Notions: Unlimited

by Robert Sheckley

  “Turn it,” he said.

  They all hovered over the radar screen, waiting.

  The food turned out of the leech’s path and streaked away. Ahead was a tremendous source, but still a long way off. The leech hesitated.

  Its cells, recklessly expending energy, shouted for a decision. The food slowed, tantalizingly near.

  The closer source or the greater?

  The leech’s body wanted food now.

  It started after it, away from the Sun.

  The Sun would come next.

  “Pull it out at right angles to the plane of the Solar System,” Allenson said.

  The operator touched the controls. On the radar screen, they saw a blob pursuing a dot. It had turned.

  Relief washed over them. It had been close!

  “In what portion of the sky would the leech be?” O’Donnell asked, his face expressionless.

  “Come outside; I believe I can show you,” an astronomer said. They walked to the door. “Somewhere in that section,” the astronomer said, pointing.

  “Fine. All right, soldier,” O’Donnell told the operator. “Carry out your orders.”

  The scientists gasped in unison. The operator manipulated the controls and the blob began to overtake the dot. Micheals started across the room.

  “Stop,” the general said, and his strong, commanding voice stopped Micheals. “I know what I’m doing. I had that ship especially built.”

  The blob overtook the dot on the radar screen.

  “I told you this was a personal matter,” O’Donnell said. “I swore to destroy that leech. We can never have any security while it lives.” He smiled. “Shall we look at the sky?”

  The general strolled to the door, followed by the scientists.

  “Push the button, soldier!”

  The operator did. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the sky lit up!

  A bright star hung in space. Its brilliance filled the night, grew, and started to fade.

  “What did you do?” Micheals gasped.

  “That rocket was built around a hydrogen bomb,” O’Donnell said, his strong face triumphant. “I set it off at the contact moment.” He called to the operator again. “Is there anything showing on the radar?”

  “Not a speck, sir.”

  “Men,” the general said, “I have met the enemy and he is mine. Let’s have some more champagne.”

  But Micheals found that he was suddenly ill.

  It had been shrinking from the expenditure of energy, when the great explosion came. No thought of containing it. The leech’s cells held for the barest fraction of a second, and then spontaneously overloaded.

  The leech was smashed, broken up, destroyed. It was split into a thousand particles, and the particles were split a million times more.

  The particles were thrown out on the wave front of the explosion, and they split further, spontaneously.

  Into spores.

  The spores closed into dry, hard, seemingly lifeless specks of dust, billions of them, scattered, drifting. Unconscious, they floated in the emptiness of space.

  Billions of them, waiting to be fed.

  WATCHBIRD

  When Gelsen entered, he saw that the rest of the watchbird manufacturers were already present. There were six of them, not counting himself, and the room was blue with expensive cigar smoke.

  “Hi, Charlie,” one of them called as he came in.

  The rest broke off conversation long enough to wave a casual greeting at him. As a watchbird manufacturer, he was a member manufacturer of salvation, he reminded himself wryly. Very exclusive. You must have a certified government contract if you want to save the human race.

  “The government representative isn’t here yet,” one of the men told him. “He’s due any minute.”

  “We’re getting the green light,” another said.

  “Fine.” Gelsen found a chair near the door and looked around the room. It was like a convention, or a Boy Scout rally. The six men made up for their lack of numbers by sheer volume. The president of Southern Consolidated was talking at the top of his lungs about watchbird’s enormous durability. The two presidents he was talking at were grinning, nodding, one trying to interrupt with the results of a test he had run on watchbird’s resourcefulness, the other talking about the new recharging apparatus.

  The other three men were in their own little group, delivering what sounded like a panegyric to watchbird.

  Gelsen noticed that all of them stood straight and tall, like the saviors they felt they were. He didn’t find it funny. Up to a few days ago he had felt that way himself. He had considered himself a potbellied, slightly balding saint.

  He sighed and lighted a cigarette. At the beginning of the project, he had been as enthusiastic as the others. He remembered saying to Macintyre, his chief engineer, “Mac, a new day is coming. Watchbird is the answer.” And Macintyre had nodded very profoundly—another watchbird convert.

  How wonderful it had seemed then! A simple, reliable answer to one of mankind’s greatest problems, all wrapped and packaged in a pound of incorruptible metal, crystal, and plastics.

  Perhaps that was the very reason he was doubting it now. Gelsen suspected that you don’t solve human problems so easily. There had to be a catch somewhere.

  After all, murder was an old problem, and watchbird too new a solution.

  “Gentlemen—” They had been talking so heatedly that they hadn’t noticed the government representative entering. Now the room became quiet at once.

  “Gentlemen,” the plump government man said, “the President, with the consent of Congress, has acted to form a watchbird division for every city and town in the country.”

  The men burst into a spontaneous shout of triumph. They were going to have their chance to save the world after all, Gelsen thought, and worriedly asked himself what was wrong with that.

  He listened carefully as the government man outlined the distribution scheme. The country was to be divided into seven areas, each to be supplied and serviced by one manufacturer. This meant monopoly, of course, but a necessary one. Like the telephone service, it was in the public’s best interests. You couldn’t have competition in watchbird service. Watchbird was for everyone.

  “The President hopes,” the representative continued, “that full watchbird service will be installed in the shortest possible time. You will have top priorities on strategic metals, manpower, and so forth.”

  “Speaking for myself,” the president of Southern Consolidated said, “I expect to have the first batch of watchbirds distributed within the week. Production is all set up.”

  The rest of the men were equally ready. The factories had been prepared to roll out the watchbirds for months now. The final standardized equipment had been agreed upon, and only the Presidential go-ahead had been lacking.

  “Fine,” the representative said. “If that is all, I think we can—is there a question?”

  “Yes, sir,” Gelsen said. “I want to know if the present model is the one we are going to manufacture.”

  “Of course,” the representative said. “It’s the most advanced.”

  “I have an objection.” Gelsen stood up. His colleagues were glaring coldly at him. Obviously he was delaying the advent of the golden age.

  “What is your objection?” the representative asked.

  “First, let me say that I am one hundred percent in favor of a machine to stop murder. It’s been needed for a long time. I object only to the watchbird’s learning circuits. They serve, in effect, to animate the machine and give it a pseudo-consciousness. I can’t approve of that.”

  “But, Mr. Gelsen, you yourself testified that the watchbird would not be completely efficient unless such circuits were introduced. Without them, the watchbirds could stop only an estimated seventy percent of murders.”

  “I know that,” Gelsen said, feeling extremely uncomfortable. “I believe there might be a moral danger in allowing a machine to make decisions that are rightfully m
an’s,” he declared doggedly.

  “Oh, come now, Gelsen,” one of the corporation presidents said. “It’s nothing of the sort. The watchbird will only reinforce the decisions made by honest men from the beginning of time.”

  “I think that is true,” the representative agreed. “But I can understand how Mr. Gelsen feels. It is sad that we must put a human problem into the hands of a machine, sadder still that we must have a machine enforce our laws. But I ask you to remember, Mr. Gelsen, that there is no other possible way of stopping a murderer before he strikes. It would be unfair to the many innocent people killed every year if we were to restrict watchbird on philosophical grounds. Don’t you agree that I’m right?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do,” Gelsen said unhappily. He had told himself all that a thousand times, but something still bothered him. Perhaps he would talk it over with Macintyre.

  As the conference broke up, a thought struck him. He grinned.

  A lot of policemen were going to be out of work!

  “Now what do you think of that?” Officer Celtrics demanded. “Fifteen years in Homicide and a machine is replacing me.” He wiped a large red hand across his forehead and leaned against the captain’s desk. “Ain’t science marvelous?”

  Two other policemen, late of Homicide, nodded glumly.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the captain said. “We’ll find a home for you in Larceny, Celtrics. You’ll like it here.”

  “I just can’t get over it,” Celtrics complained. “a lousy little piece of tin and glass is going to solve all the crimes.”

  “Not quite,” the captain said. “The watchbirds are supposed to prevent the crimes before they happen.”

  “Then how’ll they be crimes?” one of the policemen asked. “I mean they can’t hang you for murder until you commit one/can they?”

  “That’s not the idea,” the captain said. “The watchbirds are supposed to stop a man before he commits a murder.”

  “Then no one arrests him?” Celtrics asked.

  “I don’t know how they’re going to work that out,” the captain admitted.

  The men were silent for a while. The captain yawned and examined his watch.

  “The thing I don’t understand,” Celtrics said, still leaning on the captain’s desk, “is just how do they do it? How did it start, Captain?”

  The captain studied Celtrics’ face for possible irony; after all, watchbird had been in the papers for months. But then he remembered that Celtrics, like his sidekicks, rarely bothered to turn past the sports pages.

  “Well,” the captain said, trying to remember what he had read in the Sunday supplements, “these scientists were working on criminology. They were studying murderers, to find out what made them tick. So they found that murderers throw out a different sort of brain wave from ordinary people. And their glands act funny, too. All this happens when they’re about to commit a murder. So these scientists worked out a special machine to flash red or something when these brain waves turned on.”

  “Scientists,” Celtrics said bitterly.

  “Well, after the scientists had this machine, they didn’t know what to do with it. It was too big to move around, and murderers didn’t drop in often enough to make it flash. So they built it into a smaller unit and tried it out in a few police stations. I think they tried one upstate. But it didn’t work so good. You couldn’t get to the crime in time. That’s why they built the watchbirds.”

  “I don’t think they’ll stop no criminals,” one of the policemen insisted.

  “They sure will. I read the test results. They can smell him out before he commits a crime. And when they reach him, they give him a powerful shock or something. It’ll stop him.”

  “You closing up Homicide, Captain?” Celtrics asked.

  “Nope,” the captain said. “I’m leaving a skeleton crew in until we see how these birds do.”

  “Hah,” Celtrics said. “Skeleton crew. That’s funny.”

  “Sure,” the captain said. “Anyhow, I’m going to leave some men on. It seems the birds don’t stop all murders.”

  “Why not?”

  “Some murderers don’t have these brain waves,” the captain answered, trying to remember what the newspaper article had said. “Or their glands don’t work or something.”

  “Which ones don’t they stop?” Celtrics asked, with professional curiosity.

  “I don’t know. But I hear they got the damned things fixed so they’re going to stop all of them soon.”

  “How they working that?”

  “They learn. The watchbirds, I mean. Just like people.”

  “You kidding me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well,” Celtrics said, “I think I’ll just keep old Betsy oiled, just in case. You can’t trust these scientists.”

  “Right.”

  “Birds!” Celtrics scoffed.

  Over the town, the watchbird soared in a long, lazy curve. Its aluminum hide glistened in the morning sun, and dots of light danced on its stiff wings. Silently it flew.

  Silently, but with all senses functioning. Built-in kinesthetics told the watchbird where it was, and held it in a long search curve. Its eyes and ears operated as one unit, searching, seeking.

  And then something happened! The watchbird’s electronically fast reflexes picked up the edge of a sensation. A correlation center tested it, matching it with electrical and chemical data in its memory files. A relay tripped.

  Down the watchbird spiraled, coming in on the increasingly strong sensation. It smelled the outpouring of certain glands, tasted a deviant brain wave.

  Fully alerted and armed, it spun and banked in the bright morning sunlight.

  Dinelli was so intent he didn’t see the watchbird coming. He had his gun poised, and his eyes pleaded with the big grocer.

  “Don’t come no closer.”

  “You lousy little punk,” the grocer said, and took another step forward. “Rob me? I’ll break every bone in your puny body.”

  The grocer, too stupid or too courageous to understand the threat of the gun, advanced on the little thief.

  “All right,” Dinelli said, in a thorough state of panic. “All right, sucker, take—”

  A bolt of electricity knocked him on his back. The gun went off, smashing a breakfast food display.

  “What in hell?” the grocer asked, staring at the stunned thief. And then he saw a flash of silver wings. “Well, I’m really damned. Those watchbirds work!”

  He stared until the wings disappeared in the sky. Then he telephoned the police.

  The watchbird returned to his search curve. His thinking center correlated the new facts he had learned about murder. Several of these he hadn’t known before.

  This new information was simultaneously flashed to all the other watchbirds and their information was flashed back to him.

  New information, methods, definitions were constantly passing between them.

  Now that the watchbirds were rolling off the assembly line in a steady stream, Gelsen allowed himself to relax. A loud contented hum filled his plant. Orders were being filled on time, with top priorities given to the biggest cities in his area, and working down to the smallest towns.

  “All smooth, Chief,” Macintyre said, coming in the door. He had just completed a routine inspection.

  “Fine. Have a seat.”

  The big engineer sat down and lighted a cigarette.

  “We’ve been working on this for some time,” Gelsen said, when he couldn’t think of anything else.

  “We sure have,” Macintyre agreed. He leaned back and inhaled deeply. He had been one of the consulting engineers on the original watchbird. That was six years back. He had been working for Gelsen ever since, and the men had become good friends.

  “The thing I wanted to ask you was this—” Gelsen paused. He couldn’t think how to phrase what he wanted. Instead he asked, “What do you think of the watchbirds, Mac?”

  “Who, me?” The engineer grinned nervously.
He had been eating, drinking, and sleeping watchbird ever since its inception. He had never found it necessary to have an attitude. “Why I think it’s great.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Gelsen said. He realized that what he wanted was to have someone understand his point of view. “I mean do you figure there might be some danger in machine thinking?”

  “I don’t think so, Chief. Why do you ask?”

  “Look, I’m no scientist or engineer. I’ve just handled cost and production and let you boys worry about how. But as a layman, watchbird is starting to frighten me.”

  “No reason for that.”

  “I don’t like the idea of the learning circuits.”

  “But why not?” Then Macintyre grinned again. “I know. You’re like a lot of people, Chief—afraid your machines are going to wake up and say, “What are we doing here? Let’s go out and rule the world.’ Is that it?”

  “Maybe something like that,” Gelsen admitted.

  “No chance of it,” Macintyre said. “The watchbirds are complex, I’ll admit, but an M.I.T. calculator is a whole lot more complex. And it hasn’t got consciousness.”

  “No. But the watchbirds can learn.”

  “Sure. So can all the new calculators. Do you think they’ll team up with the watchbirds?”

  Gelsen felt annoyed at Macintyre, and even more annoyed at himself for being ridiculous. “It’s a fact that the watchbirds can put their learning into action. No one is monitoring them.”

  “So that’s the trouble,” Macintyre said.

  “I’ve been thinking of getting out of watchbird.” Gelsen hadn’t realized it until that moment.

  “Look, Chief,” Macintyre said. “Will you take an engineer’s word on this?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “The watchbirds are no more dangerous than an automobile, an IBM calculator or a thermometer. They have no more consciousness or volition than those things. The watchbirds are built to respond to certain stimuli, and to carry out certain operations when they receive that stimuli.”

  “And the learning circuits?”

  “You have to have those,” Macintyre said patiently, as though explaining the whole thing to a ten-year-old. “The purpose of the watchbird is to frustrate all murder attempts, right? Well, only certain murderers give out these stimuli. In order to stop all of them, the watchbird has to search out new definitions of murder and correlate them with what it already knows.”