Rising, Arbuthnot moved toward the door of the office. “Mr. Lehrer,” he said, pausing, “don’t be alarmed by this, but with all due respects, sir, you need a shave.”
“I haven’t shaved in twenty-three years,” Lehrer said. “Not since the Hobart Phase first took effect in my area of Los Angeles.”
“You will by this time tomorrow,” Arbuthnot said. And left the office; the door shut after him.
After a moment of reflection, Lehrer touched the button of the intercom. “Miss Tomsen, don’t send anyone else in here; I’m cancelling my appointments for the balance of the day.”
“Yes sir.” Hopefully, Miss Tomsen said, “He was a crank, wasn’t he? I thought so; I can always tell. You’re glad you saw him.”
“Will see him,” he corrected.
“I think you’re mistaken, Mr. Lehrer. The past tense—”
“Even if Ludwig Eng shows up,” Lehrer said, “I don’t feel like seeing him. I’ve had enough for today.” Opening his desk drawer he carefully deposited Arbuthnot’s manuscript within it, then shut it once more. He reached toward the ash tray on the desk, selected the shortest—and hence best—cigarette butt, dabbed it against the ceramic surface until it began to burn, then lifted it to his lips. Puffing shreds of tobacco into it, he sat staring fixedly out the office window at the poplar trees that lined the walk to the parking lot.
The wind, rushing about, gathered up a quantity of leaves, swirled them onto the branches of the trees, adhered them in a neat arrangement which decidedly added to the beauty of the trees.
Already, some of the brown leaves had turned green. In a short while autumn would give way to summer, and summer to spring.
He watched appreciatively. As he waited for the Erad sent out by the syndicate. Due to the crank’s deranged thesis, time had once more returned to normal. Except—
Lehrer rubbed his chin. Bristles. He frowned.
“Miss Tomsen,” he said into the intercom, “will you step in here and tell me whether or not I need a shave?”
He had a feeling that he did. And soon.
Probably within the previous half hour.
Holy Quarrel
I
Sleep dissolved; he blinked as a dazzle of white artificial light hurt him. The light came from three rings which held a fixed location above the bed, midway to the ceiling.
“Sorry to wake you, Mr. Stafford,” a man’s voice came from beyond the light. “You are Joseph Stafford, aren’t you?” Then, speaking to someone else, also unseen, the voice continued, “Would be a damn shame to wake somebody else up—somebody who didn’t deserve it.”
Stafford sat up and croaked, “Who are you?”
The bed creaked and one circle of light lowered. One of them had seated himself. “We’re looking for Joseph Stafford, of tier six, floor fifty, who’s the—what do you call it?”
“Computer GB-class repairman,” a companion assisted him.
“Yes, an expert, for example, in those new molten-plasma data storage cans. You could fix one like that if it broke, couldn’t you, Stafford?”
“Sure he could,” another voice said calmly. “That’s why he’s rated as standby.” He explained, “That second vidphone line we cut did that; it kept him directly connected with his superiors.”
“How long has it been since you got a call, repairman?” the first voice inquired.
Stafford did not answer; he fished beneath the pillow of the bed, groped for the Sneek gun he generally kept there.
“Probably hasn’t worked for a long time,” one of the visitors with flashlight said. “Probably needs the money. You need any money, Stafford? Or what do you need? You enjoy fixing computers? I mean, you’d be a sap to enter this line of work unless you liked it—with you on twenty-four-hour standby like it is. Are you good? Can you fix anything, no matter how ridiculous and remote it is, that happens to our Genux-B military planning programmer? Make us feel good; say yes.”
“I—have to think,” Stafford said thickly. He still searched for the gun, but he had lost it; he felt its absence. Or possibly before awakening him they had taken it.
“Tell you what, Stafford,” the voice went on.
Interrupting, another voice said, “Mr. Stafford. Listen.” The far right nimbus of light also lowered; the man had bent over him. “Get out of bed, okay? Get dressed and we’ll drive you to where we need a computer fixed, and on the way when you have plenty of time you can decide how good you are. And then when we get there you can have a quick look at the Genux-B and see how long it’ll take you.”
“We really want it fixed up,” the first man said plaintively. “As it is, it’s no good to us or anyone. The way it is now, data are piling up in mile-high mounds. And they’re not being—what do you say?—ingested. They just sit there, and Genux-B doesn’t process them, so naturally it can’t come up with any decision. So naturally all those satellites are just flying along there like nothing happened.”
Getting slowly, stiffly from the bed, Stafford said, “What showed up first as a symptom?” He wondered who they were. And he wondered which Genux-B they were talking about. As far as he knew, there existed only three in North America—only eight throughout Terra.
Watching him get into his work smock, the invisible shapes behind the flashlights conferred. At last one cleared his throat and said, “I understand that a tape take-up reel stopped spinning, so all the tape with all the data on it just keeps spinning onto the floor in a big heap.”
“But tape tension on the take-up reels—” Stafford began.
“In this case, it failed to be automatic. You see, we jammed the reel so it wouldn’t accept any more tape. Before that we tried cutting the tape, but as I guess you know it rethreads itself automatically. And we tried erasing the tape, but if the erase circuit comes on it starts an alarm going in Washington, D.C., and we didn’t want to get all those high-level people involved. But they—the computer designers—overlooked the take-up reel tension because that’s such a simple clutch arrangement. It can’t go wrong.”
Trying to button his collar, Stafford said, “In other words, there’re data you don’t want it to receive.” He felt lucid now; at least he had more or less wakened up. “What kind of data?” He thought with chill foreboding that he knew. Data were coming in which would cause the big government-owned computer to declare a Red Alert. Of course, this crippling of Genux-B would have to occur before a hostile attack by the South African True Association manifested itself in real but minute individual symptoms which the computer, with its vast intake of seemingly unrelated data, would take note of—notice and add together into a meaningful pattern.
Stafford thought bitterly, How many times we were warned about this! They would have to wipe out our Genux-B prior to its successful deploying of the SAC retaliatory satellites and bombers. And this was that event; these men, undercover extensions in North America of S.A.T.A., had rousted him to complete their job of making the computer inoperable.
But—data might already have been received, might already have been transferred to the receptor circuits for processing and analysis. They had started to work too late; possibly by one day, possibly only by a few seconds. At least some of the meaningful data had gotten onto the tapes, and so he had to be called in. They couldn’t finish their job alone.
The United States, then, would presently undergo a series of terror-weapon satellites bursting above it—as meantime the network of defensive machinery waited for a command from the cardinal computer. Waited in vain, since Genux-B knew of no trace harbingers of military assault—would still not ever really know until a direct hit on the national capital put an end to it and its emasculated faculties.
No wonder they had jammed the take-up reel.
II
“The war’s begun,” he said quietly to the four men with flashlights.
Now that he had turned on the bedroom lamps, he could make them out. Ordinary men with an assigned task; these were not fanatics but functionaries. They could
have worked equally well for any government, perhaps even the near-psychotic Chinese People’s. “The war has already broken out,” he guessed aloud, “and it’s essential that Genux-B not know—so it can neither defend us nor strike back. You want to see it get only data which indicate we’re at peace.” He—and no doubt they—recalled how swiftly in the two previous Interventions of Honor, one against Israel, one against France, Genux-B had reacted. Not one trained professional observer had seen the signs—or had seen to what the signs led, anyhow. As with Josef Stalin in 1941. The old tyrant had been shown evidence that the Third Reich intended to attack the U.S.S.R., but he simply would not or could not believe. Any more than the Reich had believed that France and Britain, in 1939, would honor their pact with Poland.
In a compact group, the men with flashlights led him from the bedroom of his conapt, into the outer hall and to the escy which led to the roof field. As they emerged, the air smelled of mud and dampness. He inhaled, shivered, and involuntarily gazed up at the sky. One star moved: landing light on a flapple, which now set down a few feet from the five of them.
As they sat within the flapple—rising swiftly from the roof and heading toward Utah to the west—one of the gray functionaries with Sneek gun, flashlight, and briefcase said to Stafford, “Your theory is good, especially considering that we woke you out of a sound sleep.”
“But,” a companion put in, “it’s wrong. Show him the punched tape we hauled out.”
Opening his briefcase, the man nearest Stafford brought out a wad of plastic tape, handed it mutely to Stafford.
Holding it up against the dome light of the flapple, Stafford made out the punches. Binary system, evidently programming material for the Strategic Acquired-Space Command units which the computer directly controlled.
“It was about to push the panic button and give them an order,” the man at the console of the flapple said, over his shoulder. “To all our military units linked to it. Can you read the command?”
Stafford nodded, and returned the tape. He could read it, yes. The computer had formally notified SAC of a Red Alert. It had gone so far as to move H-bomb-carrying squadrons into scramble, and also was requesting that all ICBM missiles on their assorted pads be made ready for launch.
“And also,” the man at the controls added, “it was sending out a command to defensive satellites and missile complexes to deploy themselves in response to an imminent H-bomb attack. We blocked all this, however, as you now are able to see. None of this tape got onto the co-ax lines.”
After a pause, Stafford said huskily, “Then what data don’t you want Genux-B to receive?” He did not understand.
“Feedback,” said the man at the controls. Obviously he was the leader of this unit of commandos. “Without feedback the computer does not possess any method of determining that there has been no counterattack by its military arm. In the abeyance it will have to assume that the counterattack has taken place, but that the enemy strike was at least partially successful.”
Stafford said, “But there is no enemy. Who’s attacking us?”
Silence.
Sweat made Stafford’s forehead slick with moisture. “Do you know what would cause a Genux-B to conclude that we’re under attack? A million separate factors, all possible known data weighed, compared, analyzed—and then the absolute gestalt. In this case, the gestalt of an imminent attacking enemy. No one thing would have raised the threshold; it was quantitative. A shelter-building program in Asiatic Russia, unusual movements of cargo ships around Cuba, concentrations of rocket freight unloadings in Red Canada…”
“No one,” the man at the controls of the flapple said placidly, “no nation or group of persons either on Terra or Luna or Domed Mars is attacking anybody. You can see why we’ve got to get you over there fast. You have to make it absolutely certain that no orders emanate from Genux-B to SAC. We want Genux-B sealed off so it can’t talk to anybody in a position of authority and it can’t hear anybody besides us. What we do after that we’ll worry about then. ‘But the evil of the day—’ ”
“You assert that in spite of everything available to it, Genux-B can’t distinguish an attack on us?” Stafford demanded. “With its manifold data-collecting sweepers?” He thought of something then, that terrified him in a kind of hopeless, retrospective way. “What about our attack on France in ‘82 and then on little Israel in ‘89?”
“No one was attacking us then either,” the man nearest Stafford said, as he retrieved the tape and again placed it within his briefcase. His voice, somber and morose, was the only sound; no one else stirred or spoke. “Same then as now. Only this time a group of us stopped Genux-B before it could commit us. We pray we’ve aborted a pointless, needless war.”
“Who are you?” Stafford asked. “What’s your status in the federal government? And what’s your connection with Genux-B?” Agents, he thought, of the Blunk-rattling South African True Association. That still struck him as most likely. Or even zealots from Israel, looking for vengeance—or merely acting out the desire to stop a war: the most humanitarian motivation conceivable.
But, nevertheless, he himself, like Genux-B, was under a loyalty oath to no larger political entity than the North American Prosperity Alliance. He still had the problem of getting away from these men and to his chain-of-command superiors so that he could file a report.
The man at the controls of the flapple said, “Three of us are FBI.” He displayed credentials. “And that man there is an eleccom engineer, who, as a matter of fact, helped in the original design of this particular Genux-B.”
“That’s right,” the engineer said. “I personally made it possible for them to jam both the outgoing programming and the incoming data feed. But that’s not enough.” He turned toward Stafford, his face serene, his eyes large and inviting. He was half-begging, half-ordering, using whatever tone would bring results. “But let’s be realistic. Every Genux-B has backup monitoring circuitry that’ll begin to inform it any time now that its programming to SAC isn’t being acted on, and in addition it’s not getting the data it ought to get. As with everything else it sinks its electronic circuits into, it’ll begin to introspect. And by that time we have to be doing something better than jamming a take-up reel with a Phillips screwdriver.” He paused. “So,” he finished more slowly, “that’s why we came to you.”
Gesturing, Stafford said, “I’m just a repairman. Maintenance and service—not even malfunct analysis. I do only what I’m told.”
“Then do what we’re telling you,” the FBI man closest to him spoke up harshly. “Find out why Genux-B decided to flash a Red Alert, scramble SAC, and begin a ‘counterattack.’ Find out why it did so in the case of France and Israel. Something made it add up its received data and get that answer. It’s not alive! It has no volition. It didn’t just feel the urge to do this.”
The engineer said, “If we’re lucky, this is the last time Genux-B will malreact in this fashion. If we can spot the misfunction this time, we’ll perhaps have it pegged for all time. Before it starts showing up in the other seven Genux-B systems around the world.”
“And you’re certain,” Stafford said, “that we’re not under attack?” Even if Genux-B had been wrong both times before, it at least theoretically could be right this time.
“If we are about to be attacked,” the nearest FBI man said, “we can’t make out any indication of it—by human data processing, anyhow. I admit it’s logically thinkable that Genux-B could be correct. After all, as he pointed out—”
“You may be in error because the S.A.T.A. has been hostile toward us so long we take it for granted. It’s a verity of modern life.”
“Oh, it’s not the South African True Association,” the FBI man said briskly. “In fact, if it were we wouldn’t have gotten suspicious. We wouldn’t have begun poking around, interviewing survivors from the Israel War and French War and whatever else State’s done to follow this up.”
“It’s Northern California,” the engineer said, a
nd grimaced. “Not even all of California; just the part above Pismo Beach.”
Stafford stared at them.
“That’s right,” one of the FBI men said. “Genux-B was in the process of scrambling all SAC bombers and wep-sats for an all-out assault on the area around Sacramento, California.”
“You asked it why?” Stafford said, speaking to the engineer.
“Sure. Or rather, strictly speaking, we asked it to spell out in detail what the ‘enemy’ is up to.”
One of the FBI men drawled, “Tell Mr. Stafford what Northern California is up to that makes it a hot-target enemy—that would have meant its destruction by SAC spearhead assaults if we hadn’t jammed the damn machinery… and still have it jammed.”
“Some individual,” the engineer said, “has opened up a penny gum machine route in Castro Valley. You know. He has those bubble-headed dispensers outside supermarkets. The children put in a penny and get a placebo ball of gum and something additional occasionally—a prize such as a ring or a charm. It varies. That’s the target.”
Incredulous, Stafford said, “You’re joking.”
“Absolute truth. Man’s name is Herb Sousa. He owns sixty-four machines now in operation and plans expansion.”
“I mean,” Stafford said thickly, “you’re joking about Genux-B’s response to that datum.”
“Its response isn’t exactly to that datum per se,” the closest of the FBI men said. “For instance, we checked with both the Israeli and French governments. Nobody named Herb Sousa opened up a penny gum machine route in their countries, and that goes for chocolate-covered peanut vending machines or anything else remotely similar to it. And, contrarily, Herb Sousa maintained such a route in Chile and in the U.K. during the past two decades… without Genux-B taking any interest all those years.” He added, “He’s an elderly man.”
“A sort of Johnny Apple Gum,” the engineer said, and tittered. “Looping the world, sending those gum machines swooping down in front of every gas—”
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