“Grammar is about to undergo radical changes,” my mad friend grunted.
“That isn’t all that’ll change,” I said. “I’d rather see fissionables in the five and dime than everybody fiddling with time lines.”
“I don’t believe it,” a wife said.
“You didn’t believe in ghosts,” my friend said.
“I still don’t,” I said.
‘You see them on TV. Maybe your old s-f gimmick about duplicate receivers is true. Perhaps some time travellers have split so many times they’re ghosts through attenuation.”
I tried to guess whether my friend was serious.
“How does one exorcise a virus?” he asked.
“If you’re going to play it broad,” I said, “Maybe they’re splitting personalities.”
Everyone looked at me.
“Why not? Easy with hypnosis and drugs. Get them split, hold Jeckyll and fire Mr. Hyde off into the past where he’s no problem except to the poor suckers who happen to live there.”
“So that’s where Hitler came from,” my friend said.
It was the Byzantine who brought us back down. “You were sent to find me,” he said.
I looked at my mad friend. Both of us looked at the Byzantine.
“When I disappeared into the past,” he explained. “Don’t you wonder why this place fits your requirements so exactly?”
Light began to dawn.
“That’s what I get for listening to that doubledastardly disinheritor of widows and orphans!” my mad friend said.
“Who?”
“The dipdreck that convinced me I’d be doing my country a service by going off on this junket instead of harassing hashpeddlers back where I belong!”
And now I knew why I got that sudden promotion and transfer. Looking at the sad-eyed Byzantine, I realized we had all taken the same ride. “Why did you let us find you?”
“It does you a favor and costs me nothing.” He took the last swallow of Aztec Tranquilizer and walked out of the library. Before he was quite through the door I saw him coming back in.
Then the smile and suddenly positive attitude prepared me for it even before the little man spoke. “I’ve been gone three days,” he said, and put down a package.
“Now he tells me there’s a way out of here!” my mad friend said.
“Only if you believe in time machines,” the Byzantine said, and pulled out a litre of Three Star. His earwarping smile was back with a vengeance. “Chantaje,” he said.
“Como?”
“Blackmail,” he repeated. “Against their own grandchildren.”
I sipped Three Star. Outside, rain and wind were still doing the Wuthering Heights bit. My mad friend looked wistfully at the cognac. He brightened when the Byzantine pulled a thermos of coffee from the package. “I probably won’t believe it,” he said.
“Their machine isn’t very good,” the Byzantine began. “They send somebody into the future and a ghost image flies off into the past. The traveller arrives several ounces lighter.”
“How many trips to take off five pounds?” a wife asked.
“Those are our ghosts?” my friend asked.
“But why dressed in sheets?” I asked.
“You were right about the ultimate use of this house,” the Byzantine continued. “Un manicomio. They’re using the time machine for treatment.”
“Sending their nuts into the future for advanced techniques?”
The Byzantine nodded. “Along with threats to diddle their descendants out of existence if they don’t treat these patients promptly.”
“How?”
“Oh, practice continence, for instance, at the moment when a certain person was to be conceived.”
My mad friend said something in Arabic. It sounded like tape running backward at the wrong speed. The Byzantine nodded in furious agreement. “Or worse,” he added.
“These ghost fractions that split off—are they gone forever?”
The Byzantine shrugged. “I suppose our descendants track them down and put them back together. A man would never feel whole again without all his parts.”
A wife looked up sharply then went back to her discussion of the new wraith look.
My mad friend poked absently around the library. Suddenly he withdrew a black leather volume. After a quick look through it he snapped it shut and made ritual gestures of exorcism. The Byzantine gave a sad smile. Remembering some of those decidedly odd rooms upstairs I guessed what my mad friend had discovered. “The Hellfire Club?”
“Oh, let me see!” Several wives exclaimed. And while they were looking through the pornographic hokum of those 18th century seekers after any kind of an answer from the Eternal Silence I wished for a way to let Ben Franklin and company know their curiosity had led to this.
Something had to be done if treachery, ingratitude, injustice, the eternal verities of life were to be preserved for future generations.
“Something Must Be Done,” my mad friend said, and I caught the germ of a perfectly fiendish idea.
“Will you jeopardize your immortal soul for humanity’s future?” I asked.
My mad friend thought a moment “Greater love hath no man,” he finally said.
“Can you take us back when the first ghost shows up?” I asked the Byzantine.
“Easily.”
“And get me—” I gave him a list of parts. The small man left the room and returned instantly. I put the components together into a photoelectric ghost alarm. After several feverish hours we were ready.
Whichever Hellfire Club member designed those mini- skirted nun’s habits could have cleared up in the mod fashion world. Wives were far more appealing in them than I and my mad friend who merely looked embarrassed in satan suits. The Byzantine’s dark skin made him suitable for Chief Pitchforker. With psychedelic lights and a couple of authentic gas flames we were ready for the first ghost. Skipping about in response to photoelectric alarms we spent the next few hours giving each fragmented time traveller an unforgettable experience.
Finally the detectors were silent. My mad friend peeled off his domino and rubbed his forehead where horns had worn twin spots of irritation. “And all these years I thought evil was supposed to be fun,” he groused.
“Did we accomplish anything?” the Byzantine asked.
“If our descendants do their job right and put them all back together again,” I said.
‘Then what?” a wife asked.
“They’ll be sane but one part of them’ll be so damn turned off on time travel—so full of subliminal horrors that no bungling bureaucrat’ll ever turn him into a temporanaut again.”
“What drove them up the wall to begin with?” my mad friend wondered.
The Byzantine smiled his sad smile. “Curiosity. Their machine has no safety interlocks.”
My mad friend understood. “It really is better not to know one’s own future, isn’t it? But can we be sure this is the end of time travel research for a while?”
“Most of those reconstituted temporanauts will feel strongly enough to toss a grenade into that machine,” the Byzantine said.
“How about you?” I asked.
“I think I’ll disappear for a while,” the little man said. “In fact, I’ll do it right now.” He stepped out of the library and in a sudden lull I could hear him walking upstairs. I also heard a helicopter plup-plupping down in front of the house.
While my mad friend stalled Shapiro’s rescue team in the foyer I rushed about the house dismantling the ghost traps into their unrecognizable components. Finally we stepped into the chopper.
It was just turning daylight when we set down at Regional HQ. The pilot and extra man on the chopper rushed us out and across the windswept field into the ground floor of control. “Hi,” I said to Shapiro.
“You’re all under arrest,” Shapiro answered.
My mad friend was muttering something in Latin. With a sinking feeling that I already knew the answer, I asked, “Why?”
; “Witchcraft,” Shapiro said.
1973
One Plus One Equals Eleven
Even though they’ve been called “thinking machines,” computers can’t think. At least, not on the human level. But, there are some forms of human endeavor that don’t require thinking—on the human level.
It has been remarked that a machine does not have interesting thoughts. Conservatives would say a machine has no thoughts at all. The same could probably be said for many humans.
When I was first summoned to psychoanalyze a sick computer nobody had the temerity to put it in those terms. In the first place, I am not a psychiatrist. I am an engineer. And this was just another job. Like automobiles and like human beings, computers blow an occasional fuse. That’s when I climb out of my business suit, get into my white coveralls, and start checking circuits.
Despite scare stories about Taking Over (Has anyone noticed how computers have supplanted the Catholics, the Jews, and Daddy Warbucks?) they really aren’t very smart. Though 2001’s berserk HAL showed amazingly human instincts for self-preservation, the central time-sharing complex I had to fix couldn’t have cared less how many white-coveralled technicians invaded it to perform solemn auguries over transistors. No doors slammed behind me; no unexplained heavy objects fell near me, if one excepts my thermos bottle which caused a momentary complication in a secondary power supply.
I checked conductivity, read out the computer’s self-diagnosis, scraped the crud off the contacts around the edges of some printed circuit boards, made a note to have someone look into the building’s humidity control, and began filling out my report.
From somewhere a time-sharing terminal was doing its thing—apparently without complication since no lights were flashing, no bells ringing. It looked like for once I would be able to spend a weekend as planned. And then . . .
I find I must digress a moment if this is to make any sense to a layman. (Curious, that choice of terminology—as if I constituted some sort of priesthood!) But . . . computers really are idiots. Like some not-very-intelligent humans, they count on their fingers. The only difference is, having billions of fingers, a computer never loses track. But unlike humans, computers are limited by a single simple principle. What goes in comes out. Nothing more.
If the information fed in is correct and has a one-to-one relationship with reality, then the idiot machine can add or subtract (It really doesn’t know how to multiply or divide.) and draw certain conclusions from the data input. If the information fed into the computer is faulty . . . Engineers say, “Garbage in; garbage out.”
So. . . I was looking forward to a weekend when the sudden pounding of a readout made me hesitate. There was nothing really unusual about it. I’d fed certain stuff into the central memory core myself some moments ago and had been reassured as to the idiot savant’s full and complete recovery when the same data emerged one millisecond later transmogrified into exactly the kind of information several other not-very-intelligent computers and one reasonably intelligent programmer had predicted it would.
The thing that made me hesitate was, well . . . I hate to bring up things like this but, like counterfeiting, rape and murder, I suppose data rustling is going to be with us for a long time too.
You see, it’s just like a bank. Everyone puts his money in, or in a computer’s case, his information. There’s bound to be somebody greedy who works out a method to draw out not just his own money, but everybody else’s too. And if you think information isn’t valuable, just look into what corporations spend each year to keep overeager competitors from indulging in industrial espionage.
With a time-sharing computer setup, our greedy client seduces a secretary, or pays off a comptroller’s gambling debts or . . . anyway, he gets the magic word, the code phrase that unlocks the computer and the first thing you know, all your competitors know exactly what you said last night after your wife said—and we all know where that can lead to.
Remembering that the edges of those printed circuit cards hadn’t really been all that dirty, I had a sudden little twinge when that readout began chattering. Maybe I’d misdiagnosed. Maybe instead of a dirty contact some joker was tapping the memory core—doing it in some clumsy way that made for all these odd symptoms. I tiptoed (Don’t ask me why—nobody in miles to hear me.) over to the readout and picked up a strip of yellow paper. This is what it said:
Somerset remarks one
produced a book in
an adventure, visited
the court, that same door where
it must be after a copy book maxim
rabbi still remains medieval.
Theologians . . . It all seems yet,
just as love’s generation less
hiatus. Love is a feat,
ranging and indulging in another
way. Cannot the moment then,
having once, love again? Possibility
nonexistent. So . . . Love. Substantial
and immovable, was right when he, in
having loved, often unrequited.
Love one another . . . that unrequited
love to excess—by some anathema,
drive us up the . . .
Thus spake—Sic loquitur machina.
Well! Didn’t make much sense, actually. I read it over a couple of times, wondering if it was just my natural antipathy toward poetry without rhyme or meter. Finally I decided it was just another example of garbage in, garbage out.
For one mad moment I was tempted to copy it out on butches paper with a blunt pencil and mail the whole works off to John Ciardi for a critique but . . . every racket has its inside jokes. I wondered what frustrated poet was sitting some where miles away grinding out this garbage. Why?
The why was clear enough. Some body had to stand watch. Somebody probably had fed a really big one into the computer and if the time sharing part of it was working any where near capacity, then somebody was sitting around drinking coffee from a paper cup, working doublecrostics, and waiting for the idiot machine to find time to solve his problem. And with a keyboard right in front of him (or her, or, though I didn’t realize it yet, even possibly it) why not punch out doggerel or whatever this literary analog of a Rorschach was properly called? Chances were he’d forgotten to switch off the input to the central memory core.
No real damage. The nice thing about a central memory core is that when you tell this idiot machine to forget it, he actually does. I was just about to punch a suggestion to either forget it or turn off the input when the readout began clattering again.
Simpler days over there
Bill and a few, though George,
of course, spoke English.
World affairs, British
Empire, convenient sidelines
striking lofty to the
bungling.
They were so inept.
Endless quagmire
a winner, thus spake Wilson.
Sulked, but we believed.
Someone apparently was quoting—was it Gibbon who called history the record of man’s knaveries and follies? In any event, this one, though devoid of rhyme and meter as the first, at least made sense in some dark, prelogical kind of way. It struck me that computers might think this way if their circuits had been designed by women. Whoever was on the other end, he (she or it) was feeding some odd thoughts into the central memory core. I wondered how they would blend with the eleven million discrete bits of information that made up a week’s payroll for one of the center’s hundred-odd clients.
Reading over this second offering it suddenly struck me that I was intruding on somebody’s private thoughts. Whoever was tapping out this drivel was surely unaware that I was standing here reading over his shoulder a hundred or fifteen hundred miles away. To warn him that I had tapped into a private line promised all the appeal of entering a public toilet and discovering one was not alone. I was out of my coveralls and cinching up my necktie when the readout began clattering again.
I took a firm resolve not to read
it. Which I broke of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. Whoever was on the other end of the machine was growing, acquiring finesse and technique. Of course, I still thought it stunk but then I’m one of those hopeless sorts who thinks poetry should have rhyme or meter—or even both! But the next offering had instead, a title:
GENESIS
The young riposte to
whatever moment is, “I didn’t.”
Plain biological truth in that
particular anyhow. So . . .
Loose from the ovary, to accept
whatever; insisted on once-a—
Now the poorly shaded biology
shown before, between spermatozoa
parthenogenetically doubt.
But no tadpoles, each bent on
ovulation sweepstakes.
Didn’t volunteer?
Generations happen: the ovum
didn’t begin its uterus hanging on a
month’s turnover . . . How many classes?
Show me a human; maybe you’ll get those
single freezings, others have
rights to be born.
Unanswerable, this on whole;
only half to the women. Volunteer
to drop fallopian lodgings, perfectly willing.
So many movies conceived in Spring, Alphonse,
benefiting the mindedly ferocious
out of the great claim,
“I”
Now there was something haunting and evocative about that one. It made the kind of sense that can make a man lie awake all night trying to understand what he and his wife were really arguing about. I finished getting dressed, stuffed my coveralls and soldering iron inside my briefcase (engineers have vanities too), and got ready to leave. Then I went back and tried to reread “Genesis.”
Either continued exposure was wearing me down or this was actually good poetry. But why was some poor clot pounding it out here instead of sending it off to . . . Where does one send poetry? Surely there must be periodicals for poets just as there are for electronics engineers.
I stopped for a moment. The whole weekend stretched gloriously before me. I didn’t want to get involved in somebody else’s hangups. But on the other hand, nobody knew who I was. That is, I wasn’t a regular employee here and if things got sticky I could always walk away from the keyboard and saunter anonymously off into my weekend. I took a deep breath, refreshed my memory, and tapped out a query.
Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 24