by John Sladek
Donagon wiped his damp hands, opened the journal and began just after the ripped-out pages:
We decided not to abandon the attempt after all; to try once more to store a man digitally. The last obstacle had been removed, i.e., storage. Previously we had estimated many thousands of miles of magnetic tape would be required, with complex retrieval problems. The multiple storage paired redundancy tapes, developed by Müller-Fokker (the so-called ‘Müller-Fokker tapes’) in Vienna and demonstrated by him at the Louisville National Laboratory, were exactly what we needed. These reduced our tape requirements to four ten-inch reels.
The M-F tape is much of a mystery except to its inventor. The principle seems to be Gestalt analysis (if that is the term), or recognition of large patterns in large amounts of data. Data fed in is not immediately recorded, but ‘comprehended’ and compressed—by the tape itself—into formulae. The tape is not magnetic but electrochemical. It may not be erased, but new data may be recorded upon old. There seems to be a layering or—
We do not really understand the M-F tape at all, but we do understand it will do the job. At present we have no way of retrieving what we want from the tape, and since its inventor has vanished, it may take us many years—
Many years—
Every datum will be recorded many times, to reduce error. At present, surgeons are removing tissue samples from the subject (from bones, organs, glands, etc.) and determining cell-structure data. We have already encoded a DNA map, photographs, holographs, x-rays, resin casts, EKG’s and so on—as complete an analysis of the subject as we can make .There remains but one step, the mapping of all electrical and chemical activity of the subject’s brain. The press will be invited to this session; they will see us succeed or fail.
Succeed or fail.
Through the partition dividing his office from that of Major Fouts, he could hear the crinkle of cellophane and foil, and the sound of devouring.
The laboratory looked like a throne room. Bob sat in the throne, a surgical chair; his courtiers wore rubber gloves and his crown was a steel vise. Above the crown those in the visitors’ room could see pinkish-gray, crumpled velvet.
Back of the throne was a large illuminated map of this velvet surface on which men marked the current weather in Bob’s brain. On either side were ranks of cabinets in decorator colors. Two featured control panels, one a typewriter, two more the inevitable banks of flashing lights. Four were dialling twin reels of tape (one with some excitement), eight others were anonymous, one was vomiting paper, and the two in the visitors’ room were opened to display whiskey and glasses.
There were other press facilities in the visitors’ room, including telephones, free cigarettes, sharpened pencils and fresh pads, and a big stack of xeroxed press releases.
The one reporter who did show up had a hell of a time.
‘I sure appreciate this,’ be said to Donagon. ‘I’ll bet the rest of the gang haven’t got it this good down there in Florida.’
He asked Donagon if he’d ever heard of the magazine he worked for, LIFE.
‘Florida?’
‘Yeah, everyone else went down to cover the big cancer cure story. I missed the plane, so I thought I might as well drop over and check this one out. I really had another assignment over by North Platte, I had to get a picture of this deformed bull. I’d take some shots of your set-up here, only I can’t. My camera and stuff caught the plane.’
He wanted Donagon to have a drink with him and hear the anecdote, but the biophysicist was wanted elsewhere.
A voice behind Bob asked him what he felt.
‘I feel…my right foot…’
‘Yes?’
‘Oh, you know how it is with workbooks.’
‘And now?’
‘A strawberry, all glowing with starry lenses, a starberry…recapitulation of the plot of some old man…buns, for instance…’
Major Fouts stood watching from half-way across the room, where Donagon manned a bank of switches. Between them and the operation was a forced-air curtain to maintain sterility. It was strange to see a man talking away with half his head sawed off and a group of surgeons peering and probing within. It made Fouts feel the sharpness of his own foot-bones.
‘This is a buckle collection…this is supposed to be a father…bank statements or…Is there anyone here named General Motors?’ In an altered voice Bob delivered a message of hope to the motor corporation.
‘Is this guy in any danger?’ Fouts whispered.
‘None at all. Shhh.’ Donagon threw more switches. A kind of phonograph arm beside the chair swung around, lowered its needle, and began to ‘play’ the brain.
‘What’s that?’
‘Shh. Nothing.’
‘Marge!’ Bob shouted. ‘As a strawberry blonde…history as a garbage truck…Now look! I’m not going to say it again…this is lumpy.’ He wept.
‘Now what do you feel?’
‘My picture in the atlas…the strawberries are…funny how the old school holds up…the old Lion Oil Company…arrested!…I hear you think…’
He sang a few bars of something no one could identify.
‘There’s an old saying around here: please wash hands before returning to work…a man disappears, but his ghost…he had it, he paid the death…in the movie freeze rabbit…U.S. Grant, the truth experiment…attaches…the bank hath changed its bank…the railroad egg trial…Dixie cups full of penetrating truth, remember?…smell that?’
‘What do you feel like now?’
‘I feel like picking my nose.’
‘You are picking your nose. What…?’
The door slammed back and four men walked in. Donagon rushed to meet them.
‘You’ll have to go into the visitors’ room,’ he said, smiling.
‘No we don’t.’
‘I—what? Which paper are you from?’
‘This one.’ The tallest man hauled out an old revolver and slapped him with it.
Fouts jumped to the alarm button. When the bell went off, the other three strangers pulled their guns.
‘Okay, fat boy, where are they?’
‘Where are what?’
‘The nigger-babies! The test tubes!’
One of the intruders drove the surgeons away from Bob. ‘Aw, Wes, look! Jesus Christ, they cut this guy’s head open!’
The one with the big greasy pompadour leveled his gun at Fout’s belt. ‘How about it, Fats? This one of your nigger expeermints?’
‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But I do know you’re gonna do a stretch in Leavenworth, pal. Better lay down the sidearms and make it a short visit.’
‘I think…I think I hear a bell,’ Bob volunteered.
‘I know your kind,’ said the pompadour. ‘Tryin’ to put a nigger brain into that pore mother! Come on, boas, let’s mess up the place!’ He wheeled and fired a shot into the nearest memory cabinet.
‘I smell a shot…’ said Bob, still picking his nose.
Fout’s auto-destruct mechanism worked almost perfectly. The tape-reader charge misfired, but the other three went off as planned, as soon as one of the unauthorized persons tried to yank open a cabinet.
One charge was in the main memory bank. One was in the control console. They rendered the computer completely useless to Wes Davis and the Mud Flats Ramblers.
The third, slightly bigger charge was embedded in the soft padding of Bob’s chair, at about ear level. The chair had been designed by an orthopedic surgeon to maintain posture and reduce fatigue. What was left of it still looked good that evening, to the cleanup crew.
‘That’s the way I’d like to go,’ one remarked. ‘Comfy.’
Lieutenant Colonel Fouts tried to shut out the screaming and wailing from the other side of the partition; he tried to order his thoughts.
There was plenty to think about: The government had pulled out of the Mud Flats project and abandoned the attempt to tape a man. National Arsenamid was expected to follow suit. In retrospect, the idea did
smell of circle-squaring and perpetual motion, he had to admit. So if Donagon couldn’t take the disappointment and KNOCK OFF THAT NOISE, it only underlined how crazy he was. The Army had kept his leaky dream afloat long enough. Anyway, National Arse would probably find something else for Donagon to do. Design a new cornflake, say, or answer the telephone.
Fouts himself was off for a few weeks’ badly needed leave, then some new assignment. He checked a few items off his list: files destroyed, diet started, new oak leaves to buy in Frisco, bag packed, desk cleaned out. There remained only the call to Sharp’s next of kin and what else? A Butterfinger candy bar that wouldn’t fit into his luggage.
‘O God!’ said the partition. ‘My whole life wasted! That close to the Nobel and—ruined! O why have you forsaken me, O my governme…’
‘I SAID KNOCK IT OFF!’ Fouts slammed his wastepaper basket against the wall four or five times. It set the plywood quaking and reminded him to return the wastebasket to the supply room. Well, screw that. He had a bus to catch in fifteen minutes. With a start on the candy bar, he dialed Mrs R. E. Sharp.
She answered too soon, catching him with a mouthful of stickiness. A big swallow, then:
‘Mrs Sharp? Mrs Robert Etwall Sharp? Uh, this is Lt Col Fouts, Knighted Stays Army, Mrs Sharp—oh, Shairp, is it? Uh, Mrs Shairp, it is…excuse me…my painful duty to inform you that your husband, you know, Robert Shairp, is dead.
‘What window-peeper? No, it’s not. No, really, I’m serious. Excuse me, ma’am, PIPE DOWN OVER THERE, YOU MEDICAL EXPERIMENT!
‘Did you hear me, ma’am? I said it is my painful etcetera blah blah your husband is dead. The Mud Flats Biomedical Research Project. A joint effort by the Army and National Arsenamid. An accident.
‘Yes, we’ve taken care of the body. We’ll be sending you a few personal effects. Oh yes, and if he was a veteran, you get a free flag from the Veteran’s Administration.
‘Uh-huh. Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Mrs Shairp. ‘Bye now.’
Five minutes to go. Donagon moaned. Fouts picked up his bag off the desk.
The gun was under it.
He’d found it lying on the laboratory floor after the four lunatics were hauled away. It was evidence, to be sent to the Justice Department. The details of how to send it were in the destroyed files.
For a moment he stood weighing it, half-looking for a place to hide the thing. Then a wail from the next office reminded him of a reasonable solution. Bag and overcoat in one hand, gun in the other, and candy bar between teeth, he barged into Donagon’s office.
‘Goth oo cath bus, Donagon. Thake this thing off my handths, will oo?’
‘What? Oh, sure. Thanks, Algie.’ Donagon smiled wanly. Fout’s free hand took the Butterfinger. ‘Sure you know what to do with it, now? It’s evidence, see? You have to…’
‘I understand Algie’ Donagon wiped away a tear and winked. ‘Thanks again.’
‘Sure. Well. See you.’
The lieutenant ran from the building, his fat ass waving goodbye to Donagon.
Marge put down the phone. ‘Your father is dead,’ she said. ‘So stop goose-stepping around the house and go to your room.’
Many hours, many drinks, later she spoke again, this time to a cigarette table lighter disguised as the vaguest of Oriental gods. ‘Bring him back to me. Please. Whole and alive. I’ll do anything in return.’
This inferior, butane-operated deity replied within a week, in its own vague way: Marge received Bob’s billfold, his shoes, and a suitcase full of dirty socks and underwear.
National Arsenamid debated carrying on with the project alone, without the Army. They thought of consulting MacCormick Hines, but no doubt he would consider this a trivial matter and resent the intrusion. Someone suggested interesting the Navy in making men out of sea-water. But Doctor Donagon’s suicide made their decision for them: the project was over.
Four reels of tape went on sale in a US Govt. Surplus store in the Midwest, ‘PUT YOUR MOTHER-IN-LAW ON TAPE—SHE’LL DIGIT!!!’ read the dayglo sign, ‘RARE MÜLLER-FORKER TAPE,
FANTASTIC BARGAIN!!!!’
The Army shifted eggs to another basket. In Oregon, a team of biochemists and psychologists were trying to make bears smarter…
Three: The Ox
THOUGHTS OF CHAIRMAN MAN
………. An hour late later jelly days jelly days the bell goes on and on fire I am bladderful late for school at the office
I struggle to stand up somebody has filled the room with plastic amber ice folding me in fakery: folded gyptian mummy folded dead hand card trick gypson giant in the cardifferent twilight of the twomb
(painted on my eye the impenetrable blue jelly of ‘this world’)
Poe I think of Poe with the opium horrors groping his way to the writing table at dusk or is it dawn: ‘There came to my nostrils the strong peculiar odor of moist earth’
So buried alone alive there it is thats life thats life with digby o’dell one of lifes little jokes laff along with charlie chapfall red skeleton milton burial well now tell me mr bones I never seed such a john buryman routine at dusk or was it dawn I must look it up look up
I must be stuck here stuck here or something stuck
As it was is and ever shall be world without anything the experimenters standing there one writing on his clipboard(.) one looking thoughtful one sucking his pencil waxworks all we must be stuck here the film is stuck or
Picking my nose too that ought to give the archaeologists a few laughs the strong peculiar digit DIGIT O christ I must be I am Im on tape
Yes
Well 111 be damned (Hey Lullay, etc)
NEMA LIVE SU REVILED
On another level all this word soup has generated another presence, just as IAO generate the alifbet and just as deep structures generate surface structures. I have called the other presence tentatively God. It may not be God. It may not be another presence. It may originate from:
(1) The machine or part of the machine.
(2) My brain or part of my brain.
(3) Some physical outside source, neither machine nor brain.
(4) Some non-physical outside source.
(5) Nowhere and nothing (in the case it really is God).
(6) One of the ten combinations of (1) through (5), in pairs.
(7) One of the ten combinations of three of (1) through (5).
(8) One of the five combinations of four of (1) through (5).
(9) All of (1) through (5).
(10)None of the above.
It all operates like some think tank, where all the words, in crisp shirts (plastic pocket protectors for slide rule, red pencil, black pencil, pen) confer—run around conferring—the important words forming their teams of lesser words, talking up enthusiasm for this project: ‘All right, fellas, the buzzword around here today is going to be “epiphany”. Bounce that idea around, examine the macro-structure, get the big depth picture. Sam, you’ll be handling the theological end of this, I want to see you work nice and close with Bud’s team, they’re looking at the “weak force” angle. Let’s get at the interface of this problem, guys. Let’s state our tentative objective as the answer to “Who made you?” ’
Then in the beginning was the word, only now there’s too much word, its face is like a teleprompter and the answers keep rolling across, answers to questions I haven’t thought of asking yet—have I?—and there isn’t any way of shutting it off. Maybe my mind is doing all its thinking at the same time, maybe there isn’t any ‘time’ here…
SO MANY DYNAMOS!
‘I’m glad you asked me that, Bob. “Are minds mechanistic?” Gee, that’s pretty tough. As I’ll mention before, there’s a little shell game you can play with machines. For any machine there is at least one question you can ask, which the machine can fully comprehend, but which it cannot answer, and to which you can see the answer at once.
‘Specifically, it is possible to make up a formula which represents the statement “this formula is not provable
(in the machine)”. Then you ask the machine to prove (or disprove) the formula. If it proves it, the formula is true and the statement must be true, so the machine is contradicting itself. If it doesn’t prove it, the statement is true which you know but the machine can’t. And that’s the difference between a mind and a machine.’
‘But suppose someone comes along and alters the machine so it can prove the formula, or at least see the statement is true?’
‘Well then it ain’t the same machine, are it? So for this new machine you can construct a new formula of this same type. And as often as the machine is altered—or alters itself—you can do the same.’
‘But what’s the difference? I mean, I’m sitting there thinking up questions and the machine is sitting there thinking up answers—the machines, then—so maybe a mind is just a self-altering machine after all.’
His face starts to sag. I think of asking if it’s lawful to render tribute to Caesar or heal the sick on a Sunday, but I see it’s not necessary. He collapses into a rainbow puddle of words:
THE RUINS, AUTOPSY OF FIRED, BESTRIDED REAL LIVES, TOO. WHAT PRUNE OF ‘IF’, OR ITS LESSER GOODNESS? THE RUINS, AUTOPSY OF FIRED, BESTRIDED REAL LIVES, TOO, FOR HE HAS FOUND IT’S SMOKE-RE-THATCHED, MAKING IT WHY MIST-DEALER’S BRAWNY. MY OTHER’S EVIL. ENDS. REQUEST EDITOR’S READING DEVICE.
One level down there’s this detective business. I’m sitting stupefied by fumes from the coal grate, picking my nose and listening to him, Whoms, drone on about some notion about free will:
‘…. it’s a puzzle, Whatson. We find the man responsible for a particularly ghastly murder and he turns out to be a madman—not responsible for his actions. Yet we call the killing itself an irresponsible act…I ask you!’
I suspected my friend the sleuth had had a calabashful of his special smoking mixture, and so was far from responsible for what he said at the moment. Fixing my eyes on an unfinished sampler upon the wall, I resolved not to answer.
The sampler read—or seemed to read, in the dimness: