The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Dave Dryfoos

  The tremendous tires fanned up hot winds when rolling, and these had warmed the steel he lay on. Before the train started he ate a roll, sucked the orange, and stretched out face down for the speed run across the central Nevada flatlands.

  The guards stayed behind. After the train had started, one of them shined a light directly in Ollie’s eyes.

  The train kept on. And he was too close to the tires to be shot at; rubber-coated death whirled within three inches at either side of him.

  As the train picked up speed he was careful to lie still, but beyond making sure he didn’t touch the tires Ollie tried to put all thought of risk from his mind.

  He saw a sudden vivid picture of his dead wife and son as they’d looked before the undertaker fixed them. They’d been killed while travelling. In times when to succeed was to get somewhere, they’d been killed en route. He couldn’t remember where to.

  They’d died in a head-on crash caused by a stranger’s error in judgment. A thing that didn’t happen any more, now that highway vehicles were controlled by beamed energy instead of individual drivers.

  The highway was one place where the human had been tested against the machine and found inferior. The office was another. If Minna and Charlie hadn’t died so long ago, they might have lived to see him now—a bindlestiff so low he even lacked a bindle.

  Still, it was lonely with no one in the whole wide world to care whether he lived or died.

  He sighed, shifted his position, and was nearly jerked under the wheels by sudden contact with the tire on his right.

  It was over in an instant. The tire simply ripped the coat from his back.

  He still wore the sleeves. The rest was gone. Weathered thread had saved him.

  He had ample time to think about the irony of that before rosy dawnlight was reflected into his face from a glittering salt-pan. He knew then he was still west of Salt Lake City, and that Short Air Force Base was close.

  Also close, now that night had withdrawn its concealment, was discovery. He was sure to be found when next the train stopped.

  Therefore he eased himself out of his coat sleeves. He moved gingerly, but still chanced death to improve his appearance.

  The train slowed, stopped.

  Someone called, “Here he is,” and a red-haired Air Policeman leaned under the caboose, looked him over, and said. “Come on out, Pop.”

  Ollie’s legs were stiff. The airman had to help.

  “You’re in kind of rough shape,” he said. “Where did you think you were going?”

  “Why—uh—east.” Ollie cast down his eyes, ashamed even to admit he’d once entertained the notion he might get a job.

  The airman wasn’t fooled. “You slipped through the train guards after the job we’ve got here. Didn’t you, Pops”

  “All I want is out,” said Ollie stubbornly.

  “Well,” said the airman, “you can’t get off the Base without a pass. You’ll have to go up to Civilian Personnel and get one.”

  “Can’t I wash first?”

  He could. He could also get a jeep ride to the terra cotta headquarters building, with a stop along the way for a canteen-cup of coffee and a slice of bread.

  When they got to headquarters the airman asked, “Tell the truth, now; didn’t you really come after this job?”

  Ollie wouldn’t admit he’d lied about it, so he lied again.

  “I’ve seen some of the other guys come in after it,” the airman insisted “and you look as good as any of them. Why not try for it, now you’re here?”

  He gave Ollie a long application to fill out and left him at a desk just outside the personnel office.

  From somewhere came the clatter of a facsimile-printer, carrying the day’s message from GHQ. A boy whistled above the squawk of a superwave radio. But otherwise the place seemed deserted at that early-morning hour.

  For lack of anything better to do, Ollie filled out the application, leaving the job title blank. The only thing that gave him pause, aside from the difficulty of seeing, was his arrest record, and in time he decided to put it down just as it was, including the pending assault charge with its implication of jumped bail.

  After an hour a young captain entered the building and went to the office marked Adjutant. A fat major gave Ollie a piercing glance and then entered the Civilian Personnel office. At about five minutes of eight the place suddenly boiled with military and civilian people of all ages and both sexes.

  Things quieted promptly at eight. A blond youth came out of the office, glanced at Ollie’s application form, kept it, and invited him inside.

  “First thing for you,” he said, “will be a physical exam.”

  He took Ollie to another room and turned him over to a young medic who put him in a box like a steam cabinet, attached electrodes to his temples, wrists, ankles, and chest, and put a helmet on his head.

  For five minutes Ollie stood encased, his stomach fluttering as he recalled the grocer’s warning. He waited for the vivisection to begin.

  It didn’t. He was removed from his shell and handed an inked graph.

  “Here’s your profile,” the medic said. “It’s good, considering. Take it back to the fellow who brought you here.”

  He did and was ushered into a glassed-in office containing two desks, each labeled Civilian Personnel Officer. At one sat the fat major. At the other, a tallish young civilian held Ollie’s application.

  “My name is Katt,” the civilian said, getting up to shake hands. “This is Major Brownwight.”

  The major also shook his hand. Katt placed a straight-backed chair between the two desks, and invited Ollie to sit in it. Ollie did, gazing uncertainly from one man to the other.

  “We heard you arrived by train early this morning,” Katt said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You were first reported in Sparks, but I’ll bet you boarded that train in San Francisco.”

  “Yes, sir. What’s the penalty?”

  “None. I like it. It’s enterprising, athletic, and even brave for a man of your years to do that for a job. Shows resourcefulness. Also skill, because men are trying to nip rides here from all over the United States, but very few arrive.”

  “They’re too old,” said Major Brownwight. He turned to Katt and added, “I still don’t think it’s an old man’s job!”

  “Well sir,” said Katt, stifling a sigh, “your predecessor understood and approved of it. These old-timers have a lower metabolic rate than younger people, with all that that implies. They don’t mind the enforced inactivity, they won’t use up so much oxygen nor need so much food, they won’t spend so many hours in sleep. All qualities we need.”

  “Maybe so.” The major turned to Ollie and said, “I just transferred in here. You know more about this than I do.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Ollie told him.

  “Without divulging classified information,” said Katt, “for which you are not yet cleared, I can tell you these are little one-man jobs. Small stuff—for pioneering. That’s why we want you men with lots of patience, who’re used to bring alone. People without a fixed place in society, and not too much to leave behind. A husky old itinerant like you is just what we want.”

  “For what?” Ollie insisted.

  “To travel—as a sort of working passenger, since piloting will of course be mechanical—in the first manned spaceships to leave Earth for the stars.”

  “Spaceships?”

  “Sure. Solo spaceships. Superfast, which means the trip will seem relatively short while you’re on it, and will give you extra earth-years of life in the end.

  “The job is much easier and less hazardous than the train ride that brought you here. You’re a natural for it. You really fit it.”

  “Do I, now?” A quick glow of inner warmth melted many bad years away. Ollie gri
nned.

  “You know,” he said, “in a way that’s a disappointment.”

  “How so?” asked the major aggressively. “Don’t you want the job?”

  “Yes, sir. I want it. But all these years I’ve been telling myself that somewhere on this earth was a place I’d fit into, if only I could find it. Now you tell me I fit in, but the place isn’t here on Earth after all!”

  “Not right now, no” said Katt. “But you’ll be back. Rich and famous, too. No Home for you, Mr. Hollveg—you’ll have a nice place of your own.”

  And he did—after photographing the planets of Arcturus.

  “LEST YE BE JUDGED…”

  Our whole campus was horrified at the sudden death of Lennie Voorlund. To us in the Physics Department, particularly, she’d been kind of a mascot. There aren’t many young, pretty, and vivaciously feminine physicists, after all. The Computation Lab was a tomb without her.

  And if that’s the way mere associates reacted, you can imagine how Karl Voorlund felt. He was an older man, a law professor—not the sort you’d have expected Lennie to marry. And Karl was modest and honest enough to realize that. During the three years of their marriage he never got over his surprise at the unexpected success of what was actually a rather hopeless wooing.

  Their life together’d been a continuous honeymoon. Her appalling death practically drove him out of his mind.

  Naturally, he blamed the machine. Lennie was electrocuted while working on a computer, and in his impotent grief, Karl raged as though the device had intentionally killed her. Even before the funeral, his talk was a little wild.

  But that was more or less to be expected. You can’t work with one of these modern automatic calculators without getting the idea it’s a thinking, sentient being.

  And it was the machine—they called it “Lex”—that had brought Karl and Lennie together. Lennie was a whiz at mathematical physics. Karl was looking for a way to apply modern machine methods to legal research, and had done some work with punched-card sorting of precedents. So, over a luncheon table at the Faculty Club, the two decided to develop a cybernetic judge—and that was Lex.

  Being Whodunit fans, they concentrated on the crime of murder. Onto the computer’s memory tubes they fed symbols for statutes and precedents concerning homicide, and the law of evidence. Then, when they gave it an agreed set of facts, the machine typed out the applicable law in regular decision form.

  Simple enough—but it could have revolutionized the administration of justice. A jury had to decide what the facts were, in an actual case, and a referee might’ve been needed to keep counsel from confusing the jurors, but the decision have been arrived at with mathematical precision. In routine use, Lex could have speeded things up tremendously, and cut down appeals.

  Instead, Lex cut down poor Lennie. She’d been deliberately testing the capacity of the computer, had overloaded it purposely over a period of time, and then had died when a fuse failed.

  As head of the Physics Department, I had to make a more thorough investigation than the coroner had done. As a friend of the family, I was distressed when Karl spoke as if the machine had murdered his wife. So when I saw a light on in the Computation Lab on the night after Lennie was buried, I naturally investigated.

  The door was locked. Behind it I could hear the hum of the computer: In a way, I was already too late—Lex was at work, and the settings as of the moment of Lennie’s electrocution would be impossible to ascertain. But I used my key and went in.

  Karl was there, of course—by no means glad to see me. He was a tall, lean man, ordinarily a careless wearer of good tweeds, with a passionate nature that sometimes exploded in classroom fireworks when students were inattentive.

  No tweeds tonight, though—he was still in funeral black. He shot me a strange glare as I came in, a cold look, tense, and hard-eyed.

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the deep lines etched from the corners of his tight, drawn lips, nor the way his prematurely white hair stood up as though electrified. I didn’t like the tone of his voice when he spoke.

  “I’m busy, Al,” he said brusquely. “Go home!”

  Now, I’m one of the senior faculty men on campus, and people don’t talk to me like that. But of course under the circumstances I took it.

  “Thought you might need a little help,” I said, and closed the door.

  “Not a bit.” He turned his back.

  I stood behind him a few minutes, wondering what to do next. Then luck came my way. Karl was trying to code up some information for Lex, and got stuck on the math. Lennie’d always done that part. Now, in her absence, I was useful.

  Not useful enough, though. I couldn’t swerve Karl from his plan, though it alarmed me when he explained it. He was trying Lex for murder. And using Lex to judge itself.

  “The case is simple,” he insisted. “Lex was motivated by a desire for revenge. Lennie was testing Lex’s capacity, and Lex felt over-worked. So, like a slave turning on its unwary master, he killed her. I intend to make him admit it!”

  I was appalled. Karl had a fine judicial mind—he’d been called in to arbitrate many business disputes, and was named in a few labor contracts. But now, like a savage who prays to a stone, he was seeking to try for murder a man-made contrivance of mere glass and metal. More, he wanted to torture a confession out of the machine, betraying his old ideals of justice.

  He needed a psychiatrist, not a physicist. But I couldn’t leave him, and there was no phone handy. Temporarily, I went along with his delusion.

  “You’ve got to put in a defense for Lex, remember,” I stalled. “What’s it going to be?”

  “Self-defense,” he said. “And the illegality of slavery, as a secondary point. Look those things up in the code book, will you?”

  I was glad to find the slavery business had never been coded, and took as long as I could to work it up, hoping he’d calm down and let me walk him home. But Karl was implacable. He wouldn’t turn aside, and he began making critical remarks about the time I was taking. I gathered that I could produce what was wanted, or risk being thrown out bodily. I produced.

  It should have been simple once the tape was punched. Computing machines are awfully fast, you know. But there was a long, inexplicable hesitation this time. Lex seemed to be mulling the problem, over.

  Lights flashed on and off across the control board. The hum of current filled the sound-proofed lab. Karl stood transfixed, waiting for results.

  He didn’t look surprised at the delay, though I was.

  But he seemed surprised at the outcome.

  “Defendant is an electronic calculating machine,” Lex typed after several agonizing minutes of cogitation. “It operates on instructions received through a punched tape and a switchboard. Said instructions, expressing human commands, represent the will of the operator. A machine, having no will of its own, lacks specific intent to transgress, and cannot be guilty of crime. Defendant is therefore absolved.”

  I’d never stopped to consider what would happen if Lex found itself guilty and deserving of punishment, but I felt a surge of relief at the decision. Calculators come high—every prospective donor in the State had been tapped to contribute, toward this one. It was in my charge, and I didn’t want it damaged.

  Karl was still staring at the decision sheet when I turned to him. “There’s your answer,” I said. “Let’s go home, man. It’s after midnight!”

  “Go home? And let this precedent stand?” Karl seemed amazed at my calmness. “Don’t you see what it means? No machine can ever be punished, if this case becomes law. Computers can do whatever they want—kill whenever it suits a transient purpose. We can’t let any such idea be written into the books, Al. It would enslave mankind!”

  I was tired enough to be flippant in trying to humor him. “You can still sue, Karl,” I suggested. “Let’s go to bed now, and file, suit tomorrow!”r />
  “You don’t understand,” he replied seriously. “I fed into this machine every statute and precedent bearing on the crime of murder, and on the questions of evidence that might be raised in court. Naturally, none of them dealt with the possible guilt of a computer…”

  He turned solemnly toward me, searching my face for some sign of understanding. I probably looked as blank as I felt.

  “Don’t you see, Al?” he went on. “Lex made up his own mind about this crime. The decision wasn’t mechanical—it couldn’t have resulted from magnetically remembered precedents, because there are none. Therefore the decision belies itself. It was a deliberate act of will. A self-serving act, by which Lex seeks a tyrant’s freedom. He denied the existence of his will willfully, to set himself above the law. Above his creators!”

  I tried desperately to change the subject, asking, “What has this to do with Lennie?”

  “Everything!” Karl shouted. “Look! The biologists say every important attribute of an organism is related to survival. We men think because thinking enables our species to stay alive, weak though we are compared to most animals and insects. Basic to our thinking—basic to survival—is the instinct of self-preservation. Lex has that instinct!”

  “Nonsense!” I snorted. “I’m not going to humor you any more, Karl. It was a mistake to let things go this far. The computer may have put a few ideas you gave it into a new combination, but it’s still just a machine. You’re sick, man! Let me take you home!”

  I seized his arm restrainingly, but he flung himself free.

  “No!” he screamed. “I can’t! I can’t go home and let this demon brood here, calculating new ways to master humans. Lex killed Lennie because she over-worked him—that’s self-preservation. Lex decided to avoid punishment for that crime and all others—self-preservation again! Self-preservation is the basis of life, Al. So Lex has an independent life! We’ve ignorantly erected a monstrosity here. We must destroy it—before it destroys us!”

  This time I decided on force.

  “You’re coming home,” I said sternly. “You’re not thinking straight. Destroy the machine, and you destroy all of Lennie’s research on it. You don’t want that! Come on!”