by Kris Neville
There was a garbled quacking as the fast playback went into operation: and from the right side of the synchronizer, the excerpt tape came out in irregular inputs. He clipped this off when the fast playback was over and inserted it in the speech analyzer for numerical conversion. In a moment he received the final results, which he put into the green mom delivery box on top of the accumulation of similar results from the rest of his shift. He closed the lid, slipped the carrying strap over his shoulder and continued on his rounds.
Entering black, the final room, he said, “Thirty for today, Mike.”
“Good,” said the slender, narrow faced clerk. He took the excerpt page, checked it against his chart, and passed it to the operator, who began the complex breakdown. “If you’re all through, stick around a second, and we’ll go up and monitor Chin well’s latest.”
The operator completed the break-down; he passed the work to his assistant, who ran it off on the numerical converter.
“We’ll get this one,” Mike said, “and I can drop my delivery box off at Central, too.”
The operator’s assistant brought the strip across the room. The excerpt now read substantially the same as all the other converted excerpts, a row of numbers: 0010001, 1001000, 1111101.
“Good,” Mike said, dropping it into his own delivery box. He stood up. “Let’s go.”
THERE was an input Central for each of the information gathering Sections; and, in addition, there were four output—or questioning—Centrals through which the Machine transmitted to stored knowledge. They connected to the one vast, isolated building on Knob Hill where the Machine, itself, was loused.
At the Speech Central, as at other input Centrals, the five converted color excerpts—the number varied from Central to Central—were typed directly up to the transmitter boards, and the job of the input Central was finished, and the Machine was current.
Mike and Ralph deposited their delivery boxes, and the woman at the desk checked out the two rooms.
Smiling, she said, “If you want to wait a couple of seconds, it’s about time for the Security Report.”
Mike glanced at Ralph. “Want to wait? We may as well.”
“Okay by me.”
“You’d be surprised,” the woman said, sorting out the strips in little piles, “at the interest everybody’s taking in Chinwell. My, my!” She squared a pile. “Just yesterday my little daughter, Julia, she said to me—”
“There’s the warning light,” Mike interrupted.
Across the large room, the light was blinking red; the wall panel slid silently open, revealing the screen outlet of the Machine. Input operators suspended their typing, and the supervisor halted her conversation with the repair technician, who was trying to fix a disconnected input typer. Activity ceased altogether; everyone turned toward the screen, waiting.
There was a low hum, and the loyalty line flashed upon the superimposed graph. It was a descending red gash, and the findings of the previous day were magnified into bold relief at the loose end. The line ran from the right hand reference, pre-Machine 5, to just a little under two and a half: representing a halved function since the Machine Regan existence.
“It’s holding its own,” said Mike.
The woman at the desk, staring across his shoulder, said, “No. It’s actually down a little bit—not much, though.” The loyalty line wavered and vanished; the panel slid to; the Machine had reported to its Masters.
More to himself than not, Ralph said, “You’d think it would be up.”
“Let’s go see what the old buzzard has to say,” Mike said, satisfied.
Walking down the corridor, Ralph said reflectively, “It seems silly for him to waste all that energy. He must know it’s not going to do any good.”
“The lunatic fringe,” said Mike.
Ralph, Ivy McCord’s husband, looked down at the polished floor and said nothing.
“I’m glad we have them down to two and a half per cent,” said Mike.
IN THE monitoring office there was an unusual number of people. The master tape recorder unrolled silently to itself on a direct line from the receiver; a transcriber hummed softly on another direct line; and on a third line the pick-up camera (a check against General Video, whose operations were closely integrated with Speech) rustled moving film.
Otherwise it was silent in the room except for Chinwell’s voice, and motionless except, for his kinetic video image.
’The voice was harsh, grating and naked, demanding full, fascinated attention.
The two men made their way quickly to the far wall and depressed a pair of seats; then, sitting down, they began to watch as closely as the rest.
One member of the audience glanced nervously around the room, eyeing suspiciously the particularly tense faces, as if to say: Will you be converted, you with the thatch of yellow hair and the just too-lax mouth? Seeking to penetrate into a secret that lay beyond the Machine, itself: Which ones? (The Machine told other things: the number of people who would commit suicide during the next quarter; the percentage of those who, upon reaching, sixty-five, would die.) Looking around, studying the faces, the man seemed to be thinking: which ones? you? you? you? Or—me?
Ralph shuddered, listening; and then the speech was over and life picked up momentum with each clock tick and eyes brightened from the dazed dream state.
“Hand that to him,” Mike said, “He’s a damned fine showman.”
“They shouldn’t let him go on talking like that!”
“Drive him underground?”
“I know,” Ralph said wearily. “I read the Revolutionary, too.”
The Revolutionary was a volume the Philosophical Series, fact-inference checked for validity by the Machine, contained the following passage upon the subject of suppression: “By nature a revolutionary is an exhibitionist, and unless drastic coercive measures are employed, he will openly announce his every intention. Such measures, themselves tend to be self-defeating, however, by three principal reasons: by narrowing the allowable margin of freedom, the place a premium upon conformity and eventually upon mediocrity; per section, per se, tends to create a sympathy among a certain segment of the population for the cause itself, where without persecution, no sympathy would exist and third, repressive measures would make it more difficult to gauge the effects of the revolutionary upon the climate opinion. Accordingly, suppression should be applied only in a Twenty situation when the existence of the government is actually endangered, and then on long enough to permit the climate opinion to regain its normal balance. It is to be noted, psychologically, that the revolutionary may be expected attempt to force suppression by becoming more extreme in his position as popular support declines, an attempt which if successful, would serve only to reward him with martyrdom in compensate for personal failure . . .”
“No,” Ralph said, resuming his thoughts after a pause, “I don’t know what I meant, I guess. It just seems me that this way he can reach all the lunatic fringe.”
“So what?”
Ralph did not answer. Automatically he began to trace a bell curve on his trouser leg: the useful figure that accords the incident of morons and generations of totalitarians and anarchists, of flowers of Chinwell and blind worshipers of the Machine, determined from established, average base for a given culture. He drew a fingernail across one extremity of the curve. “Two and a half per cent.”
“Eh?”
“. . . nothing.”
He moved his fingernail idly up the slight crease that was the curve, up to the twenty per cent maximum, beyond which lay a revolutionary climate of opinion.
“I was thinking of the ones he’s converting every day.”
Mike shrugged. “A few don’t matter; the over all percentage is falling.”
“Damn it!” snapped Ralph irritably, “how would you feel if someone. you knew began to believe him? It wouldn’t do much good to realize that it was merely a quantum, a necessary unit in the total Statistic!”
“I guess not.”
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With a nervous gesture, Ralph riffled the pages of a Statistic Bulletin on the table at the left; glanced without seeing, at the careful compilation of informed conclusions, as valid as the facts were valid.
“Aw, hell,” he said. “I’m just gloomy. It kind of gets you, sometimes. Things. Forget it.”
“Sure. Chinwell’s just a tempest in a teapot.”
“Not to the tea,” said Ralph quietly after a minute.
AT home Ivy was reading the paper when Ralph came in; she turned a page lazily. “Hello.”
“Hello,” he said.
She did not look up as he walked across the room to his chair. She turned another page.
He settled into the chair. He lit his pipe slowly, taking great care to see that the whole tobacco surface was properly ignited; he puffed smoke idly, studying her. When the tobacco, was ash, he tapped the dottle into a plastic ashtray where it lay smouldering.
He said, “What are you reading about?”
She rustled the paper. “Someone in Africa, the paper calls him ‘Little Chinwell.’ ”
“I processed it today,” Ralph said. “I didn’t think it was such a very good speech.”
She said, “There’s an article here on a man in Poland, too. Czerniak, the Prophet.” She folded the paper and placed it on the chair arm.
“See. There’s a lot of people.” Suddenly her wide, vacant eyes were shining excitedly. “See. There’s a lot of people thinking like Chinwell!”
“Not many,” he said mildly.
“How can you know that?”
“The Machine . . .”
“I don’t care what the Machine says; I mean, how can you know? How does it know?”
He began to tap at the smouldering dottle. “Did Milly come by this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Oh?”
Annoyed, Ivy reached out for the paper again; she began to toy with it in her lap, folding in one of the corners, and then refolding the corner again, over the original fold. She creased and recreased each fold deeply.
“Did she ask you to go to the Adirondacks with her?”
“Yes!” Ivy said sharply, pressing her fingernail deliberately along the latest fold.
“And what did you say?”
“No.”
Ralph stood up. He came to her chair and looked, down at her.
“No!” she said more emphatically. “There’s some things we’ve got to talk about.”
Wearily she put the paper aside. She reached for a cigarette. When she lit it, her hand was shaking. She blew the smoke toward his face. “Go on.”
“You’re changing, Ivy.”
“I am?” she said carelessly.
“Did you hear Chinwell again today?”
“Yes,” she admitted with equal carelessness.
“Listen, Ivy. Do you believe in what he, says?”
“That the Machine is evil?”
“And other things.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What do you mean by that? You don’t know—?”
“What I said!” she snapped, irritably grinding out her cigarette. “Suppose I do? Then what? Some of the things he says . . .”
“What things?”
“I don’t know . . . oh, about modern people being bored. About life being too orderly. About the Machine taking all the fun out of living.”
HE WALKED to the far wall and began to study the original Colberg, a gift to them from her parents. It was an impressionistic picture from Colberg’s dark period. Half-light glinted on dull metal at the center, and shadows shaded the metal into a peculiar, living, vital roundness, as if it had some human quality, a softness, an understanding in addition to its cold, metallic existence. In the background there was a lattice of wires, a blood-red filigree: as if they were a living circulation system, for the central metal.
“You were never bored before you began to listen to him,” he said.
“I was,” she said. “I think I was. I just didn’t know what was the matter with me. He seems to open your eyes to things—to explain you to yourself in a way you never understood before.”
He followed the gleaming metal into the shadows, tried to discern the sharp outlines that should be there but which were blended away. “Why don’t you start going around to the Culture Center again?”
“That!” she said almost hysterically. “My God, that place!”
He flinched at her voice. “You don’t read anymore, either.”
“Read,” her voice dropped bitterly. “Well, why not,” he said. “You’ve got the best training . . .”
“Training,” she said flatly.
“I suppose your parents shouldn’t have spent God-knows-how-much of you. I suppose you want to throw away all they’ve built up?”
“I hate them,” she said.
“Ivy!” he said. “Don’t talk like that!”
“I do. What’s wrong with saying it if I do? Why do you keep standing then looking at that stupid picture? It’s a stupid picture.”
“You used to like it.”
“It’s a stupid, stupid picture!” she said excitedly.
“What do you want? Ivy, I can’t figure out what you want.” He turned around “I’ll tell you what I want. I want excitement, that’s what I want!” She stood up and paced the room. “People like me aren’t built to live like this! I want to be alive!”
He stared at her blankly.
“It’s like being—being cooped up by walls that say: do this now, brush your teeth next! Listen to this program now that, tomorrow—”
“That’s not fair.”
“Do what’s good for you! Take this use that, avoid the other! Oh God, l don’t see how anybody can stand it!”
“Listen,” he said, stopping her with his hand. “You’re wrong. Most people don’t feel that way about it.”
“Most people, hell! Most people don’t matter a damn! Most people don’t live. Who cares about most people?”
“You’re talking just, like him. “Next you’ll be saying that it’s all right to murder!’ Is that your idea of—of fun?”
“It might be,” she said. “If you have a reason.” She faced him, her breath his sing between her teeth. “Yes, it might be all right if the person you killed didn’t matter!” She shrugged his hand off her arm. “We weren’t suppose to live by any law of a Machine! We weren’t made for that kind of law. We were made for the law of the jungle, like Chinwell says ‘We’re made for emotions! We’re made to feel!’ ”
“Shut up!”
“Chinwell says . . .”
He slapped her in the mouth, then bringing an ugly red welt to her cheek.
Slowly she lifted her hand to her face; she rubbed the cheek; her wide eyes narrowed with emotion. Her chest was heaving. “Why . . . why did you do that?”
“I—I don’t know. I’m sorry. I—”
“Kiss me,” she said, licking her lip where it was cut;
He started to walk away.
“Wait!” she said, holding his arm. “You’re right! I don’t believe in Chinwell! I don’t believe in what he says. It’s you I believe in, don’t you see that? It’s you I’m in love with!”
RALPH stopped working and glanced at the pile-up of manuscripts in front of him. He looked at his watch. He drummed his pencil in annoyance that he should be behind schedule. He went back to work.
After a moment’s hesitation, he circled a word group with the red pencil. Then, in indecision, he glanced at the random table.
“Damn!” he said, crossing out the circled words. Once more he studied the chart, and this time, when he bent to the copy, he was very careful. And having circled a new word group, he rechecked. Then he fumbled at the page, trying to turn it; in exasperation he ripped it across the body of the text. He found some tape and repaired the tear. He resharpened the black pencil, wetted it with the tip of his tongue, stopped, brushed at his hair, dropped the pencil, bent to pick it up.
The buzzer on his d
esk intercom sounded stridently. He straightened up guiltily and flicked on the speaker! “Hello,” he said curtly.
“Ralph, this is Alan.”
“What’s wrong?” Ralph snapped.
“. . . that’s what I called you about.”
“Yes?” Ralph said, rubbing his hand nervously along his leg.
“The Chinwell script of yesterday; the Machine acknowledged our excerpts with the suggestion that they were inconsistent.”
“. . . well?”
“Don’t be so damned touchy,” the voice said with faint irritation.
“I’m sorry. I—sorry.”
“A check showed that you had the excerpts off. Quite, badly. So we had to make the Machine reject, and we’ll have to run it over. That takes time.”
Ralph said nothing.
“I see you’re a little behind with your other manuscripts. Are you feeling all right?”
“Sure! I’m fine!”
“Okay, okay. I think I better send a checker over.”
“You can—”
“Can what, Ralph?”
“Nothing! I—nothing. I’m sorry, Alan. I guess I’m not quite up to par today, after all. I’ll be extra careful. Sorry about the Chinwell mistake. Sorry I snapped at you.”
“That’s all right. Even the best of us, you know . . . I’ll send a checker over anyway.”
“—all right.”
“That’s better, Ralph. See you.”
“Good-by.”
Ralph stood up and wept to the water cooler. He drew a full cup of water; he spilt some, drinking. He crumpled the cup and let it fall into the waste chute. He went back to his desk.
Idly he began to fold in one edge of the paper; he checked himself.
“Damn it!” he said, shaking himself. By the time the checker arrived, he had finished the one manuscript and was working on another.
“Hello,” she said, crossing to his desk, j “Hello,” he said sullenly.
“I see your cigarette’s burning a place on the desk.”
“Eh? Oh—yeah.” He picked up the cigarette butt and crushed it in the ashtray; he rubbed his finger over the burnt spot. “It must have dropped out; I was working and didn’t notice.”