Vectors

by Charles Sheffield

  The afternoon weather seemed ready to break, and there was a thunderstorm on the way. He flagged a cab and rode through the gathering gloom back to WAWD's offices on Wisconsin Avenue. As they drove over Key Bridge, his own mood matched the turbulence of the heavy clouds rolling above him.

  He arrived just before the storm broke. There was sheet lightning to the west, over the Potomac, and fat drops of warm rain were spattering the sidewalk as he made his way into the building and took the elevator up to the WAWD office.

  * * *

  Dear Mr. Kirkwood,

  Enclosed with this letter you will find a formal offer from WAWD Corporation to acquire the assets, in total, of Kirkwood Research Corporation. I prepared such a document in anticipation of our meeting, and developed this letter in case our discussions were terminated for some reason before I had presented all the relevant factors for your consideration.

  Although the formal offer gives full details, I wish to stress two elements of our offer. First, should you accept you will be constrained from working on computerized biological implants, except for and on behalf of WAWD Corporation, for a period of seven years. Second, you will be given full and complete facilities to pursue such researches, upon acceptance, within WAWD. We neither wish to inhibit your creativity, nor to minimize the value of the development work you have done in the past four years.

  I strongly urge you to accept this offer. If you do, WAWD has a powerful incentive to preserve the secrecy and value of your work. If you do not, we would have no reason to keep the existence of your work a secret. How long would it take Texas Instruments or Hewlett-Packard to catch up with and pass you, given their resources and the information that we could provide to them on the feasibility of programmable implants?

  I believe you need a group like us to help you. There are elementary precautions that you should have taken and did not. For example, the cut-out circuit that you used to protect against overload from incoming signals was hopelessly inadequate. I suspect that you are reading this with a splitting headache. I have no doubt you will change the system quickly, but there are many other, less obvious, problems that you will run into as soon as big money gets involved. You have technical ingenuity, but you lack our business know-how. Both ingredients are necessary to realize the business potential of your work.

  Finally, do not let prior events influence your decision too much. Business makes strange bedfellows. I am sure we will readily develop a good working relationship should you accept our offer. Since we will undoubtedly need to discuss this further, I suggest that you call me at WAWD Corporation to arrange for the next steps.

  Yours sincerely,

  Merle Walters

  * * *

  "Any reply yet from Kirkwood?"

  "Not yet. Give him a few hours, Tolly. He must be feeling as though his brains have been fried. That signal generator really pushed out a lot of power, and all at the right frequency."

  "You think he will take the offer, Merle?"

  "When he's had time to think about it. I'm sure he'll try and find a way out for a while. He's not a very likable man—big streak of greed, and quite sneaky. You'll have your hands full if he does accept. I think my letter will make him realize he doesn't have much choice if he wants to see his money dreams come true."

  Suomi grimaced a little. "A nice gesture on your part, Merle. You get the tiger to run after you, then stand carefully out of the way so I can tame him. If you had a business motto, it would be something like 'Quaerete Pessimum'—Seek the Worst. Then buy it, and work at it until it can show a profit."

  "Not a bad motto, at that. All the big advances come out of some kind of trouble—war, or disease, or plain necessity."

  Merle was sitting in Tolly Suomi's office, clearly enjoying himself. His gray jacket was off, and a hefty bourbon and soda was sitting in easy reach.

  "Anyway Tolly, I really owe you one on this Kirkwood deal. Come on, you might as well admit it. You set me up, didn't you?"

  "Set you up, Merle?" Suomi's face, as always, was impassive and unreadable.

  "That's right. You didn't tell me that you had been to one of the auctions, yourself, after Jack and Jim made their reports. I dug that out of an office memo, when Franny wasn't paying much attention." Merle sipped his drink and let it sit for a second on his tongue. "Now Tolly, I know very well how your mind works. I believe that you had a suspicion that you might be seeing some kind of implanted communication equipment, before you ever called me in. You were getting worried about me, knowing I was feeling useless away from the office. Dying from the top, like a tree, as old Swift put it. So you decided, let's turn the poor old devil on to this. It can't do any harm, and it might be interesting for him." Merle sniffed. "Well, maybe you were right. I do feel a hell of a lot better than I did two weeks ago. Come on Tolly, true or false?"

  Suomi gave the imperceptible Tolly smile. "An interesting, if improbable conjecture, Merle. I can swear one thing to you, in all honesty: I never realized where this might lead—and I never, for one moment, considered that you might twist my arm, and the Board's arm, into offering a ridiculously high sum of money for a small, eight-man company doing half a million a year. I still say it was far too much."

  "I know you do, Tolly. But I'm right, all the same. You'll see it in the next year, when I convince you what Kirkwood Research really is. Even Charles Kirkwood himself doesn't know it, yet. You see—"

  He was interrupted by the buzz of the intercom, Franny was on the line. "Mr. Walters, we just had a message from Mr. Kirkwood. He would like to meet with you here tomorrow morning to discuss your letter. I said we'd call back if you couldn't make it."

  "That's fine, Franny." Walters turned again to Suomi. "So, it's getting ready to begin, Tolly. I'm telling you, we're in on the ground floor of the most important human development in the last million years."

  Suomi raised his eyebrows half a millimeter. "More important than fire, Merle? More important than the printing press, or the wheel?"

  "I'll stand by my statement. You see, you've never had the chance to observe the level of communication among those people at Kirkwood Research. It's breathtaking—almost terrifying. They all have programmable implants, and built-in telemetry units, and they can swap data with each other—and programs—in real-time, and they can do the same thing with their central computer and central data banks. They do it directly, or over long distances they use the relays they have in the VWs."

  "But aren't they still just exchanging numbers and logic sequences, Merle? It sounds to me like hard, slow work—not my idea of rapid information swapping."

  "I'm sure it was that to begin with. They had to think in sequences of numbers and instructions, slowly and carefully, just the way we use manual key strokes to operate programmable calculators. But after a while it must get to be an unconscious operation."

  Suomi was thoughtful. "You mean, it goes on automatically, the way we adjust the focus of our eyes, or pick up a glass? Help yourself to a refill, by the way. We don't have to think about it, and we can do it at the same time as we do other things."

  "I don't really know the details, or how it feels. I do know for a fact that Charles Kirkwood could give detailed instructions to the other men, with a small fraction of his attention, at the same time as he was talking to me. You can't imagine the degree of communication they achieve, unless you see it—and perhaps not even then."

  Walters was silent for a moment, absorbed in his own thoughts. At last he spoke again. "Tolly, I told you a couple of weeks ago that telepathy was bunk."

  "—and I agreed with you."

  "I know you did. But we were both wrong. It didn't come the way we expected it, but we have telepathy, here and now."

  "Not really, Merle. It's just computers and two-way radios, the way the Kirkwood people are operating."

  "So what? The results are the same. It uses the technology we've already developed, and it uses the electromagnetic spectrum, not some new thing we've never heard of. But th
at's the way we do it: we build on what we have.

  "Tolly, it's here. Direct mind-to-mind transfer of information. Now perhaps you understand why I'm willing to spend ten times as much as you might think, to be in on the leading edge of it."

  Suomi was silent, performing his own assessment of the potential and the problems. Finally, he shook his head, a dissatisfied expression on his face. "Merle, if I read you right, you are telling me that your money-hungry friends over at Kirkwood Research are the first step to Homo gestalt."

  Walters grinned. "Depressing thought, eh? But it's true enough. We shouldn't be too surprised. Look at it this way: we've wanted to travel as fast as the wind for thousands of years. Now, you drove in this morning. How long did it take you to get from Potomac to Wisconsin Avenue?"

  "Three-quarters of an hour, give or take five minutes."

  "So you averaged maybe ten miles an hour. Remember the old elephant joke? 'I saw an elephant on the Long Island Expressway this morning.' "

  Tolly Suomi nodded. "Sure. 'What was he doing there?' "

  " 'Same as everybody else, about three miles an hour.' "

  "I see what you're getting at. Last week, I flew the Eastern Shuttle up to New York. Flying like a bird—in a tin box, eating plastic food."

  "That's progress. We can communicate our thoughts directly to others, but we'll have to do it numerically, using electronic implants and radio communication."

  Suomi shook his head thoughtfully. "You're probably right, Merle. We need a better word than telepathy—a more precise one. It's one thing to transfer data, but the real trick would be to transfer emotions directly."

  "Maybe we'll do that, too, with the implants. Think about it, Tolly. It shouldn't be too hard to monitor and telemeter the basic body functions—chemical balances, temperatures, ion concentrations. It's only a short step from there to emotional states."

  Suomi was staring at the wall before him, as though seeing the future spread out there. Finally, he looked over at Walters' empty glass. "Maybe we should call it a day, Merle. You've been through quite a bit, these last few hours."

  "One more thing." Merle Walters rattled the ice cubes in the empty tumbler. "We've taken it a long way, but there's a big step left. I said I'd given you one reason why I wanted to buy Kirkwood. There was a second one."

  He picked up his briefcase, opened it and fished out a projector cube. "Remember I had Alex Burns make me a simulation, before I went over to Kirkwood?"

  "I certainly do. It cost four thousand dollars. I'd been wondering what you did with that—you haven't mentioned it since Alex delivered it."

  "It's here. I thought that if Kirkwood were a real visionary—he's not—this might persuade him directly that the implants have to be handled with real care. I never had a chance to use it. You might want to play it through tonight, and you'll see what a great job Alex did—sound, vision, and special effects."

  Suomi looked at the gray cube sitting in front of him. "For four thousand dollars, it had better be a masterpiece. What's it about?"

  Merle Walters rubbed his bald head reflectively. "Well, it just takes the implants the logical next step. What do you think it would be like if everybody had an implant—got one when they were a child?"

  "Everybody?" Suomi pursed his lips. "Well, if it goes the way you painted it, they'd have fantastic communication with each other—and with the central data banks too. It would be instant access to any information, anywhere. Things like ordinary libraries would disappear."

  "Right. So if you didn't have an implant you'd be a real outsider. You'd be outside the shared data base, and outside the group-awareness. Do you see where that leads?"

  "I can see some of it, Merle. It's pretty obvious that the worst punishment you could inflict would be to disable a man's implant. Like being in solitary confinement, but probably a lot worse. And there's no doubt we'd develop complete dependence on the big data banks—but we're not far from that already."

  Walters leaned forward, his lined face earnest. "So now take the last step. Tolly, can you imagine how men with implants would react if they were taken to a place where they were light-years, or light-hours—or even light-minutes—away from the supporting memory banks, and the shared data? I don't think they could take it. They'd go insane."

  "You are suggesting that the implants will prevent us from traveling more than a few light-seconds from Earth?"

  "That's it. Unless we're careful, we'll find we've chained ourselves to a region that doesn't go much past the Moon. We're getting low on resources here. We can't afford to be shackled like that. That's what Alex Burns shows on the simulation. It's so well-done, it depressed the hell out of me, and I was expecting it. Of course, it won't come in our time, Tolly. But I don't want to see it come at all. We have to keep moving out." He crammed his hat on his bald, furrowed head. "Take a look at it, and form your own opinions.

  "I'll see you tomorrow, Tolly. Seek the worst. We'll have to work out terms with Kirkwood, then we'll get ready to tame the real tiger."

  He limped out. Tolly Suomi, thoughtfully stroking his neat gray beard, watched him go. That was the trouble with setting Merle up for anything. He was always more than you could ever anticipate, never less. Tolly picked up the gray projector cube, stood up from his desk and went over to the window. Dusk was gathering on the late August evening, and the earlier thunderstorm had cleared the air. The first stars were coming out, twinkling softly through the mellow haze. Somehow they looked a little dimmer and farther away than before.

  Afterword.

  In the Afterword to "Fixed Price War," I remarked that it was an example of an "If This Goes On. . ." story. It extrapolated a trend, but no one necessarily believes that the trend will continue that far. I think we also need to define a new class of science fiction story, which we can call the "These Things Shall Be" type—where the events have not happened yet, but we feel quite sure they will.

  This story falls into the "These Things Shall Be" class. I am sure that we will, within the next twenty to thirty years, see direct connections from mind to computer—perhaps at a primitive level at first, but quickly getting more sophisticated. After this story was written but before it was published, I kept looking at the journals on interactive computer systems, half-afraid that I would see an article describing experiments just like those conducted at Kirkwood Research. I didn't, but it could happen next year or next month.

  That is one problem with writing "These Things Shall Be" tales—the event may happen before the story can be sold. I had plotted out and even titled a short story called "The Descent From The Peacock Throne," which told how and why the Shah of Iran was ousted from power. I thought it would happen at the time of the succession, when the valiahd, the Crown Prince Reza, tried to assume the throne. I was five years off in my timing. Bang goes one story.

  Maybe I could put it in an alternate universe and call it a fantasy ("The Man In The High Mosque?").

  THE LONG CHANCE

  It takes time to adjust to bad news. Unfortunately, time was the one thing we didn't have; when we finally received a clear medical diagnosis, Ana had less than five weeks to live and was going down fast. Suddenly, after seven marvelous years together, with every reason to look forward to fifty more, I saw our future collapse into a handful of days.

  For more than a month I had known in my heart that there was a big problem. Ana's loss of weight and general lassitude were bad omens which, together with the translucent, waxen look of her forehead and the fine blue veins on her temples, had warned me of the worst. Tom Lambert, our doctor and a good personal friend, finally told us the grim biopsy results: no operation, no treatment worth trying and a rapidly terminal prognosis. Tom was a realist—which I am not. He prescribed massive doses of painkillers and tranquilizers for Ana, and more tranquilizers for me.

  "Take as many as you need, Drake," he told me. "And don't neglect your own health. I can be here any time, night or day, if you need me."

  I flushed my prescriptio
n down the drain as soon as he had left. I had already drained my cup of sorrow. There was work to do, and little time to do it; I needed all my faculties. Ana and I had always done all our thinking together, our planning together. Now I had to work it out for both of us. It took me two frantic weeks to make my plans, snatching the time when Ana was sleeping or drugged. Then I called Lambert and asked him to come over.

  He arrived early that evening. It was fantastic May weather, with spring flowers leaping to blossom and bursting life everywhere except in the darkened house. After a brief examination of Ana, Tom led me into the living room and shook his head.

  "It's going faster than I thought, Drake. At this rate, Anastasia will go into a final coma in a week or so. Let me have her taken to a hospital now. You don't want to see what's coming. You don't look as if you've had a wink of sleep yourself for the past month."

  True, but irrelevant. I sat down opposite Tom and told him what I wanted to do, the part I wanted him to play. He heard me out, then shrugged his shoulders. I could see the pitying look in his eyes as he agreed to go along with my request.

  "If you want to do it, Drake, I'll help you. After all, Ana has nothing to lose. But you know they've never done a successful thaw and revival, even on a healthy test animal. I have to tell you that in my opinion you'll be wasting your money and just making this thing harder for yourself. What does Anastasia say about the idea?"

  "Not much. She's willing—maybe for my sake, She thinks that it won't work but she agrees that she has nothing to lose. Look, bring the papers with you tomorrow and we'll sign them. We have to do it quickly, while Ana can still hold a pen."

  Eight days later I called Tom again. He came to the house, felt Ana's pulse and took blood pressure and brain-wave readings.