The Computer Connection

by Alfred Bester

  The Ms. stockholder sobbed.

  “In a Resultant experiment the outcome can be foretold from the very nature of the constituents. There is no new and unforeseen set of properties arising from the combination of the constituents.”

  Edison (Professor Crookes) was nodding and beaming. I had to work hard to follow the exposition and I doubted whether the U-Con heads were twigging at all, but they seemed to be impressed.

  “The nature of an Emergent cannot be foretold from the nature of its several constituents as they were prior to combination. The nature of an Emergent can only be discovered through experiment and observation, and no one can possibly foretell it. It springs up, new and unexpected, to the surprise of everybody.”

  “Example,” Edison called.

  “Here is an example. We know the constituents of the human animal. From these constituents is it possible to predict the phenomenon of abstract thought? Is abstraction Resultant or Emergent?”

  “Too abstruse,” I called in XX. “A simple, graphic example which even heads can see and believe.”

  Sitting Bull thought hard for a moment. Then he turned to Fee. “Nitric acid. Hydrochloric. Three beakers. Three slugs of gold.”

  While she scurried to the stock shelves he smiled at the house and said, “I’m going to give you a simple demonstration. I will show you that neither nitric acid nor hydrochloric acid attack the noble metals. Their properties are known. And yet when they are combined they form an Emergent called aqua regia, which does consume the noble metals. Early chemists had no way of predicting this. Today, with our knowledge of ion transfer, we do understand and can predict, particularly when we’re assisted by computer analysis. This is what I mean when I say the new cryogenic research is Emergent. Nothing can be foretold. Computers can’t help us because a computer is no better than its stored data and we have none available yet. Thank you, Fee.”

  He set up the three beakers, dropped a chunk of gold into each, and unstoppered the acid bottles. “Watch closely, please. Gold in each beaker. Hydrochloric acid in the first. Nitric acid in the second. Aqua regia, the royal water, in the—”

  He was interrupted by a blast of coughings, gaspings, stranglings. It sounded like fifty people were drowning. In half a minute the entire audience had stampeded out of the laboratory; only Edison, the Syndicate, and myself were left with the Chief. Sequoya looked at us in bewilderment. “What happened?” he asked in XX.

  Glassware began to crash down as their metal supports gave way. Window blinds and valence and spectra charts fell with a clatter. The light fixtures dropped with sizzling short-circuit flares, and we were in pitch darkness. “What happened?” Guess repeated.

  “What happened? I can tell you what happened.” Edison barked with laughter. “That damn fool girl brought you fuming nitric acid. Fuming. And the fumes have turned this room into one big nitric acid bath. Everything’s being eaten away.”

  “Did you see her do it? Did you see the label? Why didn’t you stop her?” The Chief sounded furious.

  “No. No, and no. I’ve deduced it. Not an Emergent, just a Resultant.”

  “Dear God! Dear God! I’ve ruined the whole pitch to the U-Con crowd.” Despairing.

  Suddenly I did the take and let out a yell.

  “What’s the matter, Guig?” the Group called. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, you damn fools, and that’s why I’m hollering. I’m Grand Guignol triumphant. Don’t you understand? Why didn’t he know it was fuming nitric acid? Why didn’t he choke on the fumes? Why isn’t he eaten away now? Why wasn’t he forced to run out with Fee and the rest? Think about it while I revel.”

  After a long moment, the Syndicate said, “I never believed in your campaign, Guig. I apologize. It was a million to one against, so I hope you’ll pardon me.”

  “You’re pardoned. You’re all pardoned. We’ve got another Molecular Man. We’ve got a brand new beautiful Moleman. Still there, Uncas?”

  “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Take a deep breath of nitric. Belt down a stiff shot. Do anything you like to celebrate, because nothing, but nothing you eat, drink, or breathe can kill you. Welcome to the Group.”

  5

  And he disappeared. How it happened: We had to get out of the acid bath before everything was eaten off us—rings, watches, bridgework, fillings, the portable lab Hiawatha carried inside his tutta. There was a crowd of dumbfounded stockholders milling outside the laboratory sounding like victims of a coryza plague, and we got separated. When we finally got together again, clustered around Fee-5, the Chief was gone and there was no locating him in the crowd. We hollered for him in XX. N. Fee began to panic.

  I gave her a look. Again no time for cosseting. “Where can we talk in private? Sacred private?”

  She feathered her vanes and landed again. “The high vacuum chamber.”

  “R. Go.”

  She led us on a twisted course to a giant sphere, opened a sequence of submarine hatches, and we were inside the sphere keeping company with half a space capsule.

  “High vacuum circuitry check,” she said.

  “Lovely scene for criminal assault.”

  She gave me a look, the equal of mine, and it began to dawn on me that I’d better mind my manners with this new-risen phoenix.

  I said to the Syndicate, “That was a lovely performance. Thanks.”

  “Ah, yes. To make someone want something you must show them that someone else wants it more. Elementary.”

  “By any chance was anything you said true?”

  “But it was all truth.”

  “You represent the independent sovereign state of I. G. Farben?”

  “I own fifty-one percent of it.”

  “How much of the whole world do you own, Greek?”

  “Fourteen point nine one seven percent, but who counts?”

  “My God, you’re rich. Am I rich?”

  “You have eleven million six hundred thousand one hundred and three. By my standards you are poor.”

  Fee-5 let out a little moan and I relented. “R,” I said. “It’s a simple problem. The poor bastard has had too many shocks in one day and he’s run off in all directions. All we have to do is find him and cool him. Now he may be somewhere in the JPL complex or at the university. Your job, Fee. Find him.”

  “I can if he’s anywhere.”

  “R. Let’s hope he’s somewhere. Now, he may have scuttled for the tepee, but there’s the problem of the wolves. We’d better let M’bantu handle that. On the other hand he may have levanted to a Particle Bio research center for technical advice. Ed?”

  “I’ll handle that.”

  “He may have cut for a patent office to file for an exclusive on his discovery.”

  “Mine,” the Syndicate said.

  “He may have started on a bash to relieve the pain. I’ll put Scented Song on that.”

  Edison barked his laugh. “I can just see her charging into the fangojoints on Sabu.”

  “Y. I’d like to be with her. Now there’s an outside chance that he may have gone into cataleptics again. That’s for Borgia.”

  “What about you, Guig?”

  “I’m going back to my place. Nemo and I will hold the fort. Keep the progress reports coming. Gung?”

  “R.”

  Fee had been breathing heavily—controlling panic, I thought—but now she began to gasp in heaves and her face was turning blue.

  “Now what?” I shot at her.

  “Not her fault,” Ed said calmly. “Somebody’s started pumping out the chamber. She’s strangling on vacuum.”

  “Never a dull moment at JPL,” I said. “Out.” We out, me carrying Fee-Cyanosis Chinese, and a dozen techs outside wanted to know how dast we be in there contaminating the circuits. You can’t please everybody.

  So we started our various searches for Sequoya and I did like hell go home. I had a damned good hunch where the Chief had taken refuge (I hadn’t spent five days in a bamboo caul for no
thing) and I took the next linear for the Erie reservation. But I did have the courtesy to call and brief Nemo on the assignments.

  Now, here had been this mudhole, the size of a moon crater, 240 miles long, 60 miles wide, 200 feet deep, black, repellent, all ooze, crisscrossed with gutters containing the poisonous effluents extruded by a better industry for a better tomorrow. This was the generous gift to the Amerind nations to possess and inhabit forever or until a progressive Congress ousted the dispossessed again. Nine thousand square miles of hell.

  Now it was nine thousand square miles of paradise. It suggested a fantastic image to me; a shattered rainbow of odd-shaped fields of poppies glowing red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The channels had been roofed over with tile. The lake bed was scattered with wickiups, the traditional Indian hut, once made of mud and branches, but these were built of marble, granite, limestone, terracotta, travertine. Flagged roads wandered everywhere in no particular pattern, and all around the lake bed was a gentle cushion fence that pushed you back if you came too close. If you persisted in coming closer it stiff-armed you with a piston jolt.

  The gate was guarded by Apaches, all no-nonsense courtesy and speaking nothing but Apache. I couldn’t palaver with them; I just kept repeating “Sequoya” in a determined voice. They hocked a tchynik for a few minutes and then the boss of the gate issued me a guide in a hovercraft. He drove me through a tangle of roads and paths to a gleaming marmol wickiup and pointed. There was the Chief in a breechclout with his back to a marble wall, enjoying the morning sun.

  I sat down alongside him without a word. Every instinct told me to adapt myself to his tempo. He was silent, deadpan, immobile. Me too. It was a little buggy. He didn’t slap; neither did I. He did one thing that told me how deeply he had withdrawn into his people’s past—he turned over lazily and pissed to one side and then turned onto his back again. I didn’t imitate that. There’s a limit. There’s also toilet training.

  After a few hours of silence he lazed to his feet. I didn’t move until he reached down a hand to help me up. I followed him into the wickiup. It was as beautifully decorated as his tepee and enormous; room after room in tile and leather, Hopi scatter rugs, spectacular silver and porcelain. Sequoya hadn’t been guffing me; these redskins were rich.

  He called something in what I figured was Cherokee and the family appeared from all directions; Papa, most majestic and cordial and even more of the Lincoln type. (I suspect that Honest Abe may have had a touch of the redbrush in him.) Mama, so billowy that you wanted to bury yourself in her when you were in trouble. A sister around seventeen or eighteen, so shy I couldn’t get a look at her. She kept her head lowered. A couple of kid brothers who immediately charged on me to touch and feel my skin with giggles. Evidently they’d never seen a paleface before.

  I minded my manners; deep bow to papa, kiss mama’s hand, kiss sister’s hand (whereupon she ran out of the room), knocked the boys heads together and gave them all the trinkets and curios I had in my pockets. All this, you understand, without a spoken word, but I could see the Chief was pleased and he sounded pleasant when apparently he explained me to the family.

  They gave us lunch. The Cherokees were originally a Carolina crowd so it was sort of coastal; mussel soup, shrimp and okra, baked hominy, berry corn cobbler, and yalipan tea. And not served on plastic; bone china, if you please, and silver flatware. When I offered to help with the dishes, mama laughed and hustled me out of the kitchen while sister blushed into her boozalum. Sequoya chased the kid brothers, who were climbing all over me, and led me out of the wickiup. I thought it was going to be another liedown in the sun, but he began to saunter down the paths and roads, walking as though he owned the reservation. There was a light breeze and the entire spectrum of poppies genuflected.

  At last he asked, “Logic, Guig?”

  “No.”

  “Then how?”

  “Oh, we had a dozen rational possibilities—the Group is tracking them down—but I related.”

  “Ah. Home.”

  I grunted.

  “How long since you’ve had a family and a home, Guig?”

  “A couple of centuries, more or less.”

  “You poor orphan.”

  “That’s why the Group tries to stick together. We’re all the family we have.”

  “And now it’s going to happen to me.”

  I grunted.

  “It is, isn’t it? You weren’t shooting me through a Black Hole?”

  “You know it is. You know it’s happened already.”

  “It’s like a slow death, Guig.”

  “It’s long life.”

  “I’m not so sure you did me a favor.”

  “I’m positive I had nothing to do with it. It was a lucky accident.”

  “Lucky!”

  We both grunted.

  After a few minutes he asked, “What did you mean, ‘tries to stick together’?”

  “In some ways we’re a typical family. There are likes and dislikes, jealousies, hatreds, downright feuds. Lucy Borgia and Len Da Vinci have been at each other’s throats since long before I was transformed. We don’t dare even mention them to each other.”

  “But they gathered around to help you.”

  “Only my friends. If I’d asked the Rajah to come and lend a hand he wouldn’t even bother to turn me down; he hates me. If Queenie had come it would have been a disaster; Edison and Queenie can’t abide each other. And so it goes. It’s not all sweetness and light in the Group. You’ll find out as you get to know us.”

  We broke off the talk and continued the walk. Each time we passed one of those luxury wickiups I saw handicrafts in progress: looms, pottery wheels, silversmiths, ironmongers, leatherworkers, woodcarvers, painters, even a guy flaking arrowheads.

  “Souvenirs for the honk tourists,” Sequoya explained. “We convince them that we still use bows and arrows and lances.”

  “Hell, man, you don’t need the money.”

  “No, no, no. Just goodwill. We never charge the tourists anything for souvenirs. We don’t even charge an admission fee at the gates.”

  God knows, Erie seemed to be up to its ass in goodwill. It was all silence and smiles. Dio! The blessed quiet! Apparently the cushion fence blocked broadcasts as well as unwelcome visitors.

  “When they squeezed the nations and tribes out of our last reservations,” Sequoya said, “they generously gave us the bed of Lake Erie for our very own. All the fresh water feeding the lake had been impounded by industry. It was just a poisoned bed, a factory sewer, and they moved us all in.”

  “Why not the charming, hospitable South Pole?”

  “There’s coal down there that they’re hoping to get at some day. The very first job I had was working on techniques for melting the cap for Ice Anthracite Inc.”

  “Most farsighted.”

  “We dug channels to drain the pollution. We put up tents. We tried to live with the rot and stench. We died by the thousands; we starved, suffocated, killed ourselves. So many great tribes wiped out… .”

  “Then what turned this into a paradise?”

  “A very great Indian made a discovery. Nothing would grow in the poisoned land except poppies, the Ugly Poppies.”

  “Who made the discovery?”

  “His name was Guess. Isaac Indus Guess.”

  “Ah, I’m beginning to understand. Your father?”

  “My great grandfather.”

  “I see. Genius runs in the family. But why do you call them Ugly Poppies, Chief? They’re beautiful.”

  “So they are, but they produce a poisoned opium, and ugly drugs are extracted from it; new drugs, unheard-of drugs with fantastic effects—they’re still exploring the possible derivatives—and overnight, in a drug culture, the reservation became rich.”

  “That story’s a fairy tale.”

  He was surprised. “Why do you say that Guig?”

  “Because a benevolent government would have taken Erie away from you for your own good.”


  He laughed. “You’re absolutely right, except for one thing: There’s a secret process involved in getting the poppies to produce the poisoned opium, and they don’t know it. We’re the only ones who do and we’re not telling. That’s how we won the final war with the palefaces. We gave them the choice: Erie or poppy poison, not both. They offered all sorts of treaties, promises, deals, and we turned them down. We’ve learned the hard way not to trust anybody.”

  “The story’s still thin, Chief. Bribes? Blackmail? Treason? Spies?”

  “Oh, yes, they’ve tried them all. They still are. We handle them.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, come now, Guig… .”

  He said that with such merciless amusement that a chill ran down my spine. “Then what you’ve got, in effect, is a Redskin Mafia.”

  “More or less. The Mafia International wanted us to join them but we turned them down. We trust no one. They tried to use muscle, but our Comanches are still a tough tribe—too tough, I think. But I was grateful for that little war. It cooled the Comanche feist and they’re easier to live with now. So’s the Mafia International. They won’t start pressuring again. We gave them a bellyful of traditional barbarism they’ll never forget. That’s our college.”

  He pointed to about forty acres of low, white, clapboard buildings. “We built it in the Colonial style to show there were no hard feelings for the early settlers who started the great robbery. Firewater distillery. Ugly synthesis. Education. It’s the best college in the world and we’ve got a waiting list a mile long.”

  “Students?”

  “No. Professors. Research fellows. Teachers. We don’t admit students from the outside; it’s reserved for our own kids.”

  “Are any of your kids on junk?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I know of. We don’t run a permissive society. No drugs. No bugs.”

  “Firewater?”

  “Now and then, but it’s so horroroso that they quit pretty soon.”

  “Is it a secret process, too?”