The God Machine

by Martin Caidin

He stabbed the pipe at me. "Rules of the game is," he said with a flourish of the pipe, "horse sense can beat logic, or whatever it is you fellers call the scientific method, any day in the week and," he smacked his lips satisfyingly, "twice on any Sunday y'care to name."

  "What do you mean?" I was starting to come out of the alcoholic fog.

  "Remember when you had that flush?"

  I nodded.

  "Well, t'tell you the truth, I had you beat."

  "You did?" Steven Rand, mathematician, with a stupid look on his face.

  "Shore!" Old Mike tossed off a tumbler of whiskey, wiped his lips, and sucked again at his pipe.

  "Had y'beat dead to rights, I did. Folded a full house."

  "B—But why? There was $600 in that pot!"

  "Um-mm, weren't my money. Weren't that much, either, not in a game like that. Big thing in pot limit, is to wait for the right pot, set up your opposition. Like I set you up." The pipe waved before my face. "See? That pot wasn't worth it. Let you figger you was on a winnin' streak that just couldn't lose. So I had you beat." He shrugged. "No one else in the pot, there wouldn't be much raising, and I wanted you to get a mite careless. Over-confident, you might say." He laughed, a leathery wheeze from his lungs.

  "And that you did, boy, that you did."

  I allowed as how he was absolutely right.

  "Pot limit is an all-out game. The works. You're shooting fer the top o' the mountain, so to say.

  Y'got to set things up, bide your time."

  He chuckled. "You fell for the oldest trap in the game."

  I stared at him, and he gestured freely as he went on.

  "The way to winnin' is losin'."

  He paused to let his words sink in. "You lose jes' the way you want, at the right times in the game.

  You lose jes' when you want to lose and you set up the other guy. And when he goes for broke and you also got the cards you been waiting fer, why" —he smiled hugely—"you jes' nail his hide to a tree and he's yours for the pickin's jes' like, hm-mm"—he peered at me again through the smoke—"well, jes' like you were."

  "Wait, wait a moment," I said, my voice suddenly frantic. "What did you say, Old Mike? A few moments ago, what you said was the key, what you called the oldest trap?"

  He chuckled again, pleased with the avid interest his words were receiving. "Why, I said that the way to winnin' was losin'."

  Light detonated within my head.

  "That's it!" I cried, my voice so loud heads turned to stare at our table. "That's the answer!" I didn't know I was slamming my fist into my palm over and over.

  It was the answer.

  The cybernetics brain was the world's greatest chess player. Mathematically it was perfect. It could anticipate every possible move. It couldn't lose.

  But it couldn't play poker worth a damn.

  Because it didn't know how to lie.

  35

  the more I thought about the possibilities, the more excited I became. The leathery old bastard was absolutely right—sometimes the way to winning is by losing. In the world of gambling, playing cards and playing poker are anything but the same thing. They have a relationship only in that the same deck of cards is used. In poker you set up your opponent and sometimes you toss in a winning hand to sucker in the guy across the table from you. Take a game of pot limit or table stakes, why, it's insane to play just your cards. You play the gamut—yourself, your opponent, the other players, the odds, the tremendous effectiveness of a heavy bet carefully timed. What you do, how and when you do it, is far more important than the cards. Poker is legal chicanery—bluff. A good liar, the man with the poker face, is a man who knows not only how but when to bluff, and to win.

  79, despite its masterly use of stratagems and evasion, functions within strict rules of logical deduction. It doesn't know how to lie; it can't fabricate facts. Its circuitry is built around deduction, comparator value, even heuristics. But it's a creature of logic. And it is not logical to lie, because this is distortion of datum, and you can't weave digital bits of thought from the emptiness of nonfact.

  That's why the computer is so superb a chess player. Mathematically it computes every possibility and it moves within the unassailable logic dictated by its computations. There are just so many umpteen ways of doing this, umpteen-x ways of doing that, and the rest is inevitable.

  Which is why a good poker player in the table-stakes game can whip any computer any day in the week—or, as Old Mike put it so succinctly, on any Sunday you'd care to name. Successful poker is illogical, and to the sneaking, lying, illogically playing human being it has one more advantage—the next hand is never more than a few moments away. You rescramble the odds with every shuffle and new deal.

  You can always cancel out what's wrong with a hand by throwing in the cards and starting all over again.

  The time had come for a new shuffle. And this time I was going to handle the deck.

  Every now and then you take a deep breath, and plunge. I did precisely that when I placed a person-to-person call to Tom Smythe. Call it human heuristics; I don't know. But somehow I felt absolutely confident that Tom Smythe still remained free of the hypnotic embrace of 79. Certainly that had been the case before I took off on my soul-searching trip to Jackson Hole; otherwise Tom would never have violated his own rules by issuing me a Federal ID card that made it legal for me to pack a concealed weapon.

  For several minutes Tom and I had an unholy row on the telephone, and in his voice I detected a growing sense of strain. I refused to come around to his requests by laying my cards on the table as he insisted I do. Thank the Lord this man knew me as long and as well as he did. He accepted my promise that at the first opportunity, which would be within one to three days, I would explain fully the reasons for my actions.

  "By the way," he offered, "Charlie Kane's come out of the woods. Snapped out of that mental fog."

  I chewed that over. "Fill me in, Tom. It might be important."

  "Not much to it." I could almost see Tom Smythe shrug as if to dismiss the issue. "His injuries were superficial, it seems. The doctors claim he was a victim of shock and that it's not unusual for him to snap out of it the way he did."

  That, I thought, was about the only thing that wasn't unusual where Charlie was concerned. Tom Smythe broke in on my thoughts. "The doctors even have an explanation for his insistence that there was a red light at the corner and that you ran the light. They attribute it, umm, to something they call a delayed block. Somewhere else, on a street that looks exactly like the one where he ran into you, there is a traffic light, and—"

  "Christ, do you believe that crap?"

  Tom's response was a burst of laughter. "I thought that would get a rise out of you." He chuckled.

  Then his voice grew serious. "No, I don't buy it. I might have thought nothing about it again, but I know something about what makes people tick. This doesn't come up smelling like roses. When I bring in everything else that's happened—with you as the clay pigeon—it smells less and less like roses. In fact,"

  his voice growled as he spoke his conclusions, "I would say that it stinks."

  "Hooray for you," I said. "Where's Charlie now?"

  "He went back to work yesterday. Nothing strenuous. His doctor said it would be good therapy for him."

  "Good therapy!" I exploded. "Don't they know that—"

  Tom broke in on my tirade. "I said that they think it's therapy. Me, I find it's an excellent way to keep a close eye on our friend. Rest easy, Steve," Tom said in a reassuring tone. "He doesn't even know about the cocoon we're keeping wrapped around him."

  I mumbled something inarticulate.

  "I've been meaning to ask you something," Tom said suddenly. "What happened between you and Kane?"

  I laughed. "You won't believe this, Tom," I said, knowing how foolish the words sounded. "But nothing happened. In fact, he happens to be a good friend of mine."

  "You got peculiar friends, Mr. Rand." Tom didn't hide the sarcasm.

&
nbsp; "The answer's included ha our talk a couple of days from now," I said weakly.

  "All right," he said, grudging my refusal to say more, "I won't push for the moment. The whole thing is crazy enough, but there's something else I want to go over with you, and it is important."

  "Go ahead."

  "We're having trouble with our electronic playmate."

  Open trouble with 79? The back of my neck went cold.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Difficult to say," he admitted. "Mostly it's in Vollmer's bailiwick and in accompanying sections.

  Some of the programmers act as if, well, I'm trying to find the right words for it—"

  "Try 'disturbed,' " I broke in.

  Another pause. "Yeah, that would do it, I suppose," Tom said slowly. "They sure as hell are disturbed. But it's difficult to figure it out, and no one seems to know how or why or what is really going on. But you know something, Steve?"

  "What?"

  "I've got the strangest feeling that you know what it's all about."

  "That's an interesting theory, Tom."

  "You're a big fat help."

  I ignored the remark. "Let me toss one into your lap," I said. "You said you were having problems with our, ah, electronic playmate. What kind of problems?"

  "That's even stickier to pin down," he replied. "Excessive rejection of programs, for example. But there doesn't seem to be any justification for the actions."

  "Go on."

  "To add grist for the mill," he said, "the self-programming is getting out of hand."

  That was new. I did my best to remain casual. "Oh? In what way?"

  "As much as I can tell you on this talk-box," he said, "it demands specific information that doesn't seem to have any valid reference to or bearing upon active projects. Social structures, industrial programming and succession, intricacies of political structure and succession . . . things like that." He made it clear he wouldn't say more on the telephone.

  "Well, that's a dead-end street," I lied. "But if you—"

  "No, there's more," he broke in. "And this really grabs you by the shorts," he stressed. The silence held for so long I thought we had been disconnected. But his voice came back and his words were guarded. "There seems to be an, ah, call it a subtle change in relationship between us and our friend."

  "Such as what." I was anxious for him to continue, but even as I felt my impatience, I knew that Tom Smythe was very disturbed. Even these oblique references to the project we did not identify by name or number were a staggering departure from the security-conscious habits of Tom Smythe.

  "You're going to think I'm off my trolley, Steve."

  "Damn it, man, you're hedging!"

  Another uncomfortable pause. Then, blurted out:

  "I get the feeling we're being tolerated."

  "Tolerated!"

  "That's about the sum of it. I can't shake the feeling," Tom said unhappily. "It keeps sticking in my craw."

  My humorless laughter must have sounded very shrill to Tom Smythe.

  I spoke with Tom again early the next morning, before he left for his office. After a brief hello I asked him to put the call on tape so there wouldn't be any mistake about what I would need from him.

  "I always put calls on tape," he reminded me. I'd forgotten that. "And while we're on the subject,"

  he said, irrelevant for the moment, "let me say I have spent a sleepless night trying to put together the pieces of your little puzzle. I think I'm on to a lot more than you realize and"—his voice hardened—"I do not, repeat, not like it. However—"

  "That makes two of us," I said.

  "Don't interrupt when I'm dispensing largesse," he chided. "However, I am going along with you for now." He sighed. "I hope to God you have the rest of the pieces I'm still missing."

  "Never mind that now," I said, impatient with the unexpected conversation. "Here's what I need from you, Tom . . ."

  Tom was true to his word. Early that morning, as part of the regular daily news report fed into 79, the computer unknowingly ingested a bit of "planted news." It took some doing, but the specialists in the National Security Agency can do just about anything you might dream up as a crash effort. Page 38 of The New York Times was removed from the paper before it went into data processing for programmed input. The NSA specialists redid page 38 exactly as it appeared in the original, except for one particular change. They yanked a story on an airplane crash and reset the type, then supplied Project 79 with the doctored newspaper.

  79 learned that morning that Steven Rand, mathematics and cybernetics specialist, graduate of MIT, and so forth, was among the passengers killed in the airplane crash. The paper carried further details to relate my position with Project 79. To assure completion of the effect intended, Tom slipped into the daily "update data sheets" the notation that Steven Rand had been killed and was deleted from the official records of Project 79.

  During my conversation with Tom, I asked that he set up a security clearance and admission papers and ID cards for a man named Jack Tarvin. I described Tarvin to him; about six feet tall, 195

  pounds, dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and other personal details. Jack Tarvin, I explained, was an old friend of mine, a cybernetics specialist, and I considered it imperative that not only should Tarvin be admitted to Project 79 "to visit any area for which he makes a request" but also that Tom Smythe accede to any needs of the man. I repeated this with emphasis enough times for Tom to become impatient with the repetition. He assured me they would run Tarvin through Security and other necessary machinery.

  I didn't tell Tom that Jack Tarvin at this moment was in Nagoya, Japan—and had been there for the past two years— where he worked on a research program with Japanese scientists at the University of Nagoya. Nor did I say anything about a visit I made to a printing shop in Jackson Hole, where the old man who ran the shop promised to run off a hundred business cards in the next hour. With the name of Dr. Jack Tarvin of MIT.

  I made a call to Captain Al Moore, the ordnance specialist at Fort Carson. I detailed my request to him.

  His reply was a long whistle. "What are you going to do, Rand, start a private war?"

  "No, no." I laughed. "It's all part of those tests we were working on when I asked you for the incendiaries. I wish I could tell you more about—"

  "Pray, not one word more!" he broke in. "Spare me any security lectures from the Dragon Smythe who guards the portals of your precious labyrinths. I'll do it; beat me not again."

  After our shared laughter he reminded me that he would need a justifying paper for "all those goodies." I promised to get that to him the moment I returned to my office; that was good enough for him. He assured me that everything I'd requested would be delivered that same day.

  I hung up the phone and rubbed my hands together. Jesus, it felt good to be doing something.

  And there was plenty more yet to do. I kept the telephone busy most of the morning.

  I called Kim at her office, and after the first heated words, which I had come to expect, I explained to her that a close friend and former associate of mine at MIT, Dr. Jack Tarvin, would show up at the project within the next two days.

  "Tom Smythe is running him through Security and attending to his clearance. Would you be a doll and look after Tarvin for me?"

  "I'd rather look after you, Steve Rand!"

  "Honey, I'll be back within two or three days at the most," I promised. "And I'm wild to be with you together again."

  "You certainly haven't been acting like it." She sniffed.

  "Kim, I know, but—"

  "Where are you anyway, Steve?"

  No hedging this time. "Washington, hon. I couldn't tell you before—look, I'll explain it all when I see you. Be a sweetheart, will you, and look after Tarvin for me?"

  She promised she would do that.

  I looked at my watch. Damn, I'd have to hurry. My plane left in just one hour. The ticket read Salt Lake City, change planes for the flight to Las Vegas, Nevada.
>
  I laughed when I thought of my flying to Las Vegas. I was wrapped up in a gamble wilder than they had ever seen in the gambling capital of the world.

  Theatrical makeup supplies are common fare in Las Vegas; it's got more shows and acts than any city in the world. Where there are actors and actresses there's a need for, and a supply of, theatrical materials.

  I felt like an ass when I walked through the door of a men's beauty shop. They didn't use that name for it, but the sight of grown men being anointed, fluffed, and dyed had me shifting my feet like some idiotic schoolboy. But it was the only place I knew to which I could go without attracting undue attention for what I wanted. Fortunately, for the right price it was possible to obtain a private room. For an extra fifty dollars Andre, "the man who could do anything with other men," would forget what I looked like before he went to work on me.

  My hair is light brown. When Andre got through with me my hair was almost black. So were my eyebrows, and so was the moustache I'd grown—under Andre's sure hands. "One week, ah! It will remain, I assure you. One week without any difficulty whatsoever. I, Andre, promise this. But of course"—he smiled —"You do not wish to soak your upper lip for too long in hot water, eh?" I assured him I had no intentions of doing any such thing.

  Andre also supplied lightly tinted glasses—flat glass, of course—in horn-rims. When I looked in the mirror, I failed to recognize myself. The transformation was startling.

  Andre, who'd been in this business for a long time and expected anything from his clients in Las Vegas, studied me carefully. "It is not enough, you know?"

  "What?" I was startled by his words; I'd been engrossed in my mirror reflection of a stranger.

  Andre's hand waved casually. "I am not interested in your purposes, Mr., ah, Smith"—he smiled—"but what you are doing is not enough. Mannerisms, voice, eh? All these things, too, mark a person. There are little touches, eh?"

  I gave in to his knowledge. He worked on the hair again, and I came out from under the dryer with unmistakably wavy hair. I also gained nearly an inch in height from elevated shoes. Andre suggested a complete change in clothing; he was right. I hated lumpy tweed jackets, but I got one—a size larger than I wear normally. This was necessary because of the corset I wore beneath my shirt—which quite neatly added fifteen pounds to my weight and changed my appearance in a subtle but extraordinarily effective manner.