by Ben Bova
Of course, another part of his mind countered, they’ve been studying the pulsars for a few millennia more than you have. If you could live for a million years or so, you would discover a thing or two yourself.
Still, Ignatiev felt a strange inner emotion as he watched a particular pulsar throbbing in the midst of the plasma cloud it had emitted millennia earlier. He frowned as he watched the viewscreen image, with its rows of equations running along its bottom edge. Every question answered. Every mystery solved.
He couldn’t help feeling envious. But there was something more. He felt a different kind of pride, and satisfaction. The unknowns of the universe give up their secrets to intelligent searchers. Whether the intelligence is organic or machine, we can find the answers! He thrilled to the realization, and recalled Einstein’s words: The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
We can understand it! Given time and patience, intelligence can unravel all the mysteries of the universe!
He leaned back in his chair, smiling with satisfaction.
Then Aida’s voice said gently, “Dr. Jackson wishes to see you, Professor. Urgently.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Jackson’s dark face looked troubled in the 3-D viewer.
“What’s the matter, Raj?” Ignatiev asked.
The young man hesitated, then replied, “It’s … it’s sort of personal. Could I see you face-to-face, please, Professor?”
Ignatiev felt a pang of dismay at this intrusion, but he said, “Yes, of course. Come to my quarters.”
“Thank you!”
Ignatiev hauled himself up from the chair he’d been in, blanked the wall screens, and headed for the sitting room. The doorbell chimed before he’d taken two steps past the doorway. Jackson must have been out in the corridor when he called, he realized.
Ignatiev commanded the door to slide open and Jackson stepped in. Tall and gangly, he looked tense, upset, his dark eyes troubled.
Ignatiev told the door to close as he gestured to the couch. “Sit down, Raj. Make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?”
“No thank you, Professor.” The geochemist sat down, long legs bending, long fingers gripping the edge of the couch’s cushions nervously.
Ordering his recliner to move up to the couch, Ignatiev asked, “What’s bothering you, Raj?”
The young man spread his hands in a gesture that might have indicated helplessness. “It’s…” He swallowed visibly, then finished, “It’s Dr. Mandabe.”
“Mandabe?”
“He’s a Frankenstein monster, Professor.”
Genuinely puzzled, Ignatiev asked, “What do you mean?”
Looking more miserable than ever, Jackson said, “He’s a tyrant. A dictator. He’s making us write daily reports, putting everything we do down in writing.”
Ignatiev shrugged. “That’s his management style. I imagine that’s how he ran his department back in Pretoria.”
“But it’s hurting our work!” Jackson yelped. “I’m spending more time writing the damned reports he wants than doing the research I’m writing about.”
“Doesn’t he use Aida—”
“No. He wants no part of Aida’s summaries. He doesn’t trust the machines; thinks they might be altering the data for some reason. He wants each of us to write a personal report to him. It’s nothing but busywork, and it’s hurting our real work.” Jabbing a finger at Ignatiev, the geochemist continued, “I mean, I’ve seen all kinds of bullies and dictators back on the streets of Chicago when I was growing up, but he’s worse than any of them. He threatened to throw me off the team if I didn’t do my work his way!”
Frowning, Ignatiev said, “He can’t do that.”
“You think not? Laurita Vargas is sitting in her room right now, relieved of her duties on the planetology team until she knuckles under to Mandabe’s orders.”
“He’s thrown her out of her own group?”
“Until she knuckles under,” said Jackson. Then he added, “I think he also wants her in his bed.”
Ignatiev sank back onto his recliner, stunned. “Mandabe?”
“Mandabe.” Before Ignatiev could reply, Jackson went on, “And Jugannath! He’s reduced poor Juga to a nervous wreck, demanding detailed reports, inventory lists, information he can get from Aida in a flash. But no, he’s turning Juga into a damned clerk.”
He’s right, Ignatiev said to himself. Mandabe’s become a tyrant. In less than a week.
“You’ve got to do something, Professor.”
“I … I’m not sure that there’s anything I can do. The committee elected him unanimously.”
“You nominated him. You resigned and nominated him to replace you.”
“Yes, that’s true.” I nominated him, Ignatiev thought, so I could get rid of the responsibilities of heading the committee and get back to my astronomy work. I nominated him to make my own life easier, more pleasant.
Jackson plowed ahead, “You’ve got to get the committee to fire him, remove him from the chairmanship.”
“That…” Ignatiev faltered. “That would be … difficult.”
“You’re the only one who can stand up to him.”
Almost pleading, Ignatiev said, “Don’t you see that if I made such a move it would split the committee wide open. We’d have a war on our hands.”
“What of it?”
“What of it?” Ignatiev repeated. “It would become a personal battle between Mandabe and me. A vendetta. It could wreck the committee and its work.”
Jackson shot to his feet, towering over Ignatiev. “As far as I’m concerned, the committee and its work are already wrecked. If you won’t help us, who will?”
Ignatiev pushed himself up from the recliner and realized he barely came up to Jackson’s shoulder. “I don’t want to turn this problem into a feud between Mandabe and me. We have to work this out sensibly.”
Jackson glared down at him. “You show me how to do that, Professor. I challenge you to show me how.”
* * *
Making reassuring noises, Ignatiev led Jackson to the door and showed him out. Then he returned to his recliner and summoned Aida.
The AI’s pleasant features took form in the holotank above the fireplace.
“How can I help you, Professor?”
Ignatiev asked to review the interactions between Mandabe and the various scientific teams he directed.
Two hours later he decided that Jackson had not exaggerated. Mandabe’s leadership style was to bend everyone to his will. A dictator. A tyrant.
And the clash I had with him over Gita makes it impossible for me to challenge him directly. He’ll see it as competition; he’ll think I want to take the leadership of the committee away from him.
Well, I do, Ignatiev told himself. But how to do it without humiliating him? Without making this a personal battle between the two of us?
“You are troubled, Professor.”
And there stood the machines’ avatar, standing to one side of the three-dimensional viewer on the wall, still wearing the softly flowing robe he had shown earlier.
“Troubled,” Ignatiev said. “Yes.”
With the barest shake of its head, the avatar said, “You are behaving much like every other organic species we have seen. Competition, leading to conflict. It’s inevitable, we’re afraid.”
“Inevitable?”
“One of the consequences of organic evolution is an inbuilt sense of competition among you. You see an advance by a fellow individual as a defeat for yourself.”
“That’s not true! We cooperate. We couldn’t have built cities, couldn’t have undertaken scientific research, without cooperation among ourselves.”
“Yet even within such cooperative endeavors, the sense of competition exists. Who can build the tallest tower? Who will get the credit for the latest discovery? Competition is built into your genes, and it leads inevitably to conflict.”
“Not inevitably,” Ignatiev contradicted.
&nbs
p; “No? We have studied thousands of organic civilizations and watched them destroy themselves. The only lasting good that organic creatures accomplish is—in some cases—to develop machine intelligences. Machines work together, without egos that inevitably lead to destruction.”
“Inevitably?”
“Yes. Your own human race is a good example. Faced with the knowledge of the approaching death wave, what are you doing?”
“We’ve sent out missions to the stars,” Ignatiev answered. “We’re working to save intelligent species from annihilation.”
“And what is happening back in your own solar system?” the avatar demanded. “Already the competition between your homeworld and the civilizations you have established on Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, on the satellites of Jupiter and the orbital stations around the other planets—already they are in conflict. Soon they will be at each other’s throats. The death wave won’t have to kill you, your people will destroy themselves long before the death wave reaches you.”
“No!” Ignatiev roared. “I don’t believe that!”
“Believe it,” the avatar said. “You have sent missions to star systems that hold intelligent organic civilizations, have you not?”
“Yes.”
“How many of those so-called intelligent species were already dead and gone by the time you reached them? How many of your teams of mercy have puzzled over what happened to a once-thriving civilization?”
“I … I don’t know,” Ignatiev admitted. “We’ve been traveling through space for two thousand years…”
“We can tell you,” the avatar said. “War. Not an invasion by a hostile alien species. Those worlds self-destructed in orgies of war and murder.”
“No. I can’t believe that.”
“We have tried to shield you from this final truth,” the avatar went on. “We felt it would be too great a shock to your fragile emotional systems. But it is true. Believe it. The ultimate fate of most organic species is to destroy themselves.”
“Not us!” Ignatiev snapped. “The human race isn’t going to kill itself.”
“You think not? Then watch what we have learned. Watch and see for yourself.”
The avatar vanished. Ignatiev sank back wearily in his recliner, almost against his own will, as the holographic display above the fireplace showed a red dwarf star accompanied by a retinue of planets.
Aida’s voice—sounding strangely subdued—told him, “This is the star called Mithra by humans, as it was several hundred thousand years ago.”
Ignatiev watched as millennia raced by in heartbeats. There was an intelligent civilization on the second planet out from the star, a civilization that had spanned their world with fine, delicately spired cities, a society that sent spacecraft out to explore the universe.
And it destroyed itself. Before Ignatiev’s horrified eyes, the civilization split apart and waged interplanetary war with terrifying weapons that vaporized entire cities and even, in the end, warped the orbits of the planets themselves.
In an eyeblink the fine civilization was destroyed, the intelligent organic creatures reduced to Stone Age primitives.
“They will gradually die away,” said Aida’s subdued voice. “They have doomed themselves.”
“But look!” Ignatiev shouted. “A starship! From Earth! We will save them, teach them, help them to grow strong again.”
“And what will happen to the would-be saviors from Earth? How will they react when they find that their own homeworld is tearing itself apart?”
“No. It won’t happen to us.”
Sounding almost like the avatar, Aida answered, “It will. It is in your genes. Organic civilizations self-destruct. Organic intelligence is short. Only machine intelligence is immortal.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
It was true, Ignatiev saw. Too true. He watched as the machines’ observations showed planet after planet, civilization after civilization, reduced to rubble and ashes by internecine war.
Cities atomized. Continents ravaged by disease microbes developed in research laboratories. Whole populations of intelligent creatures wiped out, their last thoughts of vengeance and hatred.
Is this our fate? Ignatiev asked himself. Are we doomed to destroy ourselves?
And he realized that whatever the fate of Earth and human civilization, it had already happened. He and his fellow voyagers here on Oh-Four had been traveling the star lanes for two thousand years. Earth could have destroyed itself in that time, Ignatiev realized.
Is that why the machines cut off our communications link with Earth? he wondered. They didn’t want us to see our homeworld destroying itself? Were the machines showing kindness? Being merciful?
The notion almost crushed him. Almost. But as he sat slumped in his desk chair, watching the horror of world after world destroying itself, a fierce determination began to grow inside him.
He straightened up. Head high, shoulders squared. Show a little faith in your fellow human beings, he told himself. The human race will survive. It has to survive. The universe is a meaningless smear of futility if humanity destroys itself.
He wanted to believe that humankind would survive this crisis. Had already survived it.
And even if the human race has destroyed itself back on Earth, we still exist. Only two thousand of us, but we are human beings and we will not extinguish ourselves. We will survive. We will live.
Slowly, Ignatiev rose to his feet, telling himself, We face a possible self-destruct situation right here. The two thousand of us could tear ourselves apart over this Mandabe business. I’ve got to find a way to solve this problem. If I can, then maybe others on Earth can solve their problem.
If they can’t, if they haven’t … then it’s up to the few of us here to carry on the human race’s quest for survival. We few, we precious few.
With a stubborn shake of his head Ignatiev rejected the possibility of defeat. Failure is not an option. Even if we’re the last two thousand human beings in the universe, we will survive. We will solve our problem. We will show these machines and the rest of the universe that humankind is smart enough, wise enough, tough enough to survive whatever the universe can throw at us.
Or so he hoped.
* * *
Gita saw the determination written on his face the instant she returned from her laboratory.
“Alex, what’s wrong?”
He almost smiled at her. “Is it that obvious?”
Her brown eyes wide with concern, Gita said, “You look as if you’re staring into the pits of hell.”
“Not quite,” he replied. “Close enough, though. Close enough.”
Leading her to the couch and sitting beside her, Ignatiev explained the problem with Mandabe and the wider implications that the machines’ avatar had revealed to him.
She listened quietly, her expression growing more concerned, more fearful as he spoke.
At last Ignatiev finished with, “So our problem with Mandabe is just a microcosm of the wider problem, the possible extinction of the human race and the other intelligent species scattered around the galaxy.”
“Intelligent organic species,” Gita amended.
Ignatiev nodded.
“There’s nothing we can do about what’s happening on Earth,” she said.
Knowing what he felt was projection of the most basic sort, still Ignatiev confessed, “I can’t help thinking that if we can solve our little problem here, the people back on Earth will be able to solve their problem, too.”
Gita’s lips curved upward slightly. “Sympathetic magic.”
“What?”
“It’s an old tribal superstition. What you do can have an effect on others.”
“But it does, doesn’t it?”
“Separated by two thousand light-years? That’s classic spooky action at a distance.”
Ignatiev recognized Einstein’s famous quip, but persisted, “We’ve got to resolve the Mandabe situation. It could tear our entire group into warring factions.”
/> Gita’s smile turned derisive. “Mandabe doesn’t have that many friends. He’s turned almost everybody against him.”
“Drunk with power,” Ignatiev muttered.
“Something like that. Also, he has the hots for Vivian Fogel.”
“That’s what Jackson said.”
“If you could talk her into going to bed with him,” Gita suggested, “your whole problem might be solved.”
Instead of laughing, Ignatiev said, “Until he turned his attentions to someone else. Like you.”
Gita looked shocked.
“Mandabe’s idea of power is to control everyone, bend us all to his will,” Ignatiev told her. “That includes you.”
“No it doesn’t,” Gita replied, her voice iron hard.
“We’ve got to find some way to resolve this conflict before it tears us apart.”
“You’ve got to find a way, Alex. No one else can.”
Ignatiev stared at her. He realized that he didn’t fully believe what she’d said, but as he reviewed in his mind the other possibilities—Jugannath, Raj Jackson—he concluded that Gita might be right. It’s my responsibility. I tried to get out from under the obligation when I resigned and handed the chairmanship to Mandabe, and look where it’s led us.
It’s my responsibility. And his mind filled with the images he had seen of worlds destroyed, of intelligent creatures killing each other in orgies of devastation.
It’s my responsibility, he repeated to himself.
CHAPTER FIFTY
How to get Mandabe to stop acting like a tyrant without causing an irreparable break between him and me? All through dinner and afterward Ignatiev pondered the problem, tried to look at it in different lights, sought an insight that could produce a viable answer.
Nothing.
At last, as he and Gita prepared for bed, she halfheartedly suggested, “Perhaps you could call for another vote by the committee.”
He looked at her: so solemn, so beautiful, so caring.
With a sigh, Ignatiev said, “That would merely bring the conflict out into the open. Mandabe would think I’m trying to take the chairmanship back from him.”
