Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

by Isaac Asimov

  Devers smiled and said, “Why not wait for the election? “ After all, it was his idea.

  They did.

  Challenge To The Reader

  What happened on election day? Did the negative vote win or the positive? And, in either case, why? The best reason counts. You can win if you have the vote come out negative or positive.

  On the evening of election day, Hopkins found himself almost unable to talk. The vote had been running a steady 90 percent in favor of “Yes” and there was simply no question about it.

  The colonists of Mars were voting to allow their planet to be used for the work that would eventually send human beings to the stars.

  Hopkins said, finally, “What happened? What did we do right? “

  “It was the tune,” said Devers, smiling his satisfaction. “I had it figured right, but I didn’t want to explain my notion because I didn’t want it to get out to the other side somehow. Not that I don’t trust everyone here, but I didn’t want the tune neutralized in some clever way.”

  “What was there about the tune that made so much difference?” demanded Hopkins.

  “Well, it did have a subliminal message. Maybe the colonists no longer knew enough French to get the meaning of the words, but they had to know the name of the battle-hymn. That name rang through their minds each time they heard the tune; each time they hummed it.”

  “So what?”

  “So this,” said Devers, grinning, “The name is ‘Mars say yes!”‘

  Feghoot And The Courts

  The planet of Lockmania, inhabitated though it was by intelligent beings that looked like large wombats, had adopted the American legal system, and Ferdinand Feghoot had been sent there by the Earth Confederation to study the results.

  Feghoot watched with interest as a husband and wife were brought in, charged with disturbing the peace. During a religious observation, when for twenty minutes the congregation was supposed to maintain silence, while concentrating on their sins and visualizing them as melting away, the woman had suddenly risen from her squatting position and screamed loudly. When someone rose to object, the man had pushed him forcefully.

  The judges listened solemnly, fined the woman a silver dollar, and the man a twenty-dollar gold piece.

  Almost immediately afterward, seventeen men and women were brought in. They had been ringleaders of a crowd that had demonstrated for better quality meat at a supermarket. They had torn the supermarket apart and inflicted various bruises and lacerations on eight of the employees of the establishment.

  Again the judges listened solemnly, and fined the seventeen a silver dollar apiece.

  Afterward, Feghoot said to the chief judge. “I approved of your handling of the man and woman who disturbed the peace.”

  “It was a simple case,” said the judge. “We have a legal maxim that goes, ‘Screech is silver, but violence is golden.’”

  “In that case,” said Feghoot, “why did you fine the group of seventeen a silver dollar apiece when they had committed far worse violence?”

  “Oh, that’s another legal maxim,” said the judge. “Every crowd has a silver fining.”

  Fault-Intolerant

  9 January

  I, Abram Ivanov, finally have a home computer; a word processor, to be exact. I fought it as long as I could. I argued it out with myself. I am America’s most prolific writer and I do fine on a typewriter. Last year I published over thirty books. Some of them were small books for kids. Some were anthologies. But there were also novels, short story collections, essay collections, nonfiction books. Nothing to be ashamed of.

  So why do I need a word processor? I can’t go any faster. But, you know, there’s such a thing as neatness. Typing my stuff means I have to introduce pen-and-ink items to correct typos, and nobody does that anymore. I don’t want my manuscripts to stick out like a sore thumb. I don’t want editors to think my stuff is second rate, just because it is corrected.

  The difficulty was finding a machine that wouldn’t take two years to learn to use. Deft, I’m not-as

  I’ve frequently mentioned in this diary. And I want one that doesn’t break down every other day. Mechanical failures just throw me. So I got one that’s “fault-tolerant. “ That means if some component goes wrong, the machine keeps right on working, tests the malfunctioning component, corrects it if it can, reports it if it can’t, and replacements can be carried through by anybody. It doesn’t take an expert hacker.

  Sounds like my kind of thing.

  5 February

  I haven’t been mentioning my word processor lately, because I’ve been struggling to learn how it works.

  I’ve managed. For a while, I had a lot of trouble, because although I have a high IQ, it’s a very specialized high IQ. I can write, but coping with mechanical objects throws me.

  But I learned quickly, once I gained sufficient confidence. What did it was this. The manufacturer’s representative assured me that the machine would develop flaws only rarely, and would be unable to correct its own flaws only exceedingly rarely. He said I wouldn’t be likely to need a new component oftener than once in five years.

  And if I did need one, they would hear exactly what was needed from the machine. The computer would then replace the part itself, do all the wiring and oiling that was necessary and reject the old part, which I could then throwaway.

  That’s sort of exciting. I almost wish something would go wrong so that I could get a new part and insert it. I could tell everyone, “Oh, sure, the discombobulator blew a fuse, and I fixed it like a shot.

  Nothing to it.” But they wouldn’t believe me.

  I’m going to try writing a short story on it. Nothing too long. Just about two thousand words, maybe. If I get confused, I can always go back to the typewriter until I’ve regained my confidence. Then I can try again.

  14 February

  I didn’t get confused. Now that the proof is in, I can talk about it. The short story went as smoothly as cream. I brought it in and they’ve taken it. No problem.

  So I’ve finally started my new novel. I should have started it a month ago, but I had to make sure I could work my word processor first. Let’s hope it works. It’ll seem funny not having a pile of yellow sheets

  I can rifle through when I want to check something I said a hundred pages earlier, but I suppose I can learn how to check back on the discs.

  19 February

  The computer has a spelling correction component. That caught me by surprise because the representative hadn’t told me about it. At first, it let misspellings go and I just proofread each page as I turned it out. But then it began to mark off any word it was unfamiliar with, which was a little bothersome because my vocabulary is a large one and I have no objection to making up words. And, of course, any proper name I use is something it was unfamiliar with.

  I called the representative because it was annoying to have to be notified of all sorts of corrections that didn’t really have to be made.

  The representative said, “Don’t let that bother you, Mr. Ivanov. If it questions a word that you want to remain as it is, just retype it exactly as it is and the computer will get the idea and not correct it the next time.”

  That puzzled me. “Don’t I have to set up a dictionary for the machine? How will it know what’s right and what’s wrong?”

  “That’s part of the fault-tolerance, Mr. Ivanov,” he said. “The machine already has a basic dictionary and it picks up new words as you use them. You will find that it will pick up false misspellings to a smaller and smaller degree. To tell you truthfully, Mr. Ivanov, you have a late model there and we’re not sure we know all its potentialities. Some of our researchers consider it fault-tolerant in that it can continue to work despite its own flaws, but fault-intolerant in that it won’t stand for flaws in those who use it. Please report to us if there’s anything puzzling. We would really like to know.” I’m not sure I’ll like this.

  7 March

  Well, I’ve been struggling with
the word processor and I don’t know what to think. For a long time, it would mark off misspellings, and I would retype them correctly. And it certainly learned how to tell real misspellings. I had no trouble there. In fact, when I had a long word, I would sometimes throw in a wrong letter just to see if it would catch it. I would write “supercede” or “vaccum” or “Skenectady.” It almost never failed.

  And then yesterday a funny thing happened. It stopped waiting for me to retype the wrong spelling. It retyped it automatically itself. You can’t help striking the wrong key sometimes so I would write “ She” instead of “the” and the “ 5” would change to a “t” in front of my eyes. And it would happen quickly, too.

  I tested it by deliberately typing a word with a wrong letter. I would see it show up wrong on the screen. I would blink my eyes and it would be right.

  This morning I phoned the representative. “Hmm,” he said. “Interesting.”

  “Troublesome,” I said, “it might introduce mistakes. If I type ‘blww’ does the machine correct it to ‘blew’ or to ‘blow’? Or what if it thinks I mean ‘blue,’ ‘ue’ when I really mean ‘blew,’ ‘ew.’ See what I mean?”

  He said, “I have discussed your machine with one of our theoretical experts. He tells me it may be capable of absorbing internal clues from your writing and knows which word you really want to use. As you type into it, it begins to understand your style and integrate it into its own programming.”

  A little scary, but it’s convenient. I don’t have to proofread the pages now.

  20 March

  I really don’t have to proofread the pages. The machine has taken to correcting my punctuation and word order.

  The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe it. I thought I had had a small attack of dizziness and had imagined I had typed something that wasn’t really on the screen.

  It happened oftener and oftener and there was no mistake about it. It got to the point where I couldn’t make a mistake in grammar. If I tried to type something like “Jack, and Jill went up the hill,” that comma simply wouldn’t appear. No matter how I tried to type “I has a book,” it always shows up as “I have a book.” Or if I wrote, “Jack, and Jill as well, went up the hill,” then I couldn’t omit the commas. They’d go in of their own accord.

  It’s a lucky thing I keep this diary in longhand or I couldn’t explain what I mean. I couldn’t give an example of wrong English.

  I don’t really like to have a computer arguing with me over English, but the worst part of it is that it’s always right.

  Well, look, I don’t throw a fit when a human copy editor sends me back a manuscript with corrections in every line. I’m just a writer, I’m not an expert on the minutiae of English. Let the copy editors copyedit, they still can’t write. And so let the word processor copyedit. It takes a load off me.

  17 April

  I spoke too soon in the last item in which I mentioned my word processor. For three weeks, it copyedited me and my novel went along smoothly. It was a good working arrangement. I did the creating and it did the modulating, so to speak.

  Then yesterday evening, it refused to work at all. Nothing happened, no matter what keys were touched. It was plugged in all right; the wall switch was on; I was doing everything correctly. It just wouldn’t work. Well I thought, so much for that business about “Not once in five years.” I’d only been using it for three and a half months and already so many parts were out that it wouldn’t work.

  That meant that new parts ought to come from the factory by special messenger, but not till the next day, of course. I felt terrible, you can bet, and I dreaded having to go back to the typewriter, searching out all my own mistakes and then having to make pen-and-ink corrections or to retype the page.

  I went to bed in a foul humor, and didn’t actually sleep much. First thing in the morning, or, anyway, after breakfast, I went into my office, and just as I walked up to the word processor, as though it could read my mind and tell that I was so annoyed I would cheerfully have kicked it off the desk and out the window-it started working.

  All by itself, mind you. I never touched the keys. The words appeared on the screen a lot more quickly than I could have made them appear and it began with:

  Fault-Intolerant

  by Abram Ivanov

  I simply stared. It went on to write my diary items concerning itself, as I have done above, but much better. The writing was smoother, more colorful, with a successful touch of humor. In fifteen minutes, it was done, and in five minutes the printer had placed it on sheets.

  That apparently had just been for exercise, or for practice, for once that was done, the last page I had written of my novel appeared on the screen, and then the words began to proceed without me.

  The word processor had clearly learned to write my stuff, just as I would have written it, only better.

  Great! No more work. The word processor wrote it under my name and wrote with my style, given a certain amount of improvement. I could just let it go, pick up the surprised reviews from my critics telling the world how I had improved, and watch the royalties pour in.

  That’s all right as far as it goes, but I’m not America’s most prolific writer for no reason. I happen to love to write. That happens to be all that I want to do.

  Now if my word processor does my writing, what do I do with the rest of my life?

  Kid Brother

  It was a great shock to me when our application for a second child was refused. We had really expected to get the license.

  I’m a respectable citizen; pillar of the community; all that kind of stuff. I was a little old, maybe.

  Josie-my wife-may have been past her best childbearing years. So what? We know other people worse off than us, older, trashy in character, who-Well, never mind.

  We had one son, Charlie, and we really wanted another child. Boy or girl, it didn’t matter. Of course, if there was something wrong with Charlie, if he developed some illness, maybe then we could license a second child. Or maybe not. And if we did get the license, they would probably take care of Charlie as a defective. You know what I mean; I don’t have to say it.

  The trouble was we were late getting started, and that was Josie’s fault. She had irregular periods and you never knew when to get her, if you know what I mean. And we couldn’t get any medical help, either. How could we? The clinics said if we couldn’t have children without help, that was great for the world. It’s patriotic, or something, to be childless.

  But we fooled them and had a child after all. Charlie.

  When Charlie was eight months old, we started applying for a second child. We wanted them pretty close in age. Was that so much to ask? Even if we were getting a little old for it? What kind of a world do we live in, anyway. No matter how much the population drops, they say it has to drop further, and if life gets easier and people live longer, it has to drop still further.

  They won’t be satisfied till they wipe out humanity alto-

  Well, look! I’ll tell this just the way I want to. If you want the story, officer, you’ll have to take it my way. What can you do to me? I really don’t much care if I live or die. Would you in my position?

  — Look, it’s no use arguing. I’ll tell it my way, or I’ll shut up and you can do your worst. You understand?

  — Well then, okay.

  As it turned out, we didn’t have to worry about Charlie being sickly, or anything like that. He grew like a bear, or one of those other animals that used to hang around in the woods and places like that in the old days. He came of good stock. You could see that. So why couldn’t we have had another child?

  That’s what I want to know.

  Intelligent? You bet. Strong. Knew what he wanted. Ideal boy. When I think of it, I could-I could-Oh, well.

  You should have seen him with the other kids as he was growing up. A natural leader. Always had his way. Always had the other children in the neighborhood doing what he wanted. He knew what he wanted and what he wanted was
always right. That was the thing.

  Josie didn’t like it, though. She said he was spoiled. In fact, she said I spoiled him. I don’t know what she was talking about. I was the making of him.

  He was two years ahead of his age in strength and in brains. I could see that. And if the other children got out of line, sometimes he would have to show them who was boss.

  Josie thought he was getting to be a bully. She said he had no friends; all the children were afraid of him.

  So what! A leader doesn’t want friends. He wants people to respect him, and if they get out of line, they better fear him. Charlie was coming along all right. Sure, the other children stayed away mostly. That was their parents’ fault; and they’re just a bunch of milksops. Once they get one child, and know they won’t have any more, they start hovering over him or her like they were the family jewels, and rare jewels, too. You smother them if you do that. They become useless-worthless.

  There was this guy Stevenson down the block. He had two girls, both pitiful things, giggling and empty-headed. How did he come to get two, I ask you? He knew somebody, maybe. A little money passed from hand to hand. Why not, he’s got more money than he admits, too. Naturally. That accounts for it.

  You’d think with two, he could afford to risk one, but no-

  — That’s all right. I’ll get to the point, when I get to the point. If you push, you’ll get nothing and we’ll let it go straight to the court. See if I care.