by William Tenn
Mrs. Brucks cheered up perceptibly. She liked listening to education. She nodded. “So?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Those people who exchanged with us—our five opposite numbers—they must have known in advance that Winthrop was going to be stubborn. Historical records to that effect existed in the future. They wouldn’t have done it—it stands to reason they wouldn’t want to spend the rest of their lives in what is for them a pretty raw and uncivilized environment—unless they had known of a way out, a way that the situation could be handled. It’s up to us to find that way.”
“Maybe,” Mary Ann Carthington suggested, bravely biting the end off a sniffle, “Maybe the next future kept it a secret from them. Or maybe all five of them were suffering from what they call here a bad case of individual eccentric impulse.”
“That’s not how the concept of individual eccentric impulse works, Mary Ann,” Dave Pollock told her with a contemptuous grimace. “I don’t want to go into it now, but believe me, that’s not how it works! And I don’t think the temporal embassies keep this kind of secret from the people in the period to which they’re accredited. No, I tell you the solution is right here if we can only see it.”
Oliver T. Mead had been sitting with an intent expression on his face, as if he were trying to locate a fact hidden at the other end of a long tunnel of unhappiness. He straightened up suddenly and said: “Storku mentioned that! The Temporal Embassy. But he didn’t think it was a good idea to approach them—they were too involved with long-range historical problems to be of any use to us. But something else he said—something else we could do. What was it now?”
They all looked at him and waited anxiously while he thought. Dave Pollock had just begun a remark about “high surtax memories” when the rotund executive clapped his hands together resoundingly.
“I remember! The Oracle Machine! He said we could ask the Oracle Machine. We might have some difficulty interpreting the answer, according to him, but at this point that’s the least of our worries. We’re in a desperate emergency, and beggars can’t be choosers. If we get any kind of answer, any kind of an answer at all...”
Mary Ann Carthington looked away from the tiny cosmetics laboratory she was using to repair the shiny damage caused by tears. “Now that you bring it up, Mr. Mead, the temporal supervisor made some such remark to me, too. About the Oracle Machine, I mean.”
“He did? Good! That firms it up nicely. We may still have a chance, ladies and gentlemen, we may still have a chance. Well then, as to who shall do it. I am certain I don’t have to draw a diagram when it comes to selecting the one of us most capable of dealing with a complex piece of futuristic machinery.”
They all stared at Dave Pollock who swallowed hard and inquired hoarsely, “You mean me?”
“Certainly I mean you, young man,” Mr. Mead said sternly. “You’re the long-haired scientific expert around here. You’re the chemistry and physics professor.”
“I’m a teacher, that’s all, a high-school science teacher. And you know how I feel about having anything to do with the Oracle Machine. Even the thought of getting close to i1 makes my stomach turn over. As far as I’m concerned it’s the one aspect of this civilization that’s most horrible, most decadent. Why, I’d rather—”
“My stomach didn’t turn over when I had to go in and have an argument with that crazy Mr. Winthrop?” Mrs. Brucks broke in. “Till then, out of this room I hadn’t taken a step, with all the everything I had positively nothing to do —you think I liked watching one minute a pair of rompers, the next minute, I don’t know what, an evening gown he starts wearing? And that crazy talk he talks—smell this from a Mars, taste this from a Venus—you think maybe, Mr. Pollock, I enjoyed myself? But somebody had to do, so I did. All we’re asking you is a try. A try you can make?”
“And I can assure you,” Mary Ann Carthington came on in swiftly, “that Gygyo Rablin is absolutely and completely the last person on Earth I would go to for a favor. It’s a personal matter, and I’d rather not discuss it now, if you don’t mind, but I would die, positively die, rather than go through that again. I did it though, because there was the teensiest chance it would help us all get home again. I don’t think we’re asking too much of you, I don’t think so one little bit.”
Mr. Mead nodded. “I agree with you, young lady. Storku is a man I haven’t seen eye to eye with since we’ve arrived, and I’ve gone out of my way to avoid him, but to have to get involved in that unholy Shriek Field madness in the bargain—” He brooded for a while over some indigestible mental fragment, then, as his cleated golf shoes began squirming lovingly, about on his feet, shook himself determinedly and went on: “It’s about time you stopped shooting off your mouth, Pollock, and got down to humdrum, specific brass tacks. Einstein’s theory of relativity isn’t going to get us back to good old 1958, and neither is your Ph.D. or M.A. or whatever. What we need now is action, action with a capital A and no ifs, no ands, no buts.”
“All right, all right. I’ll do it.”
“And another thing.” Mr. Mead rolled a wicked little thought pleasurably to and fro in his mind for a moment or two before letting it out. “You take the jumper. You said yourself we don’t have the time to do any walking, and that’s doubly true right now, doubly true, when we’re right up against the dead, dead deadline. I don’t want to hear any whining and any whimpering about it making you sick. If Miss Carthington and I could take the jumper, so can you.”
In the midst of his misery, Dave Pollock rallied. “You think I won’t?” he asked scornfully. “I’ve done most of my traveling here by jumper. I’m not afraid of mechanical progress—just so long as it’s genuine progress. Of course I’ll take the jumper.”
He signaled for one with a microscopic return of his old swagger. When it appeared, he walked under it with squared shoulders. Let them all watch how a rational, scientifically-minded man goes about things, he thought. And anyway, using the jumper wasn’t nearly as upsetting to him as it seemed to be to the others. He could take jumpers in stride.
Which was infinitely more than he could say for the Oracle Machine.
For that reason, he had himself materialized outside the building which housed the machine. A bit of a walk and he might be able to get his thoughts in order.
The only trouble was, the sidewalk had other ideas. Silently, obsequiously; but nonetheless firmly, it began to move under his feet as he started walking around the squat, slightly quivering structure. It rippled him ahead at a pace somewhat faster than the one he set, changing direction as soon as he changed his.
Dave Pollock looked around at the empty streets and smiled with resignation. The sentient, eager-to-serve sidewalks didn’t bother him, either. He had expected something like that in the future, that and the enormously alert servitor houses, the clothes which changed their color and cut at the wearers’ caprice—all more or less, in one form or another, to be anticipated, by a knowledgeable man, of human progress. Even the developments in food—from the wriggling, telepathic, please-eat-me-and-enjoy-me stuff all the way up to the more complex culinery compositions on which an interstellarly famous chef might have worked for a year or more—was logical, if you considered how bizarre to an early American colonist, would be the fantastic, cosmopolitan variety of potables and packaged meals available in any twentieth-century supermarket.
These things, the impediments of daily life, all change and modify in time. But certain things, certain things, should not.
When the telegram had arrived in Houston, Texas, informing him that—of all the people in the United States of America—he was most similar in physical composition and characteristics to one of the prospective visitors from 2458 A.D., he had gone almost mad with joy. The celebrity he suddenly enjoyed in the faculty lunchroom was unimportant, as were the Page One stories in local newspapers under the heading: LONE STAR SON GALLOPING FUTUREWARDS.
First and foremost, it was reprieve. It was reprieve and another chance. Family responsibilities, a dying
father, a sick younger sister, had prevented him from getting the advanced academic degrees necessary for a university teaching position with all of its accompanying prestige, higher income and opportunities for research. Then, when they had come to an end and he had gone hack to school, a sudden infatuation and too-hasty marriage had thrown him back onto the same treadmill. He had just begun to realize—despite the undergraduate promise he had shown and none-too-minute achievement—how thoroughly he was trapped by the pleasant residential neighborhood and cleanly modern high school between which he shuttled daily, when the telegram arrived, announcing his selection as one of the group to be sent five hundred years ahead. How it was going to help him, what, precisely, he would do with the chance, he did not know—but it had lifted him out of the ruck of anonymity; somehow, someway, it would enable him to become a striking individual at last.
Dave Pollock had not realized the extent of his good fortune until he met the other four in Washington, D. O. He had heard, of course, how the finest minds in the country had bitterly jostled and elbowed each other in a frenzied attempt to get into the group and find out what was going to develop in their speciality half a millenium hence. But not until he had talked with his prospective fellow-tourists—an itinerant worker, a Bronx housewife, a pompous mid-western business executive, a pretty but otherwise very ordinary San Francisco stenographer—did it come to him that he was the only one with any degree of scientific training.
He would be the only one capable of evaulating the amount of major technological advance! He would be the only one to correlate all the bewildering mass of minor changes into something resembling coherence! And thus, above all, he would be the only one to appreciate the essential quality of the future, the basic threads that would run through it from its underlying social fabric to its star-leaping fringes!
He, who had wanted to devote his life to knowledge-seeking, would exist for two weeks, unique and intellectually alone, in a five-century-long extrapolation of every laboratory and library in his age!
At first, it had been like that. Everywhere there was glory and excitement and discovery. Then, little, disagreeable things began to creep in, like the first stages of a cold. The food, the clothing, the houses—well, you either ignored it or made other arrangements. These people were extremely hospitable and quite ingenious: they didn’t at all mind providing you with more familiar meals when your intestines had revolted a couple of times. The women, with their glossy baldness and strange attitudes toward relations between the sexes —well, you had a brand-new wife at home and didn’t have to get involved with the women.
But Shriek Field, Panic Stadium, that was another matter. Dave Pollock was proud of being a thoroughly rational person. He had been proud of the future, when he first arrived, taking it almost as a personal vindication that the people in it should be so thoroughly, universally rational, too. His first acquaintance with Shriek Field had almost nauseated him. That the superb intellects he had come to know should willingly transform themselves into a frothing, hysterical pack of screaming animals, and at regular, almost medically-prescribed intervals... .
They had explained to him painfully, elaborately, that they could not be such superb intellects, so thoroughly rational, unless they periodically released themselves in this fashion. It made sense, but—still—watching them do it was absolutely horrifying. He knew he would never be able to stand the sight of it.
Still, this one could make acceptable in some corner of the brain. But the chess business?
Since his college days, Dave Pollock had fancied himself as a chess player. He was just good enough to be able to tell himself that if ever he had the time to really concentrate on the game, to learn the openings, say, as they should be learned, he’d be good enough to play in tournaments. He’d even subscribed to a chess magazine and followed all the championship matches with great attention. He’d wondered what chess would be like in the future—surely the royal game having survived for so many centuries would survive another five? What would it be like: a version of three-dimensional chess, or possibly another, even more complex evolution?
The worst of it was the game was almost identical with the one played in the twentieth century.
Almost every human being in 2458 played it; almost every human being in 2458 enjoyed it. But there were no human champions. There were no human opponents.
There were only the chess machines. And they could beat anybody.
“What’s the sense,” he had wailed, “of playing with a machine which has millions of `best moves and counter-moves’ built into its memory circuits? That has a selector mechanism able to examine and choose from every chess game ever re-corded? A machine which has been designed never to be beaten? What’s the sense—where’s the excitement?”
“We don’t play to win,” they had explained wonderingly. “We play to play. It’s the same with all our games: aggressions are gotten rid of in a Shriek or a Panic, games are just for mental or physical exercise. And so, when we play, we want to play against the best. Besides, every once in a while, an outstandingly good player, once or twice in his lifetime, is able to hold the machine to a draw. Now, that is an achievement. That merits excitement.”
You had to love chess as much as he did, Dave Pollock supposed, to realize what an obscenity the existence of these machines made of it. Even the other three in his group, who had become much more restive than he at twenty-fifth century mechanisms and mores, only stared at him blankly when he raged over it. No, if you didn’t love something, you weren’t bothered overmuch when it was degraded. But surely they could see the abdication of human intellect, of human reason, that the chess machines implied?
Of course, that was nothing compared to the way human reason had abdicated before the Oracle Machine. That was the last, disgusting straw to a rational person.
The Oracle Machine. He glanced at his watch. Only twenty-five minutes left. Better hurry. He took one last self-encouraging breath and climbed the cooperative steps of the building.
“My name is Stilia,” a bald-headed, rather pleasant-faced young woman said as she came toward him in the spacious ante-room. “I’m the attendant of the machine for today. Can I help you?”
“I suppose so.” He looked uncomfortably at a distant, throbbing wall. Behind the yellow square on that well, he knew, was the inner brain of the Oracle Machine. How he’d love to kick a hole in that brain.
Instead, he sat down on an upraised hummock of floor and wiped his perspiring hands carefully. He told her about their approaching deadline, about Winthrop’s stubbornness, about the decision to consult the Oracle Machine.
“Oh, Winthrop, yes! He’s that delightful old man. I met him at a dream dispensary a week ago. What wonderful awareness he has! Such a total immersion in our culture! We’re very proud of Winthrop. We’d like to help him every way we possibly can.”
“If you don’t mind, lady,” Dave Pollock said morosely, “we’re the ones who need help. We’ve got to get back.”
Stilia laughed. “Of course. We’d like to help everybody. Only Winthrop is—special. He’s trying hardest. Now, if you’ll just wait here, I’ll go in and put your problem before the Oracle Machine. I know how to do it so that it will activate the relevant memory circuits with the least loss of time.”
She flexed her right arm at him and walked toward the yellow square. Pollock watched it expand in front of her, then, as she went through the opening it made, contract be-hind her. In a few minutes she returned.
“I’ll tell you when to go in, Mr. Pollock. The machine is working on your problem. The answer you get will be the very best that can be made, given the facts available.”
“Thanks.” He thought for a while. “Tell me something. Doesn’t it seem to take something out of life—out of your thinking life—to know that you can take absolutely any problem, personal problem, scientific problem or working problem, to the Oracle Machine and it will solve it much better than you could?”
Stilia looked puzzle
d. “Not at all. To begin with, problem-solving is a very small part of today’s thinking life. It would be as logical to say that it took something vital out of life to make a hole with an electric drill instead of a hand drill. In your time, no doubt, there are people who feel just that way, they have the obvious privilege of not using electric drills. Those who use electric drills, however, have their physical energy freed for tasks they regard as more important. The Oracle Machine is the major tool of our culture; it has been designed toward just one end—computing all the factors of a given problem and relating them to the totality of pertinent data that is in the possession of the human race. But even if people consult the Oracle Machine, they may not be able to understand and apply the answer. And, if they do understand it, they may not choose to act on it.”
“They may not choose to act on it? Does that make sense? You said yourself the answers are the very best that can be made, given the facts available.”
“Human activities don’t necessarily have to make sense. That is the prevailing and rather comfortable modern view, Mr. Pollock. There is always the individual eccentric impulse.”
“Yeah, there’s always that,” he growled. “Resign your private, distinct personality by running with a howling mob at Shriek Field, lose all of yourself in an insane crowd—but don’t forget your individual eccentric impulse. Never, never forget your individual eccentric impulse!”
She nodded soberly. “That really sums it up, I must say, in spite of your rather unmistakable sarcasm. Why do you find it so hard to accept? Man is both a herd animal and a highly individualistic animal—what we call a self-realizable animal. The herd instincts must be satisfied at whatever cost, and have been in the past through such mechanisms as warfare, religion, nationalism, partyism and various forms of group chauvinism. The need to resign one’s personality and immerse in something larger than self has been recognized since earliest times: Shriek Fields and Panic Stadiums everywhere on the planet provide for this need and expend it harmlessly.”
