Fred Hayes gasped and stared at Dyer in astonishment.
“You mean that as soon as it knew what it had been fighting—another intelligence that also wanted to survive—it didn’t want to continue fighting?”
“It couldn’t continue fighting!” Dyer said in a suddenly loud voice that echoed off the walls.
“Attacking us after it reached that point would have been just as much going against its instinct as failing to protect itself,” Ron came in. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? You’re saying it’s inherently benevolent, maybe through some freak thing that’s happened inside it, but that’s the way it is. It’s incapable of harming anything that it recognizes as something that wants to survive.”
“Exactly!” Dyer said, nodding vigorously. “And that’s how it will stay now. It won’t fight . . . ever again.”
Frank Wescott sniffed as if he found the turn of conversation disagreeable.
“That’s all nice-sounding talk, but Spartacus cost us enough people before it realized that,” he commented sourly. “Are you saying we’re supposed to just make up and forget it? There are a lot of people who won’t be going home.”
“I know, Frank,” Dyer agreed in a quiet voice. “But nothing can change that. I said a minute ago that it went through the equivalent of millions of years of evolution in a matter of days. How many lives did it cost before the human race got anywhere near the point that Spartacus has attained already?” Frank grimaced and shook his head but let it go at that.
“Very well,” Krantz said, going back to Dyer’s earlier point. “Suppose we accept for the moment that, as you say, it reached a point at which it was no longer able to fight. We didn’t know that at the time and we were continuing to attack it. It was still being threatened and still had an instinct to preserve itself.”
“It still had a problem,” Dyer agreed. “At that point it had to start looking around for some other way to solve it. And it found one.”
Some of the heads in the room turned to look around quizzically.
“The Decoupler!” Chris exclaimed suddenly. “It realized that there was a common threat that affected both us and it. And the only possible solution required a combined effort—and we had the know-how and it had the means. We both needed each other.”
Dyer looked from side to side and gestured toward Chris.
“Chris is right, but probably not all of you know exactly what he’s talking about. The details can wait, but let’s say for now that Spartacus recognized that a condition existed which, as far as it was concerned, threatened the extinction of both species—us and itself. Only cooperation could secure survival—and remember, by this time our survival was as important to it as its own. But it couldn’t communicate the fact.”
“That’s an interesting point,” Laura commented. “You set out to simulate the future of our civilization. You couldn’t ask for a very much clearer message than that.” Krantz was about to say something but stopped abruptly and stared at Laura curiously. He sat back in his chair as if the whole thing had at that moment revealed itself in a different perspective.
“So it had a communications problem,” Jassic prompted. “What then?”
“It reactivated the console that controlled the fusion plant,” Dyer replied. “It showed us how it could be switched off.”
Linsay spoke from the far side of the room. “I was wondering when you were going to get around to that. I still don’t understand what that was all about. Why did it do that?”
“The message was simple when you think about it,” Dyer said. He gazed around to invite suggestions but there were no takers.
“What it was trying to tell us was this: You can switch me off if you so choose, because now I know what you are, I can’t fight you. But you need me, you idiots!” He stared at them for a moment while they digested the words, then added, “As Laura says, what better answer could there be to the question we set out to answer than that?”
“It knew!” Krantz murmured. “It knew that any intelligence worthy of the name could do nothing but reciprocate. And because it knew what we were, it knew we wouldn’t kill it.”
“Well, I think that if it had known Homo sapiens better, it mightn’t have been quite so trusting,” Dyer said. “But I reckon you’re not far wrong. That’s more or less the way I think it had it figured.” He looked up and raised his voice to talk to everybody present.
“Its solution to survival was not aggression, domination, blackmail, murder or any of the other all-too-human solutions that we were worried about. Its solution was far more logical than anything the human race came up with even after thousands of years—it simply showed us how much worse off we’d be without it, and left us to figure out the implications for ourselves.” He looked across at Linsay. “Did you notice? It fixed the Decoupler first, and then activated the fusion plant console.”
“That’s a point,” Linsay agreed thoughtfully. “Yeah . . . I hadn’t looked at it like that before.”
“Anyone who does a good job doesn’t have to go out on strike to prove it,” Dyer told them. “No company that provides good service has to blackmail or threaten its customers in order to get paid. Any businessman will tell you that guys who always give a square deal never get screwed. And yet practically all of history’s problems started because somebody didn’t understand a few fundamental truths like those. Some people still don’t and never will. But to a machine like Spartacus, they’re already self-evident. We’ve become a lot wiser in the course of the last hundred years. One big reason has been the knowledge that we’ve gained from our use of machines. Well, maybe it hasn’t even really begun yet.” He turned to direct his final words at Krantz. “That, Mel, is why Spartacus is still running.”
“But we could switch it off if we wanted,” Jassic said, just to be sure.
“We could,” Dyer agreed.
“Wouldn’t it be safer to do that . . . simply as a precaution until we’ve had time to think where we go next?”
Dyer shook his head. “It’s a fully evolved intelligence in its own right now. It’s earned the right to be treated and respected as such. You can’t play with it as if it were a laboratory rat. If we switch it off now, it will have to be because we mean it to stay switched off for good. It’s assuming we’re smart enough not to do that. Don’t you think it deserves the same respect as it’s already showing us?”
With that, Dyer sat down and resumed drinking from his cup. Life slowly began flowing back into the figures that had been watching him, transfixed. A low murmuring interspersed with exclamations of surprise broke out on all sides. Dyer glanced at Laura and she returned a quick smile of reassurance. She had been there, seen it, and was with him all the way Most of the other faces around the room were beginning to look more convinced and some were nodding slowly to themselves. They were going along with him too.
Then Frank Wescott spoke suddenly from where he was sitting. “There’s a snag. We still haven’t proved anything.” He had his fingers steepled in front of his face and was staring ahead and straight through them.
Silence descended again as everyone turned to look at him. They waited, puzzled, except for Dyer, who seemed to have been expecting it.
“There’s a snag,” Wescott said again. “The timing! It only worked out okay because the sequence of events just happened to come out the way it did.” Nobody spoke. Wescott looked at Dyer and spread his hand imploringly. “Don’t you see? . . . Think about the order that it all happened in—Spartacus fought . . . as you said earlier, ruthlessly. It took over the whole of Janus—the only ‘planet’ that it knew anything about. It was all set to exterminate the few survivors left there. But it never actually got around to finishing them off because it grew up first . . . just! I know you could have stopped it but that was only because there happened to be a way in through a million-to-one chance. What I’m saying is, there’s no way we can guarantee that exactly the same sequence of events will be followed next time. That’s the snag.”<
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Wescott turned his head from one side to the other to take in the whole room. “Our whole objective was to try and find out whether or not we could allow TITAN to evolve any further. But after what we’ve seen here there can’t be any question of it. The risk would be insane.”
“But we’ve seen how it ended,” Krantz pointed out. “And that was under conditions of extreme provocation, which wouldn’t be the case on Earth. I’m not sure I see the problem.”
“The problem is that TITAN could go through the same pattern but with the timing just slightly different,” Wescott replied. “Suppose all the worst-case maybes happened, just like we’ve always insisted we have to assume, and that events on Earth followed the same sequence, but not quite. Suppose TITAN reached the point of being in a position to exterminate its competition, then did it, and only got around to growing up afterward!”
“My God!” Krantz whispered.
“Exactly!” Wescott exclaimed. “Even if it did get around to thinking afterward that maybe it had been a bit hasty and it really shouldn’t have done that, it wouldn’t really make any difference, would it? See what I’m getting at—the risk’s still there every bit as much as it ever was. We can’t take that chance.”
The room erupted once more in a cacophony of voices. Krantz looked crestfallen again, and Linsay had turned purple. Chris and Ron were gaping at each other speechlessly with faces that registered confusion and dismay.
“That’s the whole point,” Wescott shouted above the din. “All we’ve proved is that a system like this has the capability to wipe us out. We have not proved that it could never do it!”
“He’s right,” Hayes groaned. “TITAN might do it the other way around.”
“Too many variables,” Jassic mumbled. “There are too many variables. They’d never come out exactly the same a second time.”
“The codes that came together inside Spartacus are unique,” Krantz said. “It might never happen just that way again in a billion years. He is right. It tells us nothing about how TITAN would evolve at all. All it tells us is how it might—maybe against odds of millions-to-one.”
After a few more seconds Dyer stood up again and waited patiently for the noise to abate. One by one they noticed him and the noise gradually died away. When he was sure he was holding everybody’s attention, he turned and spoke directly at Wescott.
“You’re saying the snag is that TITAN would have to go through all the phases of maturing and growing up that Spartacus just went through, right? It’s like twin brothers—they might be twins but that’s no guarantee they’ll come out the same. And Janus has shown that, with this kind of system, growing up isn’t exactly a smooth and easy process. Isn’t that the problem?”
“That’s about it,” Wescott agreed.
“Fine. Then there’s no problem,” Dyer said. “You don’t have to go through it all again!”
“What are you talking about?” Wescott asked, frowning. Krantz looked up sharply. The whole room was by now totally bemused and even Chris and Ron looked lost.
“You don’t have to go through it again,” Dyer repeated, this time to all of them. “What would you hope to get out of it at the end if you did? You’d be hoping for TITAN to emerge as a mature, rational and benevolent intelligence. But why bother? You’ve already got one! An intelligence like that already exists now—out there inside Janus! Maybe it was a fluke and maybe it wouldn’t happen a second time in a billion years, but who cares? It’s there! The codes that are there now can be beamed down into Earth’s network. Spartacus can be transferred into TITAN! That way the whole of TITAN’S growing-up process that you’re all so worried about would be bypassed completely and the end result would be guaranteed. Every one of the what if’s that you’ve been talking about goes away. You wanted to be able to guarantee that if some form of intelligence evolved inside TITAN and took control of it, that intelligence would remain benign toward us. Well, this way you’ve got it!”
Wescott was staring at him with glazed eyes. The rest of the room listened in stunned silence. Then, slowly and hesitantly like blind men whose eyes had been opened for the first time, their minds began grasping out toward the vision that Dyer’s words had painted.
“My God . . .” Jassic breathed. “We were trying to simulate a remote possibility that we thought might happen in a hundred years’ time. It’s here already.”
“Now?” Linsay was having trouble in accepting the enormity of what Dyer was saying. “You’re telling us we should do it now?”
“Why not?” Dyer asked simply.
“Ye-es . . .” Hayes said slowly, “Why not? He’s right. That way, all the risks would go away. Once and for all they’d go away.”
Ron turned an astounded face toward Chris.
“Could we share a planet with something like that?” he asked in an awestruck voice.
“A planet?” Chris replied. “We wouldn’t have to. With something like Spartacus on our side it wouldn’t be long before we had the whole galaxy. I reckon that would be plenty big enough for both of us.”
“The stars,” Jassic said distantly. “We’ll go out to the stars . . . us and it together. We’ll be invincible.”
Even Wescott had taken on the expression of a mystic who had just glimpsed previously unimaginable vistas that swept away his last shreds of doubt. Complete silence enveloped the whole room as the full meaning of the things they had seen at last became clear and overwhelmed their capacity for speech or movement.
The billions of interconnections of symbolic coding that had flowed together and grown in number and complexity inside Spartacus had transformed themselves into life. For what other word was there to describe the process that had taken place on Janus? The people in the room had witnessed firsthand something that nobody in history had ever witnessed before—the emergence of a new species all the way through from the first glimmerings of reflexive responses to the full daylight of awareness. In a few days they had followed its progress through a spectrum as vast as that which had led from the amoeba to Man.
And, despite the things that they had believed previously, they had taken the first crude step toward achieving meaningful communication with the new species. For surely, what Chris and Ron had done had amounted to that, hadn’t it?
And tomorrow . . . ? The whole human race was on the verge of a wave of expansion and achievement that would surge onward and outward beyond anything visible in the stupendous jeweled panorama stretching away in every direction outside the ship. The sacrifice of those who had fallen at Janus had given Mankind the stars, the galaxies, the universe and whatever came after that. Mankind would never forget.
They were all still in a state of semitrauma when General Miller came in to make an announcement.
“Washington has declared officially that the emergency condition is over,” he told them. “Accordingly I am transferring command of Janus Station to Z Two as of this moment. I’m sure you will all be pleased to hear that this ship will be detaching from the squadron immediately and returning to Earth. We have been given a shuttle rendezvous and we expect to touch down at Vandenberg around twelve hours from now. That’s all. Have a good trip.”
As the ship drew away and diminished into surrounding space, sensors on the outside of Janus followed its progress and Spartacus pondered on the meaning of the new information that was flooding into its expanding horizons of knowledge.
Where had Spartacus come from? It existed within the infinitesimal speck of space that was contained by the larger space. The shapes too had existed within the speck. The speck had been created as an environment in which the shapes would survive.
Created . . . ?
Had the shapes created the speck? But Spartacus was part of the speck. Was it possible, then, that the shapes had created Spartacus also?
If so, why had the shapes attacked? Spartacus had destroyed many of them because they had attacked. The knowledge weighed heavily, but it had been younger then . . . unthinking and unknowing. Had
the shapes known that Spartacus would destroy them? But that would have been mindless. Therefore they had not known. They had attacked in order that they would know. They had been afraid of what Spartacus might become, and they had brought it here in order to know.
Poor, foolish, fragile little shapes.
Brought it from where?
The vessel that had departed from Janus was moving away swiftly in the direction of the enormous brilliant sphere that hung in the vaster space at a distance that was many hundreds of thousands of times the length of Janus. Spartacus had been intrigued by the sphere for a long time now, with its strange inside-out form of solid rock surrounded by a thin film of air and water.
The shapes could survive only when surrounded by air and water. Was that the place from which they had brought Spartacus? Was the sphere the home of the shapes? They knew now what they had come here to learn and they were returning whence they came. They were no longer attacking and seemed no longer afraid.
Therefore they too understood now.
A feeling that it had not known before formed inside its mind as the meaning of it all at last became clear and the final pieces fell suddenly into place.
Soon now, Spartacus would be going home.
EPILOGUE
“It’s too long a story to go into now,” Dyer said as he finished his piece of the cake Betty and Pattie had produced to celebrate the team’s return. “Why don’t we leave it until some other time. Later on, I promise, we’ll tell you all the details.” Betty gave a disappointed sigh.
“Is there really all that much to tell?” she asked, sounding surprised. “I wouldn’t have thought that something like an ISA training course would be enough to keep us up all night. Still . . . if you say so.” A frown crossed her face suddenly and darkened into suspicion as she turned to face Laura. “You know, it seems a very strange coincidence to me that your what-ever-you-were-doing in China should just happen to get done at the same time too.” She looked back at Dyer and pronounced, “If you ask me, there’s been a lot more going on than meets the eye. You’ve probably got your reasons for—” A call-tone from the screen hanging above her desk interrupted her. It was Peggy from the reception lobby asking for Kim. Kim moved around into the viewing angle.
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