THE BICENTENNIAL MAN

by Isaac Asimov

  Bakst said, “A complete listing is not needed. That is the point of my game. Some combinations are more probable than others and by building probability upon probability, we can cut the task enormously. It is the manner of achieving this building of probability upon probability that I ask you to help me with.”

  “It would still take a great deal of my time. How could I justify this to myself?”

  Bakst hesitated. No use in trying a complicated selling job. With Multivac, a straight line was the shortest distance between two points. .

  He said, “An appropriate gene combination might produce a human being more content to leave decisions to you, more willing to believe in your resolve to make men happy, more anxious to be happy. I cannot find the proper combination, but you might, and with guided genetic engineering--”

  “I see what you mean. It is-good. I will devote some time to it.”

  Bakst found it difficult to hitch into Noreen’s private wave. length. Three times the connection broke away. He was not surprised. In the last two months, there had been an increasing tendency for technology to slip in minor ways-never for long, never seriously-and he greeted each occasion with a somber pleasure.

  This time it held. Noreen’s face showed, holographically three-dimensional. It flickered a moment, but it held.

  “I’m returning your call,” said Bakst, dully impersonal.

  “For a while it seemed impossible to get you,” said Noreen. “Where have you been?”

  “Not hiding. I’m here, in Denver.”

  “Why in Denver?”

  “The world is my oyster, Noreen. I may go where I please.”

  Her face twitched a little. “And perhaps find it empty everywhere. We are going to try you, Ron.”

  “Now?”

  “Now!”

  “And here?”

  “And here!”

  Volumes of space flickered into different glitters on either side of Noreen, and further away, and behind. Bakst looked from side to side, counting. There were fourteen, six men, eight women. He knew every one of them. They had been good friends once, not so long ago.

  To either side and beyond the simulacra was the wild background of Colorado on a pleasant summer day that was heading toward its end. There had been a city here once named Denver. The site still bore the name though it had been cleared, as most of the city sites had been. ...He could count ten robots in sight, doing whatever it was robots did.

  They were maintaining the ecology, he supposed. He knew no details, but Multivac did, and it kepi fifty million robots allover the Earth in efficient order.

  Behind Bakst was one of the converging grids of Multivac, almost like a small fortress of self-defense.

  “Why now?” he asked. “And why here?”

  Automatically he turned to Eldred. She was the oldest of them and the one with authority-if a human being could be said to have authority.

  Eldred’s dark-brown face looked a little weary. The years showed, all six score of them, but her voice was firm and incisive. “Because we have the final fact now. Let Noreen tell you. She knows you best.”

  Bakst’s eyes shifted to Noreen. “Of what crime am I accused?”

  “Let us play no games, Ron. There are no crimes under Multivac except to strike for freedom and it is your human crime that you have committed no crime under Multivac. For that we will judge whether any human being alive wants your company any longer, wants to hear your voice, be aware of your presence, or respond to you in any way.”

  “Why am I threatened with isolation then?”

  “You have betrayed all human beings.”

  “How?”

  “Do you deny that you seek to breed mankind into subservience to Multivac?”

  “Ah!” Bakst folded his arms across his chest. “You found out quickly, but then you had only to ask Multivac.”

  Noreen said, “Do you deny that you asked for help in the genetic engineering of a strain of humanity designed to accept slavery under Multivac without question?”

  “I suggested the breeding of a more contented humanity. Is this a betrayal?”

  Eldred intervened. She said, “We don’t want your sophistry, Ron. We know it by heart. Don’t tell us once again that Multivac cannot be withstood, that there is no use in struggling, that we have gained security. What you call security, the rest of us call slavery.”

  Bakst said, “Do you proceed now to judgment, or am I allowed a defense?”

  “You heard Eldred,” said Noreen. “We know your defense.” .

  “We all heard Eldred,” said Bakst, “but no one has heard me. What she says is my defense is not my defense.”

  There was a silence as the images glanced right and left at each other. Eldred said, “Speak!”

  Bakst said, “I asked Multivac to help me solve a problem in the field of mathematical games. To gain his interest, I pointed out that it was modeled on gene combinations and that a solution might help in designing a gene combination that would leave man no worse off than he is now in any respect and yet breed into him a cheerful acceptance of Multivac’s direction, and acquiescence in his decisions.”

  “So we have said,” said Eldred.

  “It was only on those terms that Multivac would have accepted the task. Such a new breed is clearly desirable for mankind by Multivac’s standards, and by Multivac’s standards he must labor toward it: And the desirability of the end will lure him on to examine greater and greater complications of a problem whose endlessness is beyond what even he can handle. You all witness that.”

  Noreen said, “Witness what?”

  “Haven’t you had trouble reaching me? In the last two months, hasn’t each of you noticed small troubles in what has always gone smoothly? ...You are silent. May I accept that as an affirmative?”

  “If so what then?”

  Bakst said, “Multivac has been placing all his spare circuits on the problem. He has been slowly pushing the running of the world toward rather a skimpy minimum of his efforts, since nothing, by his own sense of ethics, must stand in the way of human happiness and there can be no greater increase in that happiness than to accept Multivac.”

  Noreen said, “What does all this mean? There is still enough in Multivac to run the world-and us-and if this is done at less than full efficiency, that would only add temporary discomfort to our slavery. Only temporary, because it won’t last long. Sooner or later, Multivac will decide the problem is insoluble, or will solve it, and in either case, his distraction will end. In the latter case, slavery will become permanent and irrevocable.”

  “But for now he is distracted,” said Bakst, “and we can even talk like this-most dangerously-without his noticing. Yet I dare not risk doing so for long, so please understand me quickly.

  “I have another mathematical game-the setting up of networks on the model of Multivac. I have been able to demonstrate that no matter how complicated and redundant the network is, there must be at least one place into which all the currents can funnel under particular circumstances. There will always be the fatal apoplectic stroke if that one place is interefered with, since it will induce overloading elsewhere which will break down and induce overloading elsewhere--and so on indefinitely till all breaks down.”

  “Well?”

  “And this is the point. Why else have I come to Denver? And Multivac knows it, too, and this point is guarded electronically and robotically to the extent that it cannot be penetrated.”

  “Well?”

  “But Multivac is distracted, and Multivac trusts me. I have labored hard to gain that trust, at the cost of losing all of you, since only with trust is there the possibility of betrayal. If any of you tried to approach this point, Multivac might rouse himself even out of his present distraction. If Multivac were not distracted, he would not allow even me to approach. But he is distracted, and it is I!”

  Bakst was moving toward the converging grid in a calm saunter, and the fourteen images, keyed to him, moved along as well. The soft susu
rrations of a busy Multivac center were all about them.

  Bakst said, “Why attack an invulnerable opponent? Make him vulnerable first, and then--”

  Bakst fought to stay calm, but it all depended on this now. Everything! With a sharp yank, he uncoupled a joint. (If he had only had still more time to make more certain.)

  He was not stopped--and as he held his breath, he became aware of the ceasing of noise, the ending of whisper, the closing down of Multivac. If, in a moment, that soft noise did not return, then he had had the right key point, and no recovery would be possible. If he were not quickly the focus of approaching robots

  He turned in the continuing silence. The robots in the distance were working still. None were approaching.

  Before him, the images of the fourteen men and women of the Congress were still there and each seemed to be stupefied at the sudden enormous thing that had happened.

  Bakst said, “Multivac is shut down, burnt out. It can’t be rebuilt.” He felt almost drunk at the sound of what he was saying. “I have worked toward this since I left you. When Hines attacked, I feared there might be other such efforts, that Multivac would double his guard, that even I had to work quickly--I wasn’t sure--” He was gasping, but forced himself steady, and said solemnly, “I have given us our freedom.”

  And he paused, aware at last of the gathering weight of the silence. Fourteen images stared at him, without any of them offering a word in response.

  Bakst said sharply, “You have talked of freedom. You have it!”

  Then, uncertainly, he said, “Isn’t that what you want?”

  When I first finished the preceding story, or thought I had, I was left dissatisfied. I lay awake till about 2 A.M. trying to figure out what dissatisfied me, and then decided I had not made my point. I got up, quickly wrote down the last three paragraphs of the story as it finally appeared, ending with that horrified question, and then went peacefully to sleep.

  The next day, I rewrote the last page of the manuscript to include the new ending and when I sent it off to the Times, much as I wanted to make the sale, I indicated where I would be intransigent.

  “Please note,” I wrote, “that the ending on an unresolved question is not an accident. It is of the essence. Each reader is going to have to consider the meaning of the question and what answer he himself would give.”

  The Times asked for some trivial changes and clarifications but did not allow even a whisper of objection to emerge concerning my ending, I am glad to say.

  My own original title had been “Mathematical Games,” by the way, and for a while I considered restoring it in the book version. However, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MULTIVAC has a swing to it. Besides, a large number of people saw it on the single day during which it was available to the reading public. More people came up to me over the next few weeks to tell me they had read that story than had ever been the case for any other story I had ever written. I don’t want them to think I changed the title in order to lure them into thinking they hadn’t read the story before, so that they might buy this book, so THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MULTIVAC it stays.

  Among those who saw my story in The New York Times Magazine was William Levinson, editor of Physician’s World. In the same issue of the magazine section was an article entitled “Triage.” Triage is a system of choosing whom to save and whom to allow to die when conditions do not allow of saving all. Triage has been used in medical emergencies when limited facilities have been applied to those with the best chance of making it. Now there is a feeling that triage might be applied on a worldwide scale, that some nations and regions cannot be saved and that no effort should be made to save them.

  It occurred to Levinson that the subject could be treated through the medium of science fiction and since my name was staring at him on the same contents page, he approached me. I was struck with the idea and agreed at once. I started it on January 19, 1975. Levinson liked THE WINNOWING when it was done and it was all set to appear in the June 1975 issue, when the magazine suddenly suspended publication the issue before.

  Sad and embarrassed, Levinson returned the story, but, of course, it wasn’t his fault, so I wrote him a reassuring letter. After all, the story had been paid for and it wasn’t likely I couldn’t place it elsewhere.

  Ben Bova took it at once, in fact, and it appeared in the February 1976 Analog.

  The Winnowing

  Five years had passed since the steadily thickening wall of secrecy had been clamped down about the work of Dr. Aaron Rodman.

  “For your own protection--” they had warned him.

  “In the hands of the wrong people--” they had explained.

  In the right hands, of course (his own, for instance, Dr. Rodman thought rather despairingly), the discovery was clearly the greatest boon to human health since Pasteur’s working out of the germ theory, and the greatest key to the understanding of the mechanism of life, ever.

  Yet after his talk at the New York Academy of Medicine soon after his fiftieth birthday, and on the first day of the Twenty-first Century (there had been a certain fitness to that), the silence had been imposed, and he could talk no more, except to certain officials. He certainly could not publish.

  The government supported him, however. He had all the money he needed, and the computers were his to do with as he wished. His work advanced rapidly and government men came to him to be instructed, to be made to understand.

  “Dr. Rodman,” they would ask, “how can a virus be spread from cell to cell within an organism and yet not be infectious from one organism to the next?”

  It wearied Rodman to have to say over and over that he did not have all the answers. It wearied him to have to use the term “virus.” He said, “It’s not a virus because it isn’t a nucleic acid molecule. It is something else altogether -a lipoprotein.”

  It was better when his questioners were not themselves medical men. He could then try to explain in generalities instead of forever bogging down on the fine points. He would say, “Every living cell, and every small structure within the cell, is surrounded by a membrane. The workings of each cell depend on what molecules can pass through the membrane in either direction and at what rates. A slight change in the membrane will alter the nature of the flow enormously, and with that, the nature of the cell chemistry and the nature of its activity.

  “All disease may rest on alterations in membrane activity. All mutations may be carried through by way of such alterations. Any technique that controls the membranes controls life. Hormones control the body by their effort on membranes and my lipoprotein is an artificial hormone rather than a virus. The LP incorporates itself into the membrane and in the process induces the manufacture of more molecules like itself-and that’s the part I don’t understand myself.

  “But the fine structures of the membranes are not quite identical everywhere. They are, in fact, different in all living things-not quite the same -in any two organisms. An LP will affect no two individual organisms alike. What will open the cells of one organism to glucose and relieve the effects of diabetes, will close the cells of another organism to lysine and kill it.”

  That was what seemed to interest them most; that it was a poison.

  “A selective poison,” Rodman would say. “You couldn’t tell, in advance, without the closest computer-aided studies of the membrane biochemistry of a particular individual, what a particular LP would do to him.”

  With time, the noose grew tighter about himself, inhibiting his freedom, yet leaving him comfortable--in a world in which freedom and comfort alike were vanishing everywhere, and the jaws of hell were opening before a despairing humanity.

  It was 2005 and Earth’s population was six billion. But for the famines it would have been seven billion. A billion human beings had starved in the past generation, and more would yet starve.

  Peter Affare, chairman of the World Food Organization, came frequently to Rodman’s laboratories for chess and conversation. It was he, he said, who had first grasped the signifi
cance of Rodman’s talk at the Academy, and that had helped make him chairman. Rodman thought the significance was easy to grasp, but said nothing about that.

  Affare was ten years younger than Rodman, and the red was darkening out of his hair. He smiled frequently although the subject of the conversation rarely gave cause for smiling, since any chairman of an organization dealing with world food was bound to talk about world famine.

  Affare said, “If the food supply were evenly distributed among all the world’s inhabitants, all would starve to death.”

  “If it were evenly distributed,” said Rodman, “the example of justice in the world might lead at last to a sane world policy. As it is, there is world despair and fury over the selfish fortune of a few, and all behave irrationally in revenge.”

  “You do not volunteer to give up your own oversupply of food,” said Affare.

  “I am human and selfish, and my own action would mean little. I should not be asked to volunteer. I should be given no choice in the matter.”

  “You are a romantic,” said Affare. “Do you fail to see that the Earth is a lifeboat? If the food store is divided equally among all, then all will die. If some are cast out of the lifeboat, the remainder will survive. The question is not whether some will die, for some must die; the question is whether some will live.”

  “Are you advocating triage--the sacrifice of some for the rest--officially?”

  “We can’t. The people in the lifeboat are armed. Several regions threaten openly to use nuclear weapons if more food is not forthcoming.”

  Rodman said sardonically, “You mean the answer to ‘you die that I may live’ is ‘If I die, you die.’ ...An impasse.”