by Isaac Asimov
“Cosmic AC,” said Man, “how may entropy be reversed?”
The Cosmic AC said, “there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”
Man said, “Collect additional data.”
The Cosmic AC said, “i will do so. i have been doing so for a hundred billion years. my predecessors and i have been asked this question many times. all the data i have remains insufficient.”
“Will there come a time,” said Man, “when data will be sufficient or is the problem insoluble in all conceivable circumstances?”
The Cosmic AC said, “no problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.”
Man said, “When will you have enough data to answer the question?”
The Cosmic AC said, “there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”
“Will you keep working on it?” asked Man.
The Cosmic AC said, “i will.”
Man said, “We shall wait.”
The stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.
One by one Man fused with AC, each physical body losing its mental identity in a manner that was somehow not a loss but a gain.
Man’s last mind paused before fusion, looking over a space that included nothing but the dregs of one last dark star and nothing besides but incredibly thin matter, agitated randomly by the tag ends of heat wearing out, asymptotically, to the absolute zero.
Man said, “AC, is this the end? Can this chaos not be reversed into the Universe once more? Can that not be done?”
AC said, “there is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”
Man’s last mind fused and only AC existed—and that in hyperspace.
Matter and energy had ended and with it space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.
All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.
But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.
A timeless interval was spent in doing that.
And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer—by demonstration—would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “let there be light!”
And there was light—
THE UGLY LITTLE BOY
Edith Fellowes smoothed her working smock as she always did before opening the elaborately locked door and stepping across the invisible dividing line between the is and the is not. She carried her notebook and her pen although she no longer took notes except when she felt the absolute need for some report.
This time she also carried a suitcase. (“Games for the boy,” she had said, smiling, to the guard—who had long since stopped even thinking of questioning her and who waved her on.)
And, as always, the ugly little boy knew that she had entered and came running to her, crying, “Miss Fellowes— Miss Fellowes—” in his soft, slurring way.
“Timmie,” she said, and passed her hand over the shaggy, brown hair on his misshapen little head. “What’s wrong?”
He said, “Will Jerry be back to play again? I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Never mind that now, Timmie. Is that why you’ve been crying?”
He looked away. “Not just about that, Miss Fellowes. I dreamed again.”
“The same dream?” Miss Fellowes’ lips set. Of course, the Jerry affair would bring back the dream.
He nodded. His too large teeth showed as he tried to smile and the lips of his forward-thrusting mouth stretched wide. “When will I be big enough to go out there, Miss Fellowes?”
“Soon,” she said softly, feeling her heart break. “Soon.”
Miss Fellowes let him take her hand and enjoyed the warm touch of the thick dry skin of his palm. He led her through the three rooms that made up the whole of Stasis Section One—comfortable enough, yes, but an eternal prison for the ugly little boy all the seven (was it seven?) years of his life.
He led her to the one window, looking out onto a scrubby woodland section of the world of is (now hidden by night), where a fence and painted instructions allowed no men to wander without permission.
He pressed his nose against the window. “Out there, Miss Fellowes?”
“Better places. Nicer places,” she said sadly as she looked at his poor little imprisoned face outlined in profile against the window. The forehead retreated flatly and his hair lay down in tufts upon it. The back of his skull bulged and seemed to make the head overheavy so that it sagged and bent forward, forcing the whole body into a stoop. Already, bony ridges were beginning to bulge the skin above his eyes. His wide mouth thrust forward more prominently than did his wide and flattened nose and he had no chin to speak of, only a jawbone that curved smoothly down and back. He was small for his years and his stumpy legs were bowed.
He was a very ugly little boy and Edith Fellowes loved him dearly.
Her own face was behind his line of vision, so she allowed her lips the luxury of a tremor.
They would not kill him. She would do anything to prevent it. Anything. She opened the suitcase and began taking out the clothes it contained.
Edith Fellowes had crossed the threshold of Stasis, Inc. for the first time just a little over three years before. She hadn’t, at that time, the slightest idea as to what Stasis meant or what the place did. No one did then, except those who worked there. In fact, it was only the day after she arrived that the news broke upon the world.
At the time, it was just that they had advertised for a woman with knowledge of physiology, experience with clinical chemistry, and a love for children. Edith Fellowes had been a nurse in a maternity ward and believed she fulfilled those qualifications.
Gerald Hoskins, whose name plate on the desk included a Ph.D. after the name, scratched his cheek with his thumb and looked at her steadily.
Miss Fellowes automatically stiffened and felt her face (with its slightly asymmetric nose and its a-trifle-too-heavy eyebrows) twitch.
He’s no dreamboat himself, she thought resentfully. He’s getting fat and bald and he’s got a sullen mouth.
—But the salary mentioned had been considerably higher than she had expected, so she waited.
Hoskins said, “Now do you really love children?”
“I wouldn’t say I did if I didn’t.”
“Or do you just love pretty children? Nice chubby children with cute little button-noses and gurgly ways?”
Miss Fellowes said, “Children are children, Dr. Hoskins, and the ones that aren’t pretty are just the ones who may happen to need help most.”
“Then suppose we take you on—”
“You mean you’re offering me the job now?”
He smiled briefly, and for a moment, his broad face had an absentminded charm about it. He said, “I make quick decisions. So far the offer is tentative, however. I may make as quick a decision to let you go. Are you ready to take the chance?”
Miss Fellowes clutched at her purse and calculated just as swiftly as she could, then ignored calculations and followed impulse. “All right.”
“Fine. We’re going to form the Stasis tonight and I think you had better be there to take over at once. That will be at 8 p.m. and I’d appreciate it if you could be here at 7:30.”
“But w
hat—”
“Fine. Fine. That will be all now.” On signal, a smiling secretary came in to usher her out.
Miss Fellowes stared back at Dr. Hoskins’ closed door for a moment. What was Stasis? What had this large barn of a building—with its badged employees, its makeshift corridors, and its unmistakable air of engineering—-to do with children?
She wondered if she should go back that evening or stay away and teach that arrogant man a lesson. But she knew she would be back if only out of sheer frustration. She would have to find out about the children.
She came back at 7:30 and did not have to announce herself. One after another, men and women seemed to know her and to know her function. She found herself all but placed on skids as she was moved inward.
Dr. Hoskins was there, but he only looked at her distantly and murmured, “Miss Fellowes.”
He did not even suggest that she take a seat, but she drew one calmly up to the railing and sat down.
They were on a balcony, looking down into a large pit, filled with instruments that looked like a cross between the control panel of a spaceship and the working face of a computer. On one side were partitions that seemed to make up an unceilinged apartment, a giant dollhouse into the rooms of which she could look from above.
She could see an electronic cooker and a freeze-space unit in one room and a washroom arrangement off another. And surely the object she made out in another room could only be part of a bed, a small bed.
Hoskins was speaking to another man and, with Miss Fellowes, they made up the total occupancy of the balcony. Hoskins did not offer to introduce the other man, and Miss Fellowes eyed him surreptitiously. He was thin and quite fine-looking in a middle-aged way. He had a small mustache and keen eyes that seemed to busy themselves with everything.
He was saying, “I won’t pretend for one moment that I understand all this, Dr. Hoskins; I mean, except as a layman, a reasonably intelligent layman, may be expected to understand it. Still, if there’s one part I understand less than another, it’s this matter of selectivity. You can only reach out so far; that seems sensible; things get dimmer the further you go; it takes more energy.—But then, you can only reach out so near. That’s the puzzling part.”
“I can make it seem less paradoxical, Deveney, if you will allow me to use an analogy.”
(Miss Fellowes placed the new man the moment she heard his name, and despite herself was impressed. This was obviously Candide Deveney, the science writer of the Telenews, who was notoriously at the scene of every major scientific break-through. She even recognized his face as one she saw on the news-plate when the landing on Mars had been announced.—So Dr. Hoskins must have something important here.
“By all means use an analogy,” said Deveney ruefully, “if you think it will help.”
“Well, then, you can’t read a book with ordinary-sized print if it is held six feet from your eyes, but you can read it if you hold it one foot from your eyes. So far, the closer the better. If you bring the book to within one inch of your eyes, however, you’ve lost it again. There is such a thing as being too close, you see.”
“Hmm,” said Deveney.
“Or take another example. Your right shoulder is about thirty inches from the tip of your right forefinger and you can place your right forefinger on your right shoulder. Your right elbow is only half the distance from the tip of your right forefinger; it should by all ordinary logic be easier to reach, and yet you cannot place your right finger on your right elbow. Again, there is such a thing as being too close.”
Deveney said, “May I use these analogies in my story?”
“Well, of course. Only too glad. I’ve been waiting long enough for someone like you to have a story. I’ll give you anything else you want. It is time, finally, that we want the world looking over our shoulder. They’ll see something.”
(Miss Fellowes found herself admiring his calm certainty despite herself. There was strength there.)
Deveney said, “How far out will you reach?”
“Forty thousand years.”
Miss Fellowes drew in her breath sharply.
Years?
There was tension in the air. The men at the controls scarcely moved. One man at a microphone spoke into it in a soft monotone, in short phrases that made no sense to Miss Fellowes.
Deveney, leaning over the balcony railing with an intent stare, said, “Will we see anything, Dr. Hoskins?”
“What? No. Nothing till the job is done. We detect indirectly, something on the principle of radar, except that we use mesons rather than radiation. Mesons reach backward under the proper conditions. Some are reflected and we must analyze the reflections.”
“That sounds difficult.”
Hoskins smiled again, briefly as always. “It is the end product of fifty years of research; forty years of it before I entered the field.—Yes, it’s difficult.”
The man at the microphone raised one hand.
Hoskins said, “We’ve had the fix on one particular moment in time for weeks; breaking it, remaking it after calculating our own movements in time; making certain that we could handle time-flow with sufficient precision. This must work now.”
But his forehead glistened.
Edith Fellowes found herself out of her seat and at the balcony railing, but there was nothing to see.
The-man at the microphone said quietly, “Now.”
There was a space of silence sufficient for one breath and then the sound of a terrified little boy’s scream from the dollhouse rooms. Terror! Piercing terror!
Miss Fellowes’ head twisted in the direction of the cry. A child was involved. She had forgotten.
And Hoskins’ fist pounded on the railing and he said in a tight voice, trembling with triumph, “Did it.”
Miss Fellowes was urged down the short, spiral flight of steps by the hard press of Hoskins’ palm between her shoulder blades. He did not speak to her.
The men who had been at the controls were standing about now, smiling, smoking, watching the three as they entered on the main floor. A very soft buzz sounded from the direction of the dollhouse.
Hoskins said to Deveney, “It’s perfectly safe to enter Stasis. I’ve done it a thousand times. There’s a queer sensation which is momentary and means nothing.”
He stepped through an open door in mute demonstration, and Deveney, smiling stiffly and drawing an obviously deep breath, followed him.
Hoskins said, “Miss Fellowes! Please!” He crooked his forefinger impatiently.
Miss Fellowes nodded and stepped stiffly through. It was as though a ripple went through her, an internal tickle.
But once inside all seemed normal. There was the smell of the fresh wood of the dollhouse and—of—of soil somehow.
There was silence now, no voice at last, but there was the dry shuffling of feet, a scrabbling as of a hand over wood—then a low moan.
“Where is it?” asked Miss Fellowes in distress. Didn’t these fool men care?
The boy was in the bedroom; at least the room with the bed in it.
It was standing naked, with its small, dirt-smeared chest heaving raggedly. A bushel of dirt and coarse grass spread over the floor at his bare brown feet. The smell of soil came from it and a touch of something fetid.
Hoskins followed her horrified glance and said with annoyance, “You can’t pluck a boy cleanly out of time, Miss Fellowes. We had to take some of the surroundings with it for safety. Or would you have preferred to have it arrive here minus a leg or with only half a head?”
“Please!” said Miss Fellowes, in an agony of revulsion. “Are we just to stand here? The poor child is frightened. And it’s filthy.”
She was quite correct. It was smeared with encrusted dirt and grease and had a scratch on its thigh that looked red and sore.
As Hoskins approached him, the boy, who seemed to be something over three years in age, hunched low and backed away rapidly. He lifted his upper lip and snarled in a hissing fashion like a cat. With a r
apid gesture, Hoskins seized both the child’s arms and lifted him, writhing and screaming, from the floor.
Miss Fellowes said, “Hold him, now. He needs a warm bath first. He needs to be cleaned. Have you the equipment? If so, have it brought here, and I’ll need to have help in handling him just at first. Then, too, for heaven’s sake, have all this trash and filth removed.”
She was giving the orders now and she felt perfectly good about that. And because now she was an efficient nurse, rather than a confused spectator, she looked at the child with a clinical eye—and hesitated for one shocked moment. She saw past the dirt and shrieking, past the thrashing of limbs and useless twisting. She saw the boy himself.
It was the ugliest little boy she had ever seen. It was horribly ugly from misshapen head to bandy legs.
She got the boy cleaned with three men helping her and with others milling about in their efforts to clean the room. She worked in silence and with a sense of outrage, annoyed by the continued strugglings and outcries of the boy and by the undignified drenchings of soapy water to which she was subjected.
Dr. Hoskins had hinted that the child would not be pretty, but that was far from stating that it would be repulsively deformed. And there was a stench about the boy that soap and water was only alleviating little by little.
She had the strong desire to thrust the boy, soaped as he was, into Hoskins’ arms and walk out; but there was the pride of profession. She had accepted an assignment, after all.—And there would be the look in his eyes. A cold look that would read: Only pretty children, Miss Fellowes?
He was standing apart from them, watching coolly from a distance with a half-smile on his face when he caught her eyes, as though amused at her outrage.
She decided she would wait a while before quitting. To do so now would only demean her.
Then, when the boy was a bearable pink and smelled of scented soap, she felt better anyway. His cries changed to whimpers of exhaustion as he watched carefully, eyes moving in quick frightened suspicion from one to another of those in the room. His cleanness accentuated his thin nakedness as he shivered with cold after his bath.