Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (10 page)

Dan Thornton stood with his arms dangling, paralyzed by his own goodness and the heavy gold braid that testified to the goodness and watched the brain go mad. How they could tell it was going mad was by the way it made the pens go up and down, up and down. It was drawing paper dolls, all joined at feet and hands.

We stare at each other across a roomful of people and somehow we come together without either of us moving. I hold her tight against me and murmur into her hair that smells of sea winds and sunshine, and my murmur has no words, but says that I love her. “It’s been a long time, Dan,” she says. Her eyes are shining and I feel that she is happy to see me. Again she is different. The wild girl is deeper, harder to find now, but still there. She says, “Let’s go somewhere else.” We walk the streets, her hand in mine, our steps matched, even though she has to take long strides to keep up. We walk for hours, see the night out, watch silently when the last star is lost in a lightening sky.

We talk and I find myself defending my father. She stops me with cool fingers pressed against my lips. “You are shocked that you can love someone who is capable of evil,” she says, as if surprised at me. “We are all capable, it’s just that most of us never get the chance to do more than small evil things.” I argue that he wasn’t evil, that he never hurt anyone in his life. She is skipping at my side, not listening, and I know she thinks I am foolish. I am angry with her, almost as angry as when she said she would not marry me. I ask her again and she shakes her head. I ask her what she is doing, how she is living and she is amused that I don’t know of her. She puts a slim book into my hand, says I should not open it until she is gone again, and that won’t be until Monday.

The weekend is an agony of pleasure, and on Monday she is gone. The book is poetry that I cannot understand. They say she is brilliant, a genius, that she is the eyes and ears of the world. And I can’t understand her poetry.

Two weeks later I marry Ethel and we plan to have three children right away.

“Doctor Thornton, if you’ll just raise your hips a bit. That’s right.”

He was being taken somewhere on a stretcher on wheels. It was too hard to try to understand, so he let himself be carried and cared for, and sometime later he knew that he had the pneumonia that was to release him and send him home. After the serious part of it passed and he was told to take it easy and soak up sun on the wind-protected sunporch, he thought about the project, and he knew he wouldn’t ask to be relieved from it. The Institute brought in Carl Brundage, an old friend of his to substitute for him until he was well enough to resume a full schedule. Carl stopped in to talk when he had time, and that helped the slow days along.

“The major mistake is in the lack of selectivity in the psycho-modular units they are forced to use. Most of them belong to enlisted men, untrained minds that probably never used a tenth of their potential. You have to think of that one unit as pre-programmed, you see. It can accept no new training, can’t learn anything, can’t develop any of its potential; it is the coordinator, that’s all. The mistake lies in thinking that it is more than that. But that’s all it needs to be,” he added, deep thought furrows aging his face for a moment. Something…? Whatever the thought had been, it had not come to consciousness, however, and he shrugged. It would. He knew the workings of his own brain, knew that he might feel twinges of this sort off and on for a while, then a new idea would hit him and the twinges would go away until another new idea was born.

“Are you going to be allowed to watch the first test on Monday?” Carl asked.

“Sure. But it will be a failure.” Moodily he repeated that to himself after Carl had left to do the work that he, Thornton, was supposed to be doing.

He rested over the weekend, sleeping deeply and heavily under massive sedation. Monday was clear and warm with high cirrus clouds forming milky streaks in a perfect sky. The wind velocity was five to ten miles an hour, air temperature a mild 71. Thornton rode in a jeep to the demonstration site, twelve miles from the Institute building, in a narrow gouged-out valley, where spring was arriving later than on the more exposed hillsides. Pale green spears of unfolded leaves tipped the trees and the dogwoods still bore tiers of snowy flat blossoms.

The Phalanx sat in the center of the small valley, looking like a miner’s cabin. At the signal given by the Director the sides of the Phalanx rose slightly, enough for ten small, rounded subunits to roll out from the interior. The subunits were called the bugs. They were painted randomly in browns and greens, and when they moved away from the Phalanx, they merged with the earth and the undergrowth and were invisible. The test was to be in two parts; the first was without the psycho-modular unit hooked in, the second with it.

Scattered in the valley and on three sides of the surrounding hills were Institute men, taking the part of the enemy. Thornton had expected to be one of them, and he was grateful for the pneumonia that had turned him into a spectator. The ten bugs were only part of the force the Phalanx could control. Two of them carried sprays that threw out an arc of a water-dye mixture; in battle that would be fire. Two others recorded on film and soundtrack everything in a radius of up to ten miles, terrain permitting. Another moved along with a radar antenna spinning, homing in on a helicopter that thundered overhead, while its companion followed a flight of birds, then picked up a jet making a pencil-thin contrail.

Each bug apparently functioned as planned. Thornton waited. The sun heated his thighs and he remembered how they had burned on the climb up the hill the day he had caught the cold. His driver, one of the junior programmers, shifted excitedly and pointed to one of the bugs that was leaving the ground, skimming over the top of bushes, over a runoff stream. The Phalanx had everything under control. It didn’t fall apart until three rabbits were flushed from the bushes and ran straight at the mine detecting bug. The dye thrower swung around and sprayed the rabbits, and with them the mine detector that was immediately frozen in its tracks. The Phalanx had been programmed to put out of commission any of the subunits that were scored on. Following the rabbits the dye-thrower rolled over a “mine,” and it also was immobilized.

One by one the subunits proved vulnerable to the unexpected, and within half an hour the Phalanx sat alone, unprotected, and the men moved in and “captured” it.

Thornton watched the slumping figure of the Secretary and the unbowed figure of the Director who was gesturing expansively. The second session would take place after lunch, after the psycho-modular unit was hooked in and the men resumed their positions.

With the psycho-modular unit in place, the test was more impressive. Some of the men on the hills were “killed” by the dye-throwers, others were “gassed,” but none were taken prisoner. The Phalanx was not equipped to take prisoners. This time the Phalanx refused to be fooled by rabbits deliberately introduced by the men, and it sent a unit after the men themselves. It shot down three crows and two jets, and a hawk. When it went mad in less than an hour it had the subunits destroy each other, and turn on the Phalanx itself.

While technically a failure, the second session of the test gave great satisfaction.

There was a rally that night, conducted by the Secretary himself.

Thornton’s son was of draft age, or would be in a month. He could understand the tenor of the country that clamored for an end to the draft, an end to the endless wars, an end to the frustrations that dulled the young men and made them restless in school, made them marry too young, drive too hard and fast, experiment with drugs and danger wherever it was presented to them. He didn’t need or want the Secretary to outline this for him, but the Secretary did. His voice was sad and rousing by turns. Thornton used his illness as an excuse and left early.

The work continued. The psycho-modular units continued to go mad. Thornton convalesced without incident and discontinued the heavy sedation, and went back to a shortened work-day. He also went back to his sessions with Dr. Feldman.

There was an air of excitement at the Institute now. Success was in the smell of the spring air turning into summer, and the scientists and technicians were lightheaded. Thornton too. Carl was almost embarrassingly grateful to him for having become ill so that he had been called in. He worked like a man possessed, trying to spare Thornton all he could. Thornton knew that other departments were working even harder than his own. The psycho-cyberneticist and the perception psychologist must not sleep at all, he thought one night when he met them both in the hall. He had returned for his notebook, after napping for three hours. He would return to sleep, but they seemed prepared for an all-night stint.

How does man know what he sees? How does the brain communicate with itself; with the hormonal system; with the autonomic nervous system…? He didn’t envy them their work. When they found another answer, he got it in the language of formulae and symbols that he then translated to binary digital language and put in the Phalanx. This was tested, and if it was wrong, he took it out again, and they went back to the original problem.

Thornton dreamed often of the Phalanx and its bugs now. “Are the others reporting dreams about it?” he asked Feldman.

“They dream of everything,” the analyst said.

Thornton wondered if Feldman were curious about why his dreams seemed never to concern sex. “When I was young,” he said, “I was as horny as anyone, I guess. But now… After I got married and settled down, it seemed less important I guess I’m one of those fortunate people who isn’t driven by sex so much. I’ve hardly missed Ethel at all,” he added. It surprised him to say it and know that it was true. Of course, when he had been ill, he had missed her. She would have been good to have around then. She had a way with sick people, soothing, gentle, comforting. But normally his work was enough, and the momentary pangs of longing seemed almost directionless, certainly not aimed specifically for her. Or anyone else.

“Were you ever in love?” Feldman asked when the silence lengthened.

“Sure. A couple of times. High-school stuff; then, of course there was Ethel.”

“What about the high-school stuff? Any particular girl who stands out now?”

He couldn’t remember the name of any one girl he had admired in high school.

That night he had three programs to check. Carl had admitted mistakes in them. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Carl had said, flinging the papers down on Thornton’s desk. “And I can’t find the garbage.” He had been disgusted with himself for letting the error slip past in the first place, and even more so for not finding the error after it was known to be there.

The three programs comprised a whole; the error could be in the first of them, throwing off the next two; or it could be in the last step of the third program. There were over fifteen hundred steps involved.

Thornton worked on it until 1
a.m
., knocked off half an hour to stretch and have a sandwich, then went back to it again. At 3
a.m
. he realized that Feldman was pushing him for some reason that he couldn’t fathom. For months his relationship with Feldman had been casual, in the line of duty, but now it was different. The difference in Feldman was like the change that came over a cat that had been playing with a ball and was presented with a mouse. The same gestures, but with a new intensity, a new concentration. He wandered out into the night to smoke and let his room clear of the smoke there. He was coughing badly with each cigarette, the after-effect of pneumonia, he guessed.

He had talked to the psycho-cyberneticist about the selection of the psycho-modular unit, and Jorgenson had been in bitter agreement with his theory that they could expect no great strides forward until they were allowed to select for themselves. He knew the Director had brought it up with the Secretary, but no word had filtered down as yet about the outcome. Meanwhile the units continued to go mad and the Phalanx tried to commit suicide periodically.

He didn’t like the phrase, “tried to commit suicide,” but it was how they all talked about it. He remembered his mother and her suicide that followed the execution of his father. He remembered the pictures of the mangled children that had arrived in the mail, and the letters, and phone calls, and his mother’s anguish and final surrender. He would not have got through that period without Paula and Gregory. His hand froze in the process of lifting his cigarette to his lips.

Paula! He hadn’t thought about Paula for twenty years. Not since he had gone to hear her speak and read her poetry. Ethel had been so bored by it. They hadn’t stayed for all the program, but later he had gone back and met Paula at the reception that followed. She never appeared surprised to find him, he had thought then when her face lighted with pleasure at his approach. Never surprise, only pleasure to see him again. He almost asked her if she loved him then, but he didn’t. Again she seemed different, wiser, but not only that. In touch with something that he couldn’t grasp, perhaps. Tuned in, the students said of her, adoring her and what she wrote for them.

He inhaled deeply, coughed hard and held onto a tree until he had his breath back. Coughing made him dizzy, made his head swell and throb. He thought fleetingly of himself dying, dead, and Paula coming to the funeral, weeping over his lifeless body, pleading for another chance with him. A bitter smile twisted his face and he pulled hard on the cigarette, finishing it, not caring if he coughed or not. Another paroxysm, and he knew that he did care. He waited for it to pass and then returned to his room and the programs that had to be corrected.

Toward dawn he threw himself down on his bed and fell asleep instantly.

We pull ourselves up the steep rocks of the cliff and when we get to the top we have no breath left for talking. Paula is sweating, and she rubs the back of her hand over her face carelessly, leaving a smudge of dirt there from her forehead to her chin. I lie back with my eyes closed, trying not to cry yet. Hoping never to cry over my mother. Paula says, “Mom and Dad say you can live with us until you go to school in the fall. Okay?”