Complete Short Fiction, page 207
“I’ll have to hurry,” he said. Gosseyn frowned at that. “I’m afraid,” he said, “the time has come for special risks. I have an idea an effort will be made to dismantle the destroyed Games Machine as swiftly as possible. If I were confronted with such a job, and wanted it done fast, I would publish a notice to the effect that anybody can have what he wants provided he carts it away immediately.”
He saw that Dan Lyttle was staring at him, wide-eyed. The young man breathed:
“Why, that’s exactly what’s been done. They’re stringing up masses of lights, and trucks are arriving and leaving every second. They say that an eighth of the Machine is already gone, and that . . . why, what’s the matter?”
Gosseyn couldn’t help it. He was shuddering. He had talked so glibly about the Machine being destroyed that the reality of that destruction hadn’t penetrated.
It was penetrating now, the tremendousness, the finality of it. Without having to think about it, he knew it would never be reconstructed. Like the gorgeous cathedrals and temples of far-gone days, the Machine was product of a creative impulse, a will to perfection, which, though not dead, would not repeat itself in the same fashion, no matter how complete was the victory over the forces that had smashed it.
Gosseyn felt a personal anguish. The Machine was gone after more than three hundred years of controlling men’s lust for power. And hour by hour, all that it stood for, was going with it.
It was surely a black day for Ā. Jerkily, he forced the thought aside. “There’s no time to waste,” he said swiftly. “If the Distorter is still inside the Machine, we’ll have to go after it at once.”
“But I can’t leave until twelve.”
“Why not?”
Dan Lyttle looked distressed. “There’s been a preliminary warning about you to all hotels; and the slightest wrong move would be noticed. I’m sure of it.”
It was an angle that hadn’t occurred to Gosseyn. “Can’t you pretend to be sick?”
Lyttle smiled wanly. “We have a little system in this hotel. Anybody who wants leave states his reasons into a lie detector and—”
Gosseyn cut him off: “What about your car? Have you got a car?”
The young man’s smile was sickly now. “It’s locked in an automobile parking space on a time lock set for midnight.” He broke off anxiously: “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can’t see any way but for us to wait. In my car, you’ll be reasonably safe. But on foot, or on a public vehicle—I’m sure you’ll be caught right away. The streets are absolutely swarming with men. It’s even possible I ought to go after it alone. I swear I’ll do my best.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Gosseyn grimly. “But what you haven’t realized is that there’s a billion dollars worth of material in the Games Machine.
“The junk dealers, the organized contractors and other material groups will commit murder to get their share. They’ll gang up. They’ll hire gunmen to fight off the small competition. I assure you, you’ll need me there to get you through; and I’ll need you. And now you’d better get back to your job. We’ve got five hours to pass.”
It was going to be a long, long evening.
At first he didn’t know what to do with himself. His original plan had been to wait until dark, and then go out. He hated to waste a single minute of the extra time. But what to do?
Gosseyn paced the room. Abruptly, he saw the newspaper; and, snatching it, read captions, searching for bits of information. But there was nothing in the news that he did not already know in essence. What did strike him was the restraint of the newspaper account, as compared to the wild talk on the radio the day before. A master’s hand had obviously taken control of the gang’s propaganda.
In the middle of thinking about it, the realization came that he was ravenously hungry. He ordered the food sent up to his room. By the time it arrived, he was planning his evening.
He looked up a number. “I want a visual connection,” he said into the mouthpiece, “with the nearest phonolibrary. The number is—”
To the robot in charge at the library, he explained his general wants. Within a minute, a picture was forming on the communicator screen. Gosseyn sat then, eating and looking and listening. He knew very clearly what he wanted: a suggestion as to how he should begin training his extra-brain. Whether or not the subject matter selected by the librarian had any relevancy to that desire was not so clear.
He forced himself to be patient. When the voice began with an account of the positive and negative neural excitations experienced by the simple life forms of the sea, Gosseyn settled down determinedly.
He had an evening to pass.
Phrases came to him, clung as he turned them over in his mind; and then faded out of his consciousness, as he reluctantly discarded them. As the voice traced the growth of the nervous system on Earth, the pictures on the communicator changed, showing ever more complex neural interconnections, until finally the comparatively high forms were reached, complex creatures that could learn lessons from experience:
A worm bumping two hundred times against an electric current before it finally turned aside; and then, when put to the test again, turned aside after sixty shocks—A pike separated from a minnow by an almost invisible screen nearly killing itself to get through; and then, finally convinced that it couldn’t, not even the removal of the screen made any difference; it continued to ignore the minnow as something unobtainable—A pig going insane when confronted with a complicated path to its food—
All the experiments were shown. First the worm, then the pike actually threshing against the screen; the pig squealing madly; and later on, a cat, a dog, coyote—monkeys put through their experiments.
And still there was nothing that Gosseyn could use; no suggestion, no comparison that seemed to have anything to do with what he wanted.
“Now,” said the voice, “before we turn to the human brain, it is worthwhile to note that, in all these animals, one limitation has again and again and again revealed itself. Without exception they identify their surroundings on a too-narrow basis.
“The pike, after the screen was removed, continued to identify its environment on the basis of the pain it had experienced when the screen was in place—The coyote failed to distinguish between the man with the gun and the man with the camera—
“In each case, a similarity that did not exist was assumed. The story of the dark ages of the human mind is the story of man’s dim comprehension that he was more than an animal, but it is a story told against a background of mass animal actions, rooted in a pattern of narrow animal identifications.
“The story of Ā, on the other hand, is the story of man’s fight to train his brain to distinguish between similar yet different object-events in space time. Curiously, the scientific experiments of this enlightened period show a progressive tendency to attain refinements of similarity in method, in timing and in the structure of the materials used. It might indeed be said that science is striving to force similarity because only thus—”
He had been listening impatiently, waiting for the discussion on the human brain to begin. Now, abruptly, Gosseyn thought:
“What was that? What was that
He had to hold himself in his chair; to relax, to remember. And then, and not till then, did he climb to his feet and pace the floor in the burning excitement of an immeasurably great discovery made.
To force a greater approximation of similarity. What else could it be? There just wasn’t anything that offered such a logical continuity of the developing of the null-A idea.
Besides, he had to try something. And if he succeeded he’d have—
The thought dangled. Gosseyn frowned a black, an awful frown of dismay.
What would he have?
He began to shake. Because there was nothing. What good was similarity to him, except in a kind of a way?
He grew aware that somewhere a clock was striking the hour. Gosseyn glanced at his watch. And sighed like a sick man at the realization of the time that had passed.
Midnight.
XVII.
“In the rough, machine is a label applied to a man-made apparatus for the application or transformation of power . . . Roughly, mechanics . . . deals with dynamic manifestations on all levels: thus we have macroscopic classical mechanics, colloidal mechanics . . . and the sub-microscopic quantum mechanics . . .
A.I.C.
Masses of parked cars, moving figures, shafts of near light, a distant blaze, confusion—After they forked their car about a mile from the central glare, Gosseyn and Lyttle followed a thin stream of people for half a mile. They came at last to where other people were standing, watching. That was where the really hard part began.
Even for a null-A, it was difficult to think of a third of a mile barrier of human beings as if each unit was an individual with a personality and a will of its own.
The mob swayed or stood still. It had volitions that began like a tiny snowball rolling down hill, and grew into a landslide. There were gasps as people were crushed by the pressures; there were shrieks as the unlucky lost their foothold, and went down. People must have wondered vaguely at times what it was they were standing on, the soft squashy things they were standing on. But it couldn’t have worried them very much.
The crowd was a soulless woman; it reared up on its legs, and stared mindlessly at the ghouls who were feasting on the destroyed symbol of a world’s sanity.
Unresting were the ghouls. They piloted swarms of roboplanes overhead, loaded with their loot. But that wasn’t so bad; if they had used only that method of transportation, the danger would have been minimized.
They also used trucks. Lines of trucks driven at top speed with glaring lights straight at the fringes of crowd that constantly threatened to overlap the roads. Shaken and frightened, the mob kept its skirts drawn back.
It was along these dangerous byways of humanity that Gosseyn and his companion worked their way towards the Machine. Dangerous? They had to keep their eyes open for rifts in the packs of trucks; they had to strain to see pockets in the masses of human beings, pockets towards which they could run in the desperate hope that they would not be filled up when they got there.
In spite of the hideous risk, it did not surprise Gosseyn that they made progress. There was a curious psychological law that protected men with purposes from those who bad none. The important thing was not to arouse a counterpurpose.
Once, when they were penned in by an apparently endless line of racing trucks, Gosseyn shouted:
“This is the city side. The open fields on the other side probably have hardly anyone in them. When we leave, we’ll go that way, and work around to your car.”
The young man bellowed in answer: “And to think I believed I could come here alone.”
“This,” said Gosseyn, “is only the beginning. Wait till we come to the gunmen.”
But he didn’t say that very loud; and surprisingly it wasn’t as bad as he expected. They came to a steel fence that enterprising wrecking crews had put up against the crowd. It was for the most part a successful barrier; and the occasional individual who vaulted over it usually slunk back before the threatening guns of the guards who stood in little groups on the other side of the fence, like soldiers lawfully guarding a property from vandals.
Once more, it was a case of straightforward risk. “Keep close to the road,” Gosseyn yelled. “They’ll hesitate about shooting at the trucks.”
The moment they broke into the open, two guards raced towards them, shrieking something that was lost in the bedlam. Their contorted faces were limned in the fitful light. Their guns waved ferociously. And they went down like briefly animated dummies, as Gosseyn shot them.
He ran on after Lyttle, shocked, wondering at himself. He who had so frequently refused to kill—merciless now.
They were symbols, he decided bleakly, symbols of destruction. Having taken on unhuman qualities, they were barbarous entities, to be destroyed like attacking beasts—and forgotten.
He forgot them.
Ahead was the remnant of the Games Machine.
For hours Gosseyn had tied his sanity to a law of logic. A law which held that a machine which had taken years to build couldn’t be unbuilt in twenty-four hours.
He was not quite so right as he had expected. The machine was visibly smaller. But it was the colossal artillery damage that was responsible.
The outer tiers of game rooms were caved-in husks, as if fantastic air pressures had smashed them. And everywhere, thirty, fifty, ninety-foot holes gaped in the gleaming, dented walls. Black, jagged holes that revealed, under the spraying, glittering light, torn masses of scintillating wires and instruments—the outer portions of the nervous system of the dead Machine.
For the first time, standing there. Gosseyn thought of the Machine as a high-type organism that had been living, and was now dead. What was intelligent life but the sensitive awareness of a nervous system with a memory of experiences. In all the man-known history of the world, there never had been an organism with so much memory, such a vast experience, such a tremendous knowledge of human beings and human nature, as the Games Machine. Far in the background of his mind Gosseyn heard Dan Lyttle cry:
“Come along. We mustn’t delay.”
Gosseyn recognized that was so, and moved forward, but it was his body that followed Lyttle towards the realization of their purpose. His mind and gaze clung to the Machine.
Seen at closer range, the extent of the salvage work was more apparent. Whole sections had been torn down, were being torn down, were about to be torn down. Men carrying machines and metal plates and instruments swarmed out of dark passageways; the sight of them shocked Gosseyn. In awful revulsion, he compared them to worms crawling out of the dark orifices of human corpses, bloated with their cargoes of dead body matter.
And once more, then, he stopped, stricken by the realization that he was witnessing the ending of an era.
He stood in a gathering mental mist. It thickened instant by instant; its multiquadrillion tendrils hazed the bright reality he believed in. The altar fires of Ā were burning low; darkness was shading the great airy room in which he had spent his life—
Lyttle tugged at his arm. And that jarred Gosseyn as no words could have. Galvanized, he hurried forward, skirting the fiery glare of the truck and plane lights, the blaze of the beacons that poured down from every projection of metal big enough to support an atomic-powered searchlight.
“Around to the back,” Gosseyn called. And led the way to the overhanging fold of metal, into which the truck had disappeared with the crate containing the Distorter. As they half-ran, the din retreated somewhat; and there were not so many planes or trucks or men.
There was tremendous activity of course. The hissing of cutters, the clang of metal falling, the confusion of movement—all were there, but in a lesser quantity. For every hundred men and trucks in the front of the Machine, there were a score here, working just as hard, just as frantically, apparently conscious that it was only a matter of time until their easy possession was challenged by irresistible numbers.
And still the din grew less. Gosseyn and Lyttle came to the flange behind which the Distorter had been taken, and saw a scant dozen trucks drawn up against a loading platform. Doors had been cut out of the front of an enormous shedlike room; and from this vast, dim area, men were carrying packing cases, machines, pieces of metal and instruments.
The shed was almost empty; and the crate with the Distorter in it stood off by itself, as if waiting for them. An address had been stamped on it in six-inch black letters:
RESEARCH DEPT.,
THE SEMANTIC INSTITUTE,
KORZYBSKI SQUARE,
CITY.
The destination was a source of grim amusement to Gosseyn, as Lyttle and he headed out into an open field with the crate, out into the darkness and away around, down silent streets far from the roar and the carnage around the Machine.
He remembered it again when they reached the car, satirically now. So the Machine had wanted the Semantic Institute to have the Distorter. Well, they could have it. After he got through with it, he’d see that the schoolteachers had their chance.
The professors would no doubt write some learned books about their discoveries. Perhaps they would be allowed to publish them. Perhaps they wouldn’t. Gosseyn wouldn’t put it past Crang to let them.
He realized that the destruction of the Machine was making him bitter and unnecessarily caustic. He put the dark thought out of his mind.
The car drove presently into the yard of the neat little home of Dan Lyttle. In a vague fashion Gosseyn had believed that Patricia Hardie would be waiting there for him.
She wasn’t.
There was an excitement about removing the Distorter from its rate that took away the empty feeling of her not being there.
Briefly, nevertheless, he wondered about the feeling. She had said she would come the next day. It was now—Gosseyn glanced at his watch—5:15 a.m. Kind of early to start worrying.
They laid the Distorter, face upward, on the floor, then sat down and looked at it.
Bright, steely, alien metal—world destroyer! Because of it, the gang had reached into all the high places of Earth, and for long, oh, far too long, it was unsuspected—
His initial capture of the Distorter had proved to be one of the final steps in the crisis of Ā. Because of his action, the Games Machine had felt compelled to do something which it must have known could only end in its own destruction.
Finding itself free, it had broadcast the truth, and brought the Venusian war to Earth. For better or worse, all the forces of the gang and of Ā were now engaged, or about to be engaged.
On the gang’s side were nine thousand spaceships, the organized government of Earth, alien science and all the weapons. On the other side was integration of mind and body—and the mysterious cosmic player who had moved first one, then a second Gilbert Gosseyn into the center of the game for interplanetary power.
Sitting there, Gosseyn felt a black dismay. From every logical angle, the fight was already lost.
