The Middle of Nowhere

by David Gerrold

  “We’ve got a Morthan by the balls,” said Leen. “We can’t hang on, we can’t let go.” A thought occurred to him. He looked to Brik. “Do Morthans even have balls?”

  Brik regarded the chief engineer coldly. “Morthans don’t dance.”

  Korie allowed himself a grin. “Probably because no Morthan will let any other Morthan lead for longer than ten seconds.”

  Brik’s eyes narrowed. “Morthans don’t dance like humans.”

  “Right,” said Korie. That line of discussion was over. He stretched where he floated, pulling his arms back until his spine made a satisfying knuckle-crunch. He brought himself back to normal. “All right, let’s assume it knows whatever we know. In fact, let’s assume that whatever we know about it is only what it wants us to know.” Korie looked from one to the other, even including Gatineau. “Here’s what we know about Morthans. Everything is a calculation. Every action has an intended result, both immediate and consequential. If a Morthan shows you something, he wants you to see it because your reaction serves his purpose. There are no Morthan accidents. Right, Brik?”

  Brik rumbled his assent, but he was abruptly thinking of something else. Helen Bach.

  Gatineau was slowly putting it together. “So the imp showed itself to me because it needed us to know it’s onboard?”

  “And it triggered the destruction of the docking tube for the same reason,” said Brik, coming back to the main stream of the discussion. “To make me suspicious. It needs us to know it’s here.”

  “Where’s the advantage in taunting us?” asked Leen. “I don’t follow the logic.”

  “That’s because you’re not a Morthan,” said Brik. “The imp needs us to know that it’s aboard the ship so that we’ll act a certain way. It’s trying to steer us.”

  “Where?”

  “Taalamar,” said Korie, abruptly realizing. “This is about Taalamar.”

  “Huh?” Gatineau and Leen looked at him surprised. Brik just nodded thoughtfully.

  “It’s all the sabotage, don’t you see? What’s the real purpose? We wanted to go to Taalamar. It couldn’t let us go to Taalamar. In fact, it can’t let us go anywhere. It needs us to stay right where we are. Everything it’s done has been to keep us stuck. That’s why it keeps sabotaging things, but have you noticed that none of the traps the imp has set have been fatal—”

  “Excuse me?” protested Gatineau. “What about the docking tube?”

  “Did you die?” asked Brik.

  “No, but—”

  “Then it wasn’t fatal.”

  “What he means,” interrupted Leen, “is that none of the traps have threatened the total integrity of the vessel. It still holds air. Sort of. It still moves. Sort of.”

  “The imp wants Stardock,” said Korie.

  “That’s right,” said Brik.

  “Do you want to explain it? Or should I?”

  “You do it. I want to see what you’ve worked out.”

  “Okay. The imp had to keep us from joining the Fleet. It had to make sure we didn’t join the Fleet. We’re worthless to its purposes if we’re off patrolling. But we still had working hyperstate fluctuators, missiles, and a farm, so we were in better shape than most of other ships needing refitting. So what was the one thing it could do to make sure we wouldn’t join the Fleet? What was the one thing it could do to guarantee we stayed behind for additional detox?” Korie looked to Brik.

  “Show itself,” Brik answered, “giving us no choice but to try to capture it. Anything else—?”

  “No one here gets out alive?” guessed Leen.

  “Exactly,” said Korie. “So we’re stuck here. Unmoving. Right where it wants us. And as long as we’re here, we’re a marker. Stardock is somewhere inside a twenty-hour sphere with us at the center. That’s a small enough volume for a fleet to search.” He nodded to himself. “That’s the real point of it. The imp is going to use this ship to call in the rest of the Morthan fleet. And there’s not a lot we can do about it either, even if we know. Not unless we catch him. Which we can’t. It’s a nasty trap.”

  Brik nodded. Leen grunted. Gatineau didn’t know what to say. He felt totally out of his league. “Um, maybe this is a stupid question, but do they really want Stardock badly enough to send a whole fleet?”

  Korie turned to Gatineau. “No, it’s not a stupid question, and yes, they do want Stardock that badly. As long as the location of Stardock remains uncertain to them, the Solidarity cannot advance deeper into Allied space. Stardock gives us a staging area for flank attacks on their supply lines. Stardock has always been the issue. Everyone knows it.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, then why are they sending their fleet to Taalamar?”

  “That’s the right question to ask,” said Korie. He stretched again, this time as prelude to his next words. “It’s my belief that the assault on Taalamar is a feint to draw the fleet. Meanwhile, I think there’s a whole other fleet of Solidarity scouts that’ll be dropping probes all over everywhere. Our little imp will help the probes find Stardock by sending a signal to be picked up by any probe in the neighborhood. Scatter your probes three or four or five light-days apart, you won’t have to wait too long to pick up the signal.” Korie added one more thought then. “And now that we’re not going anywhere, there’s no reason for any more sabotage, is there? I’ll bet that the incidence of equipment failure begins falling off dramatically. Comments? Anyone?”

  “Well, you’ve figured out the easy part,” Brik said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Brik,” Korie smiled ruefully. “I can always depend on you to put things into an appropriately Morthan perspective.”

  “It’s in control of the situation,” explained Brik dryly. “Assume that the imp has found a way to tap into the autonomic nervous system and therefore the entire vessel is bugged. Therefore, there isn’t anything that happens onboard the Star Wolf that the imp doesn’t know about, or can’t find out. We can’t plan anything without it knowing. We can only do what it’s willing to allow us to do. If we plan anything else, the equipment will fail. So we have no options of our own. Theoretically, we’re paralyzed.”

  “Is that your plan?” asked Korie, slightly surprised.

  “Of course not,” said Brik. “I said theoretically.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s a logic problem. Morthan logic. Does it know that we know? We have to assume that it does know, even if it doesn’t. So do we pretend that we don’t know so it won’t find out what it probably already knows?”

  There was a momentary pause while each of his listeners translated that in their own thoughts.

  Leen was the first to react. He snorted. “With this crew? And this ship? If we try to pretend that everything is normal aboard the Star Wolf they’ll know immediately that something is wrong.”

  “So that’s the next question,” said Korie, already leaping ahead. “If it knows that we know, and if we can’t keep it a secret that we know, should we even try? What if we tell the crew we have a problem onboard. What does that give us?”

  “A new flavor of paranoia,” said Brik.

  “It gives the crew something to focus on,” said Leen.

  Korie looked to him. “Chief?”

  Leen shrugged, not an easy thing to do in zero-gee. “Something to hate. We used to chase rats when I was a kid. Not real rats. We just called’em that. These were two meters long. It kept us out of trouble. Gave us something to do. Not real good eating, though.” To Brik, he noted. “That’s why I asked before.”

  “I said I didn’t know,” replied Brik. “But I’ll be happy to help you determine it for yourself, if it’s important to you.”

  “Gentlemen?” said Korie, bringing the discussion back on purpose. “Let’s assume that we have no privacy at all aboard the Star Wolf. And probably no privacy even aboard the boat. We shouldn’t even assume that this conversation is secure. Maybe the imp is behind one of these panels—should we dismantle the boat before we say anything else?”

&n
bsp; Gatineau looked nervously around the cabin. The others were more nonchalant about the possibility. Or fatalistic.

  Korie continued thoughtfully, “It’s this simple. We’re operating totally in the open. We cannot come up with a plan that requires subterfuge of any kind, because we have no guarantees that we can keep anything secret. So, here’s our dilemma. What kind of winning strategy is played completely in the open?”

  “Naked poker,” grunted Leen.

  “Naked poker?” asked Korie.

  “You play it with all your cards face up. Very hard to bluff.”

  “It seems to me,” said Gatineau, “that there isn’t a lot to do if the other side already knows your cards.”

  “Poker may be the wrong analogy,” said Korie. “Chess is more appropriate. Both sides can see all the pieces here.”

  “That’s an assumption on your part,” said Brik. “This is blindfolded chess. Blindfolded on our side. We only think we know where the pieces are.”

  They looked to him curiously.

  “In point of fact, we know little about imps and nothing about this one in particular. Assuming that there’s only one.”

  They all digested that thought in silence.

  “Let me tell you about imps,” Brik continued. “They’re a war weapon. About a century ago, there was a Morthan colony on a planet called Citadel. They refused to join the Solidarity when they were invited . . .”

  “I can imagine the nature of the invitation.”

  “It was inappropriate for them not to join,” said Brik. “The Solidarity seeded two cities with imp-eggs.”

  “And?”

  “As soon as the inhabitants of Citadel realized what had been done, they nuked their own cities.”

  “Did it work?” asked Gatineau.”

  “No. They had to abandon the planet. Some of their vessels escaped. Most didn’t.”

  “Imps breed?”

  “It’s a possibility. We have no way of knowing what instructions any imp has been given.”

  “It looked like a . . . a space monkey,” said Gatineau. “It had large round eyes. Like a lemur. And very tiny hands. Very delicate.”

  They all looked to him.

  “It reminded me of something I saw in a story once. This farmer was having problems with a monkey stealing his fruit. He needed to trap it. So he went to see—well, never mind. Anyway, he made a box with a narrow hole in it, and he put a delicious nut in the box. That was all. The next morning, the farmer came and there was the monkey caught with its hand in the box. The monkey couldn’t pull its hand out. The hole was too small for its fist to pass through and it wouldn’t let go of the nut.”

  Leen grunted. “So all we need are some monkey nuts, huh?”

  “Just one would do it, I think.” Korie smiled. “I get the point of the story. What do we have that the monkey wants so badly that it’ll let itself be caught rather than let go?”

  “Stardock,” said Brik.

  “That’s the one thing we can’t give it.” But even as Korie was saying that, he was already doodling something on his clipboard. To Gatineau it looked like a docking collar anchored to a singularity harness. Korie stopped drawing and began tapping idly at the surface of the board with his stylus. Although it seemed a nonchalant gesture, Leen glanced over at it. He half-shrugged, waggling his hand in an iffy gesture. Brik had followed the exchange too. His expression remained noncommittal.

  Korie was still frowning in thought. “How smart are these imps, Brik?”

  “I thought I answered that.”

  “Yes and no. You said I wouldn’t want to play chess against it. That doesn’t answer the question. Even a stupid machine can play a difficult game of chess. But it’s still a stupid machine.”

  “Point taken,” said Brik.

  “You said the imp is a programmed intelligence. How well programmed? How flexible is its problem-solving ability? Can we overstress it? What I mean is, does it demonstrate real sentience?”

  Brik didn’t answer immediately. He was considering more than the immediate question. Finally, he said, “Do any of us demonstrate real sentience? How many of us are programmed? How many of us are programmed to believe we’re not really programmed? What is sentience, Mr. Korie? Answer that, and I can answer your question.”

  “That’s the moral dilemma that began with the HARLIE series and still hasn’t been satisfactorily resolved,” Korie said.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t stop us from using them, either,” Leen noted dryly.

  “All right, all right,” Korie held up a hand. “I’m leading up to something. You’ll see, wait. Let me do it this way. When I was in elementary school, we had a lot of programming classes. It’s one of the best ways to learn problem-solving skills. Anyway, as a term project one of my classmates wrote a chess program and asked me to play-test it for him. I discovered a very interesting bug—stop frowning at me, Chief, I do have a point to make.

  “If you know anything about chess, you know it’s about position and potential threat. You move your bishop to threaten his knight, he moves his knight to cover that same square. If you capture his knight, he captures your bishop. So you move your pawn into place to also attack and he moves his bishop to protect. You move another knight up, he moves a pawn. It goes on and on, each side trying to see who can put the most pieces covering the same square until one or the other gains a potential advantage and exploits it. It’s an interlocking web of corresponding attacks and protecting moves.”

  “And my point is . . .?” Leen prompted.

  “This fellow’s program was limited. After the third piece was moved into attacking position, the program seemed to lose interest in that area of the board. It would go off and make a move somewhere else instead, totally unrelated to what was happening in the crisis corner. This was a repeatable circumstance. When I showed it to the programmer, he was appalled, and it took him a while to track down the flaw in the program’s logic. But this is the point. The way he’d constructed his program, he hadn’t ever expected it to have to juggle more than three threats at a time; so when it got a third attack, it couldn’t see it.”

  “Pretty weak programming,” grunted Leen.

  “You’re right,” said Korie. “We should expect better from an eightyear-old writing his first chess program. Anyway, I’m just wondering how flexibly the imp is programmed. It can’t have a very big brain, can it? I think maybe we’re so traumatized by our experience of Cinnabar that perhaps we’re assuming the imp is capable of the same kind of cunning. What if it isn’t? What if there’s a limit to the number of threats it can process?”

  “How do you test it?” asked Brik. “And what if you’re wrong?”

  “It’s chess,” said Korie. “You find out by playing. Hmm.”

  “You going to set up a chessboard in the inner hull?”

  “That’s not a bad idea. Chief? How many chess sets can you manufacture in the next six hours?”

  Leen scowled. “How many do you need?”

  “A thousand?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “That’s right, but so is the imp. It’s a Morthan. There’s a certain amount of egotism in its actions. Let’s find out how egotistical. We’ll start with ten chessboards. If he bites, we’ll add more.”

  The chief engineer shook his head in disbelief. Brik looked amused. Gatineau was desperately trying to keep up.

  “Okay,” said Korie, casually holding up the display on his clipboard one more time, turning it slowly so all could see it. Then he cleared the display and put it aside. “Let’s get serious now. Let’s quietly pass the word among the crew that we’ve got an imp. I don’t want to make a big announcement, We’ll discreetly inform the section heads and have them pass the word along. Downplay the danger as much as you can. Downplay the creature’s intelligence. The crew is smart. They’ll figure it out soon enough. But this way, if it appears to the imp that we’re underestimating its abilities, it’s logical that we’d think in terms of trying to capture
it.”

  “And,” said Brik, “we may very well be underestimating its capabilities.”

  Korie ignored it. “Then I want detox teams going through the ship from bow to stern, as many as we can simultaneously mount. They’ll detox each section one after the other, with the idea that we’re herding the thing aft.”

  “It won’t work,” warned Brik.

  “Of course it won’t work, but it’s what we have to do anyway. Second—” Korie turned to Gatineau, “—and this is why we included you—let’s offer a bounty on the beast. Not too high. We need our crew thinking about their regular jobs. But high enough to be convincing. Because Gatineau’s the only one who’s seen it, he’ll have to be our bounty hunter.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Gatineau, unbelieving. “I can’t—I mean, I’ll do it, of course; but you can’t expect—”

  “Relax,” said Korie. “I know it’s another snipe hunt. And I know it’s not fair to you to ask you to do this.” He grinned. “That’s why I’m making it an order. Your job is to be the decoy. Your job is to set traps for the thing everywhere you can. Chief Leen will manufacture them for you. We’ll put the chess sets inside the traps. Each trap different. You’ll work with HARLIE on keeping track of the separate games and making the moves.”

  “Won’t that use up HARLIE’s processing time?”

  “Not significantly. A HARLIE unit can play at least a thousand games of grandmaster-level chess simultaneously.”

  “At least?”

  “No one’s ever tested it to the theoretical maximum. Don’t worry about it, HARLIE can handle the workload. The idea here is to give the imp so many different things to think about, to worry about, to try to track, that it won’t be able to keep up with us, and won’t be able to see our real plan. Your job is to lead the imp on a snipe hunt. You’ve earned it.”

  “Ah,” said Gatineau, looking suddenly pleased.

  “Good,” agreed Leen. “What’s our real plan?”

  Brik also looked to Korie expectantly.

  “That is our real plan.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s assume there isn’t anything we can do that it can’t find out. So let’s drive it crazy looking for a plan that isn’t there. And in the meantime, we’ll run our ship.”