Short Stories Vol.1

by Isaac Asimov

  "Or flies," said Casey, as he slapped viciously at another and flicked its remains off his wrist in furious triumph.

  He went on. "Go ahead, Johnny. I'll contribute the flies and you study them. We'll establish a science of flychology and labor to make them happy

  by removing their neuroses. After all, we want the greatest good of the greatest number, don't we? And there are more flies than men." "Oh, well," said Polen.

  Casey said, "Say, Polen, did you ever follow up that weird idea of yours? I mean, we all know you're a shining cybernetic light, but 1 haven't been reading your papers. With so many ways of wasting time, something has to be neglected, you know."

  "What idea?" asked Polen, woodenly.

  "Come on. You know. Emotions of animals and all that sort of guff. Boy, those were the days. I used to know madmen. Now I only come across idiots."

  Winthrop said, "That's right, Polen. I remember it very well. Your first year in graduate school you were working on dogs and rabbits. I believe you even tried some of Casey's flies."

  Polen said, "It came to nothing in itself. It gave rise to certain new principles of computing, however, so it wasn't a total loss."

  Why did they talk about it?

  Emotions! What right had anyone to meddle with emotions? Words were invented to conceal emotions. It was the dreadfulness of raw emotion that had made language a basic necessity.

  Polen knew. His machines had by-passed the screen of verbalization and dragged the unconscious into the sunlight. The boy and the girl, the son and the mother. For that matter, the cat and the mouse or the snake and the bird. The data rattled together in its universality and it had all poured into and through Polen until he could no longer bear the touch of life.

  In the last few years he had so painstakingly schooled his thoughts in other directions. Now these two came, dabbling in his mind, stirring up its mud.

  Casey batted abstractedly across the tip of his nose to dislodge a fly. "Too bad," he said. "I used to think you could get some fascinating things out of, say, rats. Well, maybe not fascinating, but then not as boring as the stuff you would get out of our somewhat-human beings. I used to think-"

  Polen remembered what he used to think.

  Casey said, "Damn this DOT. The flies feed on it, I think. You know, I'm going to do graduate work in chemistry and then get a job on insecticides. So help me. I'll personally get something that will kill the vermin."

  They were in Casey's room, and it had a somewhat keroseny odor from the recently applied insecticide.

  Polen shrugged and said, "A folded newspaper will always kill."

  Casey detected a non-existent sneer and said instantly, "How would you summarize your first year's work, Polen? I mean aside from the true summary any scientist could state if he dared, by which I mean: 'Nothing.' "

  ."< "Nothing," said Polen. "There's your summary."

  "Go on," said Casey. "You use more dogs than the physiologists do and I bet the dogs mind the physiological experiments less. I would."

  "Oh, leave him alone," said Winthrop. "You sound like a piano with 87 keys eternally out of order. You're a bore!"

  You couldn't say that to Casey.

  He said, with sudden liveliness, looking carefully away from Winthrop, "I'll tell you what you'll probably find in animals, if you look closely enough. Religion."

  "What the dickens!" said Winthrop, outraged. "That's a foolish remark."

  Casey smiled. "Now, now, Winthrop. Dickens is just a euphemism for devil and you don't want to be swearing."

  "Don't teach me morals. And don't be blasphemous."

  "What's blasphemous about it? Why shouldn't a flea consider the dog as something to be worshipped? It's the source of warmth, food, and all that's good for a flea."

  "I don't want to discuss it."

  "Why not? Do you good. You could even say that to an ant, an anteater is a higher order of creation. He would be too big for them to comprehend, too mighty to dream of resisting. He would move among them like an unseen, inexplicable whirlwind, visiting them with destruction and death. But that wouldn't spoil things for the ants. They would reason that destruction was simply their just punishment for evil. And the anteater wouldn't even know he was a deity. Or care."

  Winthrop had gone white. He said, "I know you're saying this only to annoy me and I am sorry to see you risking your soul for a moment's amusement. Let me tell you this," his voice trembled a little, "and let me say it very seriously. The flies that torment you are your punishment in this life. Beelzebub, like all the forces of evil, may think he does evil, but it's only the ultimate good after all. The curse of Beelzebub is on you for your good. Perhaps it will succeed in getting you to change your way of life before it's too late."

  He ran from the room.

  Casey watched him go. He said, kughing, "I told you Winthrop believed in Beelzebub. It's funny the respectable names you can give to superstition." His laughter died a little short of its natural end.

  There were two flies in the room, buzzing through the vapors toward him.

  Polen rose and left in heavy depression. One year had taught him little, but it was already too much, and his laughter was thinning. Only his machines could analyze the emotions of animals properly, but he was already guessing too deeply concerning the emotions of men.

  He did not like to witness wild murder-yearnings where others could see only a few words of unimportant quarrel.

  Casey said, suddenly, "Say, come to think of it, you did try some of my flies, the way Winthrop says. How about that?"

  "Did I? After twenty years, I scarcely remember," murmured Polen.

  Winthrop said, "You must. We were in your laboratory and you complained that Casey's flies followed him even there. He suggested you analyze them and you did. You recorded their motions and buzzings and wing-wiping for half an hour or more. You played with a dozen different flies."

  Polen shrugged.

  "Oh, well," said Casey. "It doesn't matter. It was good seeing you, old man." The hearty hand-shake, the thump on the shoulder, the broad grin- to Polen it all translated into sick disgust on Casey's part that Polen was a "success" after all.

  Polen said, "Let me hear from you sometimes."

  The words were dull thumps. They meant nothing. Casey knew that. Polen knew that. Everyone knew that. But words were meant to hide emotion and when they failed, humanity loyally maintained the pretense.

  Winthrop's grasp of the hand was gentler. He said, "This brought back old times, Polen. If you're ever in Cincinnati, why don't you stop in at the meeting-house? You'll always be welcome."

  To Polen, it all breathed of the man's relief at Polen's obvious depression. Science, too, it seemed, was not the answer, and Winthrop's basic and ineradicable insecurity felt pleased at the company.

  "I will," said Polen. It was the usual polite way of saying, I won't.

  He watched them thread separately to other groups.

  Winthrop would never know. Polen was sure of that. He wondered if Casey knew. It would be the supreme joke if Casey did not.

  He had run Casey's flies, of course, not that once alone, but many times. Always the same answer! Always the same unpublishable answer.

  With a cold shiver he could not quite control, Polen was suddenly conscious of a single fly loose in the room, veering aimlessly for a moment, then beating strongly and reverently in the direction Casey had taken a moment before.

  Could Casey not know? Could it be the essence of the primal punishment that he never leam he was Beelzebub?

  Casey! Lord of the Flies!

  "Nobody Here but-"

  You see, it wasn't our fault. We had no idea anything was wrong until I called Cliff Anderson and spoke to him when he wasn't there. What's more, I wouldn't have known he wasn't there, if it wasn't that he walked in while I was talking to him.

  No, no, no, no-

  I never seem to be able to tell this straight. I get too excited. -Look, I might as well begin at the beginning. I'm Bi
ll Billings; my friend is Cliff Anderson. I'm an electrical engineer, he's a mathematician, and we're on the faculty of Midwestern Institute of Technology. Now you know who we are.

  Ever since we got out of uniform, Cliff and I have been working on calculating machines. You know what they are. Norbert Wiener popularized them in his book, Cybernetics. If you've seen pictures of them, you know that they're great big things. They take up a whole wall and they're very complicated; also expensive.

  But Cliff and I had ideas. You see, what makes a thinking machine so big and expensive is that it has to be full of relays and vacuum tubes just so that microscopic electric currents can be controlled and made to flicker on and off, here and there. Now the really important things are those little electric currents, so-

  I once said to Cliff, "Why can't we control the currents without all the salad dressing?"

  Cliff said, "Why not, indeed," and started working on the mathematics.

  Copyright (c) 1953 by Ballantine Books, Inc.

  How we got where we did in two years is no matter. It's what we got after we finished that made the trouble. It turned out that we ended with something about this high and maybe so wide and just about this deep-

  No, no. I forget that you can't see me. I'll give you the figures. It was about three feet high, six feet long, and two feet deep. Got that? It took two men to carry it but it could be carried and that was the point. And still, mind you, it could do anything the wall-size calculators could. Not as fast, maybe, but we were still working.

  We had big ideas about that thing, the very biggest. We could put it on ships or airplanes. After a while, if we could make it small enough, an automobile could carry one.

  We were especially interested in the automobile angle. Suppose you had a little thinking machine on the dashboard, hooked to the engine and battery and equipped with photoelectric eyes. It could choose an ideal course, avoid cars, stop at red lights, pick the optimum speed for the terrain. Everybody could sit in the back seat and automobile accidents would vanish.

  All of it was fun. There was so much excitement to it, so many thrills every time we worked out another consolidation, that I could still cry when I think of the time I picked up the telephone to call our lab and tumbled everything into the discard.

  I was at Mary Ann's house that evening- Or have I told you about Mary Ann yet? No. I guess I haven't.

  Mary Ann was the girl who would have been my fiancee but for two ifs. One, if she were willing, and two, if I had the nerve to ask her. She has red hair and crams something like two tons of energy into about 110 pounds of body which fills out very nicely from the ground to five and a half feet up. I was dying to ask her, you understand, but each time I'd see her coming into sight, setting a match to my heart with every movement, I'd just break down.

  It's not that I'm not good-looking. People tell me I'm adequate. I've got all my hair; I'm nearly six feet tall; I can even dance. It's just that I've nothing to offer. I don't have to tell you what college teachers make. With inflation and taxes, it amounts to just about nothing. Of course, if we got the basic patents rolled up on our little thinking machine, things would be different. But I couldn't ask her to wait for that, either. Maybe, after it was all set-Anyway, I just stood there, wishing, that evening, as she came into the living room. My arm was groping blindly for the phone.

  Mary Ann said, "I'm all ready, Bill. Let's go."

  I said, "Just a minute. I want to ring up Cliff."

  She frowned a little, "Can't it wait?"

  "I was supposed to call him two hours ago," I explained.

  It only took two minutes. I rang the lab. Cliff was putting in an evening of work and so he answered. I asked something, then he said something, I

  asked some more and he explained. The details don't matter, but as I said, he's the mathematician of the combination. When I build the circuits and put things together in what look like impossible ways, he's the guy who shuffles the symbols and tells me whether they're really impossible. Then, just as I finished and hung up, there was a ring at the door.

  For a minute, I thought Mary Ann had another caller and got sort of stiff-backed as I watched her go to the door. I was scribbling down some of what Cliff had just told me while I watched. But then she opened the door and it was only Cliff Anderson after all.

  He said, "I thought I'd find you here- Hello, Mary Ann. Say, weren't you going to ring me at six? You're as reliable as a cardboard chair." Cliff is short and plump and always willing to start a fight, but I know him and pay no attention.

  I said, "Things turned up and it slipped my mind. But I just called, so what's the difference?"

  "Called? Me? When?"

  I started to point to the telephone and gagged. Right then, the bottom fell out of things. Exactly five seconds before the doorbell had sounded I had been on the phone talking to Cliff in the lab, and the lab was six miles away from Mary Ann's house.

  I said, "I-just spoke to you."

  I wasn't getting across. Cliff just said, "To me?" again.

  I was pointing to the phone with both hands now, "On the phone. I called the lab. On this phone here! Mary Ann heard me. Mary Ann, wasn't I just talking to-"

  Mary Ann said, "I don't know whom you were talking to. -Well, shall we go?" That's Mary Ann. She's a stickler for honesty.

  I sat down. I tried to be very quiet and clear. I said, "Cliff, I dialed the lab's phone number, you answered the phone, I asked you if you had the details worked out, you said, yes, and gave them to me. Here they are. I wrote them down. Is this correct or not?"

  I handed him the paper on which I had written the equations.

  Cliff looked at them. He said, "They're correct. But where could you have gotten them? You didn't work them out yourself, did you?"

  "I just told you. You gave them to me over the phone."

  Cliff shook his head, "Bill, I haven't been in the lab since seven fifteen. There's nobody there."

  "I spoke to somebody, I tell you."

  Mary Ann was fiddling with her gloves. "We're getting late," she said.

  I waved my hands at her to wait a bit, and said to Cliff, "Look, are you sure-"

  "There's nobody there, unless you want to count Junior." Junior was what we called our pint-sized mechanical brain.

  We stood there, looking at one another. Mary Ann's toe was still hittir

  the floor like a time bomb waiting to explode.1

  Then Cliff laughed. He said, "I'm thinking of a cartoon I saw, somewhere. It shows a robot answering the phone and saying, 'Honest, boss, there's nobody here but us complicated thinking machines.' "

  I didn't think that was funny. I said, "Let's go to the lab."

  Mary Ann said, "Hey! We won't make the show."

  I said, "Look, Mary Ann, this is very important. It's just going to take a minute. Come along with us and we'll go straight to the show from there."

  She said, "The show starts-" And then she stopped talking, because I grabbed her wrist and we left.

  That just shows how excited I was. Ordinarily, I wouldn't ever have dreamed of shoving her around. I mean, Mary Ann is quite the lady. It's just that I had so many things on my mind. I don't even really remember grabbing her wrist, come to think of it. It's just that the next thing I knew, I was in the auto and so was Cliff and so was she, and she was rubbing her wrist and muttering under her breath about big gorillas.

  I said, "Did I hurt you, Mary Ann?"

  She said, "No, of course not. I have my arm yanked out of its socket every day, just for fun." Then she kicked me in the shin.

  She only does things like that because she has red hair. Actually, she has a very gentle nature, but she tries very hard to live up to the redhead mythology. I see right through that, of course, but I humor her, poor kid.

  We were at the laboratory in twenty minutes.

  The Institute is empty at night. It's emptier than a building would ordinarily be. You see, it's designed to have crowds of students rushing through the corridor
s and when they aren't there, it's unnaturally lonely. Or maybe it was just that I was afraid to see what might be sitting in our laboratory upstairs. Either way, footsteps were uncomfortably loud and the self-service elevator was downright dingy.

  I said to Mary Ann, "This won't take long." But she just sniffed and looked beautiful.

  She can't help looking beautiful.

  Cliff had the key to the laboratory and I looked over his shoulder when he opened the door. There was nothing to see. Junior was there, sure, but he looked just as he had when I saw him last. The dials in front registered nothing and except for that, there was just a large box, with a cable running back into the wall socket.

  Cliff and I walked up on either side of Junior. I think we were planning to grab it if it made a sudden move. But then we stopped because Junior just wasn't doing anything. Mary Ann was looking at it, too. In fact, she ran her middle finger along its top and then looked at the finger tip and twiddled it against her thumb to get rid of the dust.

  % I said, "Mary Ann, don't you go near it. Stay at the other end of the room." if. She said, "It's just as dirty there."

  She'd never been in our lab before, and of course she didn't realize that a laboratory wasn't the same thing as a baby's bedroom, if you know what I mean. The janitor comes in twice a day and all he does is empty the waste-baskets. About once a week, he comes in with a dirty mop, makes mud on the floor, and shoves it around a little.

  Cliff said, "The telephone isn't where I left it." !! I said, "How do you know?" •'*'•'• "Because I left it there." He pointed. "And now it's here."

  If he were right, the telephone had moved closer to Junior. I swallowed and said, "Maybe you don't remember right." I tried to laugh without sounding very natural and said, "Where's the screw driver?"

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Just take a look inside. For laughs."