The God Machine

by Martin Caidin

  There's nothing quite like organization. Charlie's unconscious form disappeared before my eyes, whisked from the floor by the two husky agents. The door closed behind them, and I collapsed in my seat, my ears ringing and every nerve in my body twitching wildly.

  Tom returned to his chair behind his desk. "Sorry I had to do that to you, Steve," he said quickly.

  "But if I do what I think I'm going to be doing, I've got to have unquestionable reasons and justifications behind me." His face sobered. "You're aware, I hope, that we will be considered in some quarters as treasonous?"

  I'd thought about that, all right. I nodded, still not wanting to speak.

  While Tom called the security ward of the hospital, I tried to collect my thoughts. He hung up the telephone and looked at me.

  "All right, Steve," he said. "What do we do now?"

  "I've had something in mind for a few days," I said slowly. "But I think it's wisest not to say anything to you or to anyone else. Not at this point, anyway."

  "What if you get clobbered? Ever think of that? What happens to your precious plan then?"

  "I've thought of it."

  "And?"

  "If it happens, you'll be given ... it will be delivered to you; the means doesn't matter now. You'll be given a complete rundown of what I'm attempting to do."

  "That's risky as hell," he said, irritated.

  "I know, I know," I gritted. "Don't you think I'm aware of that? But I've lived with this and I think it's the best way." I shook my head. "You'll just have to go along with me, Tom."

  His eyes bored into mine. "Does Kim know?"

  "Christ, no. I wouldn't dare. She thinks I'm Jack Tarvin."

  "Do you think 79 has gotten to her?"

  I felt a sickening sensation crawl into my stomach. "I—I honestly don't know, Tom," I admitted.

  "Yesterday she was absolutely normal. I mean, I couldn't find a thing about her that wasn't Kim. But I don't know." I shrugged, helpless.

  "That's right," Tom said. "You don't know and you can't afford to take any chances. I'd hate to have you find out you made a mistake— after it was too late," he appended.

  I nodded.

  "Do you realize that if something slips up—with Kim, I mean—and she cottons on to your being Steve Rand, and if she has been put under by 79, that—"

  "I know," I snapped.

  "Don't get touchy with me," he shot back without a pause. "I want to be sure you do think of these things. You get dewy-eyed, and you can blow the whole thing."

  "I know that too, damn you."

  "You might be put into a position where you would find yourself forced to . . ." He paused. "To kill her," he finished.

  "Jesus, you twist it after you get it in, don't you?" My voice was a hoarse whisper.

  "You could say that," Tom replied with a blank face. "That's my business. You might even have to consider—if the circumstances demanded it—killing me."

  I didn't want to answer. Why make noble comments about what's so obvious?

  Tom was holding a deep think-session with himself. Finally he shook his body, as a dog might shake water from himself. He'd made a decision.

  "All right, Steve," he said, "I'll buy your way. For now, anyway. What do you want me to do?"

  I leaned forward, aware that I'd passed the final hurdle to my plans.

  "Leave everything just the way it is," I said. "Take whatever steps are necessary to give me a free hand. You may have to run interference a couple of times."

  He showed his distaste for letting events out of his direct control. "What if you get clobbered and I get clobbered? What happens to your house of cards then?"

  I looked carefully at him. "I've thought of that, of course," I said. "It's all written out. If I go several days without making —certain—telephone calls, the whole story, from beginning to end, all of it, the works . . . will be mailed to six different places."

  Instantly alert: "Any newspapers?"

  I nodded. "Yes, Tom," I said with complete honesty. "Four of them. All in the right place to do something about it."

  "God damn it, Steve," he said angrily. "That's dynamite! If there's a slipup and this ever gets out—"

  "To hell with that," I said, my voice sharp. "It will be a thousand times worse if something happens to you and me and this is buried. Don't you realize that? I had to do it this way. Besides," I said to end the argument, "it's all set up and I will not change it at this late stage."

  He leaned back in his chair, controlling his anger, knowing he had no choice but to drop the matter. "All right, all right! What's your next move?"

  "I'm supposed to be given a work tour this afternoon," I said. "Kim has been assigned to me again.

  It will give me the chance to get around and check into a couple of things without being too obvious about it."

  He nodded. "Sounds good."

  "I think I've got the weak spot in this whole damn thing figured out pretty well."

  If I'm wrong, I said to myself, this could be the kind of hand where I lose by default.

  "After I finish this afternoon with Kim," I said to Tom Smythe, "I want to grab a bite to eat—"

  "We'll eat together in the cafeteria," he interrupted. "Won't hurt at all to have you seen publicly with me some more."

  "Fine. Then I'll want about thirty minutes by myself." I said.

  "Where?"

  "My office. I've got to be alone, Tom," I stressed.

  He nodded. "Consider it done. What else?"

  "Can you keep servicing crews on duty tonight? The more people, the better."

  He chewed over my request and, finally, nodded slowly. "Can do. I suppose one day you'll explain all this to me?"

  I grinned at him. "You'll get a first edition of my memoirs," I promised.

  "Got a time schedule worked out?" he asked.

  "Yes," I replied. "I'd like to have everything moving at eight tonight. Can you be with me?"

  He laughed without humor. "I wouldn't miss this for the world."

  38

  precisely at twenty-two minutes past eight o'clock that night I entered Service Compartment Number 11. SC 11 was one of a series of servicing facilities located throughout the huge complex of Project 79 where technicians could attend to monitoring and systems checking of the intricate equipment that made up the cybernetics organism. Essentially the servicing technician was a cybernetics diagnostician who searched for symptoms of existing or potential difficulties. Each such compartment was linked directly to the master and the slaved subsystems of 79. Here you could read the bio-electronic heartbeat and other "living rhythms" of the cybernetics Brain and its many appendages. If there were a need for direct servicing of the computer systems, the compartment monitors pinpointed the specific location for such work and gave some idea of the equipment and parts that would be needed.

  There was also a random pattern of direct visual inspection of the internal systems of the computer.

  Past experience proved that no matter how exhaustive a planned program of inspection, maintenance, and repairs for the servicing of any complex cybernetics system, you still couldn't do away with a skilled technician eyeballing the mechanisms for which he was responsible. For example, any automatic system will indicate a wire that has snapped or worked itself loose. It won't show what a man can see with a glance—that the wire is loose or frayed or being subjected to pressures that will make it come loose sooner or later. The eyeball inspection adds up to preventive maintenance at its best.

  And that held one of the key elements of the plan I'd worked out so carefully. Such inspections were maintained on both the regular schedules of the project and— it was an all-important

  "and"—random scanning of the inner mechanisms of 79. It was through this established procedure that I hoped to gain access —through the security-cleared person of Dr. Jack Tarvin, of course—to the internal cybernetics systems.

  In each servicing compartment the maintenance inspector had available a programming keyboa
rd with which he could interrogate the computer as to the status of its systems. It worked easily enough. The inspector sat before the keyboard—it was no more complicated than a typewriter with a number of additional keys for automatic interrogation—and typed out the questions he wished to ask the computer.

  Most questions were not in the form of direct interrogation; the queries went into the automatic sensing systems of 79 and were simply readouts of pressure, electrical flow, temperature, humidity, and so forth.

  If there was to be a direct contact with 79, the inspector punched the DCM button for Direct Contact Mode. The answer came back on a teletype system or, if there were no requirement for permanent records, the inspector could read the answer on an electrical-word display, something like a moving signboard. When I came into Compartment SC 11, I punched for DCM.

  Tom Smythe stood behind me and to my side, watching as I activated the DCM and began to query 79 as to the status of its bionics subsystems. I didn't take any chances; I stayed in the area where I knew better than anyone else the structure of the computer systems. For ten minutes I followed what would have been the normal, expected routine of any inspector, typing out the questions and studying the answers as they slid past us on the readout display. Everything went as smoothly as it did on any other occasion when such maintenance interrogation was put to 79.

  Until I punched out the notification that a random personal inspection would be conducted within the next two-hour period:

  INSPECTION RANDOM PATTERN CHECK MECHANICAL PLUS ELECTRONIC

  SYSTEMS PLUS SUBSYSTEMS. SECURITY ADMISSION SMYTHE NUMBER ZERO ONE

  NINE SEVEN TWO SIX TARVIN

  NUMBER EIGHT EIGHT FIVE ONE SIX ONE. TIME PRESENT PLUS MINUTES ONE

  TWO ZERO. CONFIRM.

  The answer should have been before us immediately. 79 requires less than a millionth of one second to receive the message, check its memory cells, and start the reply. This time that didn't happen.

  The readout display remained dark.

  Behind me, Tom Smythe cursed in a low, unhappy voice. "That's exactly what I meant when I told you we were having difficulties with this overgrown mechanical ego," he complained. "I know and you know and that blasted machine knows the answer should have been immediate, but—"

  "Did they run systems operations checks?" I broke in, turning to glance at Tom.

  He nodded quickly. "Everything checked out perfectly," he replied. "Nothing wrong anywhere. No blocks, no stoppages, no problems in the systems. Nothing. Except that the son of a bitch won't play."

  Silence filled the compartment. I became aware of what was almost an electrical feeling in the room. I found myself shifting my feet, uneasy, a prickling sensation starting along the back of my neck.

  Tom watched me carefully. "You feel it also?" he said suddenly. "Like the damned air is ionized or something. We ran checks on that also. Nothing, just like before. But you can feel it, all right."

  He gestured angrily at the computer. "That thing is trying to make up its mind whether or not to go along with you. You know that, don't you? It's going to make a decision as to whether or not you should even be allowed to get inside its systems where—"

  "Where it considers itself to be vulnerable," I finished for him. "Tom, I don't—"

  The message light flashed on to cut off my words. We weren't prepared for the computer's response:

  CONFIRMATION DENIED.

  "What the hell—" The words burst from me without thinking.

  Tom leaned back against a tape console, lighting a cigarette.

  "Cute, isn't it?" He gestured unhappily. "This has happened before, by the way. It flatly refuses entry—even," he added significantly, "to requested maintenance personnel."

  "How long has this been going on?" I asked.

  "Couple of weeks," he answered.

  "But why haven't they done something about this?" I was amazed. How could they let this situation continue?

  "We're still trying to figure out how," Tom said. "At the same time we're trying to keep it as quiet as we can. Once the word gets out among the people who work here that our electronic friend has slipped a circuit or something, we'd have a mild panic on our hands." He took a long drag on his cigarette. "If this keeps on like this, well . . ." He shook his head slowly. "It could mean we're going to blow all these years of work and more money than you or I could count in a hundred years."

  I didn't like what I was hearing. "Why the hell didn't you tell me all this before right now?" I demanded. "It could have saved a lot of time and trouble, and—"

  "Just hang loose," Tom broke in. "It's been unpredictable, no pattern to how 79 is acting. You're a newcomer—as Tarvin, I mean—and I wanted to see what would happen with a new name cleared through Security. Evidently"—he nodded at the computer—"it's making its new habits inclusive to one and all. Another point, Steve," he said, his voice intent on the moment, "I didn't want you forming any opinions before the act." He shrugged. "It will be sort of interesting to see what happens from here on in."

  He grinned. Despite the problem weighing so heavily on his shoulders, he could still enjoy my own discomfort at the hands of the machine I'd helped give the same intelligence that was now defying me.

  And that had tried to kill me. I didn't much see the humor in it. But maybe it's better to laugh than to cry.

  I turned back to the communicator keyboard.

  JUSTIFICATION. I banged out the word.

  This time the response was immediate: NUCLEAR REACTOR COMPLEX ENTRY

  FORBIDDEN.

  "But I hadn't queried for the reactor!" I said, vexed.

  Tom didn't say anything. At this point he just watched. I moved again to the keyboard.

  JUSTIFICATION. I felt helpless with being forced to communicate in this manner. The reply glowed across the response panel:

  FAILURE REACTOR CHAMBER PERSONNEL SECURITY SYSTEM. RADIATION

  PRIMARILY GAMMA. LEVELS PROHIBITIVE HUMAN SUBJECTS.

  I wanted to curse. Tom stared at the letters sliding along the readout. "There hasn't been a thing about any radiation leakage," he said quietly. "The damn thing is lying."

  I shook my head. "No, it isn't," I replied. It can't 'lie' as we understand the term. It's beyond the capability . . . the conceptual capability, of the system. It's not lying, Tom," I repeated. "If we check we'll find radiation, all right. Only, it's not an accident. 79 created the problem to justify its refusal to permit entry."

  SPECIFY INTENSITY. We waited for the answer. Bang; it was there: just like that.

  ROENTGENS ONE ZERO ZERO.

  One hundred roentgens per hour . . . That was a rate that could affect seriously anyone exposed to the gamma radiation for more than an hour. 79 knew the level exceeded the permissible safety limits.

  Between four hundred and six hundred roentgens direct dosage is lethal to most people. And if one hundred rad didn't do the job, then I was quite certain 79 would just increase the intensity. Well, two could play the game.

  CONFIRM ADMITTANCE EMERGENCY RADIATION TEAMS. HUMAN PERSONNEL

  PROTECTED FULLY. CONFIRM.

  No luck. The answer stabbed into my eyes.

  FORBIDDEN. LEAKAGE SERIOUS. ROENTGEN LEVEL INCREASING EXPOSED

  AREAS. DANGEROUS HUMAN SUBJECTS.

  Here we go again, I thought. My fingers moved in a blur across the keys.

  BASIC SECURITY WAIVED. DECISION EMERGENCY, CANCEL

  basic requirements safety. I thought for a moment, but no good. I turned swiftly to Tom. "What's the overriding justification?"

  "Code Six Six Able Eight One."

  PRIORITY CODE SIX SIX ABLE EIGHT ONE. CONFIRM.

  Code Six Six Able Eight One was the emergency signal to shunt aside all safety and security requirements for any person authorized to enter the complex. I knew the combination to the final door to get into the reactor complex. But first there was the matter of being provided with "security acceptance"

  by 79 so that I might first get to that damned d
oor. And 79 just wasn't having any of it. I wasn't surprised when the next response came to life on the readout.

  CODE SIX SIX ABLE EIGHT ONE REJECTED. RADIATION LEVELS INCREASING

  LETHAL INTENSITY. ADMITTANCE FORBIDDEN.

  Well, to hell with the damned reactor room, Rand. Try something else! Muttering to myself I banged on the keys—

  REPORT INSPECTION STATUS PRIMARY COMPUTATION CENTER.

  The lights glowed.

  FORBIDDEN. RADIATION LEVELS ...

  I didn't wait to see the rest. I fumed, helpless. Because even with the proper ID security materials and passing the checks of Tarvin, I could never get through to where I wanted. Either to the main power center or to the primary computation center; either one would do for my purposes. But I couldn't get through those laser beams and other defenses. Damn!

  I turned to a monitoring panel, twisted open the cover, and stared at the radiation indicators for the reactor complex.

  Tom looked over my shoulder, and whistled. "Christ, look at that! It's up to three hundred already."

  I nodded.

  "I'm going in there, Tom."

  "But it's certain death! You know it will raise the intensity of the gamma—"

  I cut him off. "No matter. You know that," I said quickly, wanting anything but a discussion of my own courage. I would need all I had to get this private mission accomplished as I'd planned.

  Once I got past the basic defenses, I could get into the reactor room.

  79 wouldn't bother to seal the final entrance door to that room. Because it could immediately raise the level of radiation to a thousand roentgens or more. And that was certain death for a human being. It would be suicide for any man to force his way there.

  Suicide.

  That was the key.

  I turned to Tom. "Listen, no arguments now, for Christ's sake," I pleaded. "I know what I'm doing, Tom. But I need your help."

  He started to object, then caught himself, and nodded. "All right, Steve. But if you get killed, I'll never talk to you again."

  I was startled to find myself with a smile on my face. "Fair enough," I said. "Now, can you start an attempt by, well, a couple of men will do, to get into the primary computation center?"