When The Future Dies

by Nat Schachner

  He spread his flying vanes. He needed witnesses for his experiment, in case— A twitch of the shoulders and he soared off into the air. The vanes were uncanny. Slight twitches and they bent the gravity lines this way and that, propelling him on an appointed course. The sun's tempered rays were glareless and bathed the earth in a pleasant glow. A uniform layer of ionized atmosphere some three miles up took care of that. The warmth was that of a tepid bath, slightly under body temperature, comfortable but enervating. The Weather Machines provided for that.

  His goal was the City of the Machines. There were two men with whom he wished to talk, Guardians both. As Guardians they were a step above the rest of humankind in initiative. No law compelled them to their self-appointed tasks; only a dim and fast fading tradition of service inculcated in their genes from remote ancestors of the Scientific Guild.

  The Sector dropped away. Trim trees spaced beneath. Then the City of the Machines loomed into view. A great rounded dome of crystal clearness. He descended swiftly. At his approach a section swung noiselessly open. The shadow of his body had impinged on a photo-electric cell, closed a circuit. He floated down to the ground level. For a brief moment he stared curiously around. It was not his first visit. Years ago he had been a Guardian, until the tireless, noiseless movements of the Machines had oppressed him with a feeling of the futility of the human race, of his absolute inconsequence in the scheme of things.

  Now he stared at them with new eyes. He even felt superior to their glistening, flawless surfaces. There was that in his vista which surpassed them all, which might even—and again the shock of the unknown tingled through him—bring about a new order of things, bring blessed chaos where monotonous peace had reigned so long.

  IN THE very center of the crystal city was a huge, gleaming cylinder. It sprang solidly from the hard floor surface, thrust upward its smooth, rounded flanks until it penetrated the transparent hemisphere. At the very top it swelled into a faceted globe that turned with ceaseless motion. Light-blue flares burned within the innumerable facets, ebbed to nothingness, and flared again. Power sped on invisible beams to the Sectors, power and geared instructions to the mobile Machines that performed the local duties.

  At the base of the cylinder, and encircling it with spaced platforms to a height of a hundred feet, was the Communications Board of the Machine. A bewildering maze of filaments and impulse receivers and cells. Yet each slender strand had its specific function. Here was determined, by a change in the steady vibratory beat of a Machine, that a breakdown had occurred, that the sensitive balance had been destroyed. Impulses flashed automatically to the sending cylinder for Repair Machines to get under way. Here were prepared the great calculations and integrations whereby the world was run on an even keel. They were based on innumerable sending reports from the individual Machines. Here was determined, on the data of reported death of their wards, the human race, the necessity for new matings of pedigreed genes. In short, the eyes, ears, and brain of a Machine-dominated civilization.

  Huge flying transports, automatic in operation, dropped from the sky, nestled to magnetic currents on the landing platforms. Hatches opened automatically, disgorged their loads of minerals and precious metals from far-off mines into tubes that fed into the proper Machines on the floor of the city.

  The atom-blasting units absorbed the gushing stream of bauxite, already pulverized at the mines, and with noiseless, yet supernal forces within their rounded bellies, tore the electrons from their flashing orbits, sent uncounted trillions of positrons on their ephemeral paths, flashed them both into annihilation, and thereby released in a blaze of photon bullets and gamma rays the stored energy of matter.

  The Building Machines received their loads of metal and concrete, flew to their appointed tasks. The Cell-Mating Machines were idle now. No one had died within the past year.

  A half dozen human beings reclined on luxurious, air-cushioned couches. They were the Guardians. They did not stir; their eyes were blank on somnolent visions. Their services were unneeded.

  But there were two, whose couches, close together, faced the all-important platforms of the Brain. These were the Guardians whom Fran 19 was seeking.

  Their recognition signals blazed greetting as he dropped to their side. The eyes of the younger lighted up with pleasure. He was about Fran's age, face delicate and girlish, and smoothly unlined. His hands, when they moved, were quick and birdlike. Vic 21 was Fran's best friend in a world where friendship was a forgotten dream.

  "You appear excited, Fran," Vic said slowly. "You haven't—"

  Fran nodded. He could not keep his eyes from dancing.

  Vic half arose from his couch, sank back. "You—you've finished your work?" There was a hint of awe, of overlaid fear in his voice.

  "Yes. That's what I came to see you both about."

  The older man said nothing, but there was that in his still-piercing gaze which commanded explanation. He had not moved or stirred. His ruddy face, though smooth, connoted age. A patriarchal beard swept down over his tunic. No Barber Machine had ever cropped his whitened locks. Sem 15 was old, almost incredibly old in an era of Methuselahs. He was 1051 years old, the oldest man alive in the 97th century. He had outlived all his contemporaries, seen them succumb to sheer weariness of living, to accidents, to the natural decay of mortal faculties.

  SEM 15 had no official power or dignities. No one bowed to his will, nor did he attempt to impose it. Such things were unheard of in the 97th century. But by reason of his tremendous age, by reason of the accumulated wisdom that the slow passage of the years must have brought, by reason of the fact that he had constituted himself a perpetual Guardian to the Brain Machine, he had achieved a certain prestige.

  Fran turned to the patriarch. "I did not tell you before, Sem 15," he said respectfully, "because I had not finished; because I feared failure. Even now there—"

  Sem surveyed the youth of seventy-five with benign tranquillity. "You have labored, Fran 19, as no one has labored since the memory of man." His voice was rusty, halting, but not unpleasant. "It is not good."

  "But this is different, Sem 15," Fran said eagerly. "I have done something new, something that the Machines could never have accomplished. I have enlarged the boundaries of knowledge."

  Sem smiled vaguely. "Knowledge?" he murmured. "What need have we for new knowledge? Is there more that the Machines can do for us? Unless"—and a slight flicker of interest showed in his eyes—"unless you have perfected a Guardian Machine."

  Fran felt as if he were being bogged in an endless ocean of inertia. "No, it is not that," he answered slowly. "In fact, it is at the very opposite pole. Instead of still further elimination of human effort and toil, the principle I have discovered and the machine I have based upon it will bring toil and struggle and danger once more to the human race."

  Vic's eyes flared with sudden enthusiasm, died down again to a fear—fear of the unknown. He stared at his soft, milky-white hands and said nothing.

  But Sem 15 did an unprecedented thing. He jerked bolt upright, long beard rippling over his chest. Then as if the effort had been too great, he relaxed with a long sigh.

  "Fran 19 is mad," he murmured to no one in particular. "He is a mistake, a dangerous mistake. I, Sem 15, who was Guardian of the Mating Cells at his birth, am to blame. He is a relic of barbarism, of his tailed ancestors in the mists of antiquity."

  Then it was that Fran did an even more unprecedented thing. Never before had man exercised coercion over fellow man. But Fran was overwrought, tense with the completion of his work. Therein lay his excuse for what he did. Therein, and in the fact that by no other means could he have prodded Sem from his Guardian couch. And if Sem did not come, Vic 21 would not have dared.

  With a quick swoop Fran was upon the patriarch. Before Sem knew what had happened, he was jerked violently from his seat, dragged like an inert lump of metal high into the air.

  Fran's vanes were spread, heading him straight for the shining crystal dome.

>   "Come on, Vic," he shouted, "follow me. Sem will inspect my Machine whether he wants to or not."

  The scattered Guardians raised themselves on elbows at the violence done their eldest. It was unheard of; it was an outrage; it was—sacrilegious. A vague premonition of future disaster flitted like a shadow over their thoughts; then they sank slowly back to their cushioned rest. Vic was horrified. Fran was his friend and like a breath of cold, invigorating wind, but this was really going too far. It was an unwarrantable invasion on man's sacred privacy; it was— He spread his vanes, twitched, and soared after his friend.

  III.

  THE DOME slid open at their approach, slid shut behind them. Like a mythical eagle Fran flew, holding his prey in strong clutching arms. Sem 15 had not moved, had not stirred from his limpness. Now he raised his eyes to his ravisher.

  "This work of yours," he observed quietly, "must mean everything to you, for you to have done this. I shall look at it."

  "It does, and thank you," Fran cried, and released his hold. Side by side the three slid through the air. There was a song in Fran's heart. Sem 15 understood.

  They landed on Fran's vista. The laboratory gleamed shining and intricate behind the vita-crystal walls. The transparent globe seemed but an inconspicuous part in the array of instruments.

  Sem 15 stood gravely before its rounded orb. The rest of the apparatus had taken no more than a slow unhurried glance. Sem had seen equipment like that in the City of the Machines. But this—

  "The idea came to me almost in a flash, Sem 15," Fran said eagerly. "I was bored with life, with the do-nothingness that infects our race with dry rot. I wanted to know things, to seek f or things unknown. I did not want the Machines to cradle me like an infant."

  Sem surveyed the youngster quizzically. Back in his own youth he too had had such fleeting thoughts, but they had succumbed to the easy flow of existence.

  "I started to learn for myself," Fran went on. "It was hard, tedious work, but there grew a certain joy of achievement in me such as I had never experienced before. Then one day, it was over. I had learned all that the Machines knew, all that former generations of scientists had sought out and then declared that the frontiers had been reached. I was in despair. My accomplishments seemed futile. I felt there must be more; something important just beyond."

  The words were tumbling from Fran now. "Then like a flash it came. The very last thing I had studied was the problem of Wave Mechanics. An ancient named Schrodinger had founded the science; later men had added to it. Matter is atoms, atoms are protons, electrons, positrons, neutrons. These in turn are aggregations of waves or ripples on the surface of a subether. The electron, for example, is the intersection of series of these waves."

  Sem 15 nodded. He was listening intently now, the blankness of his placid existence pierced. Thus far he too had gone before he had left off.

  "But this was not all," Fran said excitedly. "Even in the distant past, thousands of years ago, they knew more. They knew that the electron, while obeying the mathematical laws of waves and ripples, was also a particle, in obedience to even more ancient mathematics. But it could not be placed. Somewhere, it was true, it existed within a wave group, but that wave group was indefinite in extent. It had no sharp lines of limitation. It just trailed off into surrounding space; it might, for all they knew with the instruments at their command, extend vaguely into infinity."

  "But what," breathed Vic, frowning painfully with unaccustomed thought, "did that mean as far as the electron was concerned?"

  "Just this. That there was no determinate position for the electron. Somewhere within the vague and trailing series of waves the electron existed. Its exact position was purely a probability, and `X' in the equation of the waves. Within that area it was equally likely to be anywhere."

  "That much I knew also," Sem admitted.

  "Heisenberg went a step farther," Fran said. "He elucidated the Principle of Indeterminacy. That it was impossible to know both position and velocity of an electron at a given instant. Measure one and the other changes instantaneously. Since both factors are required for accurate determination, we were, it was said, forever debarred from exact statement of cause and effect in the micro-universe."

  Sem said placidly. "Well, what harm is there in that? For all practical purposes, the probability that an electron is within a given area of waves is sufficiently limited by the fact that the circumscribed area itself is so inconceivably small. It acts for our Machines as if it were a point."

  "Exactly," Fran exclaimed, eyes snapping. "That's why nothing more was done about it. It was all pure theory. But I have changed that."

  Sem stared at him. "How?"

  Fran's voice vibrated with pride. He looked lovingly at the transparent globe. "I have," he said very slowly and distinctly, "immeasurably enlarged the limiting area of an electron wave."

  Sem shook his head dazedly. He did not understand. Vic certainly did not. He said so vehemently. His head was aching.

  "Hold this fact," Fran explained patiently. "An electron is merely something somewhere within a series of waves; these waves have no ascertainable limits, but the probability of the electron's existence so far has been limited to a tiny, circumscribed area."

  "Continue," Sem ordered, knitting his brows.

  "Well, with this Machine, I have enlarged that area of waves. Instead of trailing out into vagueness, I have continued them at almost a dead-level strain for tremendous distances. How far, I myself don't know yet. It might be a yard, it might be millions of miles."

  Vic grasped at that eagerly, proud of the fact that he had followed. "That means then that the electron, the basis of matter, might be anywhere in that extended area; that its presence in the spot where it is visible in the mass is only a probability."

  "Exactly."

  Sem, however, caught the implications like a blow in the face. His smooth, ruddy features went pale.

  "If that is true," he almost quavered, "the present position of every particle of matter in the universe would become only a mere probability. The probability that I, as an aggregation of electrons, am here in this vista might yield the very next instant to an equal probability that I am somewhere else within that enlarged area of wave trains."

  "You have grasped it perfectly, Sem 15," Fran cried delightedly. "I committed no error in taking you into my confidence."

  BUT Sem did not hear him. His eyes were fixed with a strange intentness on that innocent-looking globe. He saw the filaments, the receiving cells that tapped the unlimited power of the Central Machines, and a queer series of grids that looked like a new type of transformer.

  "It is a transformer," said Fran, reading his thoughts correctly. "That is the heart of the instrument. It acts directly on the subetherial waves of matter. It is highly selective in principle. I have set it for maximum at the energy state of the densest part of the electron waves. Therefore it reacts with the gradually weakening waves as they shade off into infinity, and steps them up in intensity until they have achieved the maximum of the core."

  Sem 15's face grew hard. A long-forgotten vigor infused his limbs. He took a quick step forward. His clenched fist raised.

  Fran cried out sharply. He twitched in frenzied haste, thrust his vanes into a whirring glide. But already he knew, with a sickening sensation in the pit of his stomach, that he would be too late. He had been far back, off his guard. He had never dreamed—

  Vic 21 was a blur of emotions. Never after could he determine what it was that made him do the incredible thing he did. Perhaps it was a latent instinct out of the distant reaches of time; perhaps it was a strangely novel access of loyalty to his friend; perhaps, somewhere in his genes, unknown to the Mating Cells, had lurked a curious adventurous streak— In any event he sprang, heaved Sem's down-descending fist aside, sent the patriarch sprawling with all the strength of his slender body.

  For a small instant he stood panting, dizzy, filled with strange, ineluctable emotions that were somehow thrilling. The
forgotten joy of conflict, of body hurtling into body. Then Fran, face drawn and white, flashed by, dead-stopped before his precious globe. That fragile bubble crystal, which Sem had attempted to smash, to rip tubes and strands and transformer into irremediable ruin. Delicate apparatus that had taken two years to complete.

  Sem was slowly, painfully dragging himself to his feet. His gravity-twisting apparatus had been smashed by his fall. A Tending Machine, its delicate impulses disturbed by the thud, by the cessation of vibrations from the vanes, floated into the room. Two supports jerked out, clasped gently around the old man, set him on his feet. A lever unfolded and unhooked the wrecked cells. A message surged through the ether for new gravity vanes.

  Fran breathed hard. "You—would have—smashed my invention?" he asked heavily.

  Sem's eyes met Fran's squarely. There was no anger in them, no resentment; only sorrow and the shadow of disasters to come.

  "Yes," he answered quietly. "I would have smashed it. And I beg you, Fran 19, to do what I was prevented from doing."

  A tremor rippled over Fran. "Never," he cried.

  "You must," Sem insisted. "I too was once a youth, with youthful ideas and follies. I too rebelled at what seemed the dreadful monotony of the years that spread before me like a lusterless carpet. I too sought knowledge beyond the Machines ; but I stopped in time. Now I am older, with more wisdom. Our life is placid; it is uneventful. Each day is like the last, each century indistinguishable from the others. But that is the inevitable concomitant of perfected civilization."

  A Repair Machine soared squatly into the room. Folded vanes slid out of an underhanging rack; jointed metal arms hooked them into place on Sem's shoulders. Then it was gone, with the noiseless speed that characterized all the Machines. Sem did not even seem to notice.