And the point of that (how often I use that phrase!) is that a mathematical model not only represents the real thing but sometimes it’s as good as the real thing. No, honestly. I mean, do you really believe that if it had been Marilyn or Carole in the flesh you were looking at, across a row of floodlights, say, that you could have taken away any more of them than you gleaned from the shower of electrons that made the phosphors display their pictures?
I did watch Marilyn on the Late, Late one night. And I thought those thoughts; and so I spent the next week preparing an application to a foundation for money; and when the grant came through, I took a sabbatical and began turning myself into a mathematical model. It isn’t really that hard. Kookie, yes. But not hard.
I don’t want to explain what programs like Fortran and simscript and sir are, so I will only say what we all say: They are languages by which people can communicate with machines. Sort of. I had to leam to speak Fortran well enough to tell the machine all about myself. It took five graduate students and ten months to write the program that made that possible, but that’s not much. It took more than that to teach a computer to shoot pool. After that, it was just a matter of storing myself in the machine.
That’s the part that Schmuel told me was kookie. Like everybody with enough seniority in my department, I have a remote-access computer console in my—well, I called it my “playroom.” I did have a party there, once, right after I bought the house, when I still thought I was going to get married. Schmuel caught me one night walking in the door and down the stairs and found me methodically typing out my medical history from the ages of four to fourteen. “Jerk,” he said, “what makes you think you deserve to be embalmed in a 7094?”
I said, “Make some coffee and leave me alone till I finish. Listen. Can I use your program on the sequelae of mumps?”
“Paranoid psychosis,” he said. “It comes on about the age of forty-two.” But he coded the console for me and thus gave me access to his programs. I finished and said:
“Thanks for the program, but you make rotten coffee.”
“You make rotten jokes. You really think it‘s going to be you in that program. Admit!”
By then, I had most of the basic physiological and environmental stuff on the tapes and I was feeling good. “What’s me?” I asked. “If it talks like me, and thinks like me, and remembers what I remember, and does what I would do—who is it? President Eisenhower?”
“Eisenhower was years ago, jerk,” he said.
“Turing’s question, Schmuel,” I said. “If I’m in one room with a teletype. And the computer’s in another room with a teletype, programmed to model me. And you’re in a third room, connected to both teletypes, and you have a conversation with both of us, and you can’t tell which is me and which is the machine—then how do you describe the difference? Is there a difference?”
He said, “The difference, Josiah, is I can touch you. And smell you. If I was crazy enough I could kiss you. You. Not the model.”
“You could,” I said, “if you were a model, too, and were in the machine with me.” And I joked with him (Look! It solves the population problem, put everybody in the machine. And, suppose I get cancer. Flesh-me dies. Mathematical-model-me just rewrites its program), but he was really worried. He really did think I was going crazy, but I perceived that his reasons were not because of the nature of the problem but because of what he fancied was my own attitude toward it, and I made up my mind to be careful of what I said to Schmuel.
So I went on playing Turing’s game, trying to make the computer’s responses indistinguishable from my own. I instructed it in what a toothache felt like and what I remembered of sex. I taught it memory links between people and phone numbers, and all the state capitals I had won a prize for knowing when I was ten. I trained it to spell “rhythm” wrong, as I had always misspelled it, and to say “place” instead of “put” in conversation, as I have always done because of the slight speech impediment that carried over from my adolescence. I played that game; and by God, I won it.
But I don’t know for sure what I lost in exchange.
I know I lost something.
I began by losing parts of my memory. When my cousin Alvin from Cleveland phoned me on my birthday, I couldn’t remember who he was for a minute. (The week before, I had told the computer all about my summers with Alvin’s family, including the afternoon when we both lost our virginity to the same girl, under the bridge by my uncle’s farm.) I had to write down Schmuel’s phone number, and my secretary’s, and carry them around in my pocket.
As the work progressed, I lost more. I looked up at the sky one night and saw three bright stars in a line overhead. It scared me, because I didn’t know what they were until I got home and took out my sky charts. Yet Orion was my first and easiest constellation. And when I looked at the telescope I had
made, I could not remember how I had figured the mirror.
Schmuel kept warning me about overwork. I really was working a lot, 15 hours a day and more. But it didn’t feel like overwork. It felt as though I were losing pieces of myself. I was not merely teaching the computer to be me but putting pieces of me into the computer. I hated that, and it shook me enough to make me take the whole of Christmas week off. I went to Miami.
But when I got back to work, I couldn’t remember how to touch-type on the console any more and was reduced to pecking out information for the computer a letter at a time. I felt as though I were moving from one place to another in installments, and not enough of me had arrived yet to be a quorum, but what was still waiting to go had important parts missing. And yet I continued to pour myself into the magnetic memory cores: the He I told my draft board in 1946, the limerick I made up about my first wife after the divorce, what Margaret wrote when she told me she wouldn’t marry me.
There was plenty of room in the storage banks for all of it. The computer could hold all my brain had held, especially with the program my five graduate students and I had written. I had been worried about that, at first.
But in the event I did not run out of room. What I ran out of was myself. I remember feeling sort of opaque and stunned and empty; and that is all I remember until now.
Whenever “now” is.
I had another friend once, and he cracked up while working on telemetry studies for one of the Mariner programs. I remember going to see him in the hospital, and him telling me, in his slow, unworried, coked-up voice, what they had done for him. Or to him. Electroshock. Hydrotherapy.
What worries me is that that is at least a reasonable working hypothesis to describe what is happening to me now.
I remember, or think I remember, a sharp electric jolt. I feel, or think I feel, a chilling flow around me.
What does it mean? I wish I were sure. I’m willing to concede that it might mean that overwork did me in and now I, too, am at Restful Retreat, being studied by the psychiatrists and changed by the nurses’ aides. Willing to concede it? Dear God, I pray for it. I pray that that electricity was just shock therapy and not something else. I pray that the flow I feel is water sluicing around my sodden sheets and not a flux of electrons in transistor modules. I don’t fear the thought of being insane; I fear the alternative.
I do not believe the alternative. But I fear it all the same. I can’t believe that all that’s left of me—mv id, my ucs, mv me —is nothing but a mathematical model stored inside the banks of the 7094. But if I ami If I am, dear God, what will happen when—and how can I wait until—somebody turns me on?
What to Do Until the Analyst Comes
The thing I would like you to note about this story is that, although it is about a sort of tripping, it was written quite a while before the hippies and the beats made dropping out a national conversational topic.
I just sent my secretary out for a container of coffee and she brought me back a lemon Coke.
I can’t even really blame her. Who in all the world do I have to blame, except myself? Hazel was a good secretary to me for 15 yea
rs, fine at typing, terrific at brushing off people I didn’t want to see, and the queen of them all at pumping office gossip out of the ladies’ lounge. She’s a little fuzzy-brained most of the time now, sure. But after all!
I can say this for myself, I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into. No doubt you remember the—Well, let me start that sentence over again, because naturally there is a certain doubt. Perhaps, let’s say, perhaps you remember the two doctors and their headline report about cigarettes and lung cancer. It hit us pretty hard at Vanden-Blumer & Silk, because we’ve been eating off the Mason-Dixon Tobacco account for 20 years. Just figure what our 15 percent amounted to on better than ten million dollars net billing a year, and you’ll see that for yourself. What happened first was all to the good, because naturally the first thing that the client did was scream and reach for his checkbook and pour another couple million dollars into special promotions to counteract the bad press, but that couldn’t last. And we knew it. V.B. & S. is noted in the trade as an advertising agency that takes the long view; we saw at once that if the client was in danger, no temporary spurt of advertising was going to pull him out of it, and it was time for us to climb up on top of the old mountain and take a good long look at the countryside ahead.
The Chief called a special Plans meeting that morning and laid it on the line for us. “There goes the old fire bell, boys,” he said, “and it’s up to us to put the fire out. I’m listening, so start talking.”
Baggott cleared his throat and said glumly, “It may only be the paper, Chief. Maybe if they make them without paper …” He’s the a.e. for Mason-Dixon, so you couldn’t really blame him for taking the client’s view.
The Chief twinkled: “If they make them without paper they aren’t cigarettes any more, are they? Let’s not wander off into side issues, boys. I’m still listening.”
None of us wanted to wander off into side issues, so we all looked patronizingly at Baggott for a minute. Finally Ellen Silk held up her hand. “I don’t want you to think,” she said, “that just because Daddy left me a little stock I’m going to push my way into things, Mr. Vanden-Blumer, but—well, did you have in mind finding some, uh, angle to play on that would take the public’s mind off the report?”
You have to admire the Chief. “Is that your recommendation, my dear?” he inquired fondly, bouncing the ball right back to her.
She said weakly, “I don’t know. I’m confused.”
“Naturally, my dear,” he beamed. “So are we all. Let’s see if Charley here can straighten us out a little. Eh, Charley?”
He was looking at me. I said at once, “I’m glad you asked me for an opinion, Chief. I’ve been doing a little thinking, and here’s what I’ve come up with.” I ticked off the points on my fingers. “One, tobacco makes you cough. Two, liquor gives you a hangover. Three, reefers and the other stuff— well, let’s just say they’re against the law.” I slapped the three fingers against the palm of my other hand. “So what’s left for us, Chief? That’s my question. Can we come up with something new, something different, something that, one, is not injurious to the health, two, does not give you a hangover, three, is not habit-forming and therefore against the law?”
Mr. Vanden-Blumer said approvingly, “That’s good thinking, Charley. When you hear that fire bell, you really jump, boy.”
Baggott’s hand was up. He said, “Let me get this straight, Chief. Is it Charley’s idea that we recommend to Mason-10
Dixon that they go out of the tobacco business and start making something else?”
The old man looked at him blandly for a moment. “Why should it be Mason-Dixon?” he asked softly, and left it at that while we all thought of the very good reasons why it shouldn’t be Mason-Dixon. After all, loyalty to a client is one thing, but you’ve got an obligation to your own people, too.
The old man let it sink in, then he turned back to me. “Well, Charley?” he asked. “We’ve heard you pinpoint what we need. Got any specific suggestions?”
They were all looking at me to see if I had anything concrete to offer.
Unfortunately, I had.
I just asked Hazel to get me the folder on Leslie Clary Cloud, and she came in with a copy of my memo putting him on the payroll two years back. “That’s all there was in the file,” she said dreamily, her jaw muscles moving rhythmically. There wasn’t any use arguing with her, so I handed her the container of lemon Coke and told her to ditch it and bring me back some coffee, C-O-F-F-E-E, coffee. I tried going through the files myself when she was gone, but that was a waste of time.
So I’ll have to tell you about Leslie Clary Cloud from memory. He came in to the office without an appointment and why Hazel ever let him in to see me 111 never know. Rut she did. He told me right away, “I’ve been fired, Mr. McGory. Canned. After eleven years with the Wyoming Bureau of Standards as a senior chemist.”
“That’s too bad, Dr. Cloud,” I said, shuffling the papers on my desk. “I’m afraid, though, that our organization doesn’t—”
“No, no,” he said hastily. “I don’t know anything about advertising. Organic chemistry’s my field. I have a, well, a suggestion for a process that might interest you. You h^/e the Mason-Dixon Tobacco account, don’t you? Well, in my work for my doctorate I—” He drifted off into a fog of long-chain molecules and short-chain molecules and pentose sugars and common garden herbs. It took me a little while, but I listened patiently and I began to see what he was driving at. There was, he was saying, a substance in a common plant which, by cauliflamming the whingdrop and ditricolating the residual glom, or words something like that, you could convert into another substance which appeared to have many features in common with what is sometimes called hop, snow, or joy-dust. In other words, dope.
I stared at him aghast. “Dr. Cloud,” I demanded, “do you know what you’re suggesting? If we added this stuff to our client’s cigarettes we’d be flagrantly violating the law. That’s the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of! Besides, we’ve already looked into this matter, and the cost estimates are—”
“No, no!” he said again. “You don’t understand, Mr. Mc-Gory. This isn’t any of the drugs currently available, it’s something new and different.”
“Different?”
“Nonhabit-forming, for instance.”
“Nonhabit-forming?”
“Totally. Chemically it is entirely unrelated to any narcotic in the pharmacopeia. Legally—well, I’m no lawyer, but I swear, Mr. McGory, this isn’t covered by any regulation. No reason it should be. It doesn’t hurt the user, it doesn’t form a habit, it’s cheap to manufacture, it—”
“Hold it,” I said, getting to my feet. “Don’t go away—I want to catch the boss before he goes to lunch.”
So I caught the boss, and he twinkled thoughtfully at me. No, he didn’t want me to discuss it with Mason-Dixon just yet, and yes, it did seem to have some possibilities, and certainly, put this man on the payroll and see if he turns up with something.
So we did; and he did.
Auditing raised the roof when the vouchers began to come through, but I bucked them up to the Chief and he calmed them down. It took a lot of money, though, and it took nearly six months. But then Leslie Clary Cloud called up one morning and said, “Come on down, Mr. McGory. We’re in.”
The place we’d fixed up for him was on the lower East Side and it reeked of rotten vegetables. I made a mental note to double-check all our added-chlorophyll copy and climbed up the two flights of stairs to Cloud’s private room. He was sitting at a lab bench, beaming at a row of test tubes in front of him.
“This is it?” I asked, glancing at the test tubes.
“This is it.” He smiled dreamily at me and yawned. “Excuse me,” he blinked amiably. “I’ve been sampling the little old product.”
I looked him over very carefully. He had been sampling something or other, that was clear enough. But no whiskey breath; no dilated pupils; no shakes; no nothing. He was relaxed and cheerful, and that was
all you could say.
“Try a little old bit,” he invited, gesturing at the test tubes.
Well, there are times when you have to pay your dues in the club. V.B. & S. had been mighty good to me, and if I had to swallow something unfamiliar to justify the confidence the Chief had in me, why I just had to go ahead and do it. Still, I hesitated for a moment.
“Aw,” said Leslie Clary Cloud, “don’t be scared. Look, I just had a shot but I’ll take another one.” He fumbled one of the test tubes out of the rack and, humming to himself, slopped a little of the colorless stuff into a beaker of some other colorless stuff—water, I suppose. He drank it down and smacked his lips. “Tastes awful,” he observed cheerfully, “but we’ll fix that. Wheel”
I looked him over again, and he looked back at me, giggling. “Too strong,” he said happily. “Got it too strong. We’ll fix that, too.” He rattled beakers and test tubes aimlessly while I took a deep breath and nerved myself up to it.
“All right,” I said, and took the fresh beaker out of his hand. I swallowed it down almost in one gulp. It tasted terrible, just as he said, tasted like the lower floors had smelled, but that was all I noticed right away. Nothing happened for a moment except diat Cloud looked at me thoughtfully and frowned.
“Say,” he said, “I guess I should have diluted that.”
I guess he should have. Wham.
But a couple of hours later I was all right again.
Cloud was plenty apologetic. “Still,” he said consolingly, standing over me as I lay on the lab bench, “it proves one diing. You had a dose about the equivalent of ten thousand normal shots, and you have to admit it hasn’t hurt you.”
“I do?” I asked, and looked at the doctor. He swung his stethoscope by the earpieces and shrugged.
In the Problem Pit Page 16