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IZZARD AND THE MEMBRANE
BY WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
The computing machine had considerable ability — but there was something besides a computer at work on that haunted machine! And moreover, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts!
Illustrated by Rogers
Scotty MacDonney was one of the Americans trapped in Europe when the sudden and unexpected eruption of uprisings boiled up out of the underground like angry lava. Simultaneously with the local revolutions, the Red Wave began rolling in from the East. But before it reached Paris, Scotty was already enjoying the tender mercy of the local revolutionaries. They had seized him almost as soon as the first shot was fired. They knew his potential value to their cause. They also knew that "converting" him would be a long and difficult task. But they had plenty of time. Their prophets always promised that time was on their side. Scotty was a cyberneticist, with incidental degrees in electronic engineering and physiological psychology. He had designed several new and improved calculating machines for American industry. He had invented a synaptic relay for the giant electronic "brain," and it was actually an improvement over a living neuron's all-or-none principle. And he had developed a new method in remote control of guided, missiles. His importance to an American war effort was vaguely but not completely realized by the American government. It was fully understood by the proponents of a new-era. When the scarlet tide had rushed across the hills and fields of France, Scotty was taken east, to a city where soft snow gathered on strange Byzantine domes whose pointed peaks speared at the chill winter sky ; a city where East met West in a subtle transfusion of wisdom and savagery. Scotty was in his late thirties. He was muscular, but not massive. His face was angular with a kind of handsome ugliness. He was generally calm, patient, easy-going — the practical scientist, with a normal family life. He had married well, and had been thoroughly settled with his wife and two children in an Ohio university town. He anticipated nervously that when his captors were done with him, he would be gray, broken, and reduced to a warped and schizophrenic shadow of his former self. He even suspected that they would make threats against his family, for it was well-known that there were plenty of agents in America capable of carrying out the threats. He certainly didn't anticipate what really happened. He was given an elegant, but well-guarded, suite of rooms in one of the best hotels. He was visited by high dignitaries of their government; they promised that he would not be abused as an enemy alien. Not borscht but caviar, not water but champagne amused his palate. He was offered various kinds of sensual pleasures, but—although idleness was beginning to whet his appetite—he turned them down, thinking of Nora and the children. Nora, with the pale cloud of hair, with the dreamer's eyes, with the willowy body that could stretch so languorously. He began to think of her so much, so frequently, and so fervently, that he began to carefully taste the strange and exotic foods, examining them for any slight bitter or metallic flavor that might suggest drugs. Nora was constantly in his thoughts ; and when a commisar brought his beautiful wife, then was forced to leave by a sudden phone call, Scotty remained restlessly chaste, although the woman had obviously been ordered to entertain him. His captors complimented him for his devotion to family. Their compliments both pleased him and increased his determination to avoid the pitfalls they offered. They shrugged, smiled with their Oriental eyes, and promised to keep him occupied in other ways. Workmen were sent to tear out a section of wall in each of his rooms. Frosted glass panels were installed in the sections. "Movie screens," they told him, "with projectors behind the walls." Why behind the walls? he wondered. Then they covered the screens with heavy, transparent plastic panels. Scotty read a Slavic trademark on one of the panels. It said, "Unbreakable." Why?
He was stretched out in a soft chair one evening, reading a Russian work on cybernetics, when the loudspeakers crackled slightly. He glanced up. They had turned the amplifiers on. Then, soft recorded music flooded the room, a lovely Russian symphony. The screen flickered on. The scene was a bedroom—and a sudden chill gripped him. It was his wife's bedroom. From the angle of view, he reasoned that the camera was concealed in a ventilator. There was Nora's purse on the dressing table, her manicure set, her brushes and combs. On the pillows was the familiar giant Teddy bear. Everything was the same. He stood up and anxiously paced the floor. What were they trying to do? Drive him insane with nostalgia? Then something moved onto the screen. He froze in his tracks and stared. It was Nora! She moved to the dressing table and sat down to brush her hair. She used the same long gliding strokes as always. And by the slow moving of her lips, he could tell that she was humming a tune. She arranged her hair carefully, then applied make-up. When she was through, she moved to the closet and selected a dress. It was an evening gown! Scotty slumped down in the chair again, too weak to stand. He felt more than a trace of bitterness and disappointment. With her husband a prisoner in an enemy nation, with two children to care for, she was wearing evening gowns. He got one last glimpse of her face before she moved out of the room. It was a happy face. The scene shifted to the hallway. The camera was looking downward and toward the door. Nora appeared, hag in hand, ethereal in the white, gown and with a golden chain binding her long ashen hair. The music became romantic. She opened the door. There stood a beautifully tailored tuxedo, with a man inside it. He stepped inside, smiling, and gave her a corsage. Scotty, stricken though he was, recognized the man. He was a government official, very handsome, and noted for his amatory successes. He had also been investigated by a senatorial committee, but charges of subversion had been dropped. Nora opened the orchids, laughed with pleasure, then kissed the man lightly. Then they went out into the evening. The door closed like an exclamation point. The screen went dark. And for three hours, it stayed as dark as the black depths of Scotty's heart. He shouted curses at his captors, but none answered him. The music wandered into a classical theme, then into Russian symphony—music of the clenched fist, of sprawling factories, of mechanized peasantry toiling for a cause. Then martial airs—the roar of mighty squadrons over Red Square, ponderous tanks rolling along the streets in full parade—all serious, all determined, all purposive. Then after three hours: "Woodaddy hoogaddy zoop! My baby's in the soup!" The sudden savage howl of American jazz. It beat at the eardrums and frayed jangled nerves. The veins in his temples were already pounding with his own inner misery. The screen became bright again—the same scene, the same closed door. Scotty waited tensely. The door opened. Nora staggered in, obviously tipsy. The man followed. Then another man. It was a congressman, a friend of Scotty's! His reputation was impeccable. He stood just inside the door, talking to them with occasional laughter. Then he nodded good night, stepped outside. When he shut the door, it seemed to Scotty that the American government had offered its blessings upon Nora and the other man. Nora laughed with sudden abandon and began skipping about the hall in a wild dance, like the complete self-release of a marijuana addict. The man was watching with a grin. Suddenly she threw herself upon him, and they clutched at each other in a rocking, wrenching embrace. Scotty could bear no more of it. He clenched his lids together until his eyes ached. A shift in the music to something low and pulsing made him steal another glance in the hope that the screen was dead. But the act had shifted to the bedroom, and it was one of such utter depravity and horror that Scotty ran out of the room, shouting hoarsely. But in the next room, the same scene confronted him. He threw himself on the floor, closed his eyes, and became violently ill.
For a week the persecution continued. The same picture over and over again, interspersed with Russian newsreels showing troops on the march, factories turning out war planes, high leaders at the conference table. Then the howl of jazz again, and the awful horror. Of course he didn't watch, but it was there, and he knew what it was, and even with his eyes closed, he could see the flicker of the screen through his lids. And the music told him what was happening. For the week he was left entirely alone. His food was pushed through a slot in the door. No one answered his shouts. Then they came and told him that there would be a new set of pictures for the following week—on exactly the same subject. Only this time, they said, he would catch a glimpse of his children's faces as they peered around a doorway and saw their mother. It was enough. They asked nothing of him. But he told them what he would do for them. He would build them the machine that would win the war. He begged and pleaded with them. They were polite, but reluctant. How did they know he could be trusted? No, he would have to wait until they discussed it with the politburo. And so, he enjoyed another week of the amusing films. When he tried to kill himself, they decided that he was ready. In two weeks he had lost twenty pounds. His eyes were bleary and wild. When they let him out of the suite, he fainted with relief. They carried him to a psychologist for indoctrination. Yes, yes, he believed in all they had to say. Yes, yes, his country was a degenerate imperialist nation. Yes, yes, it was time for the ultimate in revolutions. Yes! Anything! Let him build them something that would do everything from A to Izzard. And that's what he called it: the Izzard. They gave him to Porshkin, cyherneticist for the cause, a brutal, bearded man, who treated him to rough threats and verbal abuse, who criticized his scientific theories according to political dogma. But Scotty moved as through a daze, treating his colleague with deference, and working long hours with dull plodding intensity. They allowed him a certain amount of freedom. He was carefully guarded from a distance. A man in plain clothes followed him through the snow as he walked to the laboratory at dawn and returned at sundown to his apartment. Guards were posted near him wherever he went, but they never molested or even approached him. He devoted all of his thoughts to the project, and it kept him from being maddeningly lonely.
The Izzard was a gigantic "electronic brain." Its instrument and control panels were erected in a huge subterranean vault, and their length covered three hundred feet of walls. Another vault of equal size was built to house its memory units. A factory behind the Urals devoted itself to the manufacture of special parts according to Scotty's design. Vacuum tubes the size of peas were used for synapses, but they weren't actually tubes at all. There were to be more of them than there were cells in three human brains. It was not to be a calculator, although it had a math unit too. It's logic and semantic circuits were to solve problems in economics, military strategy, political science, human psychology, sociology, and—cybernetics. The machine would be able to analyze itself, and suggest changes. It could plot the courses of guided missiles from radio signals sent while in flight. It had two sets of memory units, one permanent, and one for temporary, erasable material. The permanent set was quickly built and powered, so that several thousand workers could begin translating the entire contents of large libraries and feeding them into the machine. The semantics and logic circuits were assembled and made ready for use before the other circuits were even begun. They were to provide a first test. Although, by themselves, they would be able to do little more than give ergo's to simple syllogisms. Europe was still solidifying itself under the new rule, and the two warring powers were still sparring timidly at each other across the Atlantic on the night that Porshkin and Scott MacDonney stood alone in the long, high-ceilinged vault of concrete, and made ready for the tests under the glaring lights that flooded down from overhead. They were alone, because the test was clandestine. Failure would be a deadly mistake, not to he tolerated by the fist held clenched above them. If the test was a success, nothing would be said —and high officials would be invited to see the second "first test." Porshkin was muttering nervously in his beard, and shouting spurts of advice at the calmer Scott, who moved thoughtfully from panel to panel checking instruments, adjusting dials, jotting careful notes in a black notebook. Porshkin stalked around after him like a chained bear, peering suspiciously at the notes, disclaiming responsibility. His bull voice filled the long hall with angry echoes. "Son of a capitalist! Brother of a capitalist!" he roared. "You suckled on imperialistic milk! You are soaked in it from childhood! The fools! They think to change the very fiber of your brain in a few short months! But I, Porshkin, know the marrow of the brain! You are still a capitalist swine!" And Scott MacDonney went on peering calmly at dials, jotting, studying, adjusting—and ignoring the mastodon with the fiery eyes, who stalked relentlessly at his heels. "I can see it in the way you take notes!" the bear growled. "You write numbers like a monk writes prayers in a holy book! You are full of 'sacred' ideas! I, Porshkin, who am born a materialist, see it in your mind! You think you're making a god! Why don't you build it an altar?" Scotty moved calmly to the master circuit breakers, which controlled all the power to the lab. One small set handled only the sunlight lamps that made the vault a pit of daytime. The other set was to control the power to the intellect circuits. The memory units were powered individually, as a precaution against forgetting, for setting the permanent memories was a long, hard process. "They blame me when you fail," Porshkin snarled. "They let you spend the people's money upon this folly! You stumbler! You capitalist! May you be the first they shoot! When they shoot us both, I shall watch you die!" Scotty checked his earlier calculations. The semantics and logic circuits alone should require an even hundred kilowatts of power. He had spent hours checking the figure. But he set the breakers to trip on one hundred and twenty kilowatts, just to be sure. Then he pressed the switch that activated the breaker-closing mechanisms. The only sounds in the vault were Porshkin's hoarse, wet breathing, and the whine of the motors that pulled the breaker contacts closer and closer together in their enclosed tub of oil. Scotty turned to look at Izzard's long black rows of panels. He had come to love the machine. He thought of nothing else, not even of the practical end to which it would be put. The war was forgotten. Other things forgotten, too. Izzard was his creature, his giant baby, his to train and to teach, to have and to hold, as he might a human child—or had he ever known any human children? Sometimes, sometimes it was hard to remember.
Suddenly, there was a loud whack! The breakers had opened again! The accompanying surge fed back into the lighting circuits. Their breakers opened. The vault was plunged in inky blackness, save for a dying, violet glow from Izzard's air vents. The darkness smelled of oil as vapor hissed from pressure valves on the tubes. A roar of rage came from Porshkin's throat, and Scotty heard his meaty arms beating at the air as he tried to find his despised colleague. Scotty ducked low and crept away along the rows of panels. Porshkin howled insults and threats in his native tongue while he heat at the darkness in search of Scotty. Scotty deliberately kicked the baseboard of a panel, to draw the bull away from the switch. Then he made a slow and quiet circle as he heard Porshkin lumbering toward the sound. He reached the breakers. He worked quickly, moving the breaker setting up a quarter turn. That would correspond to a hundred and fifty kilowatts. If Izzard demanded that much, it would damage the circuits after half an hour of heating. But he would have a few minutes to locate the trouble. Porshkin heard the setting change. His footsteps beat across the concrete floor. Scotty left the lighting breaker open, but started the motors again. Then he called a taunting curse at the raging hunter and ran toward the semantics panel to attract Porshkin away from the breakers. But it spelled his downfall. Porshkin, following the loud footsteps, was suddenly upon him. His mighty hands caught Scotty's head like a football, crushed, pressed him to his knees, then forced backward. Scotty felt the vertebrae popping in his neck. "Izzard!" he managed to gasp. "It's on! It works! Let go!" The Russian did not release him nor relax the pressure of his hands. But he looked around at the panels. Scotty could see him looking, because the floor was bathed in the purple glow of incandescent mercury vapor from Izzard's vents. Porshkin said nothing. But after a moment he flung Scotty away from him like something discarded, and went to look in the panels. Scotty picked himself up and tried to work his neck back in place. Then he hurried to the breakers, cut on the blinding lights, and noted the input power. It stood at nearly one-forty-four! Izzard was drawing forty-some per cent overload. It seemed unthinkable that such a relatively simple calculation as power-demand had been that far in error. If he missed it that much on power, how much had he missed it on delicate circuit calculations? It shocked him. He didn't care about being executed for failure; it was the failure itself that bothered him. For he was like a doctor, delivering his own child into the world. But there was no time for idle musing. He moved back to the panels. Porshkin resumed his curses and condemnations. "Give me a hand, if you want to save your skin," Scotty told him quietly. The Russian fell silent. "You know what's wrong?" he asked in a more subdued tone. "No. We've got about twenty minutes to find out. You keep an eye on the temperature gauges. When they get close to the red, warn me. We'll cut it off." Porshkin obeyed, but began grumbling under his breath. Scotty quickly jotted down the power readings in each individual circuit. Some were just what they should be. Others were one hundred per cent high! "Hey!" he called. "Watch these in particular! They're on double demand." Porshkin scowled at him. Scotty peered in through the vents at the mercury arcs. The ones supposedly overloaded were glowing no more brightly than the others. He checked readings on all meters. Nothing was off but power and its components. It seemed impossible. Fifteen minutes had passed. "How's the temperature?" he called. "The double-loaders should be in the red." Porshkin shook his head and sneered. Then he returned his gaze to the panels and put on a sarcastic smirk amid his stiff black beard. Scotty paused in suspicion. Then he backed away to check them himself. Every needle rested on the thin black line marked: Operating Temperature! "Heh heh!" the Russian chuckled. Suddenly he could no longer restrain himself. He filled his barrel-chest with air, arched his back, and rocked with wild, explosive laughter that filled the vault with ringing echoes.
Scotty was no longer interested in human reactions to his work. Izzard was his baby. It was all that mattered. While Porshkin roared, Scotty found a metal stool and began totaling the individual power readings. The total checked with the meter at the breaker. He looked at Izzard again. The temperature of the units remained a safe constant. But if the added power wasn't being dissipated as heat loss, then where was it going? Offhand, he could think of but one answer: radiation. He arose and started out of the vault. Porshkin stopped laughing. "Hey, Mr. Blunderer ! Where you going?" "Stock room!" Scotty snapped over his shoulder.
The stock room was a mile-long tunnel that encircled the other vaults. An, electric truck ran along a pair of rails that carried it around the entire circle. Scotty climbed in and drove to the instrument room. He loaded half a dozen X-ray plates, an ultraviolet light meter, several meters for the radio bands, and, after some hesitation, a Geiger counter. It struck him, as he went back to the vault, that if forty-four kilowatts were being dumped into the ultraviolet or the X-ray bands, that he and Porshkin should by now be blistered corpses—or at least well on their way to that end. And if it was going into radio-frequency, somebody from upstairs would be sending down troops to turn it off—lest American aircraft pick up the beam and home on it. That, the Geiger should register anything seemed equally incredible, simply because of Izzard's make-up. Nevertheless, he checked it first. Nothing—only a stray occasional click—and that was because the vaults had once been used for storing bombs. Porshkin was telling him quite forcefully that he was crazy, and that his warped capitalist brain could not even figure the power in a radio set. Scotty checked the other instruments. There was some ultraviolet from the mercury arcs—five hundred watts at most. There was perhaps a watt or two scattered over the radio bands. He took the meters back to stock, and began developing the plates. Nothing there, either. Was Porshkin right? Was he losing his grip? He had seen two brilliant scientists do that. Suddenly they couldn't even add a pair of vectors correctly, or even a list of numbers. He wandered back to the vault, and his heart said, "No, you haven't made a mistake." But there it was—right on the instruments. "What now, Mr. Godmaker?" chuckled the Russian. Scotty went to the control panel. The switch was in the "question" position. He pushed it to the "answer" position to let the circuits clear themselves of any spurious "ideas." Two dials spun half a turn to zero, and an automatic typewriter clicked out a line of nonsense syllables. That was all; and it was as it should be. "Whoops!" cried Porshkin as if in surprise. "Power fell off." Scotty backed up and looked. When he threw the switch, Izzard had stopped gobbling power. Why? It should actually use more power on "answer." It could still wait until tomorrow. Temperature was the real factor. He went back to the controls, and sat at the keyboard which was part of the logic circuits. Porshkin came to look over his shoulder as he pressed the switch back to "question." Scotty typed a simple query. "What is your name?" He touched the switch again. A few relays clicked. With lightning rapidity Izzard searched through her small memory unit of proper names. The keyboard clacked of its own accord. "Ans: My name is Izzard Electro-Synaptic Analyzer." Porshkin rumbled about the impropriety of teaching her to say "Izzard," and what the commissar would think. But Scotty only half-heard him; he was too elated over the response. With trembling fingers he tried another. "All crows are black. Sammy is a crow. Analyze, please." And, after the usual moment of operating noises, Izzard replied: "Ergo: Sammy is black. Qualified by operational query: What is a Sammy?" Scotty chuckled happily and patted the panel. The query meant she was playing safe, the way he wanted her to do. She wanted to make sure that a Sammy could be a crow. The Marxian dialecticians wouldn't be able to tell her that a circle was a square and have her believe it. She scanned her memories in search of false propositions, and she found "Sammy" under "Men's Names." He gave her a reply. "Operational query noted. Enter following answer in learned-memory. Namely: Human organisms sometimes apply human proper names to nonhuman objects and organisms." The reply apparently satisfied her. She would need to learn a lot of little things like that, Scotty thought. Scotty was in love at first speech. He had made her, and she would be perfect, and she was his creature. He made a few other tests with more complicated syllogisms and triads. Her responses were flawless. It was enough for the first test. He was like a child, afraid of wearing out the fascination of a new plaything. Even Porshkin was grudgingly pleased. He wanted to teach Izzard to play chess for the commissars' amusement when they made the official unveiling. They shut off the machine and took the elevator to the surface. The lift always stopped between levels, and its occupants were required to go through a long identifying procedure for the secret police. At the top level, they were stripped, searched, and fluoroscoped by a detachment of guards before they moved out into the streets.
It was a bright moonlight night. As Scotty turned on his lonely way homeward, he noticed a man hovering in the shadows of an alley. Then the figure disappeared into a dark doorway. It startled him at first. But he was in a rooming-house district. Probably an insomniac had stepped out for a breath of night air. He glanced behind him. His guard was plodding along as usual, a block to the rear. Scotty shrugged and turned his thoughts again to Izzard. The power-puzzle gnawed at his mind. If the new circuits, not yet connected, showed a similar appetite, he would have to heavy up on the main lines and the breakers. The state wouldn't like that, because it spelled mistake, and even the greenest engineer should be able to avoid a mistake like that. But that worried him less than did the problem itself. Forty kilowatts of power didn't just vanish. They had to steal away as some form of energy—heat, chemical, electromagnetic, or mechanical. But it obviously wasn't any of those. Could Izzard be converting energy into matter? He made a few mental calculations. Forty-four kilowatts was the equivalent of matter being born at about the rate of two micrograms per hour—an infinitesimally small quantity. It seemed impossible, but there wasn't any way to check it. His musings began to lead him into the realm of metaphysics. Then he remembered something. When Izzard was completed, she might be able to diagnose her own ailment. He would wait and see. He was approaching the intersection of his own street. A car was parked on the opposite corner. He had seen it there several times. It had the black-curtained windows of a government limousine, but never had he seen anyone around it. Porshkin had once whispered, "OGPU, Mr. Godmaker! They guard your sacred hide." But the car bore no markings, and it could easily have been an industrialist's staff car. He started to turn the corner. Spang! Chipped concrete stung his face. A fleeing bullet made hornet sounds. Instinctively, Scotty dropped prostrate in the building's shadow'. From somewhere across the street, a voice called out in a Slavic accent. "If you're still alive, traitor, let me tell you something. You're wife wasn't—" A sudden blast of machine-gun fire drowned the voice. The explosions made lightning-flashes in the murky street. Glass tinkled to the sidewalk from a third-story window. A car door slammed and two uniformed men ran toward tote sniper's building. With drawn revolvers, they disappeared up a stairway. A third man hurried from the limousine toward Scotty, who began picking himself up from the concrete. "Are you hurt, comrade?" Scotty shook his head, and peered at the man's face. He recognized him as a high police commissioner. "We have been expecting this," the man told him. "But we weren't certain when it would happen. The underground has had you marked for assassination. Our agents fortunately discovered the plot." Scotty brushed himself off in silence. "I think we got him with the first burst," the commissioner went on. "Did you hear him call to you?" Scotty hesitated. He had heard, but the police agent seemed, to be ... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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