“So it didn’t work,” he said dully.
In a monotone, Zander said: “The first question asked was: ‘What hath God wrought?’ The answer was vocal. After a few seconds it said: ‘There is no adequate definition of God except that He must exist in the spirits of men, in their hearts and minds. Man, this day, has completed a machine, a device, which, in its mechanical wisdom, well help Man to clarify and explain his environment. But the machine will never supplant the mind of Man. The machine exists because of Man. It is an extension of the inquisitive spirit of Man. Thus, in one sense, it can be said that God, as the spirit of Man, has builded for His use a device to probe the infinite.’”
Kayden couldn’t speak. He licked his dry lips.
“Some of them screamed and ran from the room. Some of them thought that it was a trick of some sort. To the rest of us the Machine is already a personality. And yet nothing that it said was emotional. It was factual. The question was asked. It dipped into its store of knowledge and came up with the simplest and most direct answer. The thing knew that it had been built. It knew that it existed. Its existence is a fact. Its own recognition of that fact is something that I hadn’t anticipated.”
Kayden suddenly saw how shaken Zander was. He came around the desk and took the older man’s arm, said gently: “Sit down, Artur. Let me get you a drink.”
Zander drained the glass in three quick gulps, set it on the corner of the desk and grinned up at Kayden. All of the man’s pretense was gone. He was humble. “You did it,” he said simply.
It brought back the sense of loss. “I didn’t do it,” Joseph said bitterly, “my wife did it. My wife that isn’t considered acceptable to come into this place.”
“You miss her, don’t you?” Zander said, his voice soft.
Kayden jumped up. “Now we’ve got to demonstrate this thing. I’ll get hold of our bevy of angels and we’ll give it a coming-out party. Make it for tomorrow afternoon, or the day after. You fix up a list of questions, Dr. Zander, and I’ll have Roger fix up the surroundings. Can we move the mike and the amplifier around? Good! We’ll wire it for the main assembly hall. Building K. And by the way, get the voice of the monster as deep as you can and slow it down a little. I want it to sound like one of the major prophets.”
~ * ~
At five o’clock the assembly hall was filled. The President of the United States of North America was present, as were two score of congressmen, a hundred scientists, dozens of minor officials. After Security had cleared the questions to be asked, the President was given permission to invite Ming, Dictator of the Federated States of Asia, as well as Follette, Ruler of Europe, and Captain Anderson, King of the States of Africa. South America was not represented.
Kayden sat with Roger Wald in the front row. At the appointed time, Dr. Zander walked out from the wings, turned and faced the men who sat in the audience—the men who ruled the world. A switch was turned on and a very faint hum permeated the air. All eyes were turned toward the immense amplifier that filled half the stage.
Zander faced the amplifier and said, into a small microphone: “What hath God wrought?”
In a slow voice of thunder the amplifier gave the answer that Kayden had heard in his office. He turned in his seat and looked at the faces of the men^ saw there both fear and uncertainty—and a strange pride, as though each of them had had a hand in the making of the voice that spoke slowly to them.
“When will Man reach the stars?” Zander asked.
After a short silence, the Voice said: “It is possible now. All the necessary problems have been or can be solved with present methods. When sufficient money is given to research and development, space travel will become immediately possible.”
The next few questions concerned problems that the physicists had not yet solved. The machine answered two clearly and, on the third, said: “The synthesis of all available data does not provide sufficient basis for an answer as yet. But there is validity in the assumption that the solution will be found by experimentation with the fluorine atom.”
Kayden glanced at the list in his hand and saw that Zander had asked the last question. To his surprise he heard Zander say, “The development of the Thinking Machine has been a process surrounded with secrecy because of its possible use in warfare. Will the machine help in the event of a war between nations?”
During the long pause before the question was answered, a man jumped up and yelled, “Turn it off!” He was ignored. The representatives of the nations sat, tense and expectant.
The deep voice said: “The Thinking Machine will help in warfare only in so far as it is possible to utilize some of the scientific advances made possible by the Thinking Machine. However, this is not a valid assumption. Warfare should now become avoidable. All of the factors in any dispute can be given to the Machine and an unemotional fair answer can be rendered. The Machine should not be a secret. It should be duplicated a score of times and made available to all nations. Thus can disputes be avoided. The effort to enforce secrecy is barren effort. Secrecy in the case of the Machine accomplishes nothing.”
Zander turned and walked from the stage. The humming stopped suddenly. The assembly hall was silent. The rulers of nations looked at each other and in their eyes was a new promise of trust, of acceptance.
~ * ~
Roger Wald was whistling as he came into Kayden’s office. “The bans are lifted today,” he said happily. “Come and go as you please. O fine and happy day! When does Jane arrive?”
“At four.”
“Good. You’ll get cocktails at your place at four-thirty. I’ll have them sent over.”
Wald turned to go. “Wait a minute, Roger,” Kayden said. “I know I owe Zander for the fact that the security measures are done with, but what on earth ever got into him to ask that question?”
“Didn’t he ever tell you? He must be shy. He and I were working late on the setup, and just for the hell of it, he asked that question. You see, he and I had been talking about you and your busted home life. We liked the answer so well that he decided to use the question in front of all the folks.”
Wald left the office. Joseph Kayden glanced at his watch. Two-fifteen. Just one hundred and five more minutes. He walked into the silent, empty assembly hall and turned on the amplifier. He grinned and said into the mike: “Does she still love me?”
There were a few seconds of silence. Then the Machine boomed, with what was almost irritability: “Does who still love whom? The question must be specific.”
<
~ * ~
The next stage in the development of the robot was construction of the body. Park’s contribution—artificial legs, and then arms— was of prime importance in giving mobility to the “thinking machine”
SELF PORTRAIT
by Bernard Wolfe
October 5, 1959
W
ELL, here I am at Princeton, ifacs is quite a place, quite a place, but the atmosphere’s darned informal. My colleagues seem to be mostly youngish fellows dressed in sloppy dungarees, sweatshirts (the kind Einstein made so famous) and moccasins, and when they’re not puttering in the labs they’re likely to be lolling on the grass, lounging in front of the fire in commons, or slouching around in conference rooms chalking up equations on a blackboard. No way of telling, of course, but a lot of these collegiate-looking chaps must be in the ms end, whatever that is. You’d think fellows in something secret like that would dress and behave with a little more dignity.
Guess I was a little previous in packing my soup-and-fish. Soon as I was shown to my room in the bachelor dorms, I dug it out and hung it way back in the closet, out of sight. When in Rome, etc. Later that day I discovered they carry dungarees in the Co-op; luckily, they had the pre-faded kind.
~ * ~
October 6, 1959
Met the boss this morning—hardly out of his thirties, crew-cut, wearing a flannel hunting shirt and dirty saddleshoes. I was glad I’d thought to change into my dungarees before th
e interview.
“Parks,” he said, “you can count yourself a very fortunate young man. You’ve come to the most important address in America, not excluding the Pentagon. In the world, probably. To get you oriented, suppose I sketch in some of the background of the place.”
That would be most helpful, I said. I wondered, though, if he was as naive as he sounded. Did he think I’d been working in cybernetics labs for going on six years without hearing enough rumors about ifacs to make me dizzy? Especially about the ms end of ifacs?
“Maybe you know,” he went on, “that in the days of Oppenheimer and Einstein, this place was called the Institute for Advanced Studies. It was run pretty loosely then—in addition to the mathematicians and physicists, they had all sorts of queer ducks hanging around—poets, Egyptologists, numismatists, medievalists, herbalists, God alone knows what all. By 1955, however, so many cybernetics labs had sprung up around the country that we needed some central coordinating agency, so Washington arranged for us to take over here. Naturally, as soon as we arrived, we eased out the poets and Egyptologists, brought in our own people, and changed the name to the Institute for Advanced Cybernetics Studies. We’ve got some pretty keen projects going now, pret-ty keen.”
I said I’d bet, and did he have any idea which project I would fit into?
“Sure thing,” he said. “You’re going to take charge of a very important lab. The Pro lab.” I guess he saw my puzzled look. “Pro—that’s short for prosthetics, artificial limbs. You know, it’s really a scandal. With our present level of technology, we should have artificial limbs which in many ways are even better than the originals, but actually we’re still making do with modifications of the same primitive, clumsy pegs and hooks they were using a thousand years ago. I’m counting on you to get things hopping in that department. It’s a real challenge.”
I said it sure was a challenge, and of course I’d do my level best to meet it. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed. Around cybernetics circles, I hinted, you heard a lot of talk about the hush-hush ms work that was going on at ifacs and it sounded so exciting that, well, a fellow sort of hoped he might get into that end of things.
“Look here, Parks,” the boss said. He seemed a little peeved. “Cybernetics is teamwork, and the first rule of any team is that not everybody can be quarterback. Each man has a specific job on our team, one thing he’s best suited for, and what you’re best suited for, obviously, is the Pro lab. We’ve followed your work closely these last few years, and we were quite impressed by the way you handled those photoelectric-cell insects. You pulled off a brilliant engineering stunt, you know, when you induced nervous breakdown in your robot moths and bedbugs, and proved that the oscillations they developed corresponded to those which the human animal develops in intention tremor and Parkinson’s disease. A keen bit of cybernetic thinking, that. Very keen.”
It was just luck, I told him modestly.
“Nonsense,” the boss insisted. “You’re first and foremost a talented neuro man, and that’s exactly what we need in the Pro department. There, you see, the problem is primarily one of duplicating a nervous mechanism in the metal, of bridging the gap between the neuronic and electronic. So buckle down, and if you hear any more gossip about ms, forget it fast—it’s not a proper subject of conversation for you. The loyalty oath you signed is very specific about the trouble you can get into with loose talk. Remember that.”
I said I certainly would, and thanks a whole lot for the advice.
Damn! Everybody knows ms is the thing to get into. It gives you real standing in the field if it gets around that you’re an ms man. I had my heart set on getting into ms.
~ * ~
October 16, 1959
It never rains, etc.: now it turns out that Len Ellsom’s here, and he’s in ms ! Found out about it in a funny way. Two mornings a week, it seems, the staff members get into their skiing and hunting clothes and tramp into the woods to cut logs for their fireplaces. Well, this morning I went with them, and as we were walking along the trail Goldweiser, my assistant, told me the idea behind these expeditions.
“You can’t get away from it,” he said. “e=mc2 is in a tree trunk as well as in a uranium atom or a solar system. When you’re hacking away at a particular tree, though, you don’t think much about such intangibles—like any good, untheoretical lumberjack, you’re a lot more concerned with superficialities, such as which way the grain runs, how to avoid the knots, and so on. It’s very restful. So long as a cyberneticist is sawing and chopping, he’s not a sliver of uncontaminated cerebrum contemplating the eternal slippery verities of gravity and electromagnetism; he’s just one more guy trying to slice up one more log. Makes him feel he belongs to the human race again. Einstein, you know, used to get the same results with a violin.”
Now, I’ve heard talk like that before, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. It so happens that I feel very strongly on the subject. I think a scientist should like what he’s doing and not want to take refuge in Nature from the Laws of Nature (which is downright illogical, anyhow). I, for one, enjoy cutting logs precisely because, when my saw rasps across a knot, I know that the innermost secret of that knot, as of all matter in the Universe, is e=mc2. It’s my job to know it, and it’s very satisfying to know that I know it and that the general run of people don’t. I was about to put this thought into words, but before I could open my mouth, somebody behind us spoke up.
“Bravo, Goldie,” he said. “Let us by all means pretend that we belong to the human race. Make way for the new cyberneticists with their old saws. Cyberneticist, spare that tree!”
I turned around to see who could be making jokes in such bad taste and—as I might have guessed—it was Len Ellsom. He was just as surprised as I was.
“Well,” he said, “if it isn’t Ollie Parks! I thought you were out in Cal Tech, building schizophrenic bedbugs.”
After m.i.t. I had spent some time out in California doing neuro-cyber research, I explained—but what was he doing here? I’d lost track of him after he’d left Boston; the last I’d heard, he’d been working on the giant robot brain Remington-Rand was developing for the Air Force. I remembered seeing his picture in the paper two or three times while he was working on the brain.
“I was with Remington a couple of years,” he told me. “If I do say so myself, we built the Air Force a real humdinger of a brain—in addition to solving the most complex problems in ballistics, it could whistle Dixie and, in moments of stress, produce a sound not unlike a Bronx cheer. Naturally, for my prowess in the electronic simulation of I.Q., I was tapped for the brain department of these hallowed precincts.”
“Oh?” I said. “Does that mean you’re in ms?” It wasn’t an easy idea to accept, but I think I was pretty successful in keeping my tone casual.
“Ollie, my boy,” he said in an exaggerated stage whisper, putting his finger to his lips, “in the beginning was the word and the word was mum. Leave us avoid the subject of brains in this keen place. We all have a job to do on the team.” I suppose that was meant to be a humorous imitation of the boss; Len always did fancy himself quite a clown.
We were separated during the sawing, but he caught up with me on the way back and said, “Let’s get together soon and have a talk, Ollie. It’s been a long time.”
He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty conscience. I’ll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He’s right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It’s the usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.
The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He’s still trying to get my goat; he knows how much I’ve always hated to be called Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at Len’s wisecracks.
~ * ~
October 18, 1959
Things are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here
’s how I get the picture.
A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs because, while the neuromotor systems in legs and arms are a lot alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs, the boss figures we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will have been licked.
Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed Hospital—fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a land mine explosion outside Pyongyang— and shipped him up here to be a subject in our experiments.
When Kujack arrived, the neuro boys made a major decision. It didn’t make sense, they agreed, to keep building experimental legs directly into the muscles and nerves of Kujack’s stumps; the surgical procedure in these cine-plastic jobs is complicated as all getout, involves a lot of pain for the subject and, what’s more to the point, means long delays each time while the tissues heal.
Robot and the Man - [Adventures in Science Fiction 04] Page 3