The Computer Connection

by Alfred Bester

  “The sacrifice must be made if we’re to survive.”

  “If the Extro is killed have we any guarantee that it will stop the renegade?”

  “It will. Not altogether, but to a great extent.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “He didn’t start his war until after the Guess-Extro connection was established. When that’s destroyed he’ll be crippled; still deadly but manageable.”

  “The Group has always hated killing.”

  “N hatred for killing the renegade. He’s a mad dog.”

  “Y. I only wish I knew why; it might make the problem easier to solve. Now let’s tackle the next question: How do I get at the Extro?”

  “You’re taking this on yourself?”

  “I must. I’m driven. How do I kill the Extro?”

  “Fire. Explosion. Metal-burn Power cut. Etcetera.”

  “Without its knowledge that an attack is being mounted?”

  “Are you sure that it will know?”

  “That goddamn Squatter with its ragtag network knows everything we do, every move we make.”

  “Only provided Guess is in contact to make the circuitry possible.”

  “Have we any guarantee he’ll remain buried in the salt mines?”

  “N. We might try kidnapping Guess.”

  “How, without the knowledge of the Extro? The moment we haul Guess up to the surface that spying network will be activated, and you know goddamn well that a Moleman can’t be drugged unconscious.”

  “You’re driving too hard, Guig. Let’s cool it.”

  “I can’t. When I think of Fee-5 and Poulos, the Shortie killings, the—No, I’ll cool it. Back to business. Calmly. The Extro knows everything we do and maybe everything we think. What can I use to outflank it?”

  “Hic-Haec-Hoc,” No-Name said.

  My jaw dropped. This? From Mr. Nothing? Outclassed even by him.

  “He can’t think. He can’t speak. He’s a blank.”

  “But he obeys signs. Thank you, No-Name. Thank you all. If Sam Pepys can be located and can tell me where to locate Hic, I’ll bring him and we’ll try.”

  But I tried the time-shot first, anyway, and H. G. Wells was right; I was a ghost, invisible and inaudible. Worse, I was like a two-dimensional phone projection. I oozed. I oozed through bods and buildings and I felt damned sorry for ghosts. Herb and I had pinpointed my spot very carefully and I was shot to JPL and oozed my way to the astrochem lab just as the crowd of afflicted stockholders was hacking and coughing its way out right through me. Uncanny.

  When I oozed in, Edison was barking with laughter. “That damn fool girl brought you fuming nitric acid. Fuming. And the fumes have turned this room into one big nitric-acid bath. Everything’s being eaten away.”

  “Did you see her do it? Did you see the label? Why didn’t you stop her?” The Chief sounded furious.

  “No. No, and no. I’ve deduced it. Not an Emergent, just a Resultant.”

  “Dear God! Dear God! I’ve ruined the whole pitch to the U-Con crowd.”

  Suddenly me did the take and let out a yell. I didn’t like his looks but I suppose nobody likes their own looks.

  “What’s the matter, Guig?” the Group called. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, you damn fools, and that’s why I’m hollering. I’m Grand Guignol triumphant. Don’t you understand? Why didn’t he know it was fuming nitric acid? Why didn’t he choke on the fumes? Why isn’t he eaten away now? Why wasn’t he forced to run out with Fee and the rest? Think about it while I revel.”

  After a long moment, the Syndicate said, “I never believed in your campaign, Guig. I apologize. It was a million to one against, so I hope you’ll pardon me.”

  “You’re pardoned. You’re all pardoned. We’ve got another Molecular Man. We’ve got a brand new beautiful Moleman. Still there, Uncas?”

  “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Take a deep breath of nitric. Belt down a stiff shot. Do anything you like to celebrate. Welcome to the Group.”

  And as we all left the astrochem and joined the hacking stockholders outside, he disappeared, but this time the pseudo-me followed him as he slipped out through a side iris and loped down a ramp, the ghost following and hollering. What I said was shouted and screamed: “Chief, it’s me, Guig. Listen! Hear me! Danger ahead. Hear?”

  He didn’t hear me, see me, or feel me; just went about his pokerface excape. It was one of the most frustrating and exasperating experiences of my life, and I was relieved when Herbie Wells’ mantis snatched me back. Herb saw my expression and shrugged helplessly.

  “I told you it was a lemon,” he said.

  So Natoma and I waited on standby for the outjet to Saturn VI, otherwise known as the moon, Titan. Standby because it was strictly a bribe transaction. We submitted to the search for flammable materials without complaint. Titan has a methane atmosphere, poisonous and explosive when spiked with fluorine. Methane is also known as marsh gas, produced by the decomposition of organic matter.

  People who don’t travel think all satellites are alike; rocky, sandy, volcanic. Titan is a mass of frozen organic material, and cosmologists are still arguing about that. Was the sun hotter? Was Titan an inner planet (it’s bigger than Terra’s moon) snatched by Jupiter and delivered to Saturn without charge? Was it seeded by cosmonauts from deep space ages ago who abandoned our solar system in disgust?

  Natoma came along, not because I needed her for Hic-Haec-Hoc but because you don’t shoot Saturn in a week, it’s more like a month and there’s a limit. The standby wasn’t too boring. We were entertained by the broadcast of Ice-O-Rama, a penguin sitcom. Zitzcom has just discovered that his daughter, Ritzcom, has accepted an invitation from Witzcom to spend the night with him on an iceberg. There are hilarious complications. The antarctic night lasts three months, and Zitzcom doesn’t know that it was Ritzcom’s twin sister, Titzcom, who accepted the invitation in a snit because her beau, Fitzcom, didn’t invite her to the penguin slide-in. Oh, bbls of laughs.

  I’d warned Nat that Titan was a mining moon (they quarry the organic layer and ship it out in frozen blocks) but she didn’t really understand until we’d boarded the freighter and located our private cabin for two. That was the bribe. No passengers; no crew; just deck officers and no doubt a couple of them had been willing to doss anywhere for a substantial cut. The freighter stank. The compost it shipped in-jet left a permanent aroma of the grave.

  I’d been smart enough to be prepared; a huge wicker hamper with enough deli for months, clean linen and blankets. A freighter to Saturn is no luxury jet, and although there’s a captain there’s no such thing as a captain’s table, a steward, formal meals. It’s all catch-as-catch-can, with the staff helping itself to the frozen food and drink stocks whenever so inclined. You merely endure and survive at the minimum, which is another reason why Titan will always remain a mining moon.

  We stayed in our tiny cabin a lot, talking, talking, talking. So much to catch up on. Natoma grieved with me over Poulos and tried to cheer me up. She wanted to know all about CNA-Drone. I told her all I could about DNA-Cloning, which wasn’t much, but then the technique isn’t much, still in its infancy. Then she insisted on knowing why I had deep depressions, and what big L was. I had to tell her all about Lepcer.

  “You must never, never, never run another physical risk,” she said severely.

  “Not even for your sake?”

  “Most of all never for my sake. There will be no big L this time. I know it because I have second sight, all the Guess women do, but if you ever run a risk again I’ll have you roasted over a slow fire. You’ll wish you had the big L then.”

  “Yes’m,” I said meekly. “That linear explosion wasn’t my fault, you know.”

  She pronounced a Cherokee word that would probably have shocked our brother.

  Nat had been boning up, practicing reading XX. “Titan is the largest of Saturn’s satellites,” she reported. “It is seven hundred and fifty-n
ine thousands miles distant from Saturn. Its sidereal period is—I don’t know what that is.”

  “How long it takes to go around.”

  “Is fifteen dot nine four five days. The inclination of its orbit to the ring plane—I looked those words up—is twenty apostrophe. Its—”

  “No, darling. That’s the astronomer’s symbol for minutes. They measure space in degrees, minutes, and seconds. A degree is a little zero. A minute is an apostrophe, and a second is a quotation mark.”

  “Thank you. Its diameter is three thousand five hundred and fifty miles, and it was discovered by—by—I don’t know how to pronounce this name. It’s not in the dictionary.”

  “Let me see. Oh. Not many people do. Huyghens. Higenz. He was a very great Dutch scientist a long time ago. Thank you, love. Now I know all about Titan.”

  She wanted to ask questions but I promised to take her to what used to be Holland and show her all the sights that still remained, including Hi-genz’ birthplace, if it still existed. Saturn was quite a sight itself as it came looming up. Nat had already charmed her way onto the flight deck and would spend hours staring at the cold, belted, spotted disk and the widening rings inclined ten little zero.

  Alas, only the two inner rings remain. Despite violent protests by ecologists and cosmologists, the Better Building Conglomerate had been permitted to harvest the third outer ring for some kind of better building aggregate. There was a housing crisis and BBC paid enormous taxes. One infuriated astronomer had been euthanized for burning the chairman of the board.

  If you think the inspection was tough when we embarked you should have seen what we went through when we arrived. As we came down the long tunnel to Mine City we were searched over and over again for combustibles, quasicombustibles, ferrous metals, anything that could produce a spark or a flame. Titan lived on a perpetual brink of disaster. One spark outside and the methane atmosphere could turn the moon into a nova.

  The city was freaky. This is how it was born: The prospectors quarried out the frozen marsh compost to a depth of fifty feet. When it extended for a square mile, the crater was roofed over with plastic by ORGASM (The Organic Systems and Manure Company, Ltd). Narrow streets were blocked out in a rectilinear pattern, houses were built, and there was your mining town on your explosive mining moon. It was dark; the sun was no more than a brilliant arc light, but it did receive a lovely thermal glow from Mama Saturn. It was damp to eliminate any chances of electrostatic sparks. It stank of halogens and methane and the compost choppers.

  No hotel, of course, but a residence for visiting clients with clout. I bluffed our way in. “I am Edward Curzon of I. G. Farben, and I cannot understand why you did not receive my message from Ceres. Kindly contact Directeur Poulos Poulos to verify.” I also tipped in a lordly manner and did what it had taken me years to learn; behaved quietly as though I took it for granted that my orders would be obeyed. They obey.

  I found Hic easily enough on the fourth day. I had a nerve-fire finder and all I had to do was move out beyond the quarrymen in each quarter—checking production techniques, you understand—and take a con. On Day Four the finder pointed and I followed it, hopping and galloping, for about ten miles until I came to a compost hut, rather like the sod houses the primitive pioneers used to build for themselves in nineteenth-century America. It was glittering with crystals of ammonia, as was all Titan. There were spectacular meteorite cracks and craters in the ice cover, and volcanic magma boiled up (“boiled” in the relative sense; Titan’s mean temperature is minus one hundred and thirty little zero Celsius) forming pools of liquid methane. Saturn was rising dramatically behind the hovel, and Hic-Haec-Hoc was crouched inside like a predator about to spring on his prey.

  Now, I know the popular impression. Say ‘Neanderthal” to anyone and an instant image of a caveman carrying a club and dragging a lady by the hair pops into their mind. Well, the Neanderthalers couldn’t do much carrying or dragging; their thumbs were badly opposed. They were incapable of speech because of the inadequate musculature of mouth and throat. Anthropologists are still arguing about whether it was speech and the thumb that produced Homo sapiens. Certainly, Homo neanderthalensis had the equivalent cranial capacity; it just never developed. If you can read XX, look up Homo neanderthalensis and you’ll have some idea of what Hic looked like; a punch-drunk, prizefighting loser. But strong. And like most animals, he lived a life of constant terror.

  I’d removed my helmet but I don’t know whether he recognized or remembered me. As No-Name said, he can’t think; but he understood my grunts and signs. I’d been farsighted enough to fill a pocket with sweets and every time he opened his mouth I popped one in, which delighted him. That’s how the Russians used to reward their trained bears.

  It was one hell of a session. I could give you the signs in diagram but you wouldn’t understand them. I could give you the grunts in phonetic symbols but they would be meaningless to you. But Hic understood. It’s true that he can’t think, but only in the sense of memory and rational sequence. He can absorb and understand one idea at a time. How long it remains with him depends on how soon it’s dispossessed by survival terror. The sweets helped.

  After I’d signed, grunted, bullied, and sweeted him into obedience it was hell getting Hic into the extra thermal I’d packed out, but he couldn’t come in out of the methane naked. Questions would be asked. I got him sacked at last and back we schlepped to Mine City, Colossus of Compost, Mother of Methane, Daughter of Destruction, with the two-ringed Saturn behind us. Damn Sequoya, he was right about Mankind-F. How can you fight a bod you agree with?

  After a careful inspection Natoma said, “He must be shaved from top to bottom. We’ll take him back as your feebleminded brother.” She looked at me perplexedly. “Guig, how the devil did he ever get out here?”

  “Stowaway, probably. A Moleman can endure months of that cold, and he ate anything that was handy.”

  Between signs and sweets we managed to bathe and shave Hic-Haec-Hoc. Natoma decorated him with graffiti which made him look like an average. Hic liked Nat and was comfortable with her. I think maybe he never had a mother. On the other hand he also liked his bath. I’m sure he never had one before.

  He slept on the floor of our cabin during the freighter in-jet. Only one trouble; he didn’t like any of our hamper food and the compost stench made him hungry. I couldn’t get any for him—all sealed in the freight hull—and he started eating the most lunatic things; our linen, fire extinguishers, luggage, books, playing cards. We had to keep a constant watch (he ate my watch, by the way) or he might have chewed a hole in the freighter hull.

  He’d become accustomed to Titan’s methane atmostphere and didn’t like the air in the jet. Natoma took care of that by spraying insecticide up his nose. Altogether, a problem child, and he was so brute-strong that you had to be cautious with him. But Natoma handled him beautifully. I think her experiences with the Erie warriors probably gave her the expertise.

  As we started our approach to Earth, Natoma gave a thank-you luncheon party for the deck officers. She used the last of our provisions and even heated some of them up, a tremendous luxury. How did she do it on a jet where there were no ignition tools? She made a bow-drill and sawed away until she got an ember going. Shredded plastic for tinder. Chunks of plastic for fuel. And then a fire in an aluminum basin. No fool she. The officers were enchanted, and so appreciative that two of them proposed and all of them made plans to smuggle us out of the spaceport with no passport problems for my idiot “brother” who’d lost his on Titan. (And no warning to the Extro network which, of course, they knew nothing about.) We would be home free.

  And when we put down we discovered that we’d acquired a hitchhiker.

  14

  At my age you learn to accept the unknowable with grace. You may ask, then, why the difficulty in accepting the Rajah, and the ease of accepting the spacehiker? Patent. The Rajah was the answer to a fact, an explanation which I could not yet accept because an integral part was
missing. The hitchhiker made its appearance from an unknowable spacewhere. Neither explanations nor motivations were involved. It was a fact which could neither be denied nor fitted into the cosmic construct. That fact had to be accepted as Ding an sich, a thing in itself.

  Impossible to name its original hatitat. Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto, which had not yet been visited, much less explored for indigenous fauna and flora? The asteroid belt? Perhaps a refugee from the halo of millions of comets shuttling in from space, around the sun and out again? It might even be a reject from some contrauniverse, spat into our system through a minuscule White Hole.

  Metabolism? N Known. My hunch later—fed on the electromagnetic spectrum, which meant that out in space it was floating in a sea of food. Locomotion? N known. Possibly rides the stellar winds in space, which would account for its hitching a ride on the freighter; it couldn’t buck the solar wind without help. Reproduction? N known, period. Reason for being? No living thing can answer that. Description?

  Well, when we disembarked from the freighter there it was, clinging to the hull, to the incredulity of the officers and the jetport mechs. It reminded me of a myxomycete, a “slime mold” I’d studied at Trinity College; if it was anything analogous to that order the reproduction question was answered; by spore formation. It was a giant flat slab of cytoplasm, about the size of a 3 x 5 scatter rug, translucent, and you could see thousands of nuclei inside, all connected with a demented lacework of I don’t know what. And the nuclei twinkled at you as though the thing were sharing a joke.

  Naturally I insisted on taking it along with us, to Natoma’s horror—it filled her with revulsion—but Hic-Haec-Hoc fell in love with Twinkles and slung it over his shoulders like a cape. Twinkles extruded its edges to get comfortable and blinked at Hic, and damned if Hic didn’t blink back. I was glad that Hic had at last found a friend. Twink wasn’t immobile. It would take off from Hic, flapping its edges like a buzzard, and go exploring. Then it would return and they had long conversations.