I found myself in the gallery a second time a month ago when I went to MIT to visit the archives and have a look at old records. I was alone, and the gallery seemed very spacious to me. Although unvisited and very likely unswept, it was ideally clean. Running a finger along the panes, I could see that there was not a speck of dust on them. Likewise, the information boards in the niches gleamed as if just installed. The thick, soft floor covering muffled every step. I wanted to press the button on one of the information boards, but my nerve failed me. I hid in my pocket the hand that had touched the button. I was like a child, frightened by my own actions, as if I had touched something forbidden. I was taken by surprise, not understanding the situation. It never crossed my mind that I was in a tomb, and that what loomed under the panes was a corpse, although such an idea would not have been absurd, particularly since, in the lamplight which flared up when I left the elevator, I had been taken aback by the lifelessness of the colossal pit.
The impression of decay and neglect was intensified by the appearance of the surface of the brain, undulating like a glacier congealed in grime. From its fissures protruded Jo-sephson contacts compressed into panels; they looked so large near the walls that they resembled leaves of tobacco pressed into sheets in a drying house. The fact that I had been in a tomb flashed through my mind only after I had returned to the basement and was driving up the ramp into the broad daylight. It was only then, too, that I realized with amazement that this building, which with its gallery had been built almost in anticipation of becoming a mausoleum, had not become one, nor was it visited by crowds of the curious. Yet the public loves to look at the remains of powerful creatures. In this neglect and disregard there is an inherent and continuing collective design: the silent conspiracy of a world which wants to have nothing to do with inviolate, unmitigated Intelligence unaccustomed to any emotions— this enormous stranger who disappeared suddenly, and as silently as a ghost.
I never believed in Golem's suicide. That was concocted by people selling their own ideas, who are interested only in the price they can get for them. To maintain quantum contacts and switches in an active state meant keeping an endless watch over the temperature and the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the foundations, Golem took care of this itself. Nobody had the right to enter the actual interior of the brain pit. After the assembly work had been completed, the doors leading to it on all twenty floors were hermetically sealed. It could have put an end to this, had it wanted to, but it did not do so. I do not propose to present my own arguments against the action, for they are irrelevant.
III.
Half a year after Golem's departure Time published an article on a group of "Hussites," hitherto unknown. The name was an abbreviation of the words "Humanity Salvation Squad." The Hussites proposed to destroy Golem and Honest Annie in order to rescue humanity from captivity. They operated as an absolute conspiracy, isolated from all other extremist groups. Their initial plan envisaged blowing up the buildings that housed the two machines. They proposed sending a truck loaded with dynamite down the access ramp of the Institute and into the underground parking area. The explosion was supposed to cause the ground-floor ceilings to collapse and thereby crush the electronic aggregates. The plan did not appear difficult to carry out. Security in the structures consisted only of guards on alternating shift in the porter's lodge at the main entrance, while access to the basement was prevented by a steel shutter which would burst under the impact of a truck. Nevertheless, successive attempts ended in failure. Once the brakes jammed while the truck was approaching from the city freeway, and it took until dawn to repair them. Once there was a breakdown in the radio transmitter which served to steer the truck and ignite the load. Next, the two people in charge of night operations fell ill and, instead of giving the signal for the attack, called for help. In the hospital they were diagnosed as having meningitis. The following day a back-up group got caught in a fire set off by an exploding gas tank. Finally, when all the key arrangements had been duplicated and the people in the chief positions replaced, an explosion occurred as the dynamite boxes were being loaded into the truck, and four Hussites perished.
The ringleaders included a young physicist who was supposed to have been a frequent guest at MIT. He attended Golem's lectures and was perfectly familiar with the layout of the premises and the habits of Golem itself. He believed that the accidents which had foiled the attack were not ordinary accidents: the escalation of the counterattacks was too obvious. What had begun as mechanical breakdowns (jammed brakes, a radio defect) had developed into accidents involving people, as a result of which the first lot had fallen ill, the second had suffered burns, and the last had been killed. The escalation had occurred as a growth not only in violence, but also in its spatial dimensions. When marked on a map, the locations of the various accidents turned out to be at an increasing distance from the Institute. It was as if some force were going farther and farther out against the Hussites.
Following deliberations, the initial plan was abandoned. A new one was to be worked out in such a way that neither Golem nor Honest Annie could thwart it. The Hussites decided to make an atom bomb on their own, then hide it in some great metropolis and demand that the federal government destroy Golem and Honest Annie. If not, the bomb, placed in the heart of a great city, would explode with terrible consequences. The plan was worked out with lengthy and painstaking care. A change was made to it providing for a bomb to be exploded immediately after the ransom letter had been sent to the authorities, at a considerable distance from any inhabited place—namely, at the former atomic testing ground in Nevada. This explosion was to prove that the ultimatum was no idle threat. The Hussites were convinced that the President would have no choice but to order the destruction of the two machines. They knew that this would be a violent operation, perhaps involving aerial bombardment or a rocket attack, since it would have been impossible to disable Honest Annie—and therefore Golem as well, I should think—by cutting off the electricity supply. However, they left the government a free hand in the choice of the means of destruction. They claimed that they would be able to see through a faked liquidation, and in such an event they would fulfill their threat without further warning.
The Hussites were even aware of the fact that, by virtue of being connected to the federal computer network, GOLEM could obtain information about everything within the range of the network, from telephone conversations to bank transactions and airline and hotel reservations. So they used no technological means of communication, not even radio, having made allowances for the possibility of being monitored, and having reckoned that there was no code which Golem could not break. They confined themselves to personal contact away from large towns, and conducted their technical experiments in Yellowstone National Park. It took them much longer than they had anticipated to construct the bomb—almost a year. They managed to obtain enough plutonium to make only a single bomb. Even so, they decided to act, certain that the government would yield to pressure, since it would not know that there was no second bomb.
The driver of the truck transporting the bomb to Nevada heard news of Golem's "death" over the radio and stopped at a roadside motel to discuss matters with operation control. Meanwhile the physicist who had planned the operation was of the opinion that the news of Golem's death was a trick of Golem's to provoke precisely what had resulted: a long-distance telephone conversation. The driver was ordered to wait where he was for further instructions, while the Hussite leadership debated how much Golem might have learned about their attack plans from listening in on the call. During the following week they endeavored to mend the damage which they considered the incautious driver had caused, by sending people to various distant towns, from where they were supposed to mislead Golem with intentionally ambiguous calls. The truck driver was expelled from the organization as unreliable. No trace was ever found of him; he may have been liquidated.
The terrorists' feverish activity abated a month later when the physicist retur
ned from MIT. The conspiracy was postponed until the autumn. The truck with the bomb was returned to base and its load dismantled, to protect and conceal it. During the next four months the Hussites continued to assume that Golem's silence was a tactical move. Quarrels broke out within the leadership, for during the fifth month of futile waiting one part wanted to dissolve the organization, while another endeavored to force through a radical solution: the government must be compelled to dismantle both machines, since that alone would mean their certain end. But the physicist did not want to reassemble the bomb. Attempts were made to compel him, then he disappeared. He was seen in the Chinese Embassy in Washington. He offered his services to the Chinese, signed a five-year contract with them, and flew off to Peking. A Hussite was found who was prepared to reassemble the bomb himself, but another, opposed to the attempt in the new circumstances, betrayed the whole plan by sending an account of it to the editors of Time, and also placed in certain hands a list of the members of the group, which was to be disclosed in the event of his death.
The matter received considerable publicity. A government commission was even supposed to be set up to examine its authenticity; in the end, however, the investigation was undertaken by the FBI. It was confirmed that on July 7, in an old automobile repair shop in a small locality seventy miles from the Institute, a dynamite explosion had occurred, killing four people, and also that in April of the following year a truck with a vat full of sulphuric acid had a protracted stopover at a motel on the Nevada border. The motel owner remembered this because the driver, while parking his truck, bumped into the local sheriff's car and reimbursed him for the damage.
Time did not mention the name of the physicist who had been the Hussite spy, but we had no difficulty in identifying him at the Institute. I shall not name him either. He was twenty-seven, taciturn, a solitary fellow. People considered him shy. I do not know whether he returned to the States, or what happened to him subsequently. I heard nothing more about him. When I chose my line of studies, I naively believed that I was entering a world immune to the follies of the age. I quickly lost this belief, so the case of this would-be Herostrates did not surprise me. For many people science has become a job like any other, and they consider its code of ethics the trappings of a bygone age. They are scientists during working hours, and not always even then. Their idealism, if they have any, easily becomes the prey of eccentricities and sectarian attractions. The specializing comminution of science may bear some of the blame. There are more and more scientists, and fewer and fewer scholars. But this too is irrelevant.
Doubtless the FBI also ascertained the identity of the physicist, but that must have been after I left MIT. To be honest, I regarded that as a mere trifle compared to Golem's departure, which had nothing to do with the Hussite plot. I have not made myself properly clear on this point. The plan of attack could not have influenced Golem's decision, had it constituted an isolated fact. Nor was it the straw that broke the camel's back. I am sure of this, though I have no proof. It was just one of a number of incidents which Golem regarded as people's reaction to its presence. It made no secret of this, either, as its last lecture indicates.
IV.
Golem's last lecture occasioned more controversy than the first. People had objected to the earlier one as a lampoon upon Evolution. This one was disparaged by accusations of poor construction, insufficient scholarship, and ill will, nor were those the worst charges brought against it. An idea arose of unknown authorship—eagerly seized upon by the press—which linked the weakness of this lecture with Golem's end. According to this theory, the price of Golem's increased intellectual power was the brief duration of that power. This was an attempt to create a psychopathology of machine intelligence. Everything that Golem had said about toposophy was supposed to be paranoid ravings. Television science commentators competed with one another to explain how Golem was already in decay when it presented its last lecture. Genuine scientists who could have disproved these fictions kept silent. People whom Golem would never have received had the most to say. I discussed with Creve and other colleagues whether there was any point in entering into polemics with this avalanche of stupidity, but we abandoned the idea, for arguments based on facts had ceased to count. The public made best sellers of books which said nothing about Golem, but everything about the ignorance of their authors. The only authentic thing was their common note of unconcealed satisfaction that Golem had disappeared together with its overwhelming superiority, so they could vent the resentments which it had aroused. I was not in the least surprised by this, but the silence of the scientific world puzzled me.
The wave of sensational falsifications which spawned dozens of awesomely mindless films about the "creature from Massachusetts" subsided a year later. Works began to appear which were still critical, but lacking the aggressive incompetence of the previous ones. The accusations directed against the last lecture centered around three issues. First, the fervor of the Golemic attack on man's emotional life, particularly love, was held to be irrational. Next, his arguments concerning the position which Intelligence occupies in the Universe were considered to be tangled and incoherent. Lastly, the lecture was reproached for its failure to maintain a single rhythm, so that it was like a film screened slowly at first, but later at increasing speed, Golem was said to have dwelt first on superfluous details, and even to have repeated excerpts of its first lecture, but toward the end it switched to inadmissible condensation, devoting one-sentence generalities to themes which demanded an exhaustive treatment.
These accusations were both justified and unjustified. They were justified if one considered the lecture in isolation from everything that came before and after it. But they were unjustified, since Golem had incorporated all that in its last appearance. Its utterance likewise linked two different threads. Sometimes it was speaking to everyone present in the Institute auditorium, and sometimes it was speaking to one person alone. That person was Creve. I realized this even while the lecture was going on, for I knew the controversy over the nature of the world which Creve had endeavored to force upon Golem during our nocturnal chats. So I might subsequently have cleared up the misunderstanding arising from this duality, though I did not do so, for Creve did not wish it. I could understand that Golem had not broken off the dialogue as abruptly as it seemed to outsiders. For Creve —and for me as well—the awareness of this was a secret consolation at that difficult time.
Even so, at first neither Creve nor I was able to recognize fully the dual nature of the lecture. Likewise, those who were prepared to accept the chief structural base of man in Golem's anthropology felt injured by its attack on love as a "mask for experiential steering" by means of which molecular chemistry forces us into obedience. Yet while saying this, Golem also said that it repudiated all emotional attachments, being unable to repay them in kind. If it showed any, this would be only a stranger's imitation of his host's manners, therefore essentially an imposture. For this very same reason it expatiated on its impersonality and our efforts to humanize it at any price. These efforts were distancing us from it, for how was it not to talk about this, seeing that it was supposed to talk about itself? Nowadays I am surprised only at how we could have failed to notice the places in the lecture which revealed the true significance of the events of the following night. I think Golem composed its final speech in the way it did as a joke. This may seem incomprehensible, for it would indeed be difficult to find a situation in which playfulness would be less appropriate. But its sense of humor was not to human standards. While announcing that it would not part company with us, it had in fact already left. At the same time it was not lying when it said that it would not leave without saying a word. The lecture was its farewell—it said that unequivocally. We failed to understand this, because we did not want to understand it.
We considered over and over again whether it knew the Hussites' plan. Although I cannot prove it, I believe that it was not Golem that foiled their successive attempts, but Honest Annie. Golem would
have done things differently. It would not have allowed itself to be so easily exposed by the terrorists as the author of their defeats. It would have held them so subtly at bay that they would have been unable to discern the unaccidental nature of their every fiasco, both separately and considered together. And since it had no illusions about people, it would not entirely deny them partnership. It made allowances for our unreasonable motives, not to indulge us, but out of rational objectivity, since it considered us to be "intellects subjugated by corporality." On the other hand, for Honest Annie, to whom they were of no interest and who wanted to have nothing to do with them, the terrorists represented something akin to tiresome and persistent insects. If flies disturb me in my work, I chase them away, and if they return repeatedly, I get up and swat them without reflecting on why they continually crawl across my face and my papers, for it is not man's habit to go into the motives of flies. Such was Annie's attitude toward humans. She kept out of their affairs, so long as they did not disturb her. Once, and again a second time, she checked the interlopers, and then she increased the radius of her preventive operations, showing restraint only in that she intensified her counterattacks gradually. Whether and how quickly they would recognize her intervention did not exist as a problem for her.
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