The only difference was that now they were where no help could ever reach them, where if the fields in the hoops failed they would be dead in the least fraction of a second—where even if the field maintained itself they would be dead in a few days of asphyxiation, unless they could move.
Then, abruptly, there was another lurch, and they were moving again.
As the great forty-foot sphere gathered speed and stability, Boysie Gann became aware that he had been hardly breathing. There was a great cry of thanksgiving from the people outside his room. One by one his guards came back, chattering and laughing, seeming almost human. They did not include him in their conversation, but they did not go out of their way to keep him out. One of them even disappeared for a few minutes, then came back with a tray of drinks from the Togetherness canteen ...
And then the great globe shook again. Shook—crashed into something that shrieked of destroyed metal—slammed to a jolting, smashing stop. Gann and the guards tumbled across the room, hurled against the wall like thrown gravel.
Boysie Gann heard screams and a rending sound of the metal of the great sphere being crushed. "We've had it!" someone shrieked. "The fields have failed!" And as he went deep into black oblivion (not yet feeling pain but knowing that he was bleeding; he had struck the wall too hard to get up and walk away), Gann had time for one last thought: He's right, thought Gann; this is the end.
When, some indeterminate time later, he opened his eyes and found himself still alive, he was almost disappointed. Gann was in an emergency hospital. Stiff white bandages covered part of his eyes; his head ached as if a corps of drummers were using it for practice; he could see, under the shadow of the bandages, that one arm was encased in a balloon-cast.
But he was alive.
A Togetherness nurse was bending over him. He said clearly, "I thought the tube collapsed."
"Hush," she said gently. "It did. But you were almost at the surface, and the wrecking squads dug you out."
"Almost at the surf ace?" He squinted past her at the second figure standing by his bed. For one crazy instant on waking he had thought it was the Angel of Death come to take him away. Now he saw it was an acolyte of the Machine, the linkbox in her hand, whispering tinkling notes to the microphone it contained. "I—I guess I'm at the training center," he said.
The nurse nodded. "Sleep if you can," she ordered. And Boysie Gann was glad to comply ...
For three days Boysie Gann had the status of a convalescent. It was a considerable improvement over his status as a major public enemy.
The immediate guard detail was withdrawn—several had been killed in the tube implosion and were going through the messy business of resuscitation and repair at the Body Bank. Gann was free to wander within the limited confines of one wing of the hospital in which he was a patient.
He was even allowed access to the recreation lounge, run by a young Togetherness girl who reminded him of Quarla Snow. Her disposition was like Quarla's, too. She did not seem conscious of his collar. Most important, she let him watch the news-screens to his heart's content.
Boysie Gann had been away from Earth, off on the Reefs or in intensive custody, for so long that he had lost touch with the running news stories.
He sat and dreamed. What was happening on the screen soaked slowly into his mind and heart. He watched, and loved, the gold-haired, long-legged choruses of Togetherness girls cooing their gentle threats: "Work for the Plan! Live for the Plan! You don't want to go to Heaven and make spare parts for the Plan!" Though he knew his chances of winding up in the Body Bank called Heaven and making "spare parts for the Plan" must be rated pretty high, there was no fear in what the girls were singing. It was a part of a life that he had lost, and he wanted it back.
Above all, he wanted to find himself again.
Boysie Gann could not recognize himself in the enemy of the Machine who had been castigated by the Planner himself, denounced by Machine General Wheeler, interrogated by Sister Delta Four. That Boysie Gann was a creature who had been born on Polaris Station, a man who lived with undead Reef rats and queer creatures called spacelings and pyropods. Gann could not fit the strange, rebellious shape of 'this other Boysie Gann into his personality, could not add the two identities and produce a vector sum of his future life ...
He sat up straight and glared at the viewscreen.
He had been watching a worldwide news broadcast with half his mind, hardly conscious of what he saw, although in fact what he saw was exciting enough. The news broadcast was almost a catalogue of disasters—a crashed Plan cruiser that destroyed half a city, earthquakes in Antarctica, a runaway nuclear reactor on the Indian subcontinent. Then there had been a nearer disaster. The screen had shown the very subtrain catastrophe that had put him in this place.
And called it sabotage!
Gann blinked. He hardly recognized the accident. The bland, fat Technicolonel puffing out his gruff charges of criminal conspiracy seemed to be talking about some other disaster, on some other world. Malicious sabotage? A bomb planted in the subtrain to discredit the Planner and the Planning Machine? Most incongruous of all, himself as the archvillain, with the radar-horned guard sergeant as his accomplice?
Gann put down his glass of vitamin-laced fruit juice and hobbled over to the Togetherness girl in charge of the lounge.
He was shaking. "Please," he begged. "Did you see that? What is it all about?"
She scolded him sunnily. "Now, now! Your duty under the Plan is to get well! You must prepare yourself to return to serve. No questions, no worries—nothing but healing and rest!"
He said with difficulty, "It said on the newscast that I was responsible for the subtrain accident. It isn't so! And the guard sergeant who was in charge of me—what happened to him?"
Her large, clear eyes darkened for a moment in puzzlement. But only for a moment. She would not question her orders; if her orders said that she was to care for an enemy of the Plan, she would care for an enemy of the Plan. She shook her head and, smiling, led him back to the couch. "Drink your juice," she said with playful severity, and would say no more. To her, what the Plan of Man ordained was necessarily right and true—because "right" and "truth" were defined by the Plan of Man.
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 relations
hips. 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 bis 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.
Chapter 11
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 tor the next question... . What is the second principle of mechanized instruction?"
He was sweating now as he crouched ou 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 oil' 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 bis 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.
The Starchild Page 10
