by Noel Keyes
Slowly a man came to his feet from the shadows outside the tiny circle of light cast by the shining stove.
“I have a guess,” said. “In fact, I think I know.”
“Let’s have it, Scott,” said Lawrence.
The mathematician shook his head. “I have to have some proof. You’d think that I was crazy.”
“There is no proof,” said Lawrence. “There is no proof for anything.”
“I know of a place where there might be proof—just might.” They sat stock-still—all of them in the tight stove-circle. “You remember that cabinet,” said Scott. “The one Taylor was talking about just now. The one we shook and something rattled in it. The one we couldn’t open.”
“We still can’t open it.”
“Give me some tools,” said Scott, “and I will get it open.”
“We did that once,” said Lawrence. “We used bull strength and awkwardness to open up the door. We can’t keep on using force to solve this problem. It calls for more than force. It calls for understanding.”
“I think I know,” said Scott, “what it was that rattled.” Lawrence was silent.
“Look,” said Scott. “If you have something valuable, something you don’t want someone to steal, what do you do with it?”
“Why,” said Lawrence, “I put it in a safe.”
Silence whistled down the long, dead stretches of the bast machine above them.
“There could be no safer place,” said Scott, “than a cabinet that had no way of being opened. Those cabinets held something that was important. They left one thing, something behind—something that they overlooked.”
Lawrence came slowly to his feet.
“Let’s get the tools,” he said.
It was an oblong card, very ordinary-looking, and it had holes punched in it in irregular patterns.
Scott held it in his hands and his hand was shaking.
“I trust,” said Griffith, bitterly, “that you’re not disappointed.”
“Not at all,” said Scott. “It’s exactly what I thought we’d find.”
They waited.
“Would you mind?” asked Griffith, finally.
“It’s a computation card,” said Scott. “An answer to some problem fed into a differential calculator.”
“But we can’t decipher it,” said Taylor. “We have no way of knowing what it means.”
“We don’t need to decipher it,” Scott told him. “It tells us what we have. This machine—this whole machine, is a calculator.”
“Why, that’s crazy,” Buckley cried. “A mathematical—”
Scott shook his head. “Not mathematical. At least not purely mathematical. It would be something more than that. Logic, more than likely. Maybe even ethics.”
He glanced around at them and read the disbelief that still lingered on their faces.
“It’s there for you to see,” he cried. “The endless repetition, the monotonous sameness of the whole machine. That’s what a calculator is—hundreds or thousands or millions or billions of integrators, whatever number you would need to have to solve a stated question.”
“But there would be a limiting factor,” snapped Buckley.
“The human race,” said Scott, “has never paid too much attention to limiting factors. They’ve gone ahead and licked them. Apparently, this race didn’t pay too much attention to them, either.”
“There are some,” said Buckley, stubbornly, “that you just can’t ignore.”
A brain has limitations.
It won’t apply itself.
It forgets too easily, and too many things, and the wrong things—always.
It is prone to worry—and in a brain, that’s partial suicide.
If you push it too hard, it escapes into insanity.
And finally, it dies. Just when it’s getting good, it dies.
So you build a mechanical brain—a big one that covers an Earth-size planet for the depth of twenty miles—a brain that will tend to business and will not forget and will not go insane, for it cannot know frustration.
Then you up and leave it—and that’s insanity compounded.
“The speculation,” said Griffith, “is wholly without point, for there is no way of knowing what they used it for. You persist in regarding the people of this system as humanoids, when they probably weren’t.”
“They could not have been so different from us,” Lawrence said. “That city out on Four might have been a human city. Here on this planet they face the same technical problems the human race would face if we tried a similar project and they carried it out in much the same manner that we would.”
“You overlook,” said Griffith, “the very thing that you, yourself, have pointed out so often—the fanatic drive that made them sacrifice everything to one great idea. A race of humans could not co-operate that closely or that fanatically. Someone would blunder and someone would cut someone else’s throat and then someone would suggest there ought to be an investigation and the pack would be off, howling down the wind.”
“They were thorough,” he said. ‘Terrifyingly thorough.
“There’s no life here. None that we could find. Not even an insect. And why not, do you think? Perhaps because a bug might get itself entangled in a gear or something and bollix up the works. So the bugs must go.”
Griffith wagged his head. “In fact, they suggest the thinking of a bug itself. An ant, say. A colony of ants. A soulless mutual society that goes ahead in blind, but intelligent obedience toward a chosen goal. And if that were so, my friend, your theory that they used the calculator to work out economic and social theories is so much poppycock.”
“It’s not my theory,” Lawrence said. “It was only one of several speculations. Another equally as valid might be that they were trying to work out an answer to the universe, why it is and what it is and where it might be going.”
“And how,” said Griffith.
“You’re right. And how. And if they were, I feel sure it was no idle wondering. There must have been a pressure of some sort, some impeling reason why they felt that they must do it.”
“Go on,” said Taylor. “I can hardly wait. Carry out the fairy tale to its bitter end. They found out about the universe and—”
“I don’t think they did,” Buckley said quietly. “No matter what it was, the chances are against their finding the final answer to the thing they sought.”
“For my part,” said Griffith, “I would incline to think they might have. Why else would they go away and leave this great machine behind? They found the thing they wanted, so they had no further use for the tool that they had built.”
“You’re right,” said Buckley. “They had no further use for it, but not because it had done everything that it could do and that wasn’t quite enough. They left it because it wasn’t big enough, because it couldn’t work the problem they wanted it to work.”
“Big enough!” cried Scott. “Why, all they had to do was add another tier, all around the planet.”
Buckley shook his head. “Remember what I said about limiting factors? Well, there’s one that you can’t beat. Put steel under fifty-thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet’s surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.”
Griffith let out a long breath. “Obsolete,” he said.
“An analytical machine is a matter of size,” said Buckley. “Each integrator corresponds to a cell in the human brain. It has a limited function and capacity. And what one cell does must be checked by two other cells. The ‘tell me thrice principle of making sure that there is no error.”
“They could have cleared it and started over again,” said Scott.
“Probably they did,” said Buckley. “Many, many times. Although there always would have been an element of chance that each time it was cleared it
might not be—well, rational or moral. Clearing on a machine this size would be a shock, like corrective surgery on the brain.
“Two things might have happened. They might have reached a clearance limit. Too much residual memory clinging to the tubes—”
“Subconscious,” said Griffith. “It would be interesting to speculate if a machine could develop a subconscious.”
“Or,” continued Buckley, “they might have come to a problem that was so complicated, a problem with so many facets, that this machine, despite its size, was not big enough to handle it.”
“So they went off to hunt a bigger planet,” said Taylor, not quite believing it. “Another planet small enough to live and work on, but enough bigger so they could have a larger calculator.”
“It would make sense,” said Scott, reluctantly. “They’d be starting fresh, you see, with the answers they had gotten here. And with improved designs and techniques.”
“And now,” said King, “the human race takes over. I wonder what we’ll be able to do with a thing like this? Certainly not what its builders intended it should be used for.”
“The human race,” said Buckley, “won’t do a thing for a hundred years, at least. You can bet on that. No engineer would dare to turn a single wheel of this machine until he knew exactly what it’s all about, how it’s made and why. There are millions of circuits to be traced, millions of tubes to check, blueprints to be made, technicians to be trained.”
Lawrence said sharply: “That’s not our problem, King. We are the bird dogs. We hunt out the quail and flush it and our job is done and we go on to something else. What the race does with the things we find is something else again.”
He lifted a pack of camp equipment off the floor and slung it across his shoulder.
“Everyone set to go?” he asked.
Ten miles up, Taylor leaned over the guardrail of the ramp to look down into the maze of machinery below him.
A spoon slid out of his carelessly packed knapsack and went spinning down.
They listened to it for a long time, tinkling at is fell.
Even after they could hear it no longer, they imagined that they could.
The Fire Balloons
by RAY BRADBURY
FIRE exploded over summer night lawns. You saw sparkling face of uncles and aunts. Skyrockets fell up in the brown shining eyes of cousins on the porch, and the cold charred sticks thumped down in dry meadows far away.
The Very Reverend Father Joseph Daniel Peregrine opened his eyes. What a dream: he and his cousins with their fiery play at his grandfather’s ancient Ohio home so many years ago!
He lay listening to the great hollow of the church, the other cells where other Fathers lay. Had they, too, on the eve of the flight of the rocket Crucifix, lain with memories of the Fourth of July? Yes. This was like those breathless Independence dawns when you waited for the first concussion and rushed out on the dewy sidewalks, your hands full of loud miracles.
So here they were, the Episcopal Fathers, in the breathing dawn before they pinwheeled off to Mars, leaving their incense through the velvet cathedral of space.
“Should we go at all?” whispered Father Peregrine. “Shouldn’t we solve our own sins on Earth? Aren’t we running from our lives here?”
He arose, his fleshy body, with its rich look of strawberries, milk, and steak, moving heavily.
“Or is it sloth?” he wondered. “Do I dread the journey?” He stepped into the needle-spray shower.
“But I shall take you to Mars, body.” He addressed himself. “Leaving old sins here. And on to Mars to find new sins?” A delightful thought, almost. Sins no one had ever thought of. Oh, he himself had written a little book: The Problem of Sin on Other Worlds, ignored as somehow not serious enough by his Episcopal brethren.
Only last night, over a final cigar, he and Father Stone had talked of it.
“On Mars sin might appear as virtue. We must guard against virtuous acts there that, later, might be found to be sins!” said Father Peregrine, beaming. “How exciting! It’s been centuries since so much adventure has accompanied the prospect of being a missionary!”
“I will recognize sin,” said Father Stone bluntly, “even on Mars.”
“Oh, we priests pride ourselves on being litmus paper, changing color in sin’s presence,” retorted Father Peregrine, “but what if Martian chemistry is such we do not color at all! If there are news senses on Mars, you must admit the possibility of unrecognizable sin.”
“If there is no malice aforethought, there is no sin or punishment for same—the Lora assures us that,” Father Stone replied.
“On Earth, yes. But perhaps a Martian sin might inform the subconscious of its evil, telepathically, leaving the conscious mind of man free to act, seemingly without malice! What then?”
“What could there be in the way of new sins?”
Father Peregrine leaned heavily forward. “Adam alone did not sin. Add Eve and you add temptation. Add a second man and you make adultery possible. With the addition of sex or people, you add sin. If men were armless they could not strangle with their hands. You would not have that particular sin of murder. Add arms, and you add the possibility of a new violence. Amoebas cannot sin because they reproduce by fission. They do not covet wives or murder each other. Add sex to amoebas, add arms and legs, and you would have murder and adultery. Add an arm or leg or person, or take away each, and you add or subtract possible evil. On Mars, what if there are five new senses, organs, invisible limbs we can’t conceive of—then mightn’t there be five new sins?”
Father Stone gasped. “I think you enjoy this sort of thing!”
“I keep my mind alive, Father; just alive, is all.”
“Your mind’s always juggling, isn’t it?—mirrors, torches, plates.”
“Yes. Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don’t you, Father Stone?”
Father Stone had moved away. “I think we’d better go to bed. In a few hours we’ll be jumping up to see your new sins, Father Peregrine.”
The rocket stood ready for the firing.
The Fathers walked from their devotions in the chilly morning, many a fine priest from New York or Chicago or Los Angeles—the Church was sending its best—walking across town to the frosty field. Walking, Father Peregrine remembered the Bishop’s words:
“Father Peregrine, you will captain the missionaries, with Father Stone at your side. Having chosen you for this serious task, I find my reasons deplorably obscure, Father, but your pamphlet on planetary sin did not go unread. You are a flexible man. And Mars is like that uncleaned closet we have neglected for millenniums. Sin has collected there like bric-a-brac. Mars is twice Earth’s age and has had double the number of Saturday nights, liquor baths, and eye-poppings at women as naked as white seals. When we open that closet door, things will fall on us. We need a quick, flexible man—one whose mind can dodge. Anyone a little too dogmatic might break in two. I feel you’ll be resilient. Father, the job is yours.”
The Bishop and the Fathers knelt.
The blessing was said and the rocket given a little shower of holy water. Arising, the Bishop addressed them:
“I know you will go with God, to prepare the Martians for the reception of His Truth. I wish you all a thoughtful journey.”
They filed past the Bishop, twenty men, robes whispering, to deliver their hands into his kind hands before passing into the cleansed projectile.
“I wonder,” said Father Peregrine, at the last moment, “if Mars is hell? Only waiting for our arrival before it bursts into brimstone and fire.”
“Lord, be with us,” said Father Stone.
The rocket moved.
Coming out of space was like coming out of the most beautiful cathedral they had ever seen. Touching Mars was like
touching the ordinary pavement outside the church five minutes after having really known your love for God.
The Fathers stepped gingerly from the steaming rocket and knelt upon Martian sand while Father Peregrine gave thanks.
“Lord, we thank Thee for the journey through Thy rooms. And, Lord, we have reached a new land, so we must have new eyes. We shall hear new sounds and must needs have new ears. And there will be new sins, for which we ask the gift of better and firmer and purer hearts. Amen.”
They arose.
And here was Mars like a sea under which they trudged in the guise of submarine biologists, seeking life. Here the territory of hidden sin. Oh, how carefully they must all balance, like gray feathers, in this new element, afraid that walking itself might be sinful; or breathing, or simple fasting!
And here was the mayor of First Town come to meet them with outstretched hand. “What can I do for you, Father Peregrine?”
“We’d like to know about the Martians. For only if we know about them can we plan our church intelligently. Are they ten feet tall? We will build large doors. Are their skins blue or red or green? We must know when we put human figures in the stained glass so we may use the right skin color. Are they heavy? We will build sturdy seats for them.”
“Father,” said the mayor, “I don’t think you should worry about the Martians. There are two races. One of them is pretty well dead. A few are in hiding. And the second race—well, they’re not quite human.”
“Oh?” Father Peregrine’s heart quickened.
“They’re round luminous globes of light, Father, living in those hills. Man or beast, who can say? But they act intelligently, I hear.” The mayor shrugged. “Of course, they’re not men, so I don’t think you’ll care——”
“On the contrary,” said Father Peregrine swiftly. “Intelligent, you say?”
“There’s a story. A prospector broke his leg in those hills and would have died there. The blue spheres of light came at him. When he woke, he was down on a highway and didn’t know how he got there.”
“Drunk,” said Father Stone.