NINE TOMORROWS Tales of the Near Future

by Isaac Asimov

  “And where would he have obtained a tape for the additional facts and data? Or has Education become a private matter for home study here on Earth?”

  There was dutiful laughter from the faces in the background.

  George said, “That’s why he didn’t learn, Honorable. He thought he needed a tape. He wouldn’t even try without one, no matter what the prize. He refused to try without a tape.”

  “Refused, eh? Probably the type of fellow who would refuse to fly without a skimmer.” More laughter and the Novian thawed into a smile and said, “The fellow is amusing. Go on. I’ll give you another few moments.”

  George said tensely, “Don’t think this is a joke. Tapes are actually bad. They teach too much; they’re too painless. A man who learns that way doesn’t know how to learn any other way. He’s frozen into whatever position he’s been taped. Now if a person weren’t given tapes but were forced to learn by hand, so to speak, from the start; why, then he’d get the habit of learning, and continue to learn. Isn’t that reasonable? Once he has the habit well developed he can be given just a small amount of tape-knowledge, perhaps, to fill in gaps or fix details. Then he can make further progress on his own. You can make Beeman Metallurgists out of your own Hensler Metallurgists in that way and not have to come to Earth for new models.”

  The Novian nodded and sipped at his drink. “And where does everyone get knowledge without tapes? From interstellar vacuum?”

  “From books. By studying the instruments themselves. By thinking.”

  “Books? How does one understand books without Education?”

  “Books are in words. Words can be understood for the most part. Specialized words can be explained by the technicians you already have.”

  “What about reading? Will you allow reading tapes?”

  “Reading tapes are all right, I suppose, but there’s no reason you can’t learn to read the old way, too. At least in part.”

  The Novian said, “So that you can develop good habits from the start?”

  “Yes, yes,” George said gleefully. The man was beginning to understand.

  “And what about mathematics?”

  “That’s the easiest of all, sir—Honorable. Mathematics is different from other technical subjects. It starts with certain simple principles and proceeds by steps. You can start with nothing and learn. It’s practically designed for that Then, once you know the proper types of mathematics, other technical books become quite understandable. Especially if you start with easy ones.”

  “Are there easy books?”

  “Definitely. Even if there weren’t, the technicians you now have can try to write easy books. Some of them might be able to put some of their knowledge into words and symbols.”

  “Good Lord,” said the Novian to the men clustered about him. “The young devil has an answer for everything.”

  “I have. I have,” shouted George. “Ask me.”

  “Have you tried learning from books yourself? Or is this just theory with you?”

  George turned to look quickly at Ingenescu, but the Historian was passive. There was no sign of anything but gentle interest in his face.

  George said, “I have.”

  “And do you find it works?”

  “Yes, Honorable,” said George eagerly. “Take me with you to Novia. I can set up a program and direct—”

  “Wait, I have a few more questions. How long would it take, do you suppose, for you to become a Metallurgist capable of handling a Beeman machine, supposing you started from nothing and did not use Educational tapes?”

  George hesitated. “Well—years, perhaps.”

  “Two years? Five? Ten?”

  “I can’t say, Honorable.”

  “Well, there’s a vital question to which you have no answer, have you? Shall we say five years? Does that sound reasonable to you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “All right. We have a technician studying metallurgy according to this method of yours for five years. He’s no good to us during that time, you’ll admit, but he must be fed and housed and paid all that time.”

  “But—”

  “Let me finish. Then when he’s done and can use the Beeman, five years have passed. Don’t you suppose we’ll have modified Beemans then which he won’t be able to use?”

  “But by then hell be expert on learning. He could learn the new details necessary in a matter of days.”

  “So you say. And suppose this friend of yours, for instance, had studied up on Beemans on his own and managed to learn it; would he be as expert in its use as a competitor who had learned it off the tapes?”

  “Maybe not—” began George.

  “Ah,” said the Novian.

  “Wait, let me finish. Even if he doesn’t know something as well, it’s the ability to learn further that’s important. He may be able to think up things, new things that no tape-Educated man would. You’ll have a reservoir of original thinkers—”

  “In your studying,” said the Novian, “have you thought up any new things?”

  “No, but I’m just one man and I haven’t studied long— »

  “Yes. —Well, ladies, gentlemen, have we been sufficiently amused?”

  “Wait,” cried George, in sudden panic. “I want to arrange a personal interview. There are things I can’t explain over the visiphone. There are details—”

  The Novian looked past George. “Ingenescu! I think I have done you your favor. Now, really, I have a heavy schedule tomorrow. Be well!”

  The screen went blank.

  George’s hands shot out toward the screen, as though in a wild impulse to shake life back into it. He cried out, “He didn’t believe me. He didn’t believe me.”

  Ingenescu said, “No, George. Did you really think he would?”

  George scarcely heard him. “But why not? It’s all true. It’s all so much to his advantage. No risk. I and a few men to work with— A dozen men training for years would cost less than one technician. —He was drunk! Drunk! He didn’t understand.”

  George looked about breathlessly. “How do I get to him? I’ve got to. This was wrong. Shouldn’t have used the visiphone. I need time. Face to face. How do I—”

  Ingenescu said, “He won’t see you, George. And if he did, he wouldn’t believe you.”

  “He will, I tell you. When he isn’t drinking. He—”

  George turned squarely toward the Historian and his eyes widened. “Why do you call me George?”

  “Isn’t that your name? George Platen?”

  “You know me?”

  “All about you.”

  George was motionless except for the breath pumping his chest wall up and down.

  Ingenescu said, “I want to help you, George. I told you that. I’ve been studying you and I want to help you.”

  George screamed, “I don’t need help. I’m not feebleminded. The whole world is, but I’m not.” He whirled and dashed madly for the door.

  He flung it open and two policemen roused themselves suddenly from their guard duty and seized him.

  For all George’s straining, he could feel the hypo-spray at the fleshy point just under the corner of his jaw, and that was it. The last thing he remembered was the face of Ingenescu, watching with gentle concern.

  George opened his eyes to the whiteness of a ceiling. He remembered what had happened. He remembered it distantly as though it had happened to somebody else. He stared at the ceiling till the whiteness filled his eyes and washed his brain clean, leaving room, it seemed, for new thought and new ways of thinking.

  He didn’t know how long he lay there so, listening to the drift of his own thinking.

  There was a voice in his ear. “Are you awake?”

  And George heard his own moaning for the first tune. Had he been moaning? He tried to turn his head.

  The voice said, “Are you in pain, George?”

  George whispered, “Funny. I was so anxious to leave Earth. I didn’t understand.”

  “Do you kn
ow where you are?”

  “Back in the—the House.” George managed to turn. The voice belonged to Omani.

  George said, “It’s funny I didn’t understand.”

  Omani smiled gently, “Sleep again—”

  And woke again. His mind was clear.

  Omani sat at the bedside reading, but he put down the book as George’s eyes opened.

  George struggled to a sitting position. He said, “Hello.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “You bet.” He stared at Omani curiously. “I was followed when I left, wasn’t I?”

  Omani nodded. “You were under observation at all times. We were going to maneuver you to Antonelli and let you discharge your aggressions. We felt that to be the only way you could make progress. Your emotions were clogging your advance.”

  George said, with a trace of embarrassment, “I was all wrong about him.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. When you stopped to stare at the Metallurgy notice board at the airport, one of our agents reported back the list of names. You and I had talked about your past sufficiently so that I caught the significance of Trevelyan’s name there. You asked for directions to the Olympics; there was the possibility that this might result in the kind of crisis we were hoping for; we sent Ladislas Ingenescu to the hall to meet you and take over.”

  “He’s an important man in the government, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “And you had him take over. It makes me sound important.”

  “You are important, George.”

  A thick stew had arrived, steaming, fragrant. George grinned wolfishly and pushed his sheets back to free his arms. Omani helped arrange the bed-table. For a while, George ate silently.

  Then George said, “I woke up here once before just for a short time.”

  Omani said, “I know. I was here.”

  “Yes, I remember. You know, everything was changed. It was as though I was too tired to feel emotion. I wasn’t angry any more. I could just think. It was as though I had been drugged to wipe out emotion.”

  “You weren’t,” said Omani. “Just sedation. You had rested.”

  “Well, anyway, it was all clear to me, as though I had known it all the time but wouldn’t listen to myself. I thought: What was it I had wanted Novia to let me do? I had wanted to go to Novia and take a batch of un-Educated youngsters and teach them out of books. I had wanted to establish a House for the Feeble-minded—like here—and Earth already has them—many of them.”

  Omani’s white teeth gleamed as he smiled. “The Institute of Higher Studies is the correct name for places like this.”

  “Now I see it,” said George, “so easily I am amazed at my blindness before. After all, who invents the new instrument models that require new-model technicians? Who invented the Beeman spectrographs, for instance? A man called Beeman, I suppose, but he couldn’t have been tape-Educated or how could he have made the advance?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Or who makes Educational tapes? Special tape-making technicians? Then who makes the tapes to train them? More advanced technicians? Then who makes the tapes— You see what I mean. Somewhere there has to be an end. Somewhere there must be men and women with capacity for original thought.”

  “Yes, George.”

  George leaned back, stared over Omani’s head, and for a moment there was the return of something like restlessness to his eyes.

  “Why wasn’t I told all this at the beginning?”

  “Oh, if we could,” said Omani, “the trouble it would save us. We can analyze a mind, George, and say this one will make an adequate architect and that one a good woodworker. We know of no way of detecting the capacity for original, creative thought. It is too subtle a thing. We have some rule-of-thumb methods that mark out individuals who may possibly or potentially have such a talent.

  “On Reading Day, such individuals are reported. You were, for instance. Roughly speaking, the number so reported comes to one in ten thousand. By the time Education Day arrives, these individuals are checked again, and nine out of ten of them turn out to have been false alarms. Those who remain are sent to places like this.”

  George said, “Well, what’s wrong with telling people that one out of—of a hundred thousand will end at places like these? Then it won’t be such a shock to those who do.”

  “And those who don’t? The ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine that don’t? We can’t have all those people considering themselves failures. They aim at the professions and one way or another they all make it. Everyone can place after his or her name: Registered something-or-other. In one fashion or another every individual has his or her place in society and this is necessary.”

  “But we?” said George. “The one in ten thousand exception?”

  “You can’t be told. That’s exactly it. It’s the final test. Even after we’ve thinned out the possibilities on Education Day, nine out of ten of those who come here are not quite the material of creative genius, and there’s no way we can distinguish those nine from the tenth that we want by any form of machinery. The tenth one must tell us himself.”

  “How?”

  “We bring you here to a House for the Feeble-minded and the man who won’t accept that is the man we want. It’s a method that can be cruel, but it works. It won’t do to say to a man, ‘You can create. Do so.” It is much safer to wait for a man to say, ‘I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not.’ There are ten thousand men like you, George, who support the advancing technology of fifteen hundred worlds. We can’t allow ourselves to miss one recruit to that number or waste our efforts on one member who doesn’t measure up.”

  George pushed his empty plate out of the way and lifted a cup of coffee to his lips.

  “What about the people here who don’t—measure up?”

  “They are taped eventually and become our Social Scientists. Ingenescu is one. I am a Registered Psychologist. We are second echelon, so to speak.”

  George finished his coffee. He said, “I still wonder about one thing?”

  “What is that?”

  George threw aside the sheet and stood up. “Why do they call them Olympics?”

  THE FEELING OF POWER

  Jehan Shuman was used to dealing with the men in authority on long-embattled Earth. He was only a civilian but he originated programming patterns that resulted in self-directing war computers of the highest sort. Generals consequently listened to him. Heads of congressional committees, too.

  There was one of each in the special lounge of New Pentagon. General Weider was space-burnt and had a small mouth puckered almost into a cipher. Congressman Brant was smooth-cheeked and clear-eyed. He smoked Denebian tobacco with the air of one whose patriotism was so notorious, he could be allowed such liberties.

  Shuman, tall, distinguished, and Programmer-first-class, faced them fearlessly.

  He said, “This, gentlemen, is Myron Aub.”

  “The one with the unusual gift that you discovered quite by accident,” said Congressman Brant placidly. “Ah.” He inspected the little man with the egg-bald head with amiable curiosity.

  The little man, in return, twisted the fingers of his hands anxiously. He had never been near such great men before. He was only an aging low-grade Technician who had long ago failed all tests designed to smoke out the gifted ones among mankind and had settled into the rut of unskilled labor. There was just this hobby of his that the great Programmer had found out about and was now making such a frightening fuss over.

  General Weider said, “I find this atmosphere of mystery childish.”

  “You won’t in a moment,” said Shuman. “This is not something we can leak to the firstcomer.—Aub!” There was something imperative about his manner of biting off that one-syllable name, but then he was a great Programmer speaking to a mere Technician. “Aub! How much is nine times seven?”

  Aub hesitated a moment. His pale eyes glimmered with a feeble anxiety. “Sixty-three,
” he said.

  Congressman Brant lifted his eyebrows. “Is that right?”

  “Check it for yourself, Congressman.”

  The congressman took out his pocket computer, nudged the milled edges twice, looked at its face as it lay there in the palm of his hand, and put it back. He said, “Is this the gift you brought us here to demonstrate. An illusionist?”

  “More than that, sir. Aub has memorized a few operations and with them he computes on paper.”

  “A paper computer?” said the general. He looked pained.

  “No, sir,” said Shuman patiently. “Not a paper computer. Simply a sheet of paper. General, would you be so kind as to suggest a number?”

  “Seventeen,” said the general.

  “And you, Congressman?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Good! Aub, multiply those numbers and please show the gentlemen your manner of doing it.”

  “Yes, Programmer,” said Aub, ducking his head. He fished a small pad out of one shirt pocket and an artist’s hairline stylus out of the other. His forehead corrugated as he made painstaking marks on the paper.

  General Weider interrupted him sharply. “Let’s see that.”

  Aub passed him the paper, and Weider said, “Well, it looks like the figure seventeen.”

  Congressman Brant nodded and said, “So it does, but I suppose anyone can copy figures off a computer. I think I could make a passable seventeen myself, even without practice.”

  “If you will let Aub continue, gentlemen,” said Shuman without heat.

  Aub continued, his hand trembling a little. Finally he said in a low voice, “The answer is three hundred and ninety-one.”

  Congressman Brant took out his computer a second time and nicked it, “By Godfrey, so it is. How did he guess?”

  “No guess, Congressman,” said Shuman. “He computed that result. He did it on this sheet of paper.”

  “Humbug,” said the general impatiently. “A computer is one thing and marks on paper are another.”