The Twelfth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: David H. Keller, M.D.

by David H. Keller

  The president gave one hard, long look.

  “Where is it?” he asked, puzzled.

  “I do not need one. Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Now watch me. We are going into traffic. Ten miles an hour is the best we can do. I say one word …TEN. Then another word: START. And we are off.”

  And they were. The beautiful little car started into the city traffic, the engine purring beautifully. It came to a pause when the red lights blocked all traffic, dashed skillfully forward when the green lights turned on. Meanwhile John Poorson sat nonchalantly smoking a bulldog pipe. At last he snapped one word, “RIGHT” and the car swung around the corner and started to weave its way back to the starting point.

  “STOP,” commanded Poorson in front of the main entrance to the U.A.C.C. offices.

  President Babson did not get out. He just made himself comfortable and started to talk.

  “It is a very remarkable performance, Mr. Poorson, but after all, it is nothing new. The same thing has been done with a power boat, and with an airplane. Of course that does detract from the credit due you. But it is simply one more robot.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know it. You have a very sensitive receiving set which responds to the human voice, and evidently to other external stimuli, like those red and green signals. The receiving set transmits definite orders to the operating machinery of the automobile and it moves through traffic, slowly, but safely. But after all, it is nothing but a machine. And like all machines it needs a human being to start it and stop it and direct it.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so, Man! You annoy me with your senseless repetition of that question. I admit that it is a beautiful machine, but I reiterate that it is nothing but a machine. It is made out of metal and wood and rubber. It derives power from gasoline, lubrication from oil, and depends upon electricity. It is a beautiful robot but it is only a machine.”

  John Poorson smiled as he replied. “Mr. Babson, I am just a poor inventor and you are credited with being a very rich man. I would like to make a bet with you, but what I really want to do is to sell you an idea rather than take your money by winning a bet. You think that because I sat here in this car that the car would not make the trip without me. You may have even thought that I had a hidden keyboard and did the steering by pressing this button or that. But I will tell you what I will do. I will put in the tank of this car two gallons of gas. I will let you pick out a circular route starting from here and ending here. Then I will start the car out empty of passengers. We will follow in one of your cars. If the car comes back, will you buy my invention?”

  “But it won’t come back.”

  “Why not?”

  “A thousand reasons, man. First, it would run out of gasoline. A dozen fools would stop it because it had no driver. How would it know how to turn around?”

  “Will you try it?”

  “No!”

  “That means you are afraid to.”

  “NO!!”

  “Then write out for me a hundred mile route.”

  “Here is one in the afternoon paper. It is a hard one—two cities, a toll-bridge, and a ferry.”

  “Let me have it,” asked Poorson. “You get another car for us to follow in. I will not do anything till you come back. Then we will drive out to a quiet street and start the experiment.”

  One half hour later two sport cars, model 77, stood on a side street. Poorson went to the left of the front car, pulled out a sliding arm, put ten 50 cent pieces in a pocket at the end of it.

  “That pays for the gas, toll, and ferry charges,” he remarked.

  Then, making himself comfortable, leaning against the door of the car, he reached under the seat and pulled out a tube with a mouthpiece attached. It was very similar to the business end of a dictaphone. Holding the newspaper in one hand and the tube in the other, he started to read the description of the 100 mile auto trip starting and ending in the city. It mentioned the toll and ferry charges. It gave the speed limits of the different towns. It detailed an important detour. At last Poorson came to an end of the reading and put the mouthpiece back.

  Babson looked on with amusement. “You did not say a word about buying extra gas,” he commented.

  “That is not necessary,” retorted the inventor. “Now suppose we go back to your car, and be ready to follow.”

  “Aren’t you going to start it?”

  “No. It is timed to start in three minutes after the orders are given.”

  * * * *

  For the next three hours the two men followed the empty machine. It went over the hundred mile course with the same precision a driven car would have shown. It did everything it would have done had the most skillful driver been in command. Finally the two observers parted, Babson rather curtly making an appointment for ten the following morning.

  He lost no time. Acting as though the loss of every minute was the loss of a million dollars, he hastily summoned his war board, the mechanical and fiscal experts who had helped him build the U.A.C.C.

  “I have just had a thrill and a shock,” he told them. “I have seen one of our sport cars, model 77, go over a hundred miles without a driver. I saw that car drive up to a filling station when it needed gas. I saw it obey every traffic signal. It slowed down when passing through the school zones. At toll houses it paid cash; it went on and off a ferry, it ignored a barking dog but came to a complete stop when a little child toddled across the road. It followed a complicated route which was dictated to it three minutes before it started. I tell you I saw it all. The inventor and I were right behind it. It was a good thing we were, otherwise it would not have gone five miles. As it was, we had to explain to a half hundred traffic cops that it was an experiment. Naturally they were somewhat astonished at the sight of an empty car going down the street. And out in the country it speeded up, fifty miles an hour in some places.

  “Can you see what it means, gentlemen? This inventor took a model 77 and did something to it and that something has come very near to making it a perfect machine. What is a perfect machine according to our vision, Jones?”

  “Simply a machine that does its own thinking.”

  “Exactly! We all know that a perfect machine is far better than an imperfect man. Tens of thousands of our people are being killed every year on our highways, hundreds of thousands are injured and all because the automobile is being driven by people who are not capable of turning their nervous systems and muscles into a perfect machine. I saw that converted model 77 in action for three hours and I do not think that it would ever hit a pedestrian unless he deliberately ran into it. Then think of the social side. There are still millions of people who want to drive but who lack the elemental courage. For example, the blind, the aged, timid women, cripples, little children too young to secure permits to drive. There is a market for you to think of. Suppose we could assure these people that they could drive in a machine of safety? It would send up our sales a hundred percent in a year.”

  An old mechanic stood up. His age and his ability made him trusted and respected. He was called Try Um Tyson, because no change was ever made in a U.A.C.C. model without his approval, and his approval was only given when he had personally convinced himself that the change was a worthwhile one.

  “Mr. Babson,” he asked. “Pardon me for the question, but you were not a wee bit drunk when you saw this car perform?”

  “Not a bit. I had not even taken one drink.”

  “And you saw all this with your own eyes?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “There was no dwarf or little man hidden in the car?”

  “No. I looked.”

  “And it stopped for gas…and everything, well, just like you told us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, Mr. Babson, there is only this to say. Machine or no machine, there is small difference between the way that car acted and the way it would act if it had some form of living intelligence controlling its actions. In other words it act
ed as though it were alive”

  “Just a clever machine, Mr. Tyson.”

  “Perhaps that is all a human being is, Mr. Babson.”

  “No, we have souls.”

  “Perhaps. Maybe so. That is what we think. But some day some genius will put a soul into a machine and then the human race will become slaves. My advice is for you to tell this fool of an inventor to take his plaything and sell it to someone else.”

  “Let him do that. Then one of our rivals will put us out of business.”

  “No. There will always be people who will want to have the satisfaction of driving their own cars. And even if you lose all you have invested in the U.A.C.C., it will be better than destroying the race.”

  “You talk like a madman,” interjected Cocke, the leading financier of the group. “What our stockholders want is a large dividend. If this invention can be bought cheaply enough, we can easily triple our sales, and make a handsome income. My advice is to have the machine investigated, and if it holds up like Mr. Babson said it did this afternoon, let’s buy out the inventor. If we don’t, someone else will. I have a feeling that it is a big thing.”

  That was the final decision. And Try Um Tyson was forced to be one of the committee to make the necessary investigation. He went out with Poorson the next day at ten, and he stayed with him and the new model 77. He stayed with them all day and at last, near midnight, he took a taxi to President Babson’s home. After some difficulty, he forced an entrance to the great man’s bedroom.

  “I have spent the day with Poorson,” Tyson whispered.

  “Yes?” interrogated the millionaire. “With him and his car.”

  “Yes?”

  “And I am frightened at what I saw. It is alive, Mr. Babson.”

  “No, not that,” laughed the great man.

  “I tell you it is. Poorson has taken our model 77 and he has given it a brain!”

  “Just electricity, radio, God-knows what, but it is just a scientific utilization of scientific facts, forces of nature.”

  “It’s more than that. You take the body you live in. It is bone and muscle, blood vessel and gut, and anything in it can be duplicated except the life that makes it a living being. You can say that is simply the nervous system, but no one has been able to make one. Just suppose, Mr. Babson,” (and here the man’s voice sank to a barely audible whisper) “just suppose this man Poorson has learned how to make a brain and in some way attach it to a machine. If he can do it to an automobile he can do it to any piece of machinery. Most of the machinery we know about is stationary but the locomotive, the automobile, the airplane, the submarine; they all move. Man! Cannot you see it? The whale is the great leviathan of the ocean, but put a brain into a submarine, and take a thousand of them with the killing desires of a shark and the smelling power of a bloodhound and turn them loose on the enemy’s commerce.”

  “You are drunk, Tyson!” cried the President, in anger.

  “I am not drunk, except with fear. I fear the machines we have in our pride created. Someday a new creation will rule the world. What a pity if that new creation would be the innocent work of our own foolish hands.”

  “Forget it! What I want to have you tell me is just one thing. Does the machine do what I said it did?”

  “It did and more too. No living man could have driven it better than it drove itself.”

  “Then that is all I want to know. Go back to your bed and let me return to sleep. Tomorrow we will try to come to terms with Poorson.”

  “That is bad news.”

  “It is going to be a big thing for our company.”

  But Try Um Tyson was not so sure of it.

  * * * *

  The next day Poorson was told to bring his model 77 to the tenth floor of the U.A.C.C. main building. There he was met by President Babson, and five of his leading advisors.

  “What do you want to sell us, Poorson?” asked the President.

  “Simply this,” replied the inventor, raising the seat of the car and pointing to a shining sphere about eight inches in diameter. “The rest of the changes I have made in the car are simple and can be easily duplicated by any of your mechanics, but inside that hollow steel ball is something that is my secret. I know how to make it, and I think that it would be best to keep the secret.”

  “Then you want to furnish my company with that ball?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course you understand that it will be easy for us to cut one of these balls in two and see what is inside of it?”

  “Yes, anyone can do that.”

  “And then we could make the balls ourselves.”

  “No. I doubt that.”

  “How long will the ball work?”

  “I am not sure, but certainly as long as the owner will want to use the average car.”

  “What do you want for one of them?”

  “I think, in large quantities, about one hundred dollars each.”

  “How many can you turn out a day?”

  “That depends on your plant. You are going to make them.”

  “I thought you said it was a secret.”

  “Part of it is, but the actual making of the balls and the filling of them you can do. Your machinists can make the balls, your chemists can fill them with the chemicals that I will supply the formulae of, and then they can be brought to me attached to the individual cars in the way I will show you and I will do the rest.”

  “And what is that, Mr. Poorson?”

  “I thought you had guessed it by this time. I am able to do something to it that makes it alive.”

  “You are lying to me!” cried the President of the U.A.C.C.

  “No! He is telling the truth,” whispered Tyson, harshly, as though the words burned his lips. “That is what I am afraid of. It is alive, gentlemen; it is alive! He has made a machine live! Give him a million, fifty million, and make him promise that he will destroy this one and never make any more.”

  Pandemonium reigned.

  The little inventor was the only calm person in the room. At last Babson recovered himself enough to ask:

  “You mean that you have given old 77 a brain?”

  “Something like a brain. You know it had a nervous system before, electric wires and all that sort of thing. What I have done is to furnish a sort of clearing house to receive impulses, place a value on them and sufficient reactions so the car can take care of itself.”

  “It sounds incredible,” admitted one of the mechanical experts.

  “All new inventions have that sound.”

  “And you will do this thing to these steel spheres at a hundred dollars each, as fast as we send them to you?” asked Babson.

  “That is my price.”

  “Man, you have sold something. We will, by the Seven Sacred Bulls of Bengal, have you sign on the dotted line as fast as we can get the agreement typed. You start in at once and tell these men what you want them to do. No time can be lost. I want the new model on the market by the first of the year. And will it sell? Boy. Oh, BOY! But won’t it!!”

  The next year’s sale record verified every prophecy made by the President of the U.A.C.C. The new cars sold. In addition to the uses he thought of, the general public discovered a hundred new ones. It is safe to say that the new model almost revolutionized America in more ways than one. In New York alone three hundred taxi men were killed before the rioting started by the introduction of the new car as a driverless taxi was finally introduced. But the public wanted the new cars. They were tired of the Pirates of Broadway. It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down a tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.

  Old people began to cross the continent in their own cars. Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting. The blind for the first time were safe. Parents found they could more safely send their children to school in the new car than in the old cars with a chauffeur.

  In one year, ev
ery other make of car faced failure. At the end of the year, the entire manufacturing of autos was controlled by the U.A.C.C. In five years America depended on fifty million automatic cars for its transportation. Babson was indeed making money. Poorson stayed in a little room and day by day did things to the never-ending chain of cars that rolled through that little room to have the chemicals inside the steel spheres activated into life. He was making money also, but he was doing more. He was thinking.

  In spite of the great increase in the number of automobiles, there was a constantly decreasing number of accidents and deaths. The new automatic automobile, the living machine, was far more careful in its driving than the average moronic human chauffeur. When Poorson thought along these lines, he was happy.

  But day by day he became unhappy as he saw the fate of the old cars, the second handed and third-handed cars. He saw cars that once had been beautiful, perfect machines, sold for twenty-five and fifty dollars and driven mercilessly as long as the engine would turn and the parts hold together. He followed the cars to the graveyard and saw them torn apart for the metal in them. He saw those beautiful steel spheres used as playthings, pounded and dented by curiosity seekers. In disguise he went into a research laboratory operated by a surviving rival of the U.A.C.C. and saw one of the spheres cut open, and an effort made to analyze the thing inside before it started to decay.

  It made him unhappy.

  * * * *

  He had created a form of life, and in a way he felt that he was responsible for it. He was still driving his original model 77. It was like a friend to him, a faithful dog. If there was any deterioration going on within the globe of steel, he could not detect it. Instead, he felt that the living force he had created was adding to its intelligence. He wondered at times if he could not, by adding toits mechanical armamentarium, make it speak!

  But this was the car that he owned. How different its fate from that of the average car! He felt that when its days of usefulness were over, he would keep it in a museum, and never, never think of selling it. It would be like slavery to sell it.

  And he wondered if he really was any different from the old time slave-dealer, the trafficer in human flesh. He was making something living and selling that living thing into bondage. He talked over that phase of the problem with Tyson, for he and the old man had become fast friends in spite of their original differences of opinion.