The Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  “Betsy don’t need workin’ on!” said Sergeant Bellews belligerently. “She’s a good, reliable, experienced machine! If she’s handled right, she’ll do better work than any machine I know!”

  “Granted,” said the colonel. “She’s doing work now that no other machine seems able to do—drawing scrambled broadcasts from somewhere that can only be guessed at. They’ve been unscrambled and these gentlemen have come to get the data on Betsy. I’m sure you’ll cooperate.”

  “What kinda data do they want?” demanded Bellews. “I can answer most questions about Betsy!”

  “Which,” the colonel told him, “is why I sent for you. These gentlemen have the top scientific brains in the country, Sergeant. Answer their questions about Betsy and I think some very high brass will be grateful.

  “By the way, it is ordered that from now on no one is to refer to Betsy or any work on these broadcasts, over any type of electronic communication. No telephone, no communicator, no teletype, no radio, no form of communication except viva voce. And that means you talking to somebody else, Sergeant, with no microphone around. Understand? And from now on you will not talk about anything at all except to these gentlemen and to me.”

  Sergeant Bellews said incredulously:

  “Suppose I got to talk to somebody in the Rehab Shop. Do I signal with my ears and fingers?”

  “You don’t talk,” said the colonel flatly. “Not at all.”

  Sergeant Bellews shook his head sadly. He regarded the colonel with such reproach that the colonel stiffened. But Sergeant Bellews had a gift for machinery. He had what amounted to genius for handling Mahon-modified devices. So long as no more competent men turned up, he was apt to get away with more than average.

  The colonel frowned and went out of the room. The tall young lieutenant followed him faithfully. The sergeant regarded the three scientists with the suspicious air he displayed to everyone not connected with Mahon units in some fashion.

  “Well?” he said with marked reserve. “What can I tell you first?”

  Lecky was the smallest of the three scientists. He said ingratiatingly, with the faintest possible accent in his speech:

  “The nicest thing you could do for us, Sergeant, would be to show us that this—Betsy, is it?—with other machines before her, has developed a contagious machine insanity. It would frighten me to learn that machines can go mad, but I would prefer it to other explanations for the messages she gives.”

  “Betsy can’t go crazy,” said Bellews with finality. “She’s Mahon-controlled, but she hasn’t got what it takes to go crazy. A Mahon unit fixes a machine so it can loaf and be a permanent dynamic system that can keep acquired habits of operatin’. It can take trainin’. It can get to be experienced. It can learn the tricks of its trade, so to speak. But it can’t go crazy!”

  “Too bad!” said Lecky. He added persuasively: “But a machine can lie, Sergeant? Would that be possible?”

  Sergeant Bellews snorted in denial.

  * * * *

  “The broadcasts,” said Lecky mildly, “claim a remarkable reason for certainty about an extremely grave danger which is almost upon the world. If it’s the truth, Sergeant, it is appalling. If it is a lie, it may be more appalling. The Joint Chiefs of Staff take it very seriously, in any case. They—”

  “I got cold shivers,” said Sergeant Bellews with irony. “I’m all wrought up. Huh! The big brass gets the yellin’ yollups every so often anyhow. Listen to them, and nothin’ happens except it’s top priority top secret extra crash emergency! What do you want to know about Betsy?”

  There was a sudden squealing sound from the communicator on which all the extra recording devices were focussed. Betsy’s screen lighted up. Peculiarly curved patterns appeared on it. They shifted and changed. Noises came from her speaker. They were completely unearthly. Now they were shrill past belief, and then they were chopped into very small bits of sound, and again they were deepest bass, when each separate note seemed to last for seconds.

  “You might,” said Lecky calmly, “tell us from where your Betsy gets the signal she reports in this fashion.”

  There were whirrings as recorders trained upon Betsy captured every flickering of her screen and every peeping noise or deep-toned rumble. The screen-pattern changed with the sound, but it was not linked to it. It was a completely abnormal reception. It was uncanny. It was somehow horrible because so completely remote from any sort of human communication in the year 1972.

  The three scientists watched with worried eyes. A communicator, even with a Mahon unit in it, could not originate a pattern like this! And this was not conceivably a distortion of anything transmitted in any normal manner in the United States of America, or the Union of Compubs, or any of the precariously surviving small nations not associated with either colossus.

  “This is a repeat broadcast!” said one of the three men suddenly. It was Howell, the heavy-set man. “I remember it. I saw it projected—like this, and then unscrambled. I think it’s the one where the social system’s described—so we can have practice at trying to understand. Remember?”

  * * * *

  Lecky said, as if the matter had been thrashed out often before:

  “I do not believe what it says, Howell! You know that I do not believe it! I will not accept the theory that this broadcast comes from the future!”

  The broadcast stopped. It stopped dead. Betsy’s screen went blank. Her wildly fluctuating standby light slowed gradually to a nearly normal rate of flicker.

  “That’s not a theory,” said Howell dourly. “It’s a statement in the broadcast. We saw the first transmission of this from the tape at the Pentagon. Then we saw it with the high-pitched parts slowed down and the deep-bass stuff speeded up. Then it was a human voice giving data on the scanning pattern and then rather drearily repeating that history said that intertemporal communication began with broadcasts sent back from 2180 to 1972. It said the establishment of two-way communication was very difficult and read from a script about social history, to give us practice in unscrambling it. It’s not a theory to say the stuff originates in the future. It’s a statement.”

  “Then it is a lie,” said Lecky, very earnestly. “Truly, Howell, it is a lie!”

  “Then where does the broadcast come from?” demanded Howell. “Some say it’s a Compub trick. But if they were true they’d hide it for use to produce chaos in a sneak attack. The only other theory—”

  * * * *

  Graves, the man with the short moustache, said jerkily:

  “No, Howell! It is not an extra-terrestrial creature pretending to be a man of our own human future. One could not sleep well with such an idea in his head. If some non-human monster could do this—”

  “I do not sleep at all,” said Lecky simply. “Because it says that two-way communication is to come. I can listen to these broadcasts tranquilly, but I cannot bear the thought of answering them. That seems to me madness!”

  Sergeant Bellews said approvingly:

  “You got something there! Yes, sir! Did you notice how Betsy’s standby light was wabbling while she was bringin’ in that broadcast? If she could sweat, she’d’ve been sweating!”

  Lecky turned his head to stare at the sergeant.

  “Machines,” said Bellews profoundly, “act according to the golden rule. They do unto you as they would have you do unto them. You treat a machine right and it treats you right. You treat it wrong and it busts itself—still tryin’ to treat you right. See?”

  Lecky blinked.

  “I do not quite see how it applies,” he said mildly.

  “Betsy’s an old, experienced machine,” said the sergeant. “A signal that makes her sweat like that has got something wrong about it. Any ordinary machine ’ud break down handlin’ it.”

  Graves said jerkily:

  “The other machines that received these broadcasts did break down, Sergeant. All of them.”

  “Sure!” said the sergeant with dignity. “O’ course, who’s broadcasti
n’ may have been tinkerin’ with their signal since they seen it wasn’t gettin’ through. Betsy can take it now, when younger machines with less experience can’t. Maybe a micro-microwatt of signal. Then it makes her sweat. If she was broadcastin’, with a hell of a lot more’n a micro-microwatt—it’d be bad! I bet you that every machine we make to broadcast breaks down! I bet—”

  Howell said curtly:

  “Reasonable enough! A signal to pass through time as well as space would be different from a standard wave-type! Of course that must be the answer.”

  Sergeant Bellews said truculently:

  “I got a hunch that whoever’s broadcastin’ is busting transmitters right an’ left. I never knew anything about this before, except that Betsy was pickin’ up stuff that came from nowhere. But I bet if you look over the record-tapes you will find they got breaks where one transmitter switched off or broke down and another took over!”

  Lecky’s eyes were shining. He regarded Sergeant Bellews with a sort of tender respect.

  “Sergeant Bellews,” he said softly, “I like you very much. You have told us undoubtedly true things.”

  “Think nothin’ of it,” said the sergeant, gratified. “I run the Rehab Shop here, and I could show you things—”

  “We wish you to,” said Lecky. “The reaction of machines to these broadcasts is the one viewpoint we would never have imagined. But it is plainly important. Will you help us, Sergeant? I do not like to be frightened—and I am!”

  “Sure, I’ll help,” said Sergeant Bellews largely. “First thing is to whip some stuff together so we can find out what’s what. You take a few Mahon units, and install ’em and train ’em right, and they will do almost anything you’ve a mind for. But you got to treat ’em right. Machines work by the golden rule. Always! Come along!”

  * * * *

  Sergeant Bellews went to the Rehab Shop, followed only by Lecky. All about, the sun shone down upon buildings with a remarkably temporary look about them, and on lawns with a remarkably lush look about them, and signboards with very black lettering on gray paint backgrounds. There was a very small airfield inside the barbed-wire fence about the post, and elaborate machine-shops, and rows and rows of barracks and a canteen and a USO theatre, and a post post-office. Everything seemed quite matter-of-fact.

  Except for the machines.

  They were the real reason for the existence of the post. The barracks and married-row dwellings had washing-machines which looked very much like other washing-machines, except that they had standby lights which flickered meditatively when they weren’t being used.

  * * * *

  The television receivers looked like other TV sets, except for minute and wavering standby lights which were never quite as bright or dim one moment as the next. The jeeps—used strictly within the barbed-wire fence around the post—had similar yellow glowings on their instrument-boards, and they were very remarkable jeeps. They never ran off the graveled roads onto the grass, and they never collided with each other, and it was said that the nine-year-old son of a lieutenant-colonel had tried to drive one and it would not stir. Its motor cut off when he forced it into gear. When he tried to re-start it, the starter did not turn. But when an adult stepped into it, it operated perfectly—only it braked and stopped itself when a small child toddled into its path.

  There were some people who said that this story was not true, but other people insisted that it was. Anyhow the washing-machines were perfect. They never tangled clothes put into them. It was reported that Mrs. So-and-so’s washing-machine had found a load of clothes tangled, and reversed itself and worked backward until they were straightened out.

  Television sets turned to the proper channels—different ones at different times of day—with incredible facility. The smallest child could wrench at a tuning-knob and the desired station came on. All the operating devices of Research Installation 83 worked as if they liked to—which might have been alarming except that they never did anything of themselves. They initiated nothing. But each one acted like an old, favorite possession. They fitted their masters. They seemed to tune themselves to the habits of their owners. They were infinitely easy to work right, and practically impossible to work wrong.

  Such machines, of course, had not been designed to cope with enigmatic broadcasts or for military purposes. But the jet-planes on the small airfield were very remarkable indeed, and the other and lesser devices had been made for better understanding of the Mahon units which made machines into practically a new order of creation.

  * * * *

  Sergeant Bellews ushered Lecky into the Rehab Shop. There was the pleasant, disorderly array of devices with their wavering standby lights. They gave an effect of being alive, but somehow it was not disturbing. They seemed not so much intent as meditative, and not so much watchful as interested. When the sergeant and his guest moved past them, the unrhythmic waverings of the small yellow lights seemed to change hopefully, as if the machines anticipated being put to use. Which, of course, was absurd. Mahon machines do not anticipate anything. They probably do not remember anything, though patterns of operation are certainly retained in very great variety. The fact is that a Mahon unit is simply a device to let a machine stand idle without losing the nature of an operating machine.

  The basic principle goes back to antiquity. Ships, in ancient days, had manners and customs individual to each vessel. Some were sweet craft, easily handled and staunch and responsive. Others were stubborn and begrudging of all helpfulness. Sometimes they were even man-killers. These facts had no rational explanation, but they were facts. In similarly olden times, particular weapons acquired personalities to the point of having personal names—Excalibur, for example.

  Every fighting man knew of weapons which seemed to possess personal skill and ferocity. Later, workmen found that certain tools had a knack of fitting smoothly in the hand—seeming even to divine the grain of the wood they worked on. The individual characteristics of violins were notorious, so that a violin which sang joyously under the bow was literally priceless.

  And all these things, as a matter of observation and not of superstition, kept their qualities only when in constant use. Let a ship be hauled out of water and remain there for a time, and she would be clumsy on return to her native element. Let a sword or tool stay unused, and it seemed to dull. In particular, the finest of violins lost its splendor of tone if left unplayed, and any violin left in a repair-shop for a month had to be played upon constantly for many days before its living tone came back.

  * * * *

  The sword and the tool perhaps, but the ship and the violin certainly, acted as if they acquired habits of operation by being used, and lost them by disuse. When more complex machines were invented, such facts were less noticeable. True, no two automobiles ever handled exactly the same, and that was recognized. But the fact that no complex machine worked well until it had run for a time was never commented on, except in the observation that it needed to be warmed up. Anybody would have admitted that a machine in the act of operating was a dynamic system in a solid group of objects, but nobody reflected that a stopped machine was a dead thing. Nobody thought to liken the warming-up period for an aeroplane engine to the days of playing before a disuse-dulled violin regained its tone.

  Yet it was obvious enough. A ship and a sword and a tool and a violin were objects in which dynamic systems existed when they were used, and in which they ceased to exist when use stopped. And nobody noticed that a living creature is an object which contains a dynamic system when it is living, and loses it by death.

  For nearly two centuries quite complex machines were started, and warmed up, and used, and then allowed to grow cold again. In time the more complex machines were stopped only reluctantly. Computers, for example, came to be merely turned down below operating voltage when not in use, because warming them up was so difficult and exacting a task. Which was an unrecognized use of the Mahon principle. It was a way to keep a machine activated while not actually operating. I
t was a state of rest, of loafing, of idleness, which was not the death of a running mechanism.

  The Mahon unit was a logical development. It was an absurdly simple device, and not in the least like a brain. But to the surprise of everybody, including its inventor, a Mahon-modified machine did more than stay warmed up. It retained operative habits as no complex device had ever done before. In time it was recognized that Mahon-modified machines acquired experience and kept it so long as the standby light glowed and flickered in its socket. If the lamp went out the machine died, and when reënergized was a different individual entirely, without experience.

  Sergeant Bellews made such large-minded statements as were needed to brief Lecky on the work done in this installation with Mahon-controlled machines.

  “They don’t think,” he explained negligently, “any more than dogs think. They just react—like dogs do. They get patterns of reaction. They get trained. Experienced. They get good! Over at the airfield they’re walking around beaming happy over the way the jets are flyin’ themselves.”

  Lecky gazed around the Rehab Shop. There were shelves of machines, duly boxed and equipped with Mahon units, but not yet activated. Activation meant turning them on and giving them a sort of basic training in the tasks they were designed to do. But also there were machines which had broken down—invariably through misuse, said Sergeant Bellews acidly—and had been sent to the Rehab Shop to be re-trained in their proper duties.

  “Guys see ’em acting sensible and obediently,” said Bellews with bitterness, “and expect ’em to think. Over at the jet-field they finally come to understand.” His tone moderated. “Now they got jets that put down their own landing-gear, and holler when fuel’s running low, and do acrobatics happy if you only jiggle the stick. They mighty near fly themselves! I tell you, if well-trained Mahon jets ever do tangle with old-style machines, it’s goin’ to be a caution to cats! It’ll be like a pack of happy terriers pilin’ into hamsters. It’ll be murder!”

  * * * *

  He surveyed his stock. From a back corner he brought out a small machine with an especially meditative tempo in its standby-lamp flicker. The tempo accelerated a little when he put it on a work-bench.