Classic Fiction

by Hal Clement

  “We ought to make contact in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “We’re not supposed to use rockets close to the machine, and we have to brake down to safe contact speed at least twenty miles away. That’s why the final approach takes so long. They don’t like anything they can’t account for in the neighborhood—and that goes for stray electrons and molecules, as well as atomic converters.”

  “What is their objection to rocket blasts, provided they’re not fired directly at the station?” asked Wren. “What influence could a jet of gas even one mile away possibly have on their machinery?”

  “None, directly; but gases diffuse, and some of the elements in rocket fuel are easily ionized in sunlight. The boys in there claim that the firing of a rocket blast five miles from the outer sphere will disturb some of their circuits, when the molecules which happen to leak inside their screen are ionized there. It sounds a little farfetched to me, but that’s not my line. I do know that that machine is inoperative nearly half the time from causes which are not precisely known, but which must be of the same order of magnitude as the one I mentioned. I’m careful of my jets around here, because they’d have my job if I caused them trouble more than once; and the board would slap a ‘lack of proficiency’ on my dismissal papers, so I’d have a nasty time finding a new one.”

  “If you make this trip regularly, I don’t suppose you have much difficulty with this rather tricky glide.”

  “I’m used to it. I’ve been making this supply run every week for nearly three years, with special flights between times. This ship carries everything they need at the station, and also the bright boys from home who have special problems to work, and don’t believe the machine can handle them without their personal presence.” The pilot looked sideways at Wren. “Most of those fellows were able to tell me things I didn’t know about the computer. You’re the first sightseer I’ve ever carried. I didn’t think the universities encouraged them. Are you a journalist?”

  Wren smiled. “I don’t blame you for getting some such idea. I’ll admit I don’t know the first thing about electronic computers; the station out here is only a name to me. But I have a problem. I don’t know whether it can be stated in terms that can be treated here or now; I know very little math; but I decided to come out for a conference with the operators, to find out whether or not I could be helped.” He nodded at the great expanse of silver mesh that now filled almost the entire view area of the port. “Aren’t we getting pretty close?”

  The pilot nodded silently and returned to his seat, curbing his curiosity for the time being. Actually, there was little he could do during the “landing” since he was forbidden to use power; but he felt safer at the controls while the coppery hull of his ship drifted into the resilient metal network of the static shield and was seized by metal grapples—grapples operated by specially designed electric motors so matched and paired that the inevitable magnetic, fields accompanying their operation were indetectable at more than a few feet. The grapple cables tightened, and the swaying of the ship ceased gradually as its kinetic energy was taken up by the resilient mesh. The pilot locked his controls, and rose with a grin.

  “They tell me,” he said, “that when the screen was first built, about forty years ago, some bright boy decided that the supply rocket would have to be very carefully insulated in order not to interfere with the potential equilibrium of the outer sphere; so they coated the hull of the ship that was being used then with aluminum hydroxide, I think—something very thin, anyway, but a good insulator; and they made an approach that way while a problem was being run.” He grinned more broadly. “I don’t know the exact capacity of the condenser thus formed, but there’s an operator still out here whose favorite cuss word is the name of that board member. They had to replace several thousand tubes, I guess. Now they look on the supply ship as a necessary evil, and suspend operations while we come in and the accumulated charge on the screen drains into our hull.”

  “How do I get in to the main part?” interrupted Wren, whose interest in historical anecdotes was not of a high order.

  “There’s a hollow shaft opening outside the web not far from us. There will be men out in a few moments to unload the ship, and they’ll show you the way. You’ll have to wear a spacesuit; I’ll show you how to get into it, if you’ll come along.” He led the way from the control room to a smaller chamber between it and the cargo compartments, and in a short time had the psychologist arrayed in one of the bulky but flexible garments which men must wear to venture outside the metal bubbles which bear them so far from their own element. The pilot donned one also, and then led the way through the main airlock.

  Wren had become more or less used to weightlessness on the flight to the station, but its sudden conjunction with so much open space unnerved him for a moment, and he clutched at the arm of the figure drifting beside him. The pilot, understanding, steadied his companion, and after a moment they were able to push themselves from the lip of the airlock toward the end of the metal tube whose mouth was flush with the screen, and some thirty yards away from them. As they approached the opening, four spacesuited men appeared in it, saw them, and waited to catch their flying forms. Wren found himself set “down” within reach of a heavy strand of silver cable, which he grasped in response to the gesture of one of the men—their suit radios were not on the standard frequency, and as he learned later, were not even turned on—while the pilot promptly leaped back across the gap to his ship and disappeared inside.

  A moment later a large door aft of the airlock which he and Wren had used slid open, and the four men of the station leaped for it. It was not an airlock; for convenience of this particular station, the supplies were packed in airtight containers and the storage holds were opened directly to the void for unloading. The psychologist watched with interest as one of the men came gliding back to the shaft with the end of a rope in his gauntleted hands. He braced himself beside Wren and began pulling; and a seemingly endless chain of sealed metal boxes began to trail from the open cargo door. The first of them was accompanied by another of the men, who took the rope’s end from the hands of the first and disappeared down the shaft with it. After a brief pause, the procession of containers began to follow him down the metal tube.

  The whole unloading took less than a quarter of an hour. Wren rode the end of the chain down the shaft with the rest of the men, and found himself eventually in a chamber large enough to accommodate the whole cargo; a chamber that was evidently usable as an airlock, for after sealing the door leading from the outside, one of the men pressed a green button beside it, and within a few seconds the gradual rise to audibility of a clanging bell betokened increased air pressure.

  Wren removed his suit, with some assistance, as soon as he saw the others begin to do so; and as soon as he was rid of it approached one of the unloading crew.

  “Can you tell me,” he asked, “how to locate Dr. Vainser? He should be expecting me; we have been communicating for some time.”

  The man he had addressed looked down out of pale blue eyes from a height fully seven inches greater than the psychologist’s five feet nine.

  “You must be Dr. Wren. Vainser told me you were probably on this rocket; I’ll take you to him shortly. My name is Rudd, by the way. Is any of this stuff yours?” He waved a hand toward the cases drifting around the great chamber—the other men were capturing them slowly and fastening them to the walls for more convenient opening. Wren gave an affirmative nod.

  “I have several cubic yards of problem material somewhere in the lot. It’s all marked plainly enough, so there will be no trouble in identifying it. I say, don’t you spin this place to give centrifugal gravity? I’m still not quite sure of myself without weight.” The taller man laughed at the question.

  “I suppose we could, though it would be hard to keep the screen spherical with anything like one gravity at its rim. It was decided long ago that the conveniences derived from spin were far more than offset by the nuisances; you’ll be weightless as l
ong as you are here.” He sobered momentarily. “As a matter of fact, I doubt that Vainser could stand much acceleration. You’ll see why when you meet him.” Wren had raised his eyebrows interrogatively at Rudd’s first remark; but the blond giant refused to amplify it further. He turned abruptly away from the psychologist, and left him without apology to assist in the anchoring of the last of the cases. This job took rather longer than the original unloading, and Wren was forced to curb his impatience and curiosity until it was completed.

  At last, however, Rudd turned back to his guest, and without bothering to speak beckoned him to follow. He led the way through a circular doorway opposite the original entrance, and Wren found himself in a brightly lighted, metal-walled corridor apparently extending toward the center of the globular structure. Down this the two men glided for some distance; then Rudd led the way into another and yet another passage, all brightly lighted as the first. At last, however, he checked his flight before a closed door, on which he knocked—such conveniences as electric annunciators were taboo within the walls of the station.

  The voice that sounded from behind the panel, bidding them enter, was the first intimation to Wren of the meaning that lay behind Rudd’s enigmatic remark of a few minutes before. It was a reedy, barely audible whisper, that reached their ears only because of the ventilating grill in the solid door. It suggested a speaker crushed under an unutterable load of illness, fatigue, old age; and hearing it, Wren was slightly prepared for the sight that greeted his eyes as Rudd swung the door open and the two men entered.

  Vainser, indeed, could not have stood anything like the strain of Earth gravity. What must once have been strong, athletic body was shrunken until it could have weighed scarcely eighty pounds; skinny wrists and ankles, and a pipe-stem neck protruding from the man’s clothing left little doubt of his physical condition. Wren could not even imagine his probable age; great as it must have been, the eyes that peered steadily from the brown, wrinkled old face were as alert as those of man in his prime. On Earth, that body would have given out long before; but in the gravity-free environment of the station almost the only work required of the feeble heart was to keep a reasonable supply of blood circulating to the still keen brain.

  Wren concealed his astonishment as best he could, and gave his attention to the whispered greeting that came from the lips of the ancient.

  “You are Dr. Wren, I suppose. I feel that I know you quite well from our former communication, but I am glad to meet you in person. Your problem has interested me greatly, and I shall be more than glad to help in all possible ways to prepare your data for machine solution. Judging by what you have written me so far, it will be a long task.

  “I have not yet mentioned your work to the others here, but I am sure we shall need assistance; so perhaps you will explain the nature of your study to Rudd, here, while I listen and perhaps learn more than you have already told me. By the time you have finished, your data cases should be in the office I am assigning to you, and we can start serious work whenever you wish.”

  Wren expressed his agreement with this proposal, and relaxed where he was, as there were, of course, no chairs in the room. The others hung motionless as he began to speak, their silent attention displaying their interest in the psychologist’s words.

  “My problem stems from a very old question, to which I do not even yet expect to get a complete answer. You are aware, unless you are imbedded even more deeply in the rut of your own profession than I am in mine, that many hypotheses have been advanced in the past few centuries on the nature of mind and thought. That is really the fundamental problem of my profession. The first scientific approaches to the problem were made in the late nineteenth century, by such men as Thorndike, Ebbinghaus, and Pavlov. Many theories were evolved; one of the earliest arose, I suppose, from Pavlov’s work, for it tried to explain learning and thought by the development and strengthening of interneural connections between stimuli and responses. It was claimed that the number of cells in the cerebral cortex was sufficiently large to permit enough different combinations to account for the reactions and ideas of a man’s life. I believe it was computed that the number of possible combinations of connection between and among those cells is something like ten to the three billionth power.”

  Rudd raised his eyebrows at this. “If that figure is correct, then all the reactions and ideas of every creature that has lived on Earth since the planet was made could easily be included. That number shocks even me, and I’ve been fooling around with problems involving the number of electrons in the universe—a mere ten to the fortieth or fiftieth, as I recall. What’s wrong with the theory?”

  “Mere forming of connections, and strengthening with use, doesn’t seem to be enough. If I were to have you hold your left hand against an electrode, and give you small but annoying electric shocks by means of it, preceding each shock by the ringing of a bell, you would in a very short time react to the bell by withdrawing your hand—a conditioned reflex, not beyond your conscious control, but certainly not dependent on it. If, that reflex established, I place your right hand against the electrode and sound the bell, which hand do you withdraw? The right, of course. Yet any ‘strengthened connection’ must have been formed between the sensory nerves in the left hand and the motor nerves in the same arm. Evidently connectionism is not adequate, at least as first stated.

  “Other theories have been developed—some express learning and knowledge in terms of behavior. These explain nothing until one redefines ‘behavior’ to mean everything from social activity to peristalsis and food-oxidation in the body cells, which leaves us right where we started. Possibly some extremely complex neuron connection and reaction will explain everything from nightmares to Handel’s Messiah, but every time someone brings forth a new idea in that direction a lot of psychologists are tempted to become mystics. Nothing seems to be a complete answer. Maybe the brain or the whole nervous system or the whole physical body is not the person—maybe there is a spirit or something of that nature that our microscopes and other physical apparatus can’t get hold of. I am willing to entertain that idea as a possibility, but I am not religious enough to treat the concept as a certainty; and it leaves nothing to work on. Therefore I would like to try, using your machine, to learn whether or not a purely mechanical and/or chemical set of reactions can possibly explain the observed phenomena of the human mind. I am not too familiar with electric circuit diagrams, but I know they frequently become too complex for human minds to unravel, and that this machine of yours has been used in that connection. I suppose I was thinking in terms of an imperfect analogy, but I thought the similarity in problems might be great enough to give us a toehold for at least making a start on the problem. What is your opinion?”

  “I take it,” whispered Vainser in his reedy tones, “that if we fail to set up such a circuit, nothing will have been proved; but if we succeed, your science will be able to avoid for a few generations at least the sad fate of metaphysics. Your analogy of an electric circuit is probably the best possible, by the way, and we might as well continue to use it in thinking about this matter—provided we are careful to remember that it is only an analogy. It occurs to me also that, even if we do not succeed completely with Dr. Wren’s problem, we are almost certain to gain many helpful ideas in the matter of the computer itself. It works, Doctor, on a principle rather similar to the `connectionism’ you mentioned first, though the ‘nerves’ are electron streams rather than material connections.”

  “I agree,” stated Rudd. “The study appears to be both intrinsically worthwhile, and promising in the way of by-products. I hope you won’t mind my giving what help I can, at such times as my regular job spares me.”

  “Not at all. The more people present who understand the computer, the better. I freely admit that I have no idea of the steps that must be taken to prepare my data for use. Perhaps if we went to examine it now—” Wren’s voice trailed off into an interrogative silence. Vainser took up the conversation.

&nbs
p; “I imagine your materials will not yet be in the office; the men have a good deal to do after a supply rocket arrives. I suggest we eat now—I do eat, in spite of appearances, Dr. Wren—and I am sure that all will be ready by the time we have finished.”

  This suggestion met with approval, and after Wren’s first weightless meal, the three scientists betook themselves to the “office” in which the psychologist’s data had been placed. Vainser’s word was somewhat misleading; the place was more like a cross between a drafting room, a physical laboratory, and a photographic darkroom. The cases in which Wren’s material had been packed were moored to one wall and their airtight seals broken, though the lids were still latched to keep the contents from drifting too wildly. Wren, who had by now acquired considerable proficiency in weightless maneuvering, propelled himself over to the containers and began extracting numerous notebooks, sheafs of photographs, and not a few detached pieces of paper bearing what appeared to be hastily scribbled thoughts. These he transferred to the numerous tables, anchoring them with the spring clips which here replaced the magnetic paperweights to be found in most gravity-free desks. The other two made no attempt to assist, realizing that the material was being arranged in some order with which they were unfamiliar; but when the cases were empty, they accompanied Wren to one of the tables, where they were promptly delivered a surprisingly clear and well-illustrated lecture on general psychology. The illustrative material consisted partly of tabulated experimental data, partly of the schematic “circuit diagrams” with which psychologists like to illustrate things like conditioned and unconditioned reflexes, and very largely of some excellent drawings and microphotographs of nerve and brain structure. The initial explanatory lecture finished, Vainser took the initiative, and all three plunged into the task of so redesigning all these items that they could be presented to the “sense organs” of the giant computer.