The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  “You remember, once a given tube is in full use, it acts as a ‘memory,’ a set of templates, if you like, from our previous illustration, while one of its neighbors integrates. This time, each integration simply puts each tube in total equilibrium—and the next one took over. That’s why it took several seconds for anything to happen. Thirty thousand tubes charged to the limit, and trying to find more—naturally, as soon as the last tube had completed its integration, it tried to pass the load on to another, as usual, and the whole system began to overload. It’s a thing that never happened before, but there are safety devices, put in when the station was first started, which cut off all electronic currents in the place when such an event occurs. I had forgotten about them, and they don’t record; so there was no indication of their having operated—except the obvious fact that they had! When you desensitized the eye that was causing the trouble, you put a point of resistance in an otherwise superconducting circuit; and within a few seconds the load petered out, and the lights came back on. Simple?”

  “Simple,” agreed Rudd. “But where does it leave us? Can we get any further with Wren’s business?”

  “I’m sure we can,” said Vainser after a moment’s thought. “It’s just a matter of avoiding problems whose solutions are too similar to individual tube circuits; and we certainly ought to be able to do that. I think, Wren, that we had better skip the present problem—or take it as solved, if you prefer—and get on with whatever comes next.”

  “I guess you’re right,” replied the psychologist. “Although I am unfamiliar with the interior of the computer, your analogies have given me what is probably an adequate picture of the situation. We will go on to imagination. There are a number of interesting experiments on record, dealing with eidetic imagery, lightning calculators, and similar phenomena, which should prove of value.”

  * * *

  The work progressed once more, but even more slowly. To the ever-mounting problem of graphic presentation of data was added that of avoiding particular solutions. They worked out what was in theory a simple method for this; they integrated each new method with all that had gone before, instead of treating it separately. The diagrams which resulted on the answer films were horrific in their complexity, as might be expected; and Wren had to spend a large amount of the time in studying these, trying to make sense out of them. Still, progress was made.

  Emotions were dealt with, and, to Rudd’s unfeigned astonishment, handled on a combined chemical and mechanical basis. Habits had fallen under the same assault as conditioning; attitudes and ideals, slightly more resistant, had been added to the list; the ability of the human mind to generalize from particular incidents had proved easy to add to the running integration, though Wren suspected it might have been more troublesome by itself.

  The stock of data which the psychologist had brought with him was growing low; the study was nearing the end of its planned course. There were a few of the human mind’s highest capabilities to be included—constructive imagination, artistic appreciation and ability, and similar characteristics; and these were making more trouble than all the earlier problems together. Without the practice furnished by those earlier jobs, Vainser and Rudd would probably never have succeeded in preparing this last material for use. Wren himself was little help; he was spending most of his time with the most recent of the answer sheets. They wrestled with the business for an entire week, Vainser letting subordinates handle the routine administrative work of the station instead of taking time out to do it himself; and in the end they were only half satisfied with the result.

  They pried the psychologist forcibly away from the sheet which had been absorbing his entire attention, and put him to work with them; and only after three more days did the men feel that the thing could be given to the machine. Surprisingly enough, the material had boiled down sufficiently to make possible its presentation to a single eye. The previous total sheet alone was placed beneath another.

  In consequence, the arrangement was practically identical with that which had caused the disturbance a fortnight earlier; and Wren felt slightly uneasy as Rudd shuttered the room lights and pressed the button activating the eye. Each run of the past half-dozen had taken slightly longer than its predecessor, since each represented all the previous work plus the new subject material: so no one was surprised at the two or three seconds of silence which followed the activation of the computer. Then the wavering green hairline on the screens of the status indicators steadied and straightened, and Rudd, at Vainser’s nod, desensitized the eye, opened the shutters, and removed the answer sheet from its frame. With a slight bow, which looked rather ridiculous from a man who was hanging in midair rather than standing on his feet, he handed the month’s work to Wren and remarked, “There, my friend, is your brain. If you can make that machine, we’d be interested in a model. It would probably be a distinct improvement on this thing.” He waved a hand at the walls around them as he spoke.

  “Brain?” queried Wren in some surprise. “I thought I had made the matter clearer than that. I have no reason to suppose that this diagram represents what goes on in the human mind. The study was to determine whether the mental processes we know of can be duplicated mechanically. It would seem that they can, and there is consequently no need to assume the existence of anything supernatural in the human personality. Of course, the existence of such a thing as the soul is by no means disproved; but it is now possible for psychology and spiritualism to avoid stepping on each other’s toes—and the spiritualists will have to find something besides the ‘Faute de mieux’ argument to defend their opinions. As for making such a machine as is here indicated, I should hate to undertake the task. You may try it, if you wish; but some of the symbols in this diagram have evolved during the course of our work here to the meaning of rather complex chemical and mechanical operations, as I recall, and at a guess I should say you have several lifetimes of work ahead of you in such a task. Still, try it if you like. I must now attempt to understand this mass of lines and squiggles, in order to turn the whole study into publishable words. I thank you gentlemen more than I can say for the work you have done here. I trust you have found it of sufficient interest to provide at least a partial recompense for your efforts. I must go now to look this thing over.” With a farewell nod that already bore something of the abstraction in which the man would shortly be sunk, he left the room.

  Vainser chuckled hoarsely as the psychologist disappeared. “They’re all that way,” he remarked. “Get the work done for them, and they can think of nothing but what comes next. Well, it’s the right attitude, I guess. His work certainly gave us a lot of worthwhile hints.” He cast a sideways glance at his companion. “Do you plan to build that machine, Rudd?”

  The other reactivated the eye, producing another copy of Wren’s solution from the data which still lay on the tables, and examined it closely. “Might,” he said at last. “It would certainly be worthwhile doing it; but I’m afraid our friend was right about the time required. Any of several dozen of these symbols would have to be expanded to represent a lot of research.” He tossed the sheet toward a nearby table, which it did not reach. “Let’s relax for a while. I’ll admit that was interesting work, but there are other things in life.” Vainser nodded agreement, and the technicians left the room together.

  * * *

  They saw almost nothing of Wren for the next several days. Once Rudd met him in the dining hall, where he replied absently to the big man’s greeting; once Vainser sent a messenger to the psychologist to ask if he planned to leave on the next supply rocket. The messenger reported that the answer had consisted of a single vague nod, which he had taken for assent; Wren had not lifted his eyes from the paper. Vainser had the data packed away in the original cases, ordered and packed the sheets which resulted from their investigations, and forbore to disturb Wren further. He knew better.

  And then the rocket came. It glided gently up to the great sphere, nuzzled the outer screen softly, and came to rest as the gr
apples seized it. Vainser, notified of its arrival, sent a man to inform the psychologist, and forgot the matter. For perhaps three minutes.

  The messenger must have returned in about that time, though his voice preceded him by some seconds. He was calling Vainser’s name, and there was no mistaking the alarm in his tones even before he burst through the doorway into the chief technician’s room.

  “Sir,” he panted, “something’s wrong with Dr. Wren. He won’t pay any attention to me at all, and … I don’t know what it is!”

  “I’ll go,” replied Vainser. “You bring the doctor to him. It might be some form of gravity sickness; he was a ground-gripper before he came here.”

  “I don’t think so,” replied the man as he turned to carry out the order. “You look for yourself!”

  Vainser lost no time in proceeding to Wren’s room; and once there, he felt himself compelled to agree that something other than gravity sickness was wrong. The doctor, entering a minute or two later, agreed, but he could offer no suggestion as to what might actually be the trouble.

  Wren was hanging in midair, relaxed, with the answer sheet that had cost so much work held before his face as though he were reading. There was nothing wrong with his attitude; anyone passing the open door and giving a casual glance within would have assumed him to be engaged in ordinary study.

  But he made no answer when his name was called; not a motion of the eyeballs betrayed awareness of anything around him but that piece of paper. The doctor worked it gently from his grasp; the fingers resisted slightly, and remained in the position in which they were left. The eyes never moved; the paper might still have been there before them.

  The doctor turned him so that he was facing one of the lights directly, waved his hands in front of Wren’s face, snapped his fingers in front of the staring eyes, all without making the least impression on the psychologist’s trancelike state. At last, after administering a number of stimulants intravenously without effect, the medical man admitted defeat.

  “You’d better wrap him in a suit and get him to Earth, the quicker the better,” he said. “There’s nothing more I can do for him here. I can’t even imagine what’s wrong with him.”

  Vainser nodded slowly, and beckoned to the messenger and Rudd, who had come in during the examination. They took Wren’s arms and towed him out of the room toward the great airlock, Vainser and the doctor following. With some effort, his body was worked into a spacesuit; and the old technician watched with a slowly gathering frown on his forehead as the helpless figure disappeared toward the outside. The frown was still there when Rudd came back to meet him in his office.

  For several minutes the two looked at each other silently. Each knew what the other was thinking, but neither wanted to give voice to his opinion. At last, however, Rudd broke the silence.

  “It was a better job than we realized.” The other nodded.

  “Trying to understand perfectly the workings of a brain—with a brain. We should have realized, especially after what happened a couple of weeks ago. Each thought image is a mechanical record in the brain tissue. How could a brain make a complete record of itself and its own operation? Even breaking the picture down into parts wouldn’t save a man like Wren; for, with the picture as nearly complete as he could make it, he’d think, What change is this very thought making in the pattern? and he’d try to include that in his mental picture; and then try to include the change due to that, and so on, thinking in smaller and smaller circles. He was conscious enough, I guess, so naturally the stimulants made no difference; and every usable cell of his brain was concentrated on that image, so none of the senses could possibly intrude. Well, he knows now how a brain works.”

  “Then all his work was wasted,” remarked Rudd, “if everyone who understands it promptly loses the use of his mind. Maybe I’d better not build that machine after all. I wonder if there’s any possible way of snapping the poor fellow out of it?”

  “I should think so. Simply breaking the line of thought enough for him to forget a little of it should do the trick. It can’t be done through his senses, as we learned, and stimulants are obviously the wrong thing from that point of view. I should simply deprive him of consciousness. Morphine should do it. I am enclosing a recommendation to that effect in his material, which will go back with him. I didn’t want to suggest it to our own doctor; even if he didn’t decide I was crazy, I wouldn’t want to saddle him with that responsibility. I might, of course, be very wrong. The boys on Earth will have to make up their own minds.

  “But I’m afraid you’re right about the uselessness of his results. It was a doomed line of endeavor from the start, no matter what method of approach was used. As soon as you understand completely the working of the brain, your own is of no further use. Evidently all psychologists since the year dot have been chasing their tails, but were too far behind to realize it. Wren was brighter or luckier than the others—or perhaps, simply had better tools—and caught up with his!”

  Dust Rag

  “Checking out.”

  “Checked, Ridge. See you soon.”

  Ridging glanced over his shoulder at Beacon Peak, as the point where the relay station had been mounted was known. The gleaming dome of its leaden meteor shield was visible as a spark; most of the lower peaks of Harpalus were already below the horizon, and with them the last territory with which Ridging or Shandara could claim familiarity. The humming turbine tractor that carried them was the only sign of humanity except each others’ faces—the thin crescent of their home world was too close to the sun to be seen easily, and Earth doesn’t look very “human” from outside in any case.

  The prospect ahead was not exactly strange, of course. Shandara had remarked several times in the last four weeks that a man who had seen any of the Moon had seen all of it. A good many others had agreed with him. Even Ridging, whose temperament kept him normally expecting something new to happen, was beginning to get a trifle bored with the place. It wasn’t even dangerous; he knew perfectly well what exposure to vacuum would mean, but checking spacesuit and airlock valves had become a matter of habit long before.

  Cosmic rays went through plastic suits and living bodies like glass, for the most part ineffective because unabsorbed; meteors blew microscopic holes through thin metal, but scarcely marked spacesuits or hulls, as far as current experiences went; the “dust-hidden crevasses” which they had expected to catch unwary men or vehicles simply didn’t exist—the dust was too dry to cover any sort of hole, except by filling it completely. The closest approach to a casualty suffered so far had occurred when a man had missed his footing on the ladder outside the Albireo’s airlock and narrowly avoided a hundred-and-fifty-foot fall.

  Still, Shandara was being cautious. His eyes swept the ground ahead of their tracks, and his gauntleted hands rested lightly on brake and steering controls as the tractor glided ahead.

  Harpalus and the relay station were out of sight now. Another glance behind assured Ridging of that. For the first time in weeks he was out of touch with the rest of the group, and for the first time he wondered whether it was such a good idea. Orders had been strict, the radius of exploration settled on long before was not to be exceeded. Ridging had been completely in favor of this; but it was his own instruments which had triggered the change of schedule.

  One question about the Moon to which no one could more than guess an answer in advance was that of its magnetic field. Once the group was on the surface it had immediately become evident that there was one, and comparative readings had indicated that the south magnetic pole—or a south magnetic pole—lay a few hundred miles away. It had been decided to modify the program to check the region, since the last forlorn chance of finding any trace of a gaseous envelope around the Moon seemed to lie in auroral investigation. Ridging found himself, to his intense astonishment, wondering why he had volunteered for the trip and then wondering how such thoughts could cross his mind. He had never considered himself a coward, and certainly had no one but himself
to blame for being in the tractor. No one had made him volunteer, and any technician could have set up and operated the equipment.

  “Come out of it, Ridge. Anyone would think you were worried.” Shandara’s careless tones cut into his thoughts. “How about running this buggy for a while? I’ve had her for a hundred kilos.”

  “Right.” Ridging slipped into the driver’s seat as his companion left it without slowing the tractor. He did not need to find their location on the photographic map clipped beside the panel; he had been keeping a running check almost unconsciously between the features it showed and the landmarks appearing over the horizon. A course had been marked on it, and navigation was not expected to be a problem even without a magnetic compass.

  * * *

  The course was far from straight, though it led over what passed for fairly smooth territory on the Moon. Even back on Sinus Roris the tractor had had to weave its way around numerous obstacles; now well onto the Mare Frigoris, the situation was no better, and according to the map it was nearly time to turn south through the mountains, which would be infinitely worse. According to the photos taken during the original landing approach the journey would be possible, however, and would lead through the range at its narrowest part out onto Mare Imbrium. From that point to the vicinity of Plato, where the region to be investigated lay, there should be no trouble at all.