The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  “Yes. Want to see it?”

  He led me through the old house and into a wing that had been built by his second wife, Alicia. We entered the enormous living room. Its curtains were closed; Tom pressed the wall switch and the room was filled with soft, rich light that some decorator had contrived to make women beautiful and parties successful. The furniture had been pushed back to the walls. Tom’s machine stretched along the center of the rug like a procession of stunted mechanical elephants, linked trunk to tail. For it consisted of several gray metal cabinets with a minimum of lights and switches and no dials at all, connected by many wires of different colors. I listened but heard no sound.

  “Is it working?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  (Later, bending over it, I heard a hum like that of a forgotten radio whose station has signed off for the night— the very sound of emptiness. It was the only noise the thing made.)

  “It’s not quite what I expected,” I told him. “You know— in cartoons you see big cabinets with rows of lights.”

  “The problem was different here. See this little one on the end?” It was a box less than three feet high. “It’s the smallest unit, but it does the basic work. The other components are simply devices for getting the stuff out to the light of day.”

  He led me to the little cabinet—the creative one. “This is where electronic impulses, each representing a different word, are mixed at random. Even David Sere doesn’t know how fast it works—it may turn out a billion words of mixture an hour, or maybe only a million. It isn’t like a typewriter, after all. It makes the mixture from words, not letters.

  “We could have put the entire Unabridged Dictionary into its vocabulary, but then we would have gotten back prose with such odd words as ‘sope,’ ‘paktong,’ and ‘thirl’ in it, and I didn’t want that. In the end we gave it a generous English vocabulary and a few tags of French, German, and Latin.”

  Tom touched the second cabinet. “This is the scanner. Producing the mixture is simple, but it takes lots of wires and circuits and stuff to scan the mixture and know when it ceases to be gibberish and starts making sense. Other parts of the scanner fill the basement and three bedrooms upstairs. Sere spent months ‘instructing’ it—adjusting the mechanism to accept sense-making combinations of words and reject nonsense.

  “When the scanner accepts part of the mixture as sensible English, it diverts the electron stream into this cabinet, which is called Memory. Memory is simply a recording device, necessary because there is no process that can print the stuff as fast as the machine produces it. Memory stores it, then feeds it out slowly—still as nothing but a code and electron pattern—to the next component, which converts the code into English and prints it on microfilm.

  “Every morning I snip off a bit of microfilm and develop it myself. The output ranges from six to ten inches of film a day. I have a little darkroom over there. Then I sit down at an ordinary microfilm viewer to see what the machine has written.”

  “And that’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it. That’s how I produced my novel.”

  We returned to the front porch. Tom poured Scotch over ice cubes and added pipeline water. It was near sunset now. The air had cooled a degree or two and even the horned frogs were casting shadows. Some of Tom’s calves began bellowing, at a distance that turned the sounds to music.

  “How many people know that a machine wrote Early Noon?” I asked.

  “Three. You and I and David R. Sere. But I don’t worry about Sere, he’s perfectly safe—hardly human at all. I laid down specifications for him, and then went out and found him—in Manhattan, of course. He took me to a health-food shop on Sixth Avenue, and over nuts and raisins and spinach juice he told me that his lifelong ambition had been just to sit somewhere and think. Well, he’s doing it now—in a furnished room in Bayonne, New Jersey, at my expense.”

  I asked, “Why did you send for me?”

  “The machine has written another novel. I have just finished typing it out—I can’t very well send microfilm off to my publisher, and it would be risky to hire the typing done. The thing is, this new novel is so different from Early Noon that I’m not sure I can offer it as my work. I want you to read it and tell me if you think I can get away with it. I hope you think I can, because this new one is my masterpiece.”

  “Is that thing set to write nothing but novels?” I asked.

  “No, no, damn it,” said Tom with irritation. “You don’t understand. It works at random. It can write anything. That’s the trouble—most of its output is useless to me. It has done a complete Julius Caesar, for example—and thirty of the Sonnets. It has produced several letters of application for the job of school-bus driver in Wyandotte, Ohio, in 1933. It has made dozens of dirty limericks, and has actually invented a new vice by describing it in a story. It has written the diary of a sixteen-year-old moron named Artie Messer for the year 1967.

  “It has given me thousands of things I can’t use!” He shouted the last two words and ground an ice cube to bits with his teeth, making me wince. “Want ads! Soldiers’ letters home! Contracts!

  “Contracts! Hundreds of pages of aforesaids and whereases, and I have to read it all because I never know when the damned machine will switch to another subject. Once it did five chapters of a novel I would like to have written, and then switched to a recipe for spoon bread in the style of Clementine Paddleford.

  “Three months ago it produced a lost comedy of Aristophanes in an English translation by Gilbert Murray. Murray died in 1957. Now, is this a real lost comedy of Aristophanes? Or is the play itself, like the Murray translation of it, just an invention of the machine?

  “I have no way of knowing. The Julius Caesar is real, and the Wyandotte, Ohio, letters are false—there’s no such town. But real or false, the Aristophanes is great and ought to be added to world literature. Yet how can I arrange an authentic-looking situation in which to rediscover it?”

  He shrugged and smiled. “It isn’t easy,” he said. “If I could write at all, I could do my own stuff in less time than it takes to read all the junk the machine produces.

  “I could stop, I guess. Just throw the switch and quit; take up chess, or travel. But there’s a fascination to it. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in—Shakespeare, Aristophanes, new works of real importance coming out of infinity, out of nowhere. I like being a famous writer. So I go on reading, day after day.”

  “Where is the new manuscript?”

  “Over there.” He indicated a manila envelope on the porch floor.

  “When I read Early Noon,” I said, “I felt in touch with a first-rate mind. I was surprised and a little jealous that the first-rate mind was yours. But it was not yours—I was touched and moved by a random pattern of electrons made by a machine. No mind was involved at all?”

  “No. They can do that sort of thing nowadays,” said Tom.

  It was dark. I phoned Anne and asked her to turn on the lights along one of our fences which guide me to a landing in our pasture. Then I said good night to Tom and flew home with his manuscript. The next afternoon I took it to my office and began to read.

  * * * *

  The novel was new and strange. Its events took place in the United States and in the present day, yet reading it was like entering a new country where the trees, birds, and stones were different from any known before. It took the old threads of the English language and wove them into something fine and new. Like Tom, I thought it a masterpiece. But I was worried, almost frightened, by the fact that it wasn’t real.

  In the late afternoon I switched on a light, noting that I would have to join Anne and my mother for a drink soon or they would wonder what was wrong. But just at that moment I grew puzzled. I turned back and reread a page. Then, making an exultant guess as to what I had discovered, I put down the manuscript and went to join my family.

  After dinner I returned to the novel and read it to the end, and knew that I had guessed right. The machine h
ad left the book unfinished. Tom had completed the twelfth chapter himself, and added three more. His real reason for asking me to read the book was not to get my opinion of its style but to see whether I could tell the difference between the machine’s work and his imitation of it.

  I read Tom’s chapters again, savoring his ineptitude. I imagined his rage as, peering into his microfilm viewer with tired eyes, he saw this golden stream cut off, replaced by something trivial or stupid. I imagined, too, his agony in writing those final chapters, bad as they were.

  The next morning I flew again to Tom’s house. He came out to the landing strip to meet me. Climbing out of my little plane, holding his manuscript in my hand, I walked toward him. I arranged on my face a knowing, smiling, cynical look that would tell him I had guessed his secret.

  And Tom was walking toward me. Behind him the sky dropped to a flat horizon forty miles away. We were two tiny figures on an enormous windy world, approaching each other on a concrete prairie where grass had grown for thousands of years but grew no more. Like me, Tom held a manuscript. He looked at me fearfully, with far more knowledge in his eyes than I held in mine.

  “I know,” he said. “The machine wrote this yesterday.” He handed me his manuscript. I read the first lines of it, and the pale arch of the sky turned to stone. Fear stabbed me like a pin going through a specimen. I did not know whether I had just been created or was about to be destroyed. I only knew that some fearful power had reached down from the sky and trapped us. For the opening words of the machine’s latest work were these:

  “Tom Trimble and I have been next-door neighbors all our lives, though our houses are six miles apart. We run adjoining ranches in that part of Texas where cedar, prickly pear, and prairie dogs are the chief nuisances and, in a dry year, twenty-five acres of land are needed to support a single cow....”

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  * * * *

  A SIGH FOR CYBERNETICS

  by Felicia Lamport

  Dr. Norbert Wiener, a pioneer in the use of electronic brains, warns that computing machines, now working faster than their inventors, may go out of control and cause widespread destruction.—News Item

  Thinking machines are outwitting their masters,

  Menacing mankind with ghastly disasters.

  These mechanized giants designed for compliance

  Exhibit their open defiance of science

  By daily committing such gross misdemeanors

  That scientists fear they’ll make mincemeat of Wieners.

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  * * * *

  OBVIOUS!

  by Michael Ffolkes

  ‘What d’you mean—’obvious to the meanest intelligence!’ “

  <>

  * * * *

  I REMEMBER BABYLON

  by Arthur C. Clarke

  To build the better mousetrap has become—in this day of technological marvels—the easiest part of the job. It’s getting the word to the path-beating public that really counts. And the path itself tends to resemble a nightmare behaviorist’s maze (to switch rodents and metaphors) in which all the entrances are through opinion-taking and all the exits by way of opinion-making.

  This was never so evident as in the year that began with the TV quiz scandals, progressed with “payola” and “public images,” and included the launchings of the “Echo” and “Courier” satellites, advance scouts of moon-relayed worldwide no-fail radio, telephone and television communication.

  No one is better qualified than Arthur Clarke to write about the possibilities inherent in the Echo program: world-traveler, cosmopolite, and lecturer of note. Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and past President of the British Interplanetary Society, Mr. Clarke is the very model of a modern major science-fictionist. In addition to a quantity of superior fiction (see Harcourt Brace’s 1959 omnibus collection, Across the Sea of Stars), he has written both technical and popular books on space flight, at least one vividly descriptive book on skin diving in Australian coral reefs, and any number of short articles. Between lecture seasons, space conferences, underwater explorations, and appearances before House Investigations Committees, he makes his home, in Ceylon.

  * * * *

  My name is Arthur C. Clarke, and I wish I had no connection with the whole sordid business, but as the moral— repeat, moral—integrity of the United States is involved, I must first establish my credentials. Only thus will you understand how, with the aid of the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, I have unwittingly triggered an avalanche that may sweep away much of western civilization.

  Back in 1945, while a radar officer in the Royal Air Force, I had the only original idea of my life. Twelve years before the first Sputnik started beeping, it occurred to me that an artificial satellite would be a wonderful place for a television transmitter, since a station several thousand miles in altitude could broadcast to half the globe. I wrote up the idea the week after Hiroshima, proposing a network of relay satellites 22,000 miles above the equator; at this height, they’d take exactly one day to complete a revolution, and so would remain fixed over the same spot on the Earth.

  The piece appeared in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World; not expecting that celestial mechanics would be commercialized in my lifetime, I made no attempt to patent the idea, and doubt if I could have done so anyway. (If I’m wrong, I’d prefer not to know.) But I kept plugging it in my books, and today the idea of communication satellites is so commonplace that no one knows its origin.

  I did make a plaintive attempt to put the record straight when approached by the House of Representatives Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration; you’ll find my evidence on page 32 of its report, The Next Ten Years in Space. And as you’ll see in a moment, my concluding words had an irony I never appreciated at the time: “Living as I do in the Far East, I am constantly reminded of the struggle between the western world and the U.S.S.R. for the uncommitted millions of Asia...When line-of-sight TV transmissions become possible from satellites directly overhead, the propaganda effect may be decisive....”

  I still stand by those words, but there were angles I hadn’t thought of—and which, unfortunately, other people have.

  It all began during one of those official receptions which are such a feature of social life in eastern capitals. They’re even more common in the west, of course, but in Colombo there’s little competing entertainment. At least once a week, if you are anybody, you get an invitation to cocktails at an embassy or legation, the British Council, the U.S. Operations Mission, L’Alliance Française, or one of the countless alphabetical agencies the UN has begotten.

  At first, being more at home beneath the Indian Ocean than in diplomatic circles, my partner and I were nobodies and were left alone. But after Mike godfathered Dave Brubeck’s tour of Ceylon, people started to take notice of us— still more so when he married one of the island’s best-known beauties. So now our consumption of cocktails and canapés is limited chiefly by reluctance to abandon our comfortable sarongs for such western absurdities as trousers, dinner jackets and ties.

  It was the first time we’d been to the Soviet Embassy, which was throwing a party for a group of Russian oceanographers who’d just come into port. Beneath the inevitable paintings of Lenin and Stalin, a couple of hundred guests of all colors, religions and languages were milling around, chatting with friends, or single-mindedly demolishing the vodka and caviar. I’d been separated from Mike and Elizabeth, but could see them at the other side of the room. Mike was doing his “There was I at fifty fathoms” bit to a fascinated audience, while Elizabeth watched him quizzically, and more people watched Elizabeth.

  Ever since I lost an eardrum while pearl diving on the Great Barrier Reef, I’ve been at a considerable disadvantage at functions of this kind; the surface noise is about 6 db too much for me to cope with. And this is no small handicap, when being introduced to people with names like Dharmasirawardene, Tissaverasinghe, Goonetilleke and Jayawickrame. When I’m not raiding the buffet, therefo
re, I usually look for a pool of relative quiet where there’s a chance of following more than fifty percent of any conversation in which I may get involved. I was standing in the acoustic shadow of a large ornamental pillar, surveying the scene in my detached or Somerset Maugham manner, when I noticed that someone was looking at me with that “Haven’t we met before?” expression.

  I’ll describe him with some care, because there must be many people who can identify him. He was in the mid-thirties, and I guessed he was American; he had that well-scrubbed, crew-cut, man-about-Rockefeller-Center look that used to be a hallmark until the younger Russian diplomats and technical advisers started imitating it so successfully. He was about six feet in height, with shrewd brown eyes and black hair, prematurely gray at the sides. Though I was fairly certain we’d never met before, his face reminded me of someone. It took me a couple of days to work it out: remember John Garfield? That’s who it was, as near as makes no difference.