H. L. Gold (ed), page 63
Next morning, at breakfast, he told her, “We’ll try it out tonight. After that, you’ll be a person.”
“Of course. And will you love me, Joe?” “More coffee, please,” he answered.
At the office, there was another note from his secretary: Mr. Burke wants to see you. At your convenience.
At your convenience? Was Burke going soft? Joe went right in.
Burke was smiling, a miracle in itself. Burke’s voice was jovial. “The Chief’s been telling me about the new wife, Joe. I guess I owe you an apology.”
“Not at all,” Joe said. “I had no right to be rude. I was a little overworked—at home. I wasn’t myself.”
Burke nodded smugly, soaking it up. “Beautiful, the Chief tells me. Am I going to meet her, Joe?”
“If you want. How about tonight, for dinner ? I’ve got something new planned. I’m giving her volition. Maybe you’ll want to watch.”
“Volition?”
Joe went on to explain about volition, making it as simple as he could, to match Burke’s mind.
“That,” Burke said when he’d finished, “I want to see.”
They went home in the crowded Inglewood tube. Sam was there, but Sam seemed to avoid them, for some reason. All the way home, Joe had the uncomfortable feeling that Burke didn’t believe any part of this business, that Burke was making the trip only to substantiate his own misconceptions.
But when Alice came into the living room, smiling brightly, extending her hand to the Senior Assistant, Joe had a gratifying glimpse of Burke’s face.
Burke was lost. Burke stared and swallowed and grinned like a green
stage hand at a burlesque show. Burke’s smile was perpetual and nauseating. Even in the face of Alice’s cool reserve. The dinner was fine, the liquor mellow.
Then Joe said, “Well, Alice, it’s time for the volition. It’s time for your birth as a person.”
“Of course,” she said, and smiled.
They went down into the basement, the three of them; she sat in the chair he’d prepared and he clamped on the wired helmet and adjusted the electrodes.
Burke said weakly, “It isn’t—dangerous, is it?”
“Dangerous?” Joe stared at him. “Of course not. Remember how I explained it?”
“I—uh—my—memory—” Burke subsided.
She closed her eyes and smiled. Joe threw the switch. She’d have knowledge; she’d have the memory of her past few days of existence as his alter ego. She’d have volition.
The contact clock took over. Her eyes remained closed, but her smile began to fade as the second hand moved around and around the big, contact-studded dial.
Joe was smiling, though she wasn’t. Joe was filled with a sense of his own creative power, his own inventive genius and gratification at the worried frown on the face of the imbecile Burke.
Then the clock stopped and there was a buzz; the meters dropped to zero. Alice opened her eyes. For the first time, as a person, she opened her eyes.
Her smile was back. But she was looking at Burke. Looking at Burke and smiling!
“Baby,” she said.
Burke looked puzzled, but definitely pleased. In all Burke’s adult life, no female had ever looked at him like that.
Joe said tolerantly, “You’re a little confused yet, Alice. I’m your husband.”
“You?” She stared at him. “Do you think I’ve forgotten you? Do you think I don’t know you, after living inside your brain, almost? You monster, you egocentric, selfish, humorless walking equation. You’re not my husband and I’d like to see you prove that you are.”
Now it was only Burke who smiled. “By George,” he said, “that’s right. There’s no wedding on record, is there, Joe?”
“Wedding?” Joe repeated blankly. “I made her. I created her. Of course there’s no—”
“Of course, of course, of course,” Alice shrilled. “That’s all you know. You’re the original ‘of course’ kid. Things aren’t that certain, Junior. I’ve known you just long enough and just well enough to detest you.” Now she pointed at Burke. “That’s what I want. That’s my kind of man.”
Burke gulped and grinned, nodded. “To coin a phrase, you said it, kiddo.” He smiled at Joe. “I’ll run her right down to the Center and get her registered, and take out an intent option. I guess we can’t fight fate, Joe, can we?”
Joe took a deep breath of air. “I guess not. I guess it’s—kismet.”
He was still standing there when he heard the front door slam. He kept staring at the machine, not seeing it, hearing instead all she had said. She knew him better than anyone who lived. Better, actually, than he knew himself, because she didn’t rationalize, being outside his mental sphere now. You might say she’d been in his mind and detested what she had found there.
It was a crawling feeling, the knowledge that he had been guilty of rationalization himself, that he had faults his mind refused to acknowledge. He couldn’t doubt that he was all the cold and gruesome things she had called him. The worst shock, however, was that he had studied psychology and honestly had believed he was an objective thinker.
But who, he realized, could be completely honest about himself?
He looked at the machine and saw the non-rationalization electrodes. He had used that on her and she had seen clearly what he still couldn’t recognize. What he needed, apparently, was a good, objective look at his own mind.
He set the contact clock for objectivity maximum and clamped the electrodes on his head. He reached for the switch, had to close his eyes before he could throw it.
He didn’t see the second hand going around and around the clock, but he felt the prejudice-erasing impulses, the objective-appraisal stimuli, revealing memories that had shaped him, humiliations that had twisted him and been forgotten, urgings and longings and guilts that he had never known existed.
He saw himself. It was highly unpleasant.
There was a final buzz and the clock stopped. Joe opened his eyes, both figuratively and literally. He undamped the helmet with the electrodes and stepped from the chair, holding onto the arm, looking at the mirrored inside walls of the mold.
He had made an image of himself and it had turned on him. Now he had made—what? An image of his image’s image of him? It was very confusing, yet somehow clear.
He went slowly up the stairs, smelling the perfume. It wasn’t Alice’s and that was peculiar, because she had practically swabbed herself with the stuff, knowing he liked it, and she had just left.
It was Vera’s perfume.
He remembered her waiting at the station, making her ridiculous bids at the card table, gossiping witlessly with Mrs. Harvey, hitting her thumb when she tried to hang his pictures in the study.
Vera …
He prowled dissatisfiedly through the house, as though in search of something, and then went out to the car. He took the superpike almost all the way to the Center. There were bright cards on posts every few hundred feet:
IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO GET A MATE THE GIRLS ARE GREAT AT THE DOMESTIC CENTER
He pulled into the sweeping circular drive at the huge group of buildings. A troupe of singing girls came out, dressed in majorette costumes, opened the door, helped him out, parked the car, escorted him into the lavish reception room. Music came from somewhere, soft and moody. There were murals all over the walls, every one romantic. A dispensing machine held engagement and wedding rings with a series of finger-holes on the left side for matching sizes.
The matron recognized him and said, “Mr. Tullgren has gone home for the day. Is there anything I can do?”
He told her what he wanted and she thumbed through a register.
“Yes, she’s still here,” the matron said finally. “She’s refused exactly thirty-two offers up to yesterday. You were thinking of a—reconciliation?”
Joe nodded with a new humility. “If she’ll have me.”
The matron smiled. “I think she will. Women are more understanding than men, usually. More romantic, you might say.”
Nine-tenths of the building was brightly lighted, one-tenth rather dim. In the dim tenth were the post-intent rooms, the reconciliation chambers.
Joe sat on a yellow love-seat in one of the empty reconciliation chambers, leafing through, but not seeing, a copy of a fashion magazine. Then there were steps in the hall, familiar steps, and he smelled the perfume before she came in.
She stood timidly at the archway, but Joe was even more unsure and weak in the legs and he had trouble with his breathing. “Joe,” Vera said. “Vera,” he answered.
It wasn’t much, but it seemed to be what both had in mind. “Was there something you wanted to tell me?” she asked. “Something important ?”
“It’s important to me, Vera,” he said humbly. “I hope it’s just as important to you.”
She looked brightly at him.
“I find it very difficult to put into words,” he stumbled. “The usual expressions of this emotion are so hackneyed. I would like to find some other way to say it.”
“Say what?”
“That I love you.”
She ran to him. The impact knocked the breath out of both of them, but neither noticed.
“Isn’t the old phrase good enough, silly?” she scolded and kissed him. “I love you too, lover baby.”
Behind them, at the key words, the sonic-signal closed the hidden doors in the archway and they were alone in the reconciliation chamber.
Joe discovered that Sam Tullgren, Director of the Domestic Center, had thought of everything to make reconciliations complete.
PART VI
Not Around the Corner
While it’s true that we will be able to leave the earth within a matter of years, travel to the stars is still a good distance in the future … unless, as sometimes happens, a tremendous advance is made quite suddenly and unexpectedly.
Don’t ever rule out those vast leaps in any branch of science. Research can bumble along, collecting mountains of disconnected data and not knowing what to do with the depressing mass, when a lone equation can abruptly turn the mountains into interlocking building blocks.
The clearest instance today is Einstein’s formula, E=MC2, which was the biggest factor in making nuclear fission feasible.
Something of the sort could happen to make star-hopping a reality much sooner than anyone, including scientists, had ever hoped.
Science fiction writers have long realized that the Fitzgerald Contraction, which proves mathematically that exceeding the speed of light is impossible, must be counteracted before we can tour the galaxy. Even the speed of light isn’t fast enough—it takes light over four years to reach us from the nearest star. A journey of nine years isn’t unthinkable, although it could easily become monotonous, but what about stars that are hundreds, thousands, millions of light-years away? How do we get to them? And, you may add, back again ?
Any number of ideas have been suggested. The common convention is traveling through hyperspace, which involves moving through another dimension, where the limitations on speed may be circumvented, or where distances cannot be measured in our terms.
I don’t have to explain that we can’t travel through a fourth or fifth dimension yet. It’s possible that we may never be able to. But as long as man can imagine the method and support it with mathematical argument, it must not be ruled out.
At present, though, the four stories in this section are probably not in the immediate future. Or … are they?
DAMON KNIGHT
Ask Me Anything
It began with the crutch. Then came the iron hook, then the first mechanical limbs. And finally—
Bedlam. Thin metal legs switching by, a moving forest of scissors. Metal arms flashing in balance; torsos of metal, like bright dented beetles. Round metal skulls that cupped the swift wink and unmoving stare of human eyes.
Krisch, watching them in his desk scanner, kept the volume turned down. The unit walls were deliberately made sound-reflecting; the children grew up in the atmosphere of their own clattering noise, and they learned to shout against it. To soldiers so reared, there would be no terror in the roar of battle. But Krisch, who was only human, wore earplugs when he walked among them.
The river of metal funneled into classrooms, stopped. Lights flashed on over the scanners, on the board that covered the twenty-foot wall facing Krisch’s desk. Instruction had begun.
Krisch watched the board for a while, then switched on the illuminated panel that carried his notes, and began to dictate his weekly report. He was a small, spare man, with thinning strands of iron-gray hair roached stiffly back over his freckled brown scalp. His mouth was straight, and the lines around it showed that he never smiled; but there was a glint of controlled, ironic humor in his watchful eyes.
A bell spoke and a red light gleamed. Krisch looked up sharply, identified the scanner under the warning light, and transferred its image to his own desk screen. Half a thousand pairs of eyes stared back at him from the massed metal forms in the amphitheater.
Krisch set the playback cube for one minute preceding. The robot instructors were equipped to answer all permissible questions; therefore, a non-permissible question had just been asked.
The harsh voice of the robot said, “—along the inguinal canal and enters the abdomen through the internal abdominal ring. Yes? What is your question ?”
There was a pause. Krisch scanned the rows of gleaming heads, could not tell which one had signaled “Question.” Then the abnormally loud but still childish voice spoke, and simultaneously the student’s number ap-
peared in the recording circle at the lower left corner of the screen. Krisch started it automatically. The ten-year-old voice bellowed: “What is a kiss?”
There was a five-second pause. The robot answered, “Your question is meaningless. It has been reported to the Director and you will hold yourself in readiness for his orders.” Then it resumed its lecture.
Krisch switched the scanner back to normal operation. The robot was now discussing the prostate gland. Krisch waited until it had reached the end of a sentence and then pressed the “Attention” button on his console. He said, “Cadet ER-17235 will report to the Director’s Office immediately.” He cleared the board and sank back in his cushioned chair, frowning.
A non-permissible question was bad enough in itself; there had not been one in the oldest class in the last six years of the Project’s existence. It was not only bad; it was indefensible. Logically, it should not have happened— the entire student body of the unit, according to a check made not a week ago, was correctly conditioned.
But that was not all. The robot instructor had been perfectly truthful, to the extent of its own knowledge, when it had said the cadet’s question was meaningless. The subject of normal human love relationships was not on the curriculum for two more years. To introduce it earlier, with the desired effect of repugnance, would seriously damage discipline.
Krisch turned his selector to the appropriate list, but he knew the answer already. The word “kiss” was not in the student’s vocabulary. And there was no one in the Unit, besides himself, from whom the cadet could have learned it.
Krisch stood up and went to the transparent wall behind his desk— one huge window that looked out on the parade ground and beyond it to the chill, airless surface of the planet. Only starlight gleamed from the jagged points of that landscape which faced eternally away from the sun; the force screen that maintained the Unit’s atmosphere also acted as a light trap.
He could look up and see, one thousand light-years away, the cold dim glow that was the cluster of which Cynara was a part, and the whole frightening majesty of space in between. But a hypothetical enemy scout, pausing in space to scan this waste planet, would see nothing but a tiny disk of blackness that might be a vitreous plain, or the crater of a long-dead volcano.
Krisch had been here a little more than ten years, moving along from one installation to the next with his class, turning over the vacated office and its duties to the next lowest man in the hierarchy. Each year, a new Director was shipped out with a new load of embryos and equipment, and at the end of ten more years, Krisch would be permanently installed as director of the final Unit, and as senior officer of the entire Project. That was all he had to look forward to, for the rest of his life. Many ships arrived here, but none left, or would ever leave, except those that carried the troops themselves when they were needed. Krisch’s rewards were solitude, achievement, power, and the partial satisfaction of a boundless curiosity.
His penalty, if the Project were to fail or even be seriously delayed while it was under his command, would be painful and humiliating. He would not even be allowed to die.
The door speaker said, “Cadet ER-17235 reporting as ordered, sir.”
Krisch returned to his desk. He said, “Enter.”
The metal thing stalked into the room and stood at attention in front of the Director’s desk. Only the absolute minimum of it was organic: the boy’s head, pared to a functional ball, the blue eyes staring through the metal skull-piece, a surgically simplified torso, the limb stumps. By itself, it would be no more than an unpleasant, useless lump of meat; but, housed in the metal body, it was a sketch of the perfect fighting man.
The cadet, like the rest of his class, was only ten years old. Raised from an embryo in a plastic sack, the living part of him had been transferred many times from one articulated metal shell to another. For that reason, his present body was comparatively crude. When he reached his full growth, he would be given his final body—so fantastically armored as to be almost indestructible, so powerful that it could outrun any land vehicle over broken terrain. The weapons built into his arms, controlled directly by his nerves, would be sufficient to destroy a city.
And he would be completely without fear.
Krisch let the silence frown between them while the boy stood at attention. Just now, the boy knew tension. It was necessary for discipline, and the repressed hostility toward Krisch would later be translated into a useful hatred for all non-mechanical human beings. To use physical pain as a means of punishment was out of the question, a total impossibility. That, in fact, was the root idea of the entire Project.
