles. “In a way, I do. It is . . . is very new, yes? Hard to adjust oneself.”

  “Natürlich, my friend. But if your technicians can work it out, it would be beautiful. Just imagine. With any question asked of it, the machine would be able to call on all the vast stored knowledge of the ages, go through the weighing motions, and come up with an unemotional answer. That would be creative thought, because the new is always born from the old. We even had the wrong slant on creativeness. There isn’t any such thing. It’s all a question of engrams and synthesis.”

  Zander said, “So for this ... for this dream of yours, you want everything we are doing scrapped? You want us to start from scratch with nothing but our developments in memory storage facility?”

  “I want you to do just that.”

  “You have my verbal resignation. I’ll confirm it.”

  Kayden leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling. He said softly, “Citizens of North America. Today Dr. Artur Zander resigned from the Thinking Machine Project. Joseph Kayden, in charge of the Project, has announced that, with success in sight, Dr. Zander resigned because of petty jealousy, because he didn’t wish to take orders from a man with fewer degrees than he has. Dr. Zander attempted to refute this statement, but in view of the record of failure of the Project during the time that Dr. Zander-”

  “Wait, Mr. Kayden. I have been thinking, and possibly there is more in what you suggest than I at first realized and I would-”

  Kayden grinned at him. “Doc, I don’t want to force you. I want you to work for me because you want to work for me. How about it? I’ll let you resign and I won’t say one little word.
Of course, it’ll be tough for me trying to bumble along with men who don’t have your background.”

  For the first time, Zander gave him an almost human smile. “I stay.”

  ~ * ~

  Eleven weeks later Wald stood in Kayden’s office saying, “Joe, why don’t you go down on the floor. They should be running the first test. They were hooking up when I went by.”

  “Why should I?” Kayden snarled. “If it works, a grateful government raises my pay and keeps me on the stinking job of managing the monster. If it doesn’t work, I’m stuck here until it does. Heads you win; tails I lose. Why don’t you go down?”

  Kayden sat alone as dusk gradually misted the office, hazing the sharp edges of the furniture, obscuring the picture of Jane on his desk.

  The door opened and Dr. Zander walked in. He didn’t say a word. He stood in front of the desk. Kayden switched on the light and saw to his surprise that tears were running down Zander’s cheeks.