The God Machine

by Martin Caidin

  The God Machine

  by Martin Caidin

  Scanned by BW-SciFi

  1

  I didn't move. I waited, listening. I—

  There! Again ... the sound muffled, fluttering just beyond the window of a man's senses. I strained to hear better.

  I didn't move a muscle, to prevent even the rustling of the sheets against my skin. In the swallowing gloom I rested on my elbow, holding my breath, hearing dimly the blood in my ears. Retinal phantoms I couldn't see swirled in the room. I had to move. I raised my head, staring at a razored sliver of light along the carpet by the door. It seemed to take me forever to notice that the light was uneven.

  Someone was standing out there.

  This time I heard it clearly. Sibilant, yet soft. A woman-soft voice—

  "Steve?"

  I slipped from the bed with the automatic in my right hand. My thumb probed along the cold metal, slipped the safety off. In the darkness the hammer cocking back sounded like a steel marble cracking sharply against a metal plate. For just a moment I hesitated. I didn't like guns and I knew that if I stubbed my toe and twitched my finger I could blow a very big hole in something. Or someone. The thought washed through me, but I fought it off because I knew a lot worse than a hole in the night . . . Angrily, I ordered my thoughts back to the present, to now.

  "Steve!"

  My feet padded softly as I crossed to the door. I wasn't too anxious to look through the peephole.

  I held a vision of someone on the other side of that door, waiting patiently, laughing, until I set myself up neatly, framed behind the tiny hole through which you could peer at visitors. Then, when I was fool enough to arrange myself precisely as a cooperative target, a gun from the other side would pound lead through the door. Into me. I was jumpy as hell.

  Jumpy? Or is it you're really scared?

  The voice sneered at me. I ignored it. I always tried to ignore myself. Of course I was scared.

  I stopped just to one side of the door, leaning against the wall, my heart pounding.

  "Who is it?"

  An old man's voice, croaking. I fought down the impulse to clear my throat. I sounded silly enough already, and this wasn't the time to worry about my vocal cords.

  "Steve? It's me, Barbara."

  Barbara? Of course; young, beautiful, amorous. We'd dated; one of those every-now-and-then things. When I first joined the Project and met her, we'd had wonderful times together. But it had been a long time ago. Why now? I glanced at my wrist-watch. In the gloom the luminous hands showed a quarter to four. I thought of the other side of the door, and things became jumbled. I thought of that beautiful body, but the gun in my hand kept crowding out the view and—

  "Steve, please!"

  "Are you alone, Babs?"

  "Of course I'm alone."

  I slipped the steel bolt free to release the door. "Come in." I didn't open the door myself. I stepped back, to the side and away from the hallway light, the gun in my hand ready.

  She slipped through quickly, eased the door closed behind her. I glanced at her; a light coat was already sliding from her shoulders to reveal a sweater that did nothing to hide the beautiful form beneath.

  I stepped behind her, slammed home the steel bolt. My thumb kept dancing on the safety of the automatic, and I held the thing behind me, from her sight.

  In the shadows that swallowed the room, her voice came out husky, the warm and familiar tone I'd known so well: "You haven't called me for months, Steve."

  I felt the anger in me. "This is a hell of a time to compare social notes," I retorted. I wasn't ready or willing to play games. "What's this all about, Babs?"

  She crossed the room, eased herself to the edge of the bed. She sighed. "Do you want me to beg?"

  She caught me off balance with that one. It came without preamble. No nonsense.

  "What?" I think I stammered out the word.

  Her face lifted to me. "Isn't it obvious why I'm here? I—I was on a date with some idiot, and I wanted to . . ." Her voice faltered.

  "Go on," I insisted.

  "I wanted to make love," she snapped. The steel in her voice softened as quickly as it appeared.

  I swore to myself. She knew I hadn't dated anyone for a long time. Except, that is, for Kim. But I knew that didn't bother Babs. What went on in someone's bed, she felt, was the business only of those people who made love; and no one else had anything to do with it.

  Yet, with all that had happened . . . Then she stood up and moved close to me, her breath coming faster and her cheek brushing against mine. In the darkness I grinned. Here this beautiful creature was about to drag me onto the sheets and I stood like a wooden Indian with the .38 still in my hand and not knowing what to do with it. A voice spoke clearly to me. My own voice. It told me what to do with the gun: Just hang on to it, Steve, old boy; just hang on to it and keep that safety off and the hammer all the way back.

  With her? With Babs? What the hell was I supposed to do with the .38? Shoot her?

  Her hands kept moving. They knew how and what to do with me, and I was half frantic trying to remain sensible, to keep a firm grip on myself. Babs tugged me back to the bed and eased me down. She raised her body higher, arching. Her breasts came to my face. Christ! Those beautiful breasts, against my face, pressing against my lips. My head was spinning. I smelled her perfume, just noticeable.

  Spinning ... A dun roaring began somewhere within my ears; I could almost feel my blood racing as her stomach pressed against mine. Her perfume ... my head, spinning . . . spinning . . . My God, spinning

  . . .

  You bloody fool!

  Cursing, I tried to shove her away. A sudden weakness stunned me; I seemed to have no more strength than a child. Barbara's body remained atop mine, writhing, her breasts smothering me. She was all over me and as I strained to free myself I felt her hands trying clumsily to hold me down. I began a long slide down a huge well; the temptation to let go, just to fall and fall forever, grew stronger within me.

  Fear, adrenalin, the instinct for survival . . . these are marvelous things. I tore myself from her grasp.

  Alarm bells clamored wildly in my head. Something terrible was happening. ... I knew I must get up. I cursed, raving at the weakness that crippled me. Gasping, I threw her to one side, rolling away to the other and then stumbling to my feet. She came after me like a tigress, her breasts again squeezing against my face, and Christ, my head, the spinning. . . .

  Then I remembered. The .38 ... I still held it in my right hand. I didn't want to hit her with the gun. I tried it the other way. I balled my left hand into a fist and hit her with everything I had, what I thought was a ripping blow. It was clumsy, weak. She gasped, then threw herself again at me. I fell back, staggering.

  Anger poured through me when finally I realized just how wrong everything had become. For a moment I was free. I stepped back, thumbing the safety on, and then I brought the barrel of the .38 down in a vicious arc. I felt the blow of metal smacking into something soft and yielding. I stood there with my chest heaving, gulping desperately for air, as Barbara collapsed. She didn't moan or cry out; she just crumpled to the floor.

  The .38 slipped from my fingers. I began to feel numb through my arms and legs. Cotton filled my mouth. My arms were as heavy as lead, and I wanted to sleep. That's all. Forget everything. Sleep. Just sleep . . .

  I reeled away from the window, used the walls for support, and made it to the bathroom. I pawed at the light switch, jerked open the medicine chest with clumsy, stupid motions. I had it in my fingers but I dropped it. There was that roaring again in my ears, and everything was blurring before me and I bent down to pick it up. ... I knew I'd never make it to my feet again, so I just let go and slumped to the bathroom f
loor; my head slammed against the sink but I ignored it, on my knees, pawing blindly, and then I had the ampul in my fingers, and snapped it in two and jammed the smelling salts against my nostrils.

  Something exploded in my chest and throat and deep inside my head, and in the sudden harsh light the bathroom spun wildly, a stomach-wrenching dervish of gleaming tile and toilet bowl and sink and bathtub, and I twitched my way into a fit of coughing. Long minutes later I lay weakly on the floor, my head a hornets' nest of pain. But I was through the worst of it. I took a few more stiff pulls of the ampul, and climbed shakily to my feet.

  I walked back to the bedroom. The sight of Barbara still crumpled on the floor brought me up short. I switched on a lamp, and what I saw made me curse. A nasty gash along her forehead had spilled a lot of blood that stained her hair and the carpet where she lay. I hurried to the bathroom to get a wet towel.

  While I cleaned the blood from her head and face, I thought about what had happened. Now that it was in the past, it wasn't too difficult to understand. In her hair, sprayed across her breasts . . . there was enough chemical sprayed on her body to knock out anyone against whom she could press tightly for a few minutes. The fumes were barely perceptible, and perfume had disguised the odor. Just a little longer . . . those lovely breasts against my face would have sent me spinning into unconsciousness. I tilted back her head. Sure enough; there were two small antidote filters within her nostrils.

  I was still too weak to lift her onto the bed. I placed a pillow beneath her head and as gently as I could spread a blanket across her body. For several minutes I stood quietly, watching her, trying to collect my thoughts. She began to moan; she was starting to come out of it.

  Then I began to get my brain into gear. Barbara couldn't be in this caper alone—no question that this had been planned carefully. Someone else was controlling this. Someone else who would move in swiftly after she had done her work. After I had been wafted unconscious by the chemical sprayed on her body. Someone else to finish off what she had started. It wasn't a pleasant thought.

  But Barbara didn't want to kill me, for Christ's sake! Not the real Barbara. I sagged against the wall.

  The real Barbara . . .

  Who was real any more? Who wasn't?

  If I didn't know better, if I didn't know I was sane and that this nightmare existed not wholly within my mind, but in real, prosaic, everyday morning-and-night life, I know I would have succumbed to the pressures tightening all about and against me.

  Barbara Johnson had made love with me. We were great friends. She didn't want to kill me.

  But she had tried to do exactly that.

  Charles Kane was one of my best friends.

  Not long ago he tried to murder me with his car. . . .

  During the past several weeks there had been eight separate attempts on my life.

  People—some of them friends, others only passing acquaintances, still others total strangers—had tried to do me in with rifle bullets, automobiles, poison, even a knife. Not one of these people had a damn thing against me.

  Except murder.

  No. Not really. Not those people . . . Christ, I had to shake the cobwebs from my head!

  These people weren't murderers. They were only instruments. Despite that—

  On an impulse I snapped off the lights and moved to the far side of the room, to the window facing the street. In the darkness I eased the drape from the window and studied the street below. All the parked cars seemed alike: dark and abandoned. I waited, my eyes darting back and forth. Then I saw it.

  The telltale glow of a cigarette from one car. I wasn't surprised. Someone was waiting in that car for Barbara to give the signal that I was dead to the world. He—whoever it was—could come up, quickly, to finish me off.

  The nausea came without warning, disgorging bile into my throat. I barely made it to the bathroom.

  The sick-sweet taste drove me to my knees, dry-heaving, helpless to stem the spasms that racked my body. I half sprawled on the tile, giving in to it all, feeling the headache knotting within me. I tried to fight the pain trickling through a thousand cracks of my skull, but it didn't help. I lay there weak and sick, and thought about it. ...

  I knew who was trying to kill me.

  He used these people as implements with which to carry out his task, coldly and unemotionally, a task that he considered to be essential—my death.

  Oh, I knew him, all right.

  God.

  No! I cursed at myself. Spell it out. . . .

  Not the God that people knew, to whom they prayed.

  This one was different.

  The God Machine.

  A brain. Brilliant beyond comprehension. A dream harshly real. A monstrous intellect the like of which the world had never before known. The world still knew nothing about it—him—or whatever you used for a name.

  A bio-cybernetics creature. The finest product of the science and the technology and the hopes of man. A brain—a real brain made up of the same things that make up your brain and mine. A brain that filled an entire building, that reached out across a nation, a brain that was infinitely faster and more diversified and more capable than a million human minds.

  A brain that . . . well, this one didn't think it was God.

  It knew it.

  And it was doing its best to destroy me.

  I lay there on the cold bathroom floor, my chest heaving for air and my stomach knotting in spasms and the pain scrabbling through my mind, a beautiful girl unconscious on the floor in the next room, and I wondered—

  How do you fight God?

  2

  my name is Steve Rand.

  I'm not an ordinary person.

  Ever since high school I knew there was something different about me. It was, I learned, the manner in which I thought, the way the wheels turned inside my skull. I was a numbers adept. I thought of math as, well, almost as if it were music. I never worked at math. It flowed; everything always fitted beautifully. I never experienced difficulty with the same problems that kept my friends up through all hours of the night. Numbers always marched dutifully in tune, always fell into place for me.

  I was still in high school in Madison, Wisconsin, when a government search for students with unusual skills in the mathematical sciences selected me, and some twenty others, for special tests. Two government scientists discussed with us physics, algebra, geometry, calculus, differential equations, cybernetics, probability, the topological sciences and other fields of which I was barely aware. The scientists told us that if we did well in the tests we could have our choice of almost any college or university in the country.

  I didn't fathom this sudden and, I considered, undue attention. Yet the tests themselves excited the government scientists. Even when I failed to master some of the really wicked problems they threw at us.

  When I ran into the brain twisters that stopped me cold, I knew something was wrong. I didn't know why; I just knew or sensed it. I explained to them that I simply wasn't ready to go that deep. The fact that I recognized my own inadequacies seemed to please them.

  My parents were somewhat overwhelmed by it all. Not until several days after I'd completed the tests did my father even discuss it with me. I discovered only then that he had been visited by the two government scientists. He told me—this is what he had been told—that my grasp of the problems I faced took place with extraordinary speed. Several tests with which I'd wrestled were dead end. They were deliberate blocks that didn't have any one answer to them. I seemed to recognize these almost at once and, ignoring them, went on eagerly to the remainder.

  That's all there was to it, really, for some time.

  Then, three months before my graduation, we had another visitor from the government, a man who was to become closer to me than any other human being. His name was Thomas A. Smythe, and years would pass before I was to learn that Tom Smythe had actually been assigned to me. He was—well, Tom could be described accurately as an unusual, perhaps even an
odd sort of person. Physically he was big: nearly six feet four inches. But he walked with a catlike grace and a physical ease that belied his bulk.

  And he had a mind that was positively uncanny—a mind by which, on many occasions, I would find myself frustrated and caught by surprise. That easygoing, huge fellow with his pipe and his deep throaty voice was a master psychologist. I would come to learn that rarely did he think in terms of the present.

  His everyday world always stretched years into the future.

  Tom Smythe was waiting for me one day when I arrived home from school. I mentioned I had only another three months before graduation. Tom Smythe said he had come to discuss with me and my parents, on what he called a hard basis, my career beyond high school. My scholastic record of straight A's should have guaranteed little difficulty in gaining just about any college or university. But I was also aware that not even a superb scholastic performance assured a really free choice; there were schools where the almost arbitrary decisions of admissions officials, and the waiting lists, would block admittance.

  Tom Smythe explained with unabashed candor, "If you would like to continue your career, specializing, as it were, in the mathematical sciences"—he paused for a gesture with his pipe as if to demean his ability to open any university door in the land—"we can place you wherever you wish to go.

  Of course," he added, "we have some ideas about that ourselves. . . ."

  My father was an old horsetrader from way back when. He also had the habit of driving right to the point of a matter. He stirred his drink idly, studying the swirl of Scotch around the ice cubes in his glass. Without preamble he lifted his eyes and stared directly at our visitor. "Tell me, Mr. Smythe," he said abruptly, "why the government is going to so much trouble."

  Tom Smythe knew when to cut the mustard; of a sudden he tossed aside the amenities of social conversation. "Your son is what we consider an adept in the higher mathematics," he said. "The tests Steve took some months back told us a great deal about him. Oh, not so much what he can do now," he emphasized with another gesture of his pipe. "That's only of passing importance. The tests indicated a potential, a great potential, that as yet remains untapped. It must be nurtured, guided, developed."