Collected Short Fiction, page 631
“Here we are,” she was saying, “for your first lesson in the Mechanese Learning Device, Mark Eight. This instrument is very nearly the last possible word in educational efficiency. If you co-operate, I’m sure you’ll find the experience exciting and profitable.” Her bright face smiled at him, tempting under the hood.
“Now,” she said, “we are ready to begin your introduction to the technical vocabulary of Mechanese. It is built upon a principle of economy already familiar to you: one syllable for one sentence. Obviously, that requires a large number of syllables. The total vocabulary of Mechanese, as we compute it, is more than a billion monosyllables—more than a billion one-sound sentences.”
He stopped on the beach—or it seemed that he did, for the synthetic experience created by the trainer had made him forget that he was any where else. Cold brine hissed over his bare feet, crumbled the hard sand beneath them, rushed back down the slope.
“I can’t do it,” he protested. “I can’t memorize a billion words!”
Her soft laugh checked him. “You’ll be surprised!” Her voice was a song, even when she spoke the old, familiar language. “You’ll be surprised what the trainer can make you do.” The sea breeze caught and lifted her hood, so that he had a sudden glimpse of the bright plate set in her forehead. Even hi that mild tropic air, it made him cold and ill.
“Actually, though, you don’t have to memorize a billion words,” she said. “No more than a child has to memorize every possible sentence in English. All you must learn is how to construct the Mechanese monosyllables from combinations of a, few thousand phonemes. You must learn to hear and understand very small distinctive variations hi length and stress and pitch and a few other simple features of articulation.”
“But I can’t!” Feet planted in the wet sand, he waited until she turned back. He didn’t want to learn, though he could scarcely tell her that. He was seeking secretly to defend himself from those cold probes that would be piercing his brain when he knew Mechanese. “I can’t learn to utter a billion different words.”
“You’ll be surprised,” Her laugh was as melodious as her voice. “Let’s begin.”
He shook his head stubbornly, trying to remind himself that the sharp white sand wasn’t real, that the salt-scented wind wasn’t real, that Julie herself wasn’t real.
“Do co-operate,” she urged him softly. “If you’re a good student, we can go for a swim a little later on.” Her eyes held a teasing promise, and her deft white hands made a fetching gesture, as if to toss away the robe and hood. “You must co-operate.”
Her oval face turned suddenly sober.
“If you don’t, you’ll be sorry.” Her voice turned slow and faint and sad. “I don’t like to remind you of the third principle of mechanized instruction—but the greatest reward is the end of pain.”
She shrugged, and her quick smile dazzled him. “Let’s begin!”
They began with the verbal glides, the slight inflections of tone that meant tense and mood and voice and person and aspect. She trilled the difficult syllables. Trying faithfully to imitate them, he was soon reminded of the third law of mechanized learning.
Even the tiniest error brought a twinge of pain, and his errors were frequent and great. Even when he responded instantly with a phoneme that seemed to him precisely like the one she had uttered, it was often painfully wrong.
For he wasn’t really on that dazzling coral beach. He was sealed inside the great metal pear of the trainer, with its flexible effectors caressing every inch of his really naked body. They could numb him with cold, sear him like fire, crush him with pressure.
They often did. The slightest error snatched him away from warm beach and Julie Martinet, into a special mechanical hell where he strove with all his being to earn that supreme reward that was the end of pain.
Sometimes he was trapped aboard a crippled rocket that was falling into the sun. The air was screaming out of the meteor-riddled hull, so that his lungs labored against an agony of suffocation. Cruel light blazed through one jagged hole, blinding, searing, unendurable. The wrecked compartment was a super-heated oven, in which his broken body roasted—but still he heard the voice of Julie Martinet. It came to him faintly through a laser amplifier. Sweetly it sang the combined phonemes of the syllables he had to learn. Sobbing for his breath, he struggled to make each correct response—and felt the laws of automated learning at work all around him.
When he was wrong, the fire of that devouring sun became instantly more terrible. When his answer was correct, within the narrow limits accepted by the Machine, the searing heat decreased and his struggling lungs found some tiny breath of precious air.
Whenever he got enough answers correct, that nightmare was interrupted. He was back on that dazzling beach with Julie Martinet. She promised him that cooling swim in the surf, or led him toward the tall, cool drinks waiting on a small glass-topped table under the palms, as they began another difficult lesson.
Always, before they reached the glasses or the surf, he had made another error. Each wrong response was instantly inhibited, according to the stern laws of automated learning—though the punishments varied, as if the Machine were experimenting to find what kinds of pain were most effective.
Sometimes he lay sweating in a hospital bed in a floating station in the murky upper air of Venus, gasping for his breath in the thick, hot smog, an infection of the anaerobic parasites eating like acid into his flesh—with Julie’s voice cooing monosyllabic Mechanese from his bedside radio.
Sometimes he was pinned by a rockslide in a cave beneath the cold side of Mercury, with a boulder crushing his chest and ice-cold water dripping into his face and great slimy, phosphorescent worms crawling over him, deliberately devouring him—with Julie’s voice, near him in the dark, singing the syllables he had to learn.
Always his correct responses were instantly reinforced with some slight reward. Always a sufficient cumulative total of acceptable responses earned him at least a brief relief from pain. When he came back to Julie, she was always sympathetic. Her cool hands caressed him; and bright tears of compassion shone in her eyes.
“Poor dear,” she murmured. “I know it’s very hard for you. But you must never give up. Just remember what we’re striving for. When you’ve learned enough, you’ll receive communion too. We’ll be together, then. Let’s try another lesson now. If you do well enough, perhaps the Machine will let us take that swim.”
He always shivered when she spoke of communion, or when he caught a glimpse of the bright plate in her forehead. He was careful to say nothing about that secret fear, but sometimes he wondered if the Machine, with its sensors against every inch of his body, might not detect it.
For his fear of communion kept growing, like some evil, unearthly weed, until it was more terrible than the synthetic hells that the trainer made to punish his worst errors. It lurked like some hideous hard-scaled pyropod in the shadows of his mind, haunting him until he begged Julie to let him out of the trainer.
She laughed at him.
“Really, you are very lucky,” she assured him brightly. “The trainer is a new device. Mechanese was very much harder for me, because I had to learn without it. With the trainer you can’t help learning. Just keep trying; you’ll reach communion in no tune at all.”
He didn’t dare to tell her that he didn’t want communion.
“Truly,” she bubbled joyously, “the trainer is the womb of the machine. Inside it you are being mechanized. Your inefficient random human responses are being eliminated. You are learning precision and efficiency and speed. When you are born again, out of the trainer, you will be a perfected child of the Machine.”
He tried not to shudder.
“Now let’s begin with the nominal structure,” she urged him brightly. “You have already mastered the Machine’s basic analysis of the universe as process. Mechanese has no nouns or verbs, but only things-in-process. Remember?”
Afraid of the baking heat in that wrecked ship, the burning fire of that parasitic infection, the gnawing mandibles of those phosphorescent worms, he nodded hastily.
“For example,” she trilled, “there is only one basic nominal for any object of solid matter. Such aspects as material, size, shape, and use are indicated by inflection. But it is not a noun, because the verbal intonations always convey the sense of process, so that each possible monosyllabic form is a complete statement.”
Her warm smile tantalized him.
“If you study well, perhaps we can take that swim—”
He tried—the third law of mechanized education forced bun to try—but they never took the swim.
A time came when Julie vanished. He heard a hiss of air and felt a sudden icy draft against his sweating nakedness.
Back in the training center, he squirmed across the slick pink membrane of the sensor-effector sheath, climbed into his cold coveralls, and scrambled down the flimsy metal ladder.
“Good night, sir.” The plump young Techtenant looked bored and sleepy now. “See you next shift, sir.”
He wanted terribly never to see the Techtenant or the trainer again, because they meant that he was going to be wired for communion. He wanted desperately to run away—somehow to get back to Quarla Snow and the clean Reefs of Space.
But he was exhausted and guarded and imprisoned . . . he didn’t know where . . . perhaps beneath a mile of solid rock . . . perhaps beneath the sea. He did his stint of calisthenics and took a steaming shower and sweated out the chow line and went to his tiny, tile-walled room to sleep.
Suddenly a gong was thundering. It was time to get up, to let them shave his head again, to strip and smear himself with that sticky jelly, to return to the womb of the Machine . . .
And a time came, in the trainer, when Julie Martinet—or the projected image of her—gave him a test and, smiling, told him that he had passed.
“You have earned communion now. You are ready to be born again.”
He almost gasped that he didn’t want communion. But he bit his lip. He kept silent until Julie’s bright image vanished and air valves roared and a cold wind caught him as he was finally born from the Machine.
Half-dazed and reeling—his mind whispered despairingly to him—he found himself in his cot. He did not know how he got there. He knew only something was wrong: there was some new scent in the atmosphere, some hardly perceived whisper of motion, as if someone were waiting outside his room for him to be asleep.
Then the anesthetic gas that had been piped through his pillow took effect. He slept. Deeply.
When he woke he felt a minor but nagging ache in the skin and the bone of his forehead. He was in another room—green-walled, surgical.
He did not have to touch his forehead to know that while he slept the surgeons had been at work, she hair-thin electrodes slipped into the micrometrically located centers of his brain, the bright badge of communion implanted on his brow.
In the mammalian brain exist bundles of nerves and specialized tissue which control mood and emotion, as well as those which control motor activities, homeostatic regulation, conscious thought, and the various other activities of that three-pound mass of hypertrophied tissue.
One such area is the pleasure center. Slip a fine platinum electric wire into it by stereotaxic surgery. Feed it a carefully measured, milliampere-tiny surge of electricity. The result is ecstasy! Fit a laboratory animal with such an electrode and with a key it can operate, and it will go on pressing the key, pressing the key, pressing the key . . . it will not-pause for food or drink or fear . . . it will sear itself with delight until it collapses of exhaustion, and will awake only to press the key once more.
The jolt of ecstasy that tore through Boysie Gann’s being in that first moment of awakening with the communion plate in his forehead and the electrodes embedded in his brain was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was taste, feeling, odor, and light; it was the wild delight of sex and the terrifying joy of daredevil sport; it was all the things he had ever known at once, magnified unbearably. Time stopped. He was adrift hi a turbulent sea of sensation . . . Eons and lifetimes later, he became conscious of humanity again. He was back in his body. The tides of quintessential pleasure had receded from around him, and left him aching and dry.
He opened his eyes, and saw a Technicorps medical orderly retreating from him, the communion probe wires in his hand. He had been cut off from the joy of the Planning Machine.
Gann took a long shuddering breath and reconciled himself to being human again. He could understand Sister Delta Four. He could accept his destiny hi communion with the Machine. No other reward could be half-as great as this, no other purpose as important . . .
Dazedly he became aware that something was wrong. The Technicorps man’s face was pale with fear. Voices shouted from outside, and one of them was queerly familiar.
Gann struggled to his feet, apprehensive and wary. When the door burst open, it was Machine General Wheeler who came into the room like a raging typhoon. “Gann!” he roared. “Starchild! You devil, what have you done?”
“I? Done? Nothing, General—and I’m not the Star-child, I swear it!”
“Filth!” howled the general. “Don’t lie to me! What have you done to the Planning Machine?”
Gann started to reply, to defend himself. The general gave him no chance. “Lies!” he raged. “Starchild, you’ve destroyed us all! Admit it! Admit that it was you who has driven the Planning Machine hopelessly mad!”
TO BE CONCLUDED
Starchild
Conclusion
He lunged across the orbiting worlds of the Plan to battle men and stars—on equal terms!
What Has Gone Before
The Plan of Man Is threatened by someone—or something!—from space. He calls himself the Starchild . . . and claim to have the power to extinguish suns. . . and proves the claim to be fact.
Major Boysie Gann finds himself caught up in a tangled trail that leads through the solar observatories on Mercury, out through the Reefs of Space and back to the caverns of the Planning Machine on Earth. At each step he finds himself drawn deeper into a trap of inexplicable happenings and deadly peril . . . culminating when the Planning Machine seems to go mad, driven out of control by the Starchild—and Gann is accused of being the Starchild!”
XII
The Plan of Man had gone amok. All over Earth, out into the asteroid belt, in the refrigerated warrens on Mercury, in the sunless depths of Pluto and on the slowly wheeling forts of the Spacewall, the terror had struck. Routing orders crashed one subcar ball into another two thousand miles below the surface of the earth. Six hundred persons died in a meteor-like gout of suddenly blazing gases that melted the subcar shaft and let the molten core pour in.
On Venus a Technicaptain received routine programming instructions from the Machine and, obediently, set a dial and turned a switch. It flooded forty thousand hard-won acres of reclaimed land with oily brine.
A “man of golden fire” appeared on the stage of the great Auditorium of the Plan in Peiping, where the Vice-Planner for Asia had been scheduled to speak to his staff. The golden man disappeared again, and twenty raging pyropods flashed out of nowhere into the hall, killing and destroying everything within reach. The Vice-Planner, minutes late in keeping his engagement, has his life spared in consequence.
In short, sharp words, Machine General Wheeler barked out the story of the catastrophes that were overwhelming the Plan. “The Starchild! Seen in the vaults of the Planning Machine—and now the Machine’s gone mad. Its orders are wrong! Its data can’t be trusted! Gann, if you are the Starchild—”
Boysie Gann had been pushed too far. In a shout louder than Wheeler’s own he roared, “General! I’m not the Starchild! Don’t be a fool!”
Suddenly the machinelike face of the general seemed to wilt and crack. It was in a very human voice that he said, after a moment:
“No. Perhaps you’re not. But what in the name of the Plan is going on?”
Gann snapped, “I thought you were telling me that. What’s this about the Starchild being seen in the Machine itself?”
“Just that, Gann. Guards reported someone there. A squad was sent down, and they saw him. He was at the manual consoles—changing the settings, erasing miles of tape, reversing connections. The Machine is mad now, Gann. And the Plan is going mad with it. All over the world.”
“Never mind that! What did he look like, this Star-child?”
Machine General Wheeler squared his shoulders and backed crisply, “A man. Golden, they say. Almost as if he were luminous. Photographs were taken, but he was not recognized. It . . . didn’t resemble you, Gann. But I thought—”
“You thought you’d come here anyway. Use me as a scapegoat, maybe. Is that it? The way you did when you pretended I shot Delta Four?”
The general tried to protest; then his lips smacked shut like the closing of a trap. He nodded his head twice, briskly, like a metronome. “Yes!”
Gann was taken aback. He had not expected so quick a confession. All he could do was say, “But why? Why did you shoot her? To get her out of the way as a witness?”
“Of course,” rapped Machine General Wheeler.
“And pretend I was the Starchild? To make yourself more important to the Planner and the Machine?”
“Precisely,” the general crackled out.
Gann studied him thoughtfully, then said, “Something must have changed your mind. What was it?”
The general answered without changing expression or tone. Only a faint color on the brow, a pale brightness as of perspiration, showed the strain he must have felt. “The girl recovered,” he snapped. “She told the Planner the truth—that I had merely found that document, and planted it on you. The Planner reported to the Machine and—”
