Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  A brain has limitations.

  It won’t apply itself.

  It forgets too easily, and too many things, and the wrong things—always.

  It is prone to worry—and in a brain, that’s partial suicide.

  If you push it too hard, it escapes into insanity.

  And, finally, it dies. Just when it’s getting good, it dies.

  So you build a mechanical brain—a big one that covers an Earth-size planet for the depth of twenty miles—a brain that will tend to business and will not forget and will not go insane for it cannot know frustration.

  Then you up and leave it—and that’s insanity compounded.

  ~ * ~

  “The speculation,” said Griffith, “is wholly without point, for there is no way of knowing what they used it for. You persist in regarding the people of this system as humanoids, when they probably weren’t.”

  “They could not have been so different from us,” Lawrence said. “That city out on Four might have been a human city. Here on this planet they face the same technical problems the human race would face if we tried a similar project, and they carried it out in much the same manner that we would.”

  “You overlook,” said Griffith, “the very thing that you yourself have pointed out so often—the fanatic drive that made them sacrifice everything to one great idea. A race of humans could not cooperate that closely or that fanatically. Someone would blunder, and someone would cut someone else’s throat, and then someone would suggest there ought to be an investigation, and the pack would be off, howling down the wind.”

  “They were thorough,” he said. “Terrifyingly thorough. There’s no life here. None that we could find. Not even an insect. And why not, do you think? Perhaps because a bug might get itself entangled in a gear or something and bollix up the works. So the bugs must go.”

  Griffith wagged his head. “In fact, they suggest the thinking of a bug itself. An ant, say. A colony of ants. A soulless mutual society that goes ahead in blind but intelligent obedience toward a chosen goal. And if that were so, my friend, your theory that they used the calculator to work out economic and social theories is so much poppycock.”

  “It’s not my theory,” Lawrence said. “It was only one of several speculations. Another equally as valid might be that they were trying to work out an answer to the Universe, why it is and what it is and where it might be going.”

  “And how,” said Griffith.

  “You’re right. And how. And if they were, I feel sure it was no idle wondering. There must have been a pressure of some sort, some impelling reason why they felt that they must do it.”

  “Go on,” said Taylor. “I can hardly wait. Carry out the fairy tale to its bitter end. They found out about the Universe and—”

  “I don’t think they did,” Buckley said quietly. “No matter what it was, the chances are against their finding the final answer to the thing they sought.”

  “For my part,” said Griffith, “I would incline to think they might have. Why else would they go away and leave this great machine behind? They found the thing they wanted, so they had no further use for the tool that they had built.”

  “You’re right,” said Buckley. “They had no further use for it, but not because it had done everything that it could do and that wasn’t quite enough. They left it because it wasn’t big enough, because it couldn’t work the problem they wanted it to work.”

  “Big enough!” cried Scott. “Why, all they had to do was add another tier all around the planet.”

  Buckley shook his head. “Remember what I said about limiting factors? Well, there’s one that you can’t beat. Put steel under fifty thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet’s surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.”

  Griffith let out a long breath. “Obsolete,” he said.

  “An analytical machine is a matter of size,” said Buckley. “Each integrator corresponds to a cell in the human brain. It has a limited function and capacity. And what one cell does must be checked by two other cells. The ‘tell me thrice’ principle of making sure that there is no error.”

  “They could have cleared it and started over again,” said Scott.

  “Probably they did,” said Buckley. “Many, many times. Although there always would have been an element of chance that each time it was cleared it might not be—well, rational or moral. Clearing on a machine this size would be a shock, like corrective surgery on the brain.

  “Two things might have happened. They might have reached a clearance limit. Too much residual memory clinging to the tubes—”

  “Subconscious,” said Griffith. “It would be interesting to speculate if a machine could develop a subconscious.”

  “Or,” continued Buckley, “they might have come to a problem that was so complicated, a problem with so many facets, that this machine, despite its size, was not big enough to handle it.”

  “So they went off to hunt a bigger planet,” said Taylor, not quite believing it. “Another planet small enough to live and work on, but enough bigger so they could have a larger calculator.”

  “It would make sense,” said Scott reluctantly. “They’d be starting fresh, you see, with the answers they had gotten here. And with improved designs and techniques.”

  “And now,” said King, “the human race takes over. I wonder what we’ll be able to do with a thing like this? Certainly not what its builders intended it should be used for.”

  “The human race,” said Buckley, “won’t do a thing for a hundred years, at least. You can bet on that. No engineer would dare to turn a single wheel of this machine until he knew exactly what it’s all about, how it’s made and why. There are millions of circuits to be traced, millions of tubes to check, blueprints to be made, technicians to be trained.”

  Lawrence said sharply, “That’s not our problem, King. We are the bird dogs. We hunt out the quail and flush it, and our job is done, and we go on to something else. What the race does with the things we find is something else again.”

  He lifted a pack of camp equipment off the floor and slung it across his shoulder.

  “Everyone set to go?” he asked.

  Ten miles up, Taylor leaned over the guard rail of the ramp to look down into the maze of machinery below him.

  A spoon slid out of his carelessly packed knapsack and went spinning down.

  They listened to it for a long time, tinkling as it fell.

  Even after they could hear it no longer, they imagined that they could.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Samuel Merwin Jr.

  EXIT LINE

  Here is the unlikely “super-life” form par excellence—the nearest thing to a “BEM” (see the Introduction) in this book. Unlike most ordinary BEMs, however, the ‘lorum has charm, humor, and shrewdness; he is one of the likable type, very rare in science fiction.

  ~ * ~

  THE ‘lorum lay in its scooped-out pit, basking comfortably in the rays of the system’s twin suns. It looked down upon the two Earth children, Martin and Julie, amiably if warily from its upper quarter of lavender eyes. For a moment, as Martin gravely tossed a rubber ball toward it, the ‘lorum toyed with the notion of keeping the children here on the yellow planet.

  With swiftness beyond the following power of the human eye, the ‘lorum stretched out a pseudopod and batted the ball back in a soaring arc that rebounded from the distant courtyard wall. With a quick cry of joy Martin fielded the rebound and came up with the rubber sphere, his feet in position to throw again.

  The ‘lorum signaled that it had had enough of such play, and Martin looked disappointed and bounced the ball down on the floor of the courtyard.

  “Gee, Uncle ‘Lorum,” said the boy, his face contorting in disappointment, “it’s our last chance to play to
gether.” He glanced over his shoulder at the metal frame of the tall launching tower in which the huge gleaming hull of the spaceship stood erect.

  “We still have a little time, Uncle ‘Lorum,” said Julie. “Tell us a story—you must know just one more.”

  The ‘lorum activated another brain. Yes, it was going to miss them— but as they had been and were, not as they must grow. “Very well,” it said. “I’ll tell you a story.” It never lacked stories to tell, being able to plumb the minds of the adults of the expedition at will.

  Thanks to its universal semantic understanding, it had been able easily to translate Earthly fantasies into terms understandable to these space-born children in terms of the only planetary environment they had ever known. Goldilocks’s three bears, for instance, became a family of grullahs, the strange chrysanthemum-like, three-legged creatures who inhabited the crystal forest beyond the plain.

  Giants, of course, were Ardigans, the lumpish silicon creatures that could tear great stones out of the far cliffs with ease, but melted like sand at the stream from an Earthchild’s water pistol.

  Dragons were easy. They were simply mangards—the menace that always lurked just beyond the compound walls, ready to overwhelm the now-vast structures of the Earth creatures and annihilate all life within.

  If no Earth creature had ever seen or could see the mangards—well, no one, to judge from the Earth creatures’ minds, had ever actually seen a dragon.

  But they were real enough. The ‘lorum knew. It was the mangards that were at last forcing the Earth creatures to leave this planet after two long years. It was six years by their count, and the children had grown amazingly for this slower life cycle.

  “Very well, Julie,” it said. “I shall tell you one more story.” It plumbed the minds of the adults in other parts of the compounds, found a thought that caused the slit-like mouth under the lower battery of eyes to twitch in approximation of a smile. Martin came over and sat down beside Julie.

  “There was once a very great king in a very great kingdom, a ruler of exceedingly ambitious and inquisitive mind,” it began. It did not actually speak the words, for it had neither larynx or vocal cords, but its telepathic communication was of universal application.

  “Not a fairy story, Uncle ‘Lorum,” said Martin, his head a little to one side. “Tell us a story of real adventure.”

  “And have a girl in it and a handsome hero.” said Julie.

  “Mush!” said Martin rudely. “Nothing but silly old mush.”

  Yes, thought the ‘lorum, the children were growing up. It was a pity they did not want to hear the story about the ambitious king. It had an application to the situation here in the compound which was absolutely delicious. But perhaps it was just as well.

  The Earth thing from whose mind it had plucked the fairy tale must have been dangerously close to uncomfortable truth. It would be too bad if there were trouble now.

  “No story now,” it told the children. “The mangards are making ready for another attack.”

  Using its telepathic powers, the ‘lorum summoned the seven men and four women who, with the children, made up the Earth party. They came quickly, pale of face and glancing over their shoulders, leaving the preparations for departure at which they had been busy during the past four days—twenty-three days in Earth time.

  They came and sat around the foreportion of the ‘lorum’s body— that portion they called its “head.” The ‘lorum lifted its upper pseudopods and extended them enough to make a sort of umbrella about the visitors from Earth. Then it caused the purple force to vibrate between their tips in meshlike flashes.

  “I hope it’s the last time,” said Delia Lawrence, Martin’s mother, as she leaned against her husband and shivered in fright.

  Harold Lawrence tightened his arm about her and glanced at his son, who was regarding the events with the boredom of familiarity.

  There was a thunderous crash against the screen. The air beneath it acquired a smoky, acrid tinge, as of great unfelt heat, and there was a brilliant flare of light on its outer surface. He blinked and cowered.

  If only the mangards were something they could see, could use Earth weapons against! But they were as invisible as the boojum in Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”—and as deadly. He himself had seen one of the huge and terrifying Ardigans disintegrate like a dream monster just beyond the compound walls.

  The ‘lorum had been in pitiful shape when first they set jets down on this planet—first beyond the Proxima Centauri group to feel the step of man. It had been fighting the mangards alone, and its huge rumpled form had reminded Delia of the cockalorum bird from Davy and the Goblin, which she had been reading to Martin and Julie. They had given it the name—and with suitable shortening it had stuck.

  Communication had not proved difficult, thanks to the strange creature’s telepathy. It had explained that it, too, was alien to this planet, having traveled in ovoid form from a planet in the Boötes group.

  It had warned them against the mangards, had protected them from the first attack of these fantastic invisible entities. In return, they had reared the compound according to its directions for a mangard-proof defense, adding bizarre bastions as the ‘lorum directed.

  But the mangards and the Ardigans, to a lesser degree, had licked them. So much time had to be spent in reinforcing the compounds against the recurring attacks of the mangards that there was small chance to rear a productive, peaceful community. Instead of improving with the years, conditions had grown steadily worse.

  Julie’s father, Patrick Aloysius O’Hare, one of the most brilliant rough-and-ready field biologists in the system, had spent two years seeking the answer to the ever-present threat of the mangards.

  “They’ve got to have some substance,” he said ruefully to Harold Lawrence over a highball (synthetic) one evening.

  “But you can’t spot it?” Lawrence had asked him.

  “Not yet,” said O’Hare, shaking his head sadly. “I can’t dig it out. I’ve put them through the entire spectrum. I’m beginning to believe in some other dimension.”

  “You sure you’re feeling okay, Pat?” Lawrence had asked.

  Even the ‘lorum couldn’t see mangards. But its extrasensory talents enabled it to have some understanding of them without sight and, more important, to sense when they were about to attack.

  Aware of its vast intelligence and experience, Earth people had built the serpentine compounds in accord with its telepathic suggestions. It was, the ‘lorum had told them, the only possible hope of foiling the mangards. They were, it seemed, allergic to certain shapes, especially those in S-curves.

  “It is at variance with their molecular structure,” the ‘lorum had said.

  And for a while it had seemed to work. For more than six Earth months there had been no attack at all. But of late the attacks had increased in both frequency and intensity. The gardens had gone to seed, lacking the constant cultivation the climate demanded. Supplies had begun to run dangerously low.

  Harold Lawrence, along with the other members of the expedition, could sense the ‘lorum’s growing fatigue under the onsets of the hordes of mangard attackers. Sooner or later they would overwhelm the strange huge creature that had appointed itself the guardian of the would-be colonizers from distant Earth. The Lawrence-Cardenas Expedition was going to have to return all the way to Earth or starve slowly out here on an alien planet.

  The attack subsided at last, and the ‘lorum retracted its screen and lay there, a huge and pitiable object of fatigue, its every pseudopod aquiver.

  It was then that Lawrence broached the suggestion, “ ‘Lorum,” he said, “we can make room for you in our spaceship.”

  The ‘lorum’s thoughts were weak but clear. “I am grateful for your concern, for your wish to take me away from the planet of the mangards. But when you are gone I may again be able to live in peace with them.”

  “You had best come with us,” said O’Hare. There was a trace, just a tra
ce, of suspicion underlying the tones of the biologist.

  The ‘lorum knew then against whom it had to guard, and at once extended its thought powers to blanket the suspicion in the Irishman’s mind.

  “I had best stay here—where I am suited. A change might not be for the better,” said the ‘lorum. It thanked them and bade them complete their preparations quickly. Only the children lingered.

  They took off late in that same long day, leaving the ‘lorum to its own devices on the planet that had been their home for a half-dozen Earth years. Delia Lawrence actually cried a little.

  “The poor helpless thing—just sitting there, waiting for those horrible creatures we enraged,” she sobbed. It was the first time her nerves had given way.