by William Tenn
In the midst of his misery, Dave Pollock rallied. “You think I won’t?” he asked scornfully. “I’ve done most of my traveling here by jumper. I’m not afraid of mechanical progress—just so long as it’s genuine progress. Of course I’ll take the jumper.”
He signaled for one with a microscopic return of his old swagger. When it appeared, he walked under it with squared shoulders. Let them all watch how a rational, scientifically-minded man goes about things, he thought. And anyway, using the jumper wasn’t nearly as upsetting to him as it seemed to be to the others. He could take jumpers in stride.
Which was infinitely more than he could say for the Oracle Machine.
For that reason, he had himself materialized outside the building which housed the machine. A bit of a walk and he might be able to get his thoughts in order.
The only trouble was, the sidewalk had other ideas. Silently, obsequiously; but nonetheless firmly, it began to move under his feet as he started walking around the squat, slightly quivering structure. It rippled him ahead at a pace somewhat faster than the one he set, changing direction as soon as he changed his.
Dave Pollock looked around at the empty streets and smiled with resignation. The sentient, eager-to-serve sidewalks didn’t bother him, either. He had expected something like that in the future, that and the enormously alert servitor houses, the clothes which changed their color and cut at the wearers’ caprice—all more or less, in one form or another, to be anticipated, by a knowledgeable man, of human progress. Even the developments in food—from the wrig-gling, telepathic, please-eat-me-and-enjoy-me stuff all the way up to the more complex culinery compositions on which an interstellarly famous chef might have worked for a year or more—was logical, if you considered how bizarre to an early American colonist, would be the fantastic, cosmopolitan variety of potables and packaged meals available in any twentieth-century supermarket.
These things, the impediments of daily life, all change and modify in time. But certain things, certain things, should not.
When the telegram had arrived in Houston, Texas, informing him that—of all the people in the United States of America—he was most similar in physical composition and characteristics to one of the prospective visitors from 2458 A.D., he had gone almost mad with joy. The celebrity he suddenly enjoyed in the faculty lunchroom was unimportant, as were the Page One stories in local newspapers under the heading: LONE STAR SON GALLOPING FUTUREWARDS.
First and foremost, it was reprieve. It was reprieve and another chance. Family responsibilities, a dying father, a sick younger sister, had prevented him from getting the advanced academic degrees necessary for a university teaching position with all of its accompanying prestige, higher income and opportunities for research. Then, when they had come to an end and he had gone hack to school, a sudden infatuation and too-hasty marriage had thrown him back onto the same treadmill. He had just begun to realize—despite the undergraduate promise he had shown and none-too-minute achievement—how thoroughly he was trapped by the pleasant residential neighborhood and cleanly modern high school between which he shuttled daily, when the telegram arrived, announcing his selection as one of the group to be sent five hundred years ahead. How it was going to help him, what, precisely, he would do with the chance, he did not know—but it had lifted him out of the ruck of anonymity; somehow, someway, it would enable him to become a striking individual at last.
Dave Pollock had not realized the extent of his good fortune until he met the other four in Washington, D. O. He had heard, of course, how the finest minds in the country had bitterly jostled and elbowed each other in a frenzied attempt to get into the group and find out what was going to develop in their speciality half a millenium hence. But not until he had talked with his prospective fellow-tourists—an itinerant worker, a Bronx housewife, a pompous mid-western business executive, a pretty but otherwise very ordinary San Francisco stenographer—did it come to him that he was the only one with any degree of scientific training.
He would be the only one capable of evaulating the amount of major technological advance! He would be the only one to correlate all the bewildering mass of minor changes into something resembling coherence! And thus, above all, he would be the only one to appreciate the essential quality of the future, the basic threads that would run through it from its underlying social fabric to its star-leaping fringes!
He, who had wanted to devote his life to knowledge-seek-ing, would exist for two weeks, unique and intellectually alone, in a five-century-long extrapolation of every laboratory and library in his age!
At first, it had been like that. Everywhere there was glory and excitement and discovery. Then, little, disagreeable things began to creep in, like the first stages of a cold. The food, the clothing, the houses—well, you either ignored it or made other arrangements. These people were extremely hospitable and quite ingenious: they didn’t at all mind providing you with more familiar meals when your intestines had revolted a couple of times. The women, with their glossy baldness and strange attitudes toward relations between the sexes —well, you had a brand-new wife at home and didn’t have to get involved with the women.
But Shriek Field, Panic Stadium, that was another matter. Dave Pollock was proud of being a thoroughly rational person. He had been proud of the future, when he first arrived, taking it almost as a personal vindication that the people in it should be so thoroughly, universally rational, too. His first acquaintance with Shriek Field had almost nauseated him. That the superb intellects he had come to know should willingly transform themselves into a frothing, hysterical pack of screaming animals, and at regular, almost medically-pre-scribed intervals… .
They had explained to him painfully, elaborately, that they could not be such superb intellects, so thoroughly rational, unless they periodically released themselves in this fashion. It made sense, but—still—watching them do it was absolutely horrifying. He knew he would never be able to stand the sight of it.
Still, this one could make acceptable in some corner of the brain. But the chess business?
Since his college days, Dave Pollock had fancied himself as a chess player. He was just good enough to be able to tell himself that if ever he had the time to really concentrate on the game, to learn the openings, say, as they should be learned, he’d be good enough to play in tournaments. He’d even subscribed to a chess magazine and followed all the championship matches with great attention. He’d wondered what chess would be like in the future—surely the royal game having survived for so many centuries would survive another five? What would it be like: a version of three-dimensional chess, or possibly another, even more complex evolution?
The worst of it was the game was almost identical with the one played in the twentieth century.
Almost every human being in 2458 played it; almost every human being in 2458 enjoyed it. But there were no human champions. There were no human opponents.
There were only the chess machines. And they could beat anybody.
“What’s the sense,” he had wailed, “of playing with a machine which has millions of `best moves and countermoves’ built into its memory circuits? That has a selector mechanism able to examine and choose from every chess game ever recorded? A machine which has been designed never to be beaten? What’s the sense—where’s the excitement?
“We don’t play to win,” they had explained wonderingly. “We play to play. It’s the same with all our games: aggressions are gotten rid of in a Shriek or a Panic, games are just for mental or physical exercise. And so, when we play, we want to play against the best. Besides, every once in a while, an outstandingly good player, once or twice in his lifetime, is able to hold the machine to a draw. Now, that is an achievement. That merits excitement.”
You had to love chess as much as he did, Dave Pollock supposed, to realize what an obscenity the existence of these machines made of it. Even the other three in his group, who had become much more restive than he at twenty-fifth century mechanisms and mores, only s
tared at him blankly when he raged over it. No, if you didn’t love something, you weren’t bothered overmuch when it was degraded. But surely they could see the abdication of human intellect, of human reason, that the chess machines implied?
Of course, that was nothing compared to the way human reason had abdicated before the Oracle Machine. That was the last, disgusting straw to a rational person.
The Oracle Machine. He glanced at his watch. Only twenty-five minutes left. Better hurry. He took one last self-encouraging breath and climbed the cooperative steps of the building.
“My name is Stilia,” a bald-headed, rather pleasant-faced young woman said as she came toward him in the spacious anteroom. “I’m the attendant of the machine for today. Can I help you?”
“I suppose so.” He looked uncomfortably at a distant, throbbing wall. Behind the yellow square on that well, he knew, was the inner brain of the Oracle Machine. How he’d love to kick a hole in that brain.
Instead, he sat down on an upraised hummock of floor and wiped his perspiring hands carefully. He told her about their approaching deadline, about Winthrop’s stubbornness, about the decision to consult the Oracle Machine.
“Oh, Winthrop, yes! He’s that delightful old man. I met him at a dream dispensary a week ago. What wonderful awareness he has! Such a total immersion in our culture! We’re very proud of Winthrop. We’d like to help him every way we possibly can.”
“If you don’t mind, lady,” Dave Pollock said morosely, “we’re the ones who need help. We’ve got to get back.”
Stilia laughed. “Of course. We’d like to help everybody. Only Winthrop is— special. He’s trying hardest. Now, if you’ll just wait here, I’ll go in and put your problem before the Oracle Machine. I know how to do it so that it will activate the relevant memory circuits with the least loss of time.”
She flexed her right arm at him and walked toward the yellow square. Pollock watched it expand in front of her, then, as she went through the opening it made, contract behind her. In a few minutes she returned.
“I’ll tell you when to go in, Mr. Pollock. The machine is working on your problem. The answer you get will be the very best that can be made, given the facts available.”
“Thanks.” He thought for a while. “Tell me something. Doesn’t it seem to take something out of life—out of your thinking life—to know that you can take absolutely any problem, personal problem, scientific problem or working problem, to the Oracle Machine and it will solve it much better than you could?”
Stilia looked puzzled. “Not at all. To begin with, problem-solving is a very small part of today’s thinking life. It would be as logical to say that it took something vital out of life to make a hole with an electric drill instead of a hand drill. In your time, no doubt, there are people who feel just that way, they have the obvious privilege of not using electric drills. Those who use electric drills, however, have their physical energy freed for tasks they regard as more important. The Oracle Machine is the major tool of our culture; it has been designed toward just one end—computing all the factors of a given problem and relating them to the totality of pertinent data that is in the possession of the human race. But even if people consult the Oracle Machine, they may not be able to understand and apply the answer. And, if they do understand it, they may not choose to act on it.”
“They may not choose to act on it? Does that make sense? You said yourself the answers are the very best that can be made, given the facts available.”
“Human activities don’t necessarily have to make sense. That is the prevailing and rather comfortable modern view, Mr. Pollock. There is always the individual eccentric impulse.”
“Yeah, there’s always that,” he growled. “Resign your private, distinct personality by running with a howling mob at Shriek Field, lose all of yourself in an insane crowd—but don’t forget your individual eccentric impulse. Never, never forget your individual eccentric impulse!”
She nodded soberly. “That really sums it up, I must say, in spite of your rather unmistakable sarcasm. Why do you find it so hard to accept? Man is both a herd animal and a highly individualistic animal—what we call a self-realizable animal. The herd instincts must be satisfied at whatever cost, and have been in the past through such mechanisms as warfare, religion, nationalism, partyism and various forms of group chauvinism. The need to resign one’s personality and immerse in something larger than self has been recognized since earliest times: Shriek Fields and Panic Stadiums everywhere on the planet provide for this need and expend it harmlessly.”
“I wouldn’t say it was so harmless from the look of that mechanical rabbit, or whatever it was.”
“I understand that human beings who took the place of the mechanical rabbit in the past looked much worse when a herd of men was through with them,” she suggested, locking eyes with him. “Yes, Mr. Pollock, I think you know what I mean. The self-realizable instincts, on the other hand, must be satisfied, too. Usually, they can be satisfied in terms of one’s daily life and work, as the herd instincts can be fulfilled by normal group relationships and identification with humanity. But occasionally, the self-realizable instincts must be expressed at abnormal strengths, and then we have to have a kind of private Shriek Field—the concept of individual eccentric impulse. The two are opposite poles of exactly the same thing. All we require is that another human being will not be actively interfered with.”
“And so long as that doesn’t happen, anything goes!”
“Exactly. Anything goes. Absolutely anything a person may want to do out of his own individual eccentric impulse is permitted. Encouraged, actually. It’s not only that we consider that some of humanity’s greatest achievements have come out of individual eccentric impulses, but that we feel the greatest glory of our civilization is the homage we pay to such intrinsically personal expression.”
Dave Pollock stared at her with reluctant respect. She was bright. This was the kind of girl he might have married if he’d gone on to his doctorate, instead of Susie. Although Susie— He wondered if he’d ever see Susie again. He was astonished at how bitterly homesick he felt.
“It sounds good,” he admitted. “But living with it is another thing entirely. I guess I’m too much a product of my own culture to ever swallow it down all the way. I can’t get over how much difference there is between our civilizations. We talk the same language but we sure as hell don’t think the same thoughts.”
Stilia smiled warmly and sat back. “One of the reasons your period was invited to exchange visitors with us is because it was the first in which most speech patterns became constant and language shifts came to an end. Your newly-invented speech recording devices were responsible for that. But technological progress continued, and sociological progress actually accelerated. Neither was solidified to any great extent until the invention in the latter part of the twenty-third century—”
A hum began in the distant wall. Stilia broke off and stood up. “The Oracle Machine is ready to give you the answer to your problem. Just go inside, sit down and repeat your question in its simplest form. I wish you well.”
I wish me well, too, Dave Pollock thought, as he went through the dilated yellow square and into the tiny cube of a room. For all of Stilia’s explication, he was supremely uncomfortable in this world of simply satisfied herd instincts and individual eccentric impulses. He was no misfit; he was no Winthrop: he very much wanted out and to return to what was smoothly familiar.
Above all, he didn’t want to stay any longer in a world where almost any question he might think of would be answered best by the blueish, narrow, throbbing walls which surrounded him.
But— He did have a problem he couldn’t solve. And this machine could.
He sat down. “What do we do about Winthrop’s stubbornness?” he asked, idiotically feeling like a savage interrogating a handful of sacred bones.
A deep voice, neither masculine nor feminine in quality, rumbled from the four walls, from the ceiling, from the floor.<
br />
“You will go to the time travel bureau in the Temporal Embassy at the proper time. ”
He waited. Nothing more was forthcoming. The walls were still.
The Oracle Machine evidently had not understood.
“It won’t do us any good to be there,” he pointed out. “Winthrop is stubborn, he won’t go back with us. And, unless all five of us go back together, none of us can go. That’s the way the transferring device is set. So, what I want to know is, how do we persuade Winthrop without—”
Again the enormous voice.
“You will go to the time travel bureau in the Temporal Embassy at the proper time. ”
And that seemed to be that.
Dave Pollock trudged out and told Stilia what had happened. “It seems to me,” he commented just a little nastily, “that the machine found the problem was just a bit too much for it and was trying hard to change the subject.”
“Just the same, I would do what it advised. Unless, of course, you find another, subtler interpretation of the answer.”
“Or unless my individual eccentric impulse gets in the way?”
This time the sarcasm was lost on her. She opened her eyes wide. “That would be best of all! Imagine if you should at last learn to exercise it!”
So Dave Pollock went back to Mrs. Brucks’s room and, thoroughly exasperated, told the others of the ridiculous answer the Oracle Machine had given him on the problem of Winthrop’s stubbornness.
At a few minutes to six, however, all four of them—Mrs. Brucks, Oliver T. Mead, Mary Ann Carthington, Dave Pollock—were in the time-travel bureau of the Temporal Embassy, having arrived in varying stages of upset by way of jumper. They didn’t have any particular hopes: there just wasn’t anything else to do.