The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library)

by John Sladek

  ‘But what is it good for?’ Grandison asked. ‘Besides making duplicates of itself, what is its function?’

  ‘A robot,’ declared Louie softly, ‘could instruct me in hand-to-hand Kabuki.’

  ‘You still don’t understand, Granny,’ Dill said, with a patronizing shake of his head. ‘It isn’t good for anything. That’s exactly what the government wants. What we want.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Grandison. He sighed. ‘It seems so dishonest.’

  ‘We’ll be creating thousands of new jobs—for scientists, marine guards, government clerks who keep us on file.’

  ‘I know, I know, but will we make money?’ the president snapped.

  ‘Millions.’

  They voted at once. The vote was ‘aye’ all around the table, to Louie.

  ‘Aye, I guess,’ he muttered. ‘But hey, Pop, how about a robot, though? Huh, how about—’

  Grandison reached over and cracked the jar with his gavel. The spring grip device leapt out, scattering glass and brown pills, and releasing the thick fingers of Louie the Womp from captivity.

  ‘Motion carried.’

  CHAPTER II

  ANOMALIES

  ‘$u¢¢e$$!’

  Sign on wall at Wompler Research Laboratories

  ‘I, too, am a failure,’ murmured Cal, staring at the jellyfish thing in the tank. It was supposed to be bright pink and right-side up. ‘This is the end for me too, old Plagyodus. I’ve ruined my last experiment.’

  He did not deem it necessary to add that it was his first experiment at Wompler Research, or that he had only been hired through the wonderful mistake of an IBM machine. The grey, deflated mass in the tank did not seem to be listening, anyway. A twisted rope of multicoloured wires rose from it to a panel of dials. The dials were all at zero.

  Sighing, Cal began to write on the chart hanging next to the tank, ‘Biomech. arrgt. 173b aborted 1750 hours’.

  It was more than a job he would be losing; it was a chance to do work leading to a doctorate. Everything I touchy, he thought, turns to failure. As if bearing out his words, the ballpoint pen ran dry.

  Experimenting, he found that it would write on his hand perfectly, but not on the wall chart. He covered his palm with blue scrawls and trial signatures : ‘Calvin Codman Potter, Ph.D’.

  ‘It’s the angle,’ said Hamuro Hita, the project statistician. ‘It

  won’t feed ink uphill.’

  Cal blushed, corrected the angle of the pen and signed the chart. ‘Thanks. I guess I’m not very observant for an experimenter. In fact, I’ve just ruined this experiment. I suppose you won’t be seeing much of me around here from now on.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll can you for one mistake. What happened, anyway?’ Hita spoke without pausing in his work, summing figures on an adding machine.

  ‘I forgot to put the temperature control on automatic last night.’ Ripping loose the wires from their instruments, Cal hauled up the grey, dripping lump. ‘It—it poached, or something.’ Lifting the lid of a garbage can, he plumped in the jellyfish and stuffed in the bright stiff wires after it. Hita nodded at a chair by his desk, and Cal flopped into it.

  ‘That’s what’ll happen to me, when they find out all about me,’ he said, indicating the garbage can. ‘The way they saw it, I was a bright, promising lad, having graduated at the top of my class at MIT. They expected me to set the world on fire. Whereas—’

  ‘Whereas—?’

  ‘I guess I’d rather not talk about it after all. Let’s say I was hired by mistake, and I’m scared that any minute they’ll realize it.’

  Hita nodded, and the two men lapsed into moody silence. Finishing his addition, the mathematician began cleaning his briar pipe with one blade of a pair of black-handled scissors. Cal stared about the lab, unable to conquer the feeling that he was saying goodbye to it all. Goodbye, QUIDNAC modular computer; goodbye, maze for phototropic ‘rats’; goodbye, solution in which grew a green crystalline tree, every branch of which formed part of an electronic circuit; goodbye, miniature automatic forge. He did not forget a goodbye to the main entrance, guarded by a stiff, humourless adolescent in the uniform of the Marine Corps.

  ‘We’re all flying under false colours here,’ said Hita, sliding a paperback book out of his desk drawer. ‘Do you know why the Womplers hired me? Because Louie wanted to learn Origami. The way he saw it, I’m Japanese, ergo …’

  ‘I don’t believe it !’

  ‘But you’ve only been here a week. You hardly know the Womplers, father and son. You haven’t even met the project head, Dr. Smilax. I assume your main dealings have been with

  them.’

  ‘Meaning the Mackintosh brothers?’

  Hita smiled. ‘Or as some of us call them, the brothers Frankenstein.’

  ‘But what were you telling me about Origami?’

  ‘Officially, I’m a mathematician. In fact, my duties include teaching Louie Origami. I’ve had to study up on it myself, of course. Luckily, I found this book at the drugstore.’ He riffled the pages of the paperback. ‘It’s a good job, all the same. I can make enough money at this to start my own statistical lab soon, and I only need to be silly for a half-hour a day.’

  ‘But how have you fooled them, if you don’t even know–—?’

  ‘It’s easy. You see, Louie thought Origami was a kind of Japanese self-defence. I’ve been able to make up my own rules, mostly, as we go along (I told him I was ‘black scissors’, and he was properly impressed).

  ‘As for Grandison Wompler, he seems to think I ought to speak Spanish, for some reason. I rather like the two of them. There are even days when I can stand the brothers F. The only person around here who gives me the creeps is Dr. Smilax himself.’

  ‘Have you met him? What’s he like?’ asked Cal.

  ‘No, I haven’t met him, and neither has anyone else I know of, except the twins; that’s the odd thing about him. No one even seems to know anything about him except that he’s a surgeon and a biochemist. You’d think the head of a research team would at least want to meet his subordinates, but he’s so inaccessible—’

  Cal nudged him and pointed to the entrance, above which a red bulb had begun glowing. The marine guard drew his automatic and covered the two persons entering, until they showed him the red badges of Kurt and Karl Mackintosh.

  Kurt skipped to get into step with his twin, and they strode on across the lab rapidly.

  Their immense, bulging foreheads, exaggerated by advanced baldness and invisibly pale eyebrows, loomed over tiny, pouting faces to give them the look of kewpies or dimestore cherubs. They were plump and sexless creatures, these two, and it was hard to believe them the best cybernetics engineers this side of the Iron Curtain. The only features they possessed that were not of idiot quality were their eyes. Restless, flickering, intelligent, they were the colour of bluebottle flies.

  The brothers flicked a glance at the empty tank, another at the chart, another at Cal.

  ‘We expected more of an MIT valedictorian,’ Karl said nastily, as if speaking to his brother.

  ‘That’s right, Karl. He has not only ruined experiment 173b, but we have not had a single original idea from him, and he has not hypothesized a single biomechanical arrangement.’

  ‘True enough, Kurt.’ The brothers, perhaps because of their similarity, seemed to find it desirable to identify one another often. ‘True it is, Kurt. I begin to wonder if MIT’s standards have not declined.’

  Hita cleared his throat. Steering themselves, as it were, by the clipboards under their arms, the two spun towards him. ‘But, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘Potter was just now discussing with me his new idea for a biomechanical arrangement. A sort of steel-shelled oyster, wasn’t it, Cal?’

  ‘Yes. A sort of—um—steel-shelled oyster. Yes. You see, it would have a number of advantages. Too numerous to mention.’

  ‘Such as—?’ said the twins together.

  ‘Well—instead of a pearl, it produces a ball
-bearing. A slow way to make ball-bearings, admittedly, but then we’re not really interested in the manufacture of—’

  ‘I hope, Kurt, that he will follow out his line of inquiry,’ said Karl.

  ‘And write a monograph,’ Kurt added. ‘But meanwhile we’ll assign him to Project 32 as a special assistant. He can help wire up circuits, Karl.’

  Cal felt he had been both chastised and given a second chance. He was about to stammer out his thanks when the light above the door glowed a second time.

  ‘Good evening !’ boomed Grandison Wompler from the doorway. ‘Say, it’s long after five, and we don’t pay overtime, you know.’

  The Mackintosh twins drew themselves up slightly. Karl said, ‘Dedication to the human race cannot be curtailed by mere time.’

  ‘Our work goes on,’ his brother intoned, ‘day and night, committed ever to the achievement of peace in our time, final, eternal peace—’

  ‘That’s fine. But do you have to have all these lights on?’ Grandison entered, waving aside the aimed pistol of the marine guard, and donned a white lab coat from a locker.

  ‘Our newest project will consume immense quantities of power,’ Kurt informed him. ‘But it will benefit the human race immeasurably.’

  ‘Great. Good work, boys. But will it get me a new contract? Will it put Millford on the map? Will it make the government want to shower money on me?’

  The twins looked at one another for a flickering second. ‘It will indeed,’ they chorused.

  Louie stuck his head in the door and shouted to Hita, ‘Oh, there you are.’ He smiled and nodded at the marine guard, who was trying to decide whether or not to shoot him. ‘Hita, I’ll meetcha in the gym, OK?’ Hita smiled and nodded, and the ebullient intruder withdrew.

  Grandison turned around and noticed the statistician. ‘Hi there, amigo !’ he said grinning, and walked over to him, hand extended. Hita was the only member of the staff with whom Grandison ever shook hands. ‘Como esta Usted?’

  ‘Muy bien,’ replied the Japanese, without enthusiasm.

  ‘That’s fine, fine. Now, if any of these fellows don’t treat you right, you just come tell me, hear? I signed a government contract, and that means I got to give fair and equal employment to You Fellows. It don’t matter what your race, creed, colour or religion is, you’re all Americans !’

  ‘But I’m not an American,’ Hita protested. Grandison affected not to hear him.

  ‘Yes, I rebuilt this company from nothing, in less man a year—and I want to keep what we got. We got the finest cafeteria, the best coffee machines, the nicest bowling alleys and gym, the cleanest bomb shelters money can buy—and I want us to keep ’em. I want all you boys, black and white, to put your backs into it and really pull—for the company !’

  ‘I’m sure we’re all doing our best,’ said Hita, picking up a pair of scissors. ‘Well, I must go. Adios.’

  ‘We, too, must leave, Kurt,’ said Karl. ‘We must confer with Dr. S. just now. Potter here can show you around the lab, Mr. Wompler.’ The brothers moved off, in lock-step.

  ‘Say,’ said Grandison behind his hand. ‘I heard someone say their name was Frankenstein.’ His voice dropped to a confidential whisper and his face grew solemn. ‘They ain’t—they ain’t Jews, are they?’

  ‘I believe they are Irish Protestants, sir,’ said Cal, trying to keep his face straight. ‘Their name is Mackintosh. Would you

  like to see the lab?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’

  At each exhibit, Grandison would pause while Cal named the piece of equipment. Then he would repeat the name softly, with a kind of wonder, nod sagely and move on. Cal was strongly reminded of the way some people look at modern art exhibitions, where the labels become more important to them than the objects. He found himself making up elaborate names.

  ‘And this, you’ll note, is the Mondriaan Modular Mnemonicon.’

  ‘—onicon, yes.’

  ‘And the Empyrean diffrean diffractosphere.’

  ‘—sphere. Mn. I see.’

  Nothing surprised Grandison, for he was looking at nothing. Cal became wilder. Pointing to Hita’s desk, he said. ‘The chiarascuro thermocouple.’

  ‘Couple? Looks like only one, to me. Interesting, though.’

  A briar pipe became a ‘zygotic pipette’, the glass ashtray a ‘Piltdown retort’, and the lamp a ‘phase-conditioned Aeolian’. Paperclips became ‘nuances’.

  ‘Nuances, I see. Very fine. What’s that thing, now?’ He pointed to an oscilloscope. Cal took a deep breath.

  ‘Its full name,’ he said, ‘is the Praetorian eschatalogical morphomorphic tangram, Endymion-type, but we usually just call it a ramification.’

  The old man fixed him with a stern black eye. ‘Are you trying to be funny or something? I mean, I may not be a smart-aleck scientist, but I sure as hell know a television, when I see one.’

  Cal assured him it was not a television, and proved it by switching it on. ‘See,’ he said, pointing to a pattern of square waves, ‘there are the little anapests.’

  ‘I’ll be damned ! So they are.’

  Cal went on to show him a few revanchist doctrines before the president, satisfied, took his departure.

  ‘Keep up the good work,’ he called out, ‘and take good care of the company equipment. Them ramifications don’t grow on trees y’know.’

  Cal began to chew his fingernails off, one by one, leaning against a lab table and dropping the parings in a Piltdown retort. How long can I get away with this? he wondered. They still think I’m from MIT. And so I am. From Miami Institute of Technocracy.

  Miami Institute of Technocracy was the only school in the nation that gave a Bachelor of Applied Arts degree in biophysics. Cal had graduated in a class of four : Harry Stropp, Bachelor of Physical Education, Mary Junes, Home Economics Technician, Barthemo Beele, Associate of Journalism. Cal had headed the class.

  I’ll confess to Dr. Smilax, he decided. I can explain it was all a mistake. He switched off the lights and left. The marine guard remained alone, standing at attention in the darkness.

  Cal stopped at the hall bulletin board. A new notice had been posted, and now, stalling for time, he stopped to read it.

  ‘PROJECT 32. Supervisors : DR. K. MACKINTOSH & DR. K. MACKINTOSH. Special Assistant : POTTER. Inspection will be 21 June 196–. At some time after this date, DR. A. CANDLEWOOD (Behavioural Psychol.) will join the staff.’

  Cal looked from the signature (impersonally mimeographed) to the door marked :

  T. Smilax M.D.

  NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL

  THIS MEANS YOU

  ABSOLUTELY RESTRICTED AREA

  Changing his mind, Cal spun around and headed for the main door. As he passed the open window of the gymnasium building, he heard Hita shout, ‘Hai !’ There was the sound of shearing paper.

  CHAPTER III

  A REPORT ON PROJECT 32

  ‘He who understands me finally recognizes my propositions as senseless.’

  LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

  TOP SECRET TOP SECRET TOP SECRET TOP SECRET

  I. The Purpose of Project 32

  Project 32 is the code name of a series of experiments undertaken at the Wompler Research Laboratory in Millford, Utah, in 196–. The purpose of Project 32 was to determine :

  (a) if it were possible to set into motion an autonomous, self-reproducing mechanism, a ‘Reproductive System’, and

  (b) the military use, if any, of such a system.

  II. The Background of Project 32

  Prior to the initiation of this project, it was generally considered impracticable, if not impossible, to design and set into motion a system capable of self-support, learning and reproduction. (a) Although computers had been programmed to perform simple analogies 1 or ‘learn’, i.e., profit from their mistakes in straight-forward games, they showed little promise as learning machines. And for a system to be autonomous, it must be able to discriminate portions of its environment, analogize from past experiences
and profit from mistakes of a rather complex nature. (b) Although ‘autonomous’ automated production lines already existed, they were at the mercy of their environments for power and materials. (c) Some computers had already been used to solve problems in circuitry, thus in effect ‘redesigning’ themselves. But there remained what seemed an unbridgeable gap between these and a true self-reproducing machine.

  III. The Experiments

  Early experiments comprised attempts to construct living/non-living ‘symbioses’ : Inculcating in the nervous system of a coelentrate an electric motor circuit;2 encasing oysters in shells of flexible steel;3 equipping mice with electro-hydraulically-operated tails;4 and many similar attempts, none satisfactory.

  IV. The Theory

  Out of these early experiments a modular of cellular system was conceived of, functioning somewhere between a polypidon and a highly structured society. Each cell should be :

  (a) Organized along similar lines with its fellows, and equipped to recognize order and respond to it.

  (b) Equipped to repair intracellular breakdowns, as far as possible, and to ‘eat’ non-functional cells.

  (c) Able to convert power and material from its environment into itself, and to construct new cells like itself from any surplus power and material, i.e., to reproduce.

  (d) Able to prevent its own destruction by flight, by diversion of or neutralization of the destructive agent. E.g., if made of steel, it should (1) flee from sea-water contact; (2) paint itself to seal put sea-water; or (3) develop some chemical means to neutralize the corrosive action of sea-water.

  No practical means were available to test or even construct a working model of this theoretical system, until the completion and adaptation of the QUIDNAC computer.

  V. The Quidnac

  The QUIDNAC, or Quantifiable Universal Integral DNA Computer, as originally designed by T. Smilax, had three qualities that recommended it to the project : (a) compact size; (b) a virtually infinitely-extensible memory; (c) suitability for learning complex analogic processes. In addition, T. Smilax was the head of Project 32.