Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (9 page)

Dan Thornton strode across his mammoth office and began pushing buttons on a four-by-eight-foot console on one side of his desk. Three doors flew open from other rooms, and shaking men entered; he waved them to seats and waited for the Secretary.

“I have your answer,” he said to the Secretary on his arrival. “It is simply this…” He was dying, his throat tightening and choking him, his heart pounding harder and harder…

He sat up shivering. He reached for the notebook and the light, and wrote quickly and lay down again. He thought he had been wakeful off and on most of the night, and now the sky was lightening, a pale grey touched with peach tones. He squeezed his eyes tighter, desperately wanting sleep to return, deep, untroubled sleep, and he knew that it would not.

Feldman said slowly, “You are aware of what the Phalanx is, yet you consistently deny any real knowledge of it to yourself. Why is that?”

Thornton shrugged. He thought of his wife and three children and talked of them for a few minutes until Feldman stopped him.

“I know about them. You told me early about them, and it is on your file. Tell me about the spool of thread.”

He free-associated for a while; he had learned to do it quite well, but privately he thought it was nonsense. He paid little attention to his own voice when he free-associated. It wasn’t as if he were being analyzed for a medical purpose, he had told himself early in the business. Feldman was paid to keep tabs, that was all. He had nothing to hide, nothing of interest to learn about himself, so he cooperated, but didn’t pay much attention.

Feldman said, “Maze,” and he answered, “Art Museum.” He sat straight up on the couch. He was shivering. Feldman nodded to him when he swung around to look. “So that is that,” Feldman said. “What it is actually I don’t know, but you do now, don’t you?”

Thornton shook his head violently, shivering hard. He remembered the feeling of being lost at an art exhibit years ago. “It was so meaningless,” he said. “This exhibit was arranged like a maze and the artist came over to me while I was standing there feeling stupid, and he told me that it meant nothing. I had worked hard trying to puzzle it out, and he said it had no meaning. It was arranged like a maze.”

Feldman looked disappointed. His silence invited Thornton to keep talking, but there was nothing more to say about it. Thornton said, “The Phalanx is the final solution to the problem of modern warfare. It is an armored computer bank designed to control at least twenty-five sub-units at this time, and it will have the capacity to control
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subunits when it is completed. The subunits to this point have been built to scout jungle trails, and go through undergrowth where there are no trails searching out the enemy. They come equipped with flame throwers, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, communications units, infrared sensors, mass sensors, mine laying, or mine detection devices, chemical analysis labs, still and movie cameras, audio sensors and transmitters…”

He became aware of Feldman’s bright, unblinking gaze and he paused and grinned at the analyst. Softly he added, “But the main problem with the Phalanx is that it doesn’t know what a smile is on a friendly face. It can’t distinguish between friend and enemy. It can’t tell if the metal it senses is a gun or a hoe. It has no way of knowing if the mass-burdened heat source is a man with a howitzer or an ass with a load of firewood. And no matter how many changes the psycho-cybernetics lab sends to me, I can’t program those things into it.”

Thornton stood up and stretched. His gaze followed a low, long shaft of sunlight coming through the Venetian blind where a slat was crooked. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. He sensed that Feldman made a motion toward him, but there was no effort to stop him, or to force him to complete his hour.

“Tomorrow at five,” Feldman said, and that was all.

His thighs burned as he climbed. He had wanted to climb the hill ever since the first tracery of white blossom had appeared high on its side, but no time, no time. And now his thighs burned. He should write to Ethel tonight. Hadn’t even opened her last letter yet. He had put it down somewhere and had forgotten it. On the dresser in his room? On his desk? He groaned to himself at the thought of his desk, and he slipped on a moss-covered rock and banged his knee. Sitting on the damp pungent ground he rocked back and forth nursing the knee for a few minutes, catching his breath. He had come farther than he realized. Below him, almost hidden, he could see the Institute building. It had started as a low, long simple two-story building, but had been extended in three directions, like dominoes, and at the end of one of the newer additions there was construction going on. He had a vision of it worming its way over the hills, growing like a snake through the mountains, creeping through valleys, over crests, following watercourses… He closed his eyes and composed part of the letter to Ethel. It would be dull, he decided, faltering after the initial hope-you-are-well bit. Ethel was a good woman, but dull. God, she was dull. He remembered the shock he had felt the day he understood that Ethel had settled in on herself, that she would change no more, only become more what she was, more dogmatic, less malleable to change of any sort, more picture-pretty and smug. Ethel was forty. She had been forty on her twenty-fifth birthday, would be forty on her eightieth. But she was good, kind, considerate, a good mother, a faithful and helpful wife, good social animal…

They could say that about him. A good man. Plodding maybe, but a good man. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Good to his kids, a real father.

He leaned back against a tree trunk and watched the sunset without thinking.

A good man.

The breeze on his cheek was warm and fragrant with spring. Gradually he forgot about the cold, damp ground beneath him. He thought about the three kids. Bang, bang, bang, three years, three kids. That was the way they had wanted it. Have them all together, raise them together and be done with that part of it. By the time we’re both forty, they’ll be almost grown and we’ll still be young. Well, he was forty-four, and they were all grown. But he wasn’t young. Ethel wasn’t young. Both of them were good, good, good, but they were not young. He dreamed of romping with the kids, and he knew the romping was wrong. They were glad when he tired of it and left them. He dreamed of his daughter’s soft cheek against his, as she whispered secrets to him, and his yawn that had driven her away. Yet, he did love her with an intensity that sometimes had startled and frightened him. Perhaps that was why he had driven her away. He remembered her flying past him on her bicycle, hair streaming behind her, thin legs pumping harder and harder…

We go down the coast in the skiff with the wind driving us hard. Feeling of fear, exhilaration, alertness, watching for the sudden wave that could topple us. Paula’s hair streaming out in the wind, hitting my face, stirring something in me, making me look at her through different eyes for a moment. And the intolerable ache that was Paula. The searing, burning, unbearable pain that meant Paula, and the release that was just as sudden and even more intense.

He jerked from the tree and was on his feet. He shuddered once and started down the hill. He had been dreaming of his wife and the kids. Of his daughter… A flush of deep shame swept over him and he stumbled blindly back to the Institute.

“Dr. Thornton, there has to be a way to program these abstracts, as you call them.” Melvin Jorgenson paced. He was a restless man. Even pacing failed to satisfy his need to move, and in his hands he carried and played with a pen whose point he extended and retracted over and over, each time making an audible click. Thornton noticed that he was pacing in time to the click, or was he clicking in time to his tread? He said nothing, and waited. Maybe they were going to fire him.

The Director was there also, and it was to him Jorgenson was addressing himself, although he prefaced his remarks with Thornton’s name. The Director looked unhappy.

“You know that we have been experimenting with various techniques,” Jorgenson said, glancing at Thornton, but still talking to the Director. “We have a simple psycho-modular unit in operation now, much like the one you described in your book of several years ago. That gave us the necessary line to follow, but as I say, this is a simple unit.”

He continued to talk and pace and by listening to him very carefully, and ignoring the clicks as much as possible, Thornton finally understood that there was to be a major revision in the Phalanx, and he was to program the revised version with all the data that already had gone into the obsolete model. He started to laugh and continued to laugh until someone, the Director himself, brought him water. He said that he had strangled on a smothered cough, that he had caught cold when he had fallen asleep out in the woods a few nights ago. He allowed Jorgenson to lead him to the new unit ready to be connected to the Phalanx, and he asked the right questions, intelligent questions, and he made intelligent notes and finally said, sure, why not?

“The Phalanx,” he wrote in his diary (because writing it, even though he would have to destroy what he had written afterward, set it in his mind: once written, never forgotten, he had learned early in his school career, and so had gone through school laboriously copying passages, notes, sometimes almost whole textbooks; he had remembered all of it, still remembered all of it), “is apparently a small building, and only on close approach can you see that there are treads under it, hidden by sides that come almost to the ground. There are pseudo-windows, a pseudo-exterior that can be made to conform to any local style of building. Inside…” He put the pen down and walked to the window. It was raining hard. He was slightly feverish; he really had caught a cold, and he had taken the afternoon off on the instructions of the infirmary doctor. He was supposed to be sleeping now, but the sound of the rain was unsettling instead of soothing, and he wanted to be out in it, walking bareheaded under the driving, stinging sheets of water. He thought yearningly of the pneumonia that would almost certainly follow, and the discharge from present duties, and the long rest afterward. Rest, travel, sunbathing, reading, being conducted through the computer laboratories of major countries throughout the world. His name would be magic after a year on the project, even if they hadn’t brought it off yet. Eventually they would, and then everyone connected with it would be known, not to the public, but to their peers, where it mattered. He pulled the blind over the window and returned to the diary.

“Inside the ‘house’ are the computer, its weapons and sensors, with a monitor board in the center. Here it is that we are forced to maintain human surveillance. A man has to oversee the data that are brought in, has to be able to jump over intervening bits of data to connect those things that have no apparent reason for being linked together. For instance, if a fire is to be started to clean out an area, the man has to note the weather—a fire during a thunderstorm is a futile gesture. He has to note the wind, the placement of other units, the relative value of migratory birds in the area, for example. Or the possibility of livestock that will be killed by smoke downwind from the area. All of these we can program in, if we can formulate them in clear, unambiguous language. We don’t dare let the Phalanx get confused.”

His dropped his pen again and went to the bathroom and took his temperature. It was up, 102.6. He lay down. He was thinking of the statements that could confuse the Phalanx unless all parts were satisfied: A.B, A+B, A/B, A–B, A=B… They couldn’t do it. How describe a smile in clear and unambiguous language? The Phalanx couldn’t be unmanned. Nor could it be manned in the usual sense. The Phalanx and its offspring were to be the call boxes, like the police telephones that were spaced all over cities. Imagine, he told himself, what it would be like if the call box on the corner not only alerted the precinct station, but watched suspicious characters, measured and weighed them, analyzed them, noted what weapons they carried, made countless other observations about them, came to a decision that they were okay, or not okay, and if not, then apprehended them, or killed them. Imagine that. What if it made a mistake and burned down a city block in error?
Sorry ’bout that
.

But if they could make it work, wouldn’t it be good? Wouldn’t it be better than armies over the face of the earth? Good, good, good…

Dan Thornton couldn’t lift his arm because they had pinned gold braid on it. Real gold. They got the other arm and he wanted to beg off, but they insisted, refusing to hear his pleas. With the fastening of the braid on his other arm all he could do was stand, trying not to sway, knowing the weight would topple him if he swayed. He was paralyzed from goodness, he thought.

They had this old brain hanging around, see. The guy died on the operating table, abdominal surgery, and his head was intact, going to waste. So they put the brain in this jar of nice warm nutrients and fed it now and then and it went on ticking away, thinking its own thoughts. Then they put electrodes in it, this is the sight center, this the kinesthetic… And they put return wires and hooked them to an EEG and they watched the pens go up and down, up and down, and they kept getting cuter with it until they could get that little old brain to tell them what was on its mind. Not much, as it turned out. You see, that little old brain had gone crazy as a bedbug from the various things they had done to it, but still those pens went up and down, up and down, and it couldn’t stop, couldn’t refuse to cooperate, couldn’t do anything but soak up the nutrients and sit there ticking away.

“Doesn’t he look natural, like he might get up and talk to us any minute.”

But don’t look behind that eyeball, ma’am. Empty behind it. That one too, and that.

Most of them go mad, if not immediately, then as soon as they are hooked to the computer that is sending messages at the rate of a million bits a second. They had time, and psycho-modular units to work with. They found a unit that did not go mad when they linked it to a computer. It was a simple computer, however.

If chips are black and white, and this object is green, then this object is not a chip. If tiles are red and blue, and this object is green, then this object is not a tile. And so on, and on, and on, at the rate of one million bits a second. The brain ticked away and did not go mad. They made it more complex. The object was green and round. Then more complex: green, round, and weighs
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grams… The brain did not go mad. Yet. They hooked it to the Phalanx, and the brain went mad.