Collected Short Fiction, page 630
Or so thought Boysie Gann.
So thought Boysie Gann, and was aware in some part of him that there was something in that thought which was dangerous—dangerous to him and to all mankind—for if the sweet and empty-headed Togetherness girl accepted the Plan so unquestioningly . . .
He could not put the thought together. It almost seemed as if he himself, and General Wheeler, and even the Planner—as if all the human race within the Plan were in some sense no less empty-headed than a Togetherness girl.
But he could not complete the thought. And then time ran out and he no longer had leisure for such thoughts, for he began the course of training that would lead him to communion with the Machine.
Dyadic relation: I hate spinach. Ternary relation: I hate spinach except when it is well washed. Quaternary relation: I hate spinach except when it is well washed because the sand gets in my teeth.
With instructor and book, with constant subliminal tapes droning while he slept and teaching machines snapping at him awake, Boysie Gann began to learn the calculus of statement, the logic of relations, the geometries of Hilbert and Ackermann and Boole. Conjunctions and disjunctions, axioms and theorems, double negations and metastatements . . . they all surged through his brain, nesting with destructive dilemmas and syllogisms hi the mood of Barbara. He learned to transpose and commute. He learned the principle of exportation and the use of dots as brackets. He learned the unambiguous phrasing and inflectionless grammar of machine programming; he learned the distinction between perceptual symbols and motor symbols, and learned to make the auditory symbols that bridged the gap. For hours with an oscillator squeal beeping hi his ear to guide him, he sang endless quarter-tone scales. He studied the factorization problems of the General Problem Solver and learned to quantify relationships. He learned the construction of truth tables, and how to use them to track down tautologies ha a premise.
There were neither classes nor schoolrooms; there were only study and work. It went on and on, endlessly. Gann woke to the drone of the tape-recorded voice under his pillow, ate with the chime of sonic bells hi his ear, fell exhausted into his bed with schematics of shared-time computer inputs racing through his mind.
There was a world outside the training center, but he had lost touch with it completely. In stolen moments he caught snatches of conversation between his few human contacts—the Togetherness girls who served him at table, the guards who roamed the halls—that his mind was too hard-pressed to fit together. The Starchild. The Writ of Liberation. Disasters under the earth; rocket explosions in space. They did not matter; what mattered was null hypotheses and probabilistic calculus. If he had time enough, and thought enough, to probe beyond the demands of the training, his mind always reached one step ahead—to the moment when training was over and he would receive the metal badge of communion in his flesh—and it recoiled, and returned to Hilbert and Boole.
When the course was over, Gann did not realize it He went to sleep—exhausted, as he was always exhausted in this place. He tumbled into the narrow, hard bed in the solitary, tile-walled room. The voice under his pillow promptly began to recite to him:
“. . . generate a matrix K, utilizing the mechanism of associative retrieval to add contextual relationships to coordinate retrieval. Let the ith row and the jth column show the degree of association . . .”
Some part of him was taking it in, he knew, but his conscious mind was hardly aware of it. All he was aware of was his own inadequacy. He would never match the pure, crystalline tones of Sister Delta Four and the other acolytes. He did not have the voice tor it. He would never grasp and retain all the information theory and programming he had been taught. He did not have the training for it . . .
He drifted off to sleep.
His cot was hard. The barracks were like an air-conditioned vault. Every night at lights-out it held eighty tired and silent trainees, every cot filled. And each morning, the harsh clanging of the reveille gong found a few cots empty.
No one spoke of the missing trainees. Their gear was gone with them, from the narrow shelves above the cots. Their names had been erased from the company rolls. They had ceased to exist. Nobody asked why.
One night, however, the shuffle of hurried feet awakened him. With a gasp of wild alarm, he sat up on his cot. “Jim?” He whispered the name of the man in the next bunk, a new recruit, who had the physique of a wrestler and a pure tenor voice. His mother had been a Togetherness singer, and his father had died for the Plan in space. “What—?”
“You’re asleep, bud,” a harsh whisper rasped in the dark. “Better stay that way.”
A heavy hand caught his shoulder, shoved him down.
Gann wanted to help, but he was afraid. He watched as dark forms closed around the cot. He heard Jim’s stifled gasp. He heard a muffled rattle of a voice. He heard the rustle of clothing, a metallic clink. The cot creaked. He closed his eyes as a thin blade of light stabbed at his face. Footsteps padded away.
He lay a long time in the dark, listening to the breath sounds of fewer than eighty sleeping men. Jim had treasured that red plastic medal that said his father had been a Hero of the Plan, Second Class. Jim’s voice had been fine and true, but he had been too slow to learn the semantic calculus.
Gann wanted to help, but there was nothing he could do. The machine required something mechanical in its selected servants; perhaps Jim had not been quite mechanical enough. Gann turned on the hard cot and began repeating to himself the semantic tensors; presently he slept again.
XI
Two days later, entering the second phase of training, Gann remembered the first phase through a fog of exhaustion as something like a week end at a Togetherness beach hostel. The pressure never stopped.
“Look Mechanical!”
Bleak-voiced instructors hammered that injunction at him. Bright-eyed Togetherness girls cooed it to him, as he shuffled through the chow lines. Blazing stereo signs burned it into his retinas. Sleepless speakers whispered it endlessly under his pillow.
“Look Mechanical! . . . Act Mechanical! . . . Be Mechanical!”
Each rasping sergeant and murmuring girl pointed out what that meant. To master the myriad difficult tone phonemes of Mechanese, a man had to become mechanical. The searing signs and the whispering speakers reminded him that those who failed went promptly to the Body Bank.
Locked in a stifling little examination cell walled with gray acoustic padding, he sat hunched over a black link-box, straining to catch the fleeting inflections of its tinkling Mechanese.
“The candidate—” Even that word almost escaped him. The-candidate will identify himself.”
His answering voice came out too harsh and too high. He gulped to clear his throat, and stroked his tonal beads.
“Candidate Boysie Gann.” He swallowed again, and sang his serial number.
“Candidate Boysie Gann, you are under examination,” the box purred instantly. “A passing score will move you one stage farther toward that high service which the Plan rewards with communion. But you must be warned that you are now beyond the point of return! The Plan has no place for rejects, with your classified knowledge and training—except in the salvage centers.”
“I understand, and I live to serve.” He sang the single difficult phoneme.
“Then the test will begin,” the box chirped. “You will answer each question clearly and fully, in correct Mechanese. Each millisecond of delay and each tone defect will be scored against you. The Plan has no time to waste, nor space for error. Are you ready to begin?”
Hurriedly, he sang the tone that said, “I am ready to begin.”
“Your response was delayed nine milliseconds beyond the optimum point,” the box whined instantly. “Your initial tone was twelve cycles too high. Your tonal glide was abrupt and irregular. The duration of your utterance was one millisecond too long. These errors will be scored against you.”
“I understand.”
“That response was not required from you,” the box snarled. “Your errors, however, have been analyzed and graphed. You will now prepare for your initial test question . . . What is the first principle of mechanized learning?”
When he first tried to sing his answer, his voice came out too hoarse and too low. The box piped out a new total cumulative error before he had time to touch the beads to find the true tone and try again.
“Learning is action,” his uneven tones came out at last “That is the first principle of mechanized instruction. Right responses must be instantly reinforced. Wrong responses must be instantly inhibited. The first equation of mechanized instruction states that efficiency of learning varies inversely with the time elapsed between response and reward.”
“Your accumulated total error is now four hundred and eighty-nine points,” the box snarled. “You will prepare for the next question . . . What is the second principle of mechanized instruction?”
He was sweating now as he crouched on the hard little seat. The small gray room seemed too small. The padded walls pressed in upon him. He felt almost suffocated, and he had to gasp for the breath for his hurried reply.
“Learning is survival,” he sang the curt phonemes, trying to cut them out correctly. “Successful learning is the adaptive way to life. Failure to learn is individual death. The second equation of mechanized instruction states that the speed of learning varies directly with the magnitudes of reward and punishment.”
When he paused, the box chirped. Even to his straining ears, it was only a sharp metallic insect note, entirely meaningless. He had to whistle a request for the Machine to repeat.
“Your failure in reception scores ninety points against you.” The notes from the box were only slightly slower and more intelligible. “Your cumulative total is now six hundred and seventy-three points. Your right-wrong ratio has fallen into the danger zone.”
The racing tinkle of merciless notes, sharp as shattering glass, gave him no time to recover his shattered confidence. He was only dimly conscious of the itching tickle of sweat on his ribs, the cold tingle of sweat on his forehead, the sting of sweat in his eyes.
“You will prepare for your next question.” That was only a single gliding tone phoneme, gone in a few milliseconds, so brief he nearly missed it. “What is the third principle of mechanized instruction?”
He touched his beads for the tonal keys, and sang the required phonemes. “The third principle of mechanized instruction states that the greatest reward is the end of pain.” His accumulated error mounted, and the merciless box demanded another principle of mechanized instruction—and yet another.
“Your test is ended,” the box announced at last. “Your total accumulated error is five thousand nine hundred and forty points. You will report that total to your training group.”
He was late when he reached his barracks to punch that total into the group computer. He was late again, half a minute late, for the calisthenics formation—a crime against the Machine which earned him two extra laps of double time in the track tunnel. The last man in the chow line, he was too tired to eat his ration when at last he reached the table with it; the wasted food cost him two yellow demerit points. When he got to his bunk at last, he felt too tired to sleep.
“Candidate Gann!”
He had not seen the dark forms approach his cot. He gasped and sat up trembling. A pale needle of light picked out his uniform, his boots, and kit and gear. A harsh whisper directed him. In a moment he was shuffling down the shadowy aisle between the heavy-breathing trainees, his kit on his back.
So this was it? For a moment his knees wobbled; then he began to feel illogically relieved.
He was almost yearning for the anesthesia of the Body Bank; he was almost hungry for oblivion. Because there wouldn’t be any linkboxes in the Body Bank. He wouldn’t have to practice any more impossible scales, or learn any more tables of semantic variation.
He was out of it all.
His black-uniformed escorts let him sit with them at a table in a nearly deserted mess hall. A sleepy Togetherness girl yawned as she served them. He ate no food. He drank two cups of black coffee that left a lingering bitterness in his mouth.
He joined five other stunned and sleepy trainees who must have come from another barracks. They carried their gear into a military subtrain, and carried it off again. They marched past a scowling sentry into another cavernous training center.
Gann left his gear hi a tiny tile-walled cell and reported to a cadaverous Machine Major who wore the piebald scars of a Venusian anaerobic parasite. The major returned his salute stiffly, with a black-gloved hand.
“Congratulations, Major Gann.”
Staring at the gaunt major who was shuffling through papers on his desk, Gann saw that the neat black glove was no glove, but the black skin of a salvaged hand.
“You have successfully completed Phase Two of your service training in Mechanese.” Peering at that black, borrowed hand, Gann scarcely heard the words. “You have been assigned here for Phase Three, which consists of mechanized instruction.”
A faint smile twisted the major’s yellow patched face. “Your test scores were unusual, Major Gann,” he I added. “The Machine has commended you. You ought to be a proud and happy man.”
Gann had swayed backward when that cold fact struck him. He was not a proud and happy man. He stood speechless, breathless, shuddering with a secret horror.
“You have come a long way, Major Gann.” The yellow scars turned the major’s smile into a rictus of agony. “You have escaped the danger of salvage. You have moved far toward the highest reward.” Wistfully his black fingers touched his own seamed and mottled forehead, where he had no communion receptacle of his own. “You are very fortunate, Major Gann!”
Gann stood swaying. Suddenly the harsh-lit room and the gray-cased computers and the piebald major seemed unreal. Terribly real, in his own spinning mind, the cold, bright scalpels and saws of the surgeons were carving out space for the socket in his own forehead. They were drilling into the crown and the temples and the base of his shaven head. They were probing with thin, cruel needles for the centers of sensation. They were coldly violating the most secret privacy of all his being . . .
He wanted to scream.
“Is something wrong, Major Gann?” The gaunt major rose anxiously. “You look ill.”
“Nothing, sir.” Groping for himself, he grinned faintly. “You see, I didn’t know that I had passed Phase Two. I thought we were in a salvage center.”
“You’ll soon get over that.” The major’s rictus grew more hideous. “With your record, you’re as good as already wired for communion. I wish I were in your place.”
“Thank—” He tried to wet the sandpaper dryness in his mouth and throat. “Thank you, sir!”
The Mechanese trainer was a ten-foot pear shape, fabricated out of bright aluminum. Swung in massive gimbals of gray-painted steel, it stood in a windy, gloomy cavern, under a water-stained concrete vault. Thick black cables and hoses snaked from it to the gray-cased control console at the tunnel mouth.
“There she is, sir!” The instructor was a plump young Techtenant with a pink baby face, wide blue eyes, and a bright communion plate set in his forehead. “The perfect teaching machine!”
Gann was queerly unsure of that. Smeared all over with a sticky jelly, wearing only loose gray coveralls, he hesitated at the tunnel mouth, staring uncomfortably up at that huge metal pear.
“Step right up, sir.” The Techtenant gave him an innocent grin. “Strip off your robe and slip right in.” The round blue eyes flickered at him inquiringly. “All ready, sir?”
He was wet and clammy with the jelly, and the coveralls were thin. Suddenly he shivered in the cold steady wind that blew out of the tunnel. He didn’t really want to learn Mechanese. He didn’t want to be rewarded with electrodes in his brain. But he gulped and said that he was ready.
The Techtenant touched something on the console. Air valves wheezed. That great metal pear tipped in the gimbals, opening like a sliced fruit. He stared at it, frozen, tingling, fascinated.
“Move ahead, sir.” The Techtenant touched his shoulder respectfully. “Up the ladder. Strip off. Just lie down on the sensor-effector sheath.” He chuckled easily. “Most students are a bit uneasy at first, but you’ll find it fits you, sir.”
Gann caught his breath and climbed the metal ladder. The rungs felt cold and sticky to his naked feet. The wind blew cold on his shaven head, and a sudden bitter taste of stale coffee came back from his stomach into his throat.
He stripped off the coveralls and crept uneasily out upon the bright pink membrane that lined the pear. It rippled beneath him, warm and slimy and almost alive, propelling his naked body into its central cavity.
“All set, sir?”
He attempted no answer to that cherry hail, but he heard another hiss of escaping air. The hinged upper half of the pear closed down. Warm constrictions of that pliant membrane caressed him into place. Total darkness seized him, in a hot and suffocating grip.
He tried to scream, and had no breath . . .
But then there was air for his lungs. He saw a pink glow of light through his closed eyelids.
He opened them, and saw Sister Delta Four.
Really, he supposed, it must have been only a projected image of her, but she looked alive enough. He knew this had to be an image because she wasn’t in the buried training center. But she seemed to be. Robed and hooded and carrying her black link box, she was walking down a palm-fringed coral beach that looked queerly like the Togetherness center at Playa Blanca.
And he was walking with her.
The clinging effectors of the trainer duplicated every sensation: the hard, cold, yielding firmness of the wet sand, the tingling heat of the high sun, a cool puff of ocean breeze. He heard the dull boom of surf against the breakwater, and caught a sharp whiff of rotting seaweed and then a hint of Julie’s perfume—for she was speaking to him now, in the warm, remembered tones of Julie Martinet.
