Silence met my words. The stranger spoke to Tom, for the moment ignoring me. "How much does Mr. Rand know about 6194?"
"I'll answer for him," I said quickly. "I don't know everything because I'm really not interested. But I know enough to prove a point—that a computer that's being utilized by a staff of hundreds of people is the worst security risk in the world." I was enjoying myself now; the rapt attention my words earned, to say nothing of the dismay evident in the room, was almost worth being dragged from bed.
"What a computer doesn't tell you is the tip-off," I stressed. "The cybernetics brain isn't of its own programming capable of deceit. It must have a reason, a purpose, a definition for everything it does. Do you two characters realize that—aside from your precious 6194—there are at least 117 separate programs studying the long-range effects of thermonuclear warfare?" Tom's face didn't change, not so much as a twitch. But his friend in the gray suit couldn't cut it; his mouth worked soundlessly.
"As far as I could determine from last night's session—and I repeat that I was not seeking any information—your program called 6194 is a massive study effort with absolute priority to determine a means of avoiding thermonuclear warfare or, if that doesn't work out, figuring out how to start the war deliberately and get it over with in such a manner that you will cream the opposition without getting hurt too badly yourselves."
I could not prevent the contempt that appeared in my expression. "You're real cute, all of you," I sneered. "You can't stand a future in which we're not top dog—guaranteed to be top dog. The other crowd has the thermonuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, and pretty soon there will be three and then four and then maybe a dozen countries with the means to utilize thermonuclear devices. And don't hand me your sugar-sweet propaganda about delivery systems," I said, measuring my words. "I know as well as you and everyone else in this business that you do not need long-range bombers and you do not need ballistic missiles to tear up any country in the world. The Chinese, or anyone else, are perfectly capable of filling the holds of a merchant ship with tritium or lithium and making an open-ended thermonuclear weapon in the high gigaton yield. You can sink that ship a hundred miles off the western coast of the United States. You can sink it in ten thousand feet of water. You can sink a dozen of them like that. And when they go off, a tidal wave four hundred feet high and moving at a thousand miles per hour, and radioactive beyond belief, is going to sweep the entire west coast and send its radioactivity across the entire country, and, furthermore—what the devil is the matter with you?"
The Security man's face—I still didn't know his name—was slowly turning a dark purple color. I thought he would explode. "Mr. Rand." His voice was tempered steel. "I do not know your exact position here, but for anyone to discuss weapons of that nature openly, is—is ... the worst violation of security I have ever—"
"Why don't you knock it off?" I broke in. "All this security nonsense makes me sick to my stomach. Oh, shut up!" I said quickly as he started the long pent-up explosion. "Just for the record, and just to keep you from turning purple, the information I quoted comes from a theoretical study published more than fifteen years ago in a bulletin on nuclear science. Does that make you feel better?"
"I don't believe it," he growled.
"I don't give a damn what you believe or don't—"
Smythe pushed his way into the fray. "He's right," he said. "It was published openly."
"At least fifty times," I added with a touch of salt in the open wounds of security.
"You haven't answered everything I asked you," Tom Smythe said.
"Oh?"
"Why did you interrogate the computer on 6194? I understand how you learned about it, but—"
"Are you all so dense this morning?" I shouted. "I've already told you, damn it! 79 refuses response to all interrogation on 6194! It will not release any information to any person on whom it does not have a name on its need-to-know list!"
"How do you know that?"
"It told me!" I said, still shouting and no longer caring. "Don't you understand? It will answer nothing in the way of positive information, but it will babble all day and all night, just so long as you keep interrogating it, about negative data!"
A pencil tapped slowly on Tom's desk. I knew he was fast coming to the realization that there was a break in security, but it had nothing to do with me. I saw something else, as well. Tom was deliberately prolonging this session with no apparent purpose. At least I'd thought that until this moment. Now I saw what he was doing. The more questions he asked, the longer he kept this session going, the more obvious it became to another Security official that I hadn't broached their sacred walls. To Tom, that was vital; he wasn't interested so much in finding a mistake, but in discovering the means to plug leaks. And I had given him a beauty.
There was something else to consider. I'd never have a better moment than now to get in my two cents' worth. I screwed up my face into what I hoped was an expression of injured innocence, and then I became the angry young scientist whose program has suffered tampering—without his knowledge.
"While we're on this subject of security and programming, Tom," I said, spacing my words deliberately, "who in the name of Security—that's as profane a word as I can think of at the moment—who in the name of Security authorized interference with my program? What idiot was so presumptuous as to screw up what I've been doing? You people have wrecked several weeks of hard work that will take just as long to overcome; do you realize that? It's one thing to have your own programs, but to come in and mess up what we've been doing here, to create deliberate interference, to negate the data values with which we have been working? That's unforgivable. Furthermore . . ."
In the best tradition of personal injury, emotional pain and professorial shock, I raved for a solid five minutes. During the time I spouted words, I was thinking as hard as I could. How far could I go with what I might tell Tom Smythe and his gray-suited watchdog companion? The only person I had told about the incredible performance of 79 with its attempts to control different human subjects through posthypnotic suggestion had been Kim. The danger, the overriding danger of this whole business was my inability to distinguish any victim from among the large scientific and technical group with which I worked.
Tom Smythe was a frequent visitor to every aspect of our work. How did I know that he was not also a subject of posthypnotic control? I didn't, and there wasn't a chance in the world that I could find out without tipping my hand. And if 79 decided to get real cute and take steps to eliminate opposition to what it now regarded as its primary mission—preventing the outbreak of thermonuclear war—then I might be considered as an obstacle to that goal.
How far would 79 go? The cybernetics brain, I had to keep reminding myself, was doing nothing more than fulfilling its assignment. It had been programmed to regard 6194 as having absolute priority.
Computers are narrow-minded electronic devils to begin with, and electronic rationalization would only compound what was already a nasty problem.
If Tom Smythe were being programmed by 79—I shuddered at the reversal of roles—would he be able to block what I hoped to do? I really hadn't given that as much consideration as I should have.
What would I do about 79? I simply couldn't stand by and allow the cybernetics brain to continue along the path it had started.
79 was following orders. It was possessed of a driving purpose that made human fanaticism seem lackadaisical in comparison. It suffered no distractions, was unburdened by any other primary purposes for its existence. It would thunder after its assigned goal with the brute power of an intellectual battering ram, and while it performed in this manner it would also utilize every weapon it could create. Ahhh, there lay the real danger! It did not possess a single weapon other than its own capabilities. But as it discovered new methods and new means, it would bend whatever lay within its reach, bend it to its own purposes—no! to its assigned purposes. We had never before dealt with a created intelligenc
e of the extraordinary capabilities of 79. That much was evident in the meeting in which I now participated. Even the best programmers who worked with DOD 6194 had failed to anticipate that 79 would pursue, entirely on its own, every possibility to solve the problem of avoiding the "inevitable" thermonuclear war.
And I didn't know just how far 79 had managed to go in its efforts to seek its assigned solution.
Nor did I know to what extent the cybernetics brain might reach. Once you give a super-brain full authorization to seek its goal, it will stop at nothing that lies within its capacity to accomplish. Deceit?
Lies? Sham? Those concepts didn't exist for 79.
They were all elements of strategy. And if it took strategy to accomplish its purpose, then 79
would utilize those elements of behavior. It might not recognize them in the same terms with which we accepted their values, but it could still apply them to the world of human beings who, the computer had concluded, were irrational beings in dire need of assistance.
In other words, 79 knew what was best for everyone. And it was doing everything it could to be a true and faithful servant.
Even if that meant the direct control of the key elements of the political, scientific, and military structure of nations. I stopped short at my own thought. Strange; I had always thought of the goal of 79
as inclusive to a nation. Mine. But my thoughts had been freed, and their conclusion was a matter that consciously, I suppose, I had avoided. Not a nation. Nations. And nations make up the world.
". . . and I hope you realize that your accusations about me are entirely false. What you two have done, literally, is to accuse me—you yourself, Tom, said that I was in trouble —without any basis in fact.
If anyone is responsible for a security leak with your blasted 6194, it's you. Do you realize that? Jesus, that's a hell of a way to run a railroad! You screw up and slap the blame on the first guy who's handy." I rose to my feet to accent my reaction to their false charges. "I want to make it clear and I want it for the record, and I may yet file official charges on this matter, that I have been accused without substance to the charges. What's more—"
"All right, all right!" Tom Smythe slapped his open hand against his desk, and by the look on his face I knew I had scored. "I'll admit we made an error, Steve. But no one had filed any reports or done anything officially and no one has accused you of—"
"The hell you haven't!" I shouted. "You said flat out that I was in trouble, that I'd violated your idiotic security, that I was lucky not to be in custody and—"
"I was wrong! God damn it, I—we—made a mistake!" Tom shouted back, and I felt exultation sweep through me. If Tom Smythe would admit to error with something he considered to be of grave import, then he could be brought to another viewpoint about programming 79. I grabbed a mental rabbit's foot and hung on tight.
"There's something else I want brought out into the open," I said, my voice suddenly quiet.
"Go ahead," Tom said wearily. I glanced at the still unidentified man from Security in the room with us who, I noticed, suddenly wasn't at all eager to contribute to the exchange.
"It is quite obvious to me," I began, "that the only way you could have known about my knowledge of 6194 was to consider me a poor risk and that—"
"Hey, now, wait a minute—"
"Wait, nothing," I said to Tom. "You must have been doing some checking up on people or else you would never have known about my work last night. I didn't think you had stooped to peeking through keyholes, Tom."
I'd hit a sensitive nerve. Tom's face flushed with anger. "You know better than that." The words came out carefully, and I felt a moment's remorse about what I'd said. Because it had been calculated to get under his skin. Sure, he was only doing his job. But then again, so was I—and I reminded myself of the fact.
"Oh, I know how it happened," I said. "It's obvious. Every day you run a programming query with 79, it spits out a list of anyone that's programmed data requests on 6194." I shrugged. "It still doesn't change the facts. You set up a program; you did it secretly; it's interfered with my work; and you have been keeping tabs on me and on my staff, and as far as I'm concerned you can all go to hell."
Do it now, do it now! This is just the right moment to cinch it. ...
"This is for the record, Tom. I don't like being spied on. I don't like people playing games with my work or my life. You can get someone else to play nursemaid to that bag of glorified bolts." I drew myself up straight and looked Tom Smythe straight in the eye.
" I quit."
Before they could say anything, I stormed out of his office.
As I expected, I wasn't allowed to quit. Not that easily, anyway. And besides, leaving my job was the last thing in the world I wanted. But the histrionics paid their dividends in bringing about a heart-to-heart talk with Tom Smythe and with Dr. Howard Vollmer. I figured it wouldn't do any harm to have some added weight on my side of the argument, and I informed Vollmer that I had just resigned. He came pattering into my office filled with clucking sounds of disapproval. I didn't say a word about 6194, but I did raise the roof about interference with my work, and I emulated pure volcanic action while I shouted that some military program had wrecked everything I had done for the past month. Tom Smythe walked into my office just as I reached the zenith of my performance.
During our three-man impromptu conference I demanded the authority to reprogram 79. I insisted that the bio-cybernetics project was near to being wrecked and that so much interference had taken place it would be necessary to institute major memory-block erasing. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to continue the alpha-wave pattern program as we had started it. I knew that several military studies were under way with radio-frequency broadcasts of alpha waves that might temporarily stun or otherwise affect the personnel of enemy forces, and my insistence that my efforts were being ruined would have to carry some weight with the high brass who assigned project priorities with 79.
In the end it didn't do me a bit of good. I allowed Tom to persuade me to remain in my present position, but I ran into a solid wall of opposition when it came to doing any reprogramming that required erasure of data.
"I'm sorry, Steve," Tom said, and he was sorry. "The project we discussed before must have absolute priority." I started to protest, but he cut me short. "Will it help any if I tell you that this isn't an arbitrary decision?" he asked.
"How do you mean that?"
"The priority assignment for 6194 comes down from the White House," he said after a long pause.
"That's off the record, Steve, but it's the straight goods. There simply cannot be any interference with the program."
That eliminated the indirect approach. It also made it clear to me that going through official channels wouldn't have any effect whatsoever upon my goal—to erase the memory banks that permitted 79 to continue its deadly intent to add to its list of victims under hypnotic control.
I kept one point uppermost in my thoughts. I had been responsible to some degree for bringing about this situation. What was more to the point, and of overriding importance, was that I knew better than any other man alive just how far the cybernetics brain could go in the pursuit of its assignment—even if the officials of DOD 6194 had no conception of the hell they were bringing within their midst. If 79
were permitted to continue as it had started, it would expand with lethal speed its grip on officials within government, industry, science—the gamut of control of this nation. It would not stop there; it would stop at nothing to fulfill its ordained mission.
I knew that most of the scientists I knew who might be in a position to interfere with a program protected by priority handed down from the White House would never believe what I might tell them of 79. And if there were credulity enough to heed my words, their response would be all too predictable—
they would want to handle things in the prescribed manner. Such as study groups and investigating boards, all of which would consume far more time than we w
ould have. Again and again I was forced to the reality that I had no way of knowing, really, just how far 79 had already gone.
The official avenues were closed to me. But I wasn't about to throw in the towel that easily. Where reasoning won't work, sometimes direct action will.
I spent the remainder of the day attending to careful preparations. That night I intended to get into the heart of the computer—and raise a little hell of my own making.
30
the guards watched me sign the register, passed several moments with banalities, and threw me casual versions of an official salute. I nodded to them and began the long walk to my office, limping slightly from the leather brace I had strapped to my leg. The brace relieved the pressure on my leg muscles; even with a cane I found myself pleasantly mobile. That was important. Where I intended to be tonight was no place for a wheelchair.
As I switched on the lights in my office, I thought of the value of being well known to the guards standing watch at the portals of our electronic empire. They didn't check the briefcases of those who passed before them every day. If they had inspected mine, they would even now be holding me politely but with great determination. Because a scientist does not pack into his briefcase a small crowbar, three thermite incendiary bombs, and other assorted small but deadly devices with which one man can wreak a catastrophe. Getting the thermite bombs had proved easier than I had anticipated. All it took was a visit to the Fort Carson ordnance officer, and the explanation that we were doing some tests on the heat-effective resistance of different alloys. They were cooperative enough to instruct me in the handling of the deadly things, each of which weighed only six pounds.
I locked my office door and opened the briefcase to examine the incendiary bombs and reassure myself of their operation. The ordnance officer had removed the impact fuses and replaced them with twister igniters. "Just hold it like this," he demonstrated with a model, "twist the end a half-turn to the right, and put it where you want it to burn. There's a two-minute delay built into the igniter." Neat.
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