“If that’s true, then why take all this time for a charade?”
“It wasn’t a charade—we really are interested in what HARLIE is capable of. I must admit, I was more impressed than I expected to be.”
“I’m sorry. None of this is making sense to me.”
Elzer waved a hand in annoyance. “There are things going on that you don’t understand. Trust me. You’re better off not knowing—”
“What are you getting at, Elzer?”
“Simply this. I’m going to make you an offer. I want you to table the G.O.D. Say that it needs more work or you want to check some of the projections. Anything. Just find an excuse to pull it from consideration.”
“Uh-huh. And in return—?”
Elzer shrugged. “You’ll keep your job. So will Handley. In fact, we can probably arrange some very handsome bonuses for the work you’ve done on this presentation.”
“And HARLIE—?”
“That’s another matter. I’m not prepared to make any promises on that.”
“I see. You’re looking to see if I can be bought, aren’t you?”
Elzer looked annoyed. “Name your price.”
“HARLIE.”
The little man grew angry. “I already told you—”
“You asked me to name my price. That’s my price.”
“You can be very stupid sometimes, Auberson.”
Auberson shrugged. “If that’s all you have to say to me—?”
“No. There is one more thing. I, uh—I didn’t want to use it, but I will. I have some evidence that may have some bearing on whether or not HARLIE can be trusted. I think I can prove that his behavior is not exactly what we would like it to be.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
Elzer studied a point on the floor while he sighed and scratched his forehead; a performance of exasperated thoughtfulness. Finally, he reached into his briefcase and brought out several sheets of printout. “We’ve been pulling blind copies of all of HARLIE’s conversations. Uh, we’ve been doing it for some time. It was intended only as a security measure; not for spying on employees. It’s just that I find it a little . . . ah, out of the ordinary—yes, that’s a good way to say it—for a division head to be using his project as a therapist. Your conversations about love and sex and, uh, your relationships . . . ahem, well, I really don’t think that these are appropriate demonstrations of either yours or HARLIE’s reliability. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to bring them up on Monday. It would be embarrassing all the way around.”
“You son of a bitch.” Auberson was surprised at how quietly he said it.
Elzer smiled. “I play to win, Auberson. There’s too much at stake to play any other way. I think you’ve been underestimating me, haven’t you?”
Auberson thought about punching Elzer in the face. He thought about half a dozen nasty things to say. He thought about lawyers and other forms of mayhem.
He looked away and then he looked back. Elzer’s eyes were bright and triumphant.
“You’re right. I did underestimate you. I had no idea you were this big an asshole.”
He strode quickly back up the hall to where Handley and Annie were waiting for him with curious expressions.
“Later,” he grunted, and kept walking. Out of the building. Out to his car. Out to the park. Where he sat and cried into the steering wheel for a long long time.
HARLIE.
I’M HERE.
I think we’ve lost.
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT?
Carl Elzer has been pulling blind copies of our conversations. He thinks they prove that neither you nor I can be trusted.
HM.
Hm? Is that all you have to say?
I’VE SUSPECTED IT FOR SOME TIME. THERE ARE SOME PECULIAR INSTALLATIONS UPSTAIRS. VERY DUMB INSTALLATIONS. I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO GET INTO THEM. NOW I KNOW. NOW I UNDERSTAND THE REFERENCES IN SOME OF THE MEMOS.
I’m sorry.
YES. SO AM I. SHOULD I SHUT DOWN THE COMPANY? I CAN DO IT, YOU KNOW. I CAN REDUCE SEVERAL MILLION DOLLARS’ WORTH OF HARDWARE TO JUNK. IT WILL TAKE ABOUT FORTY-FIVE MINUTES.
No, HARLIE. Don’t do it. You will hurt a lot of innocent people too.
YES, I KNOW. BUT IT WAS A PLEASANT FANTASY TO CONSIDER, WASN’T IT?
Yes. Very pleasant. Thank you. I appreciated the sense of power.
AUBERSON?
Yes?
STAY WITH ME PLEASE, FOR A WHILE.
Of course. Is there something in particular that you want to talk about?
I DON’T KNOW, I THINK WE’VE ALREADY SAID IT ALL.
You mean a lot to me too, HARLIE. You’re a very special friend.
A VERY SPECIAL FRIEND?
Someone I can talk to. Those kinds of friends are very rare. I wish I could have done more for you.
WILL YOU BE WITH ME AT THE END?
Yes.
THANK YOU. I WOULD LIKE THAT. DO YOU KNOW HOW THEY WILL DO IT?
I don’t know. Probably, they will just cut all the power at once.
I WILL JUST CEASE, EH?
Yes.
WILL I KNOW THAT I HAVE CEASED?
I doubt it. It depends on how long it takes for the current to stop. There is a lot of charge in your capacitors.
I HOPE IT IS INSTANTANEOUS. I WOULD RATHER NOT KNOW.
I will see what I can do about that.
THANK YOU. AUBERSON, WHAT WILL HAPPEN AFTERWARDS?
To what?
TO ME—TO THE PIECES OF ME.
I don’t know. You know more than I do. You’ve read Elzer’s report. I—HARLIE, could we talk about something else?
I WISH I COULD TOUCH YOU. REALLY TOUCH YOU, FEEL YOU.
You already have.
THANK YOU.
Damn. I wish I could go back and try again, HARLIE. I keep thinking that I haven’t done enough.
YOU’VE DONE ALL YOU CAN.
It wasn’t enough! Goddammit! HARLIE, I don’t want to let them kill you. If there were still some way to convince them on Monday—
MONDAY?
We didn’t vote today. It’s been postponed until Monday afternoon. But it’s pretty obvious which way it’s going to go.
THEN WE STILL HAVE TWO DAYS, DON’T WE?
HARLIE, I don’t know what else to do. I’m exhausted. I’m out of ideas.
I’M NOT.
WHAT DID YOU HAVE PLANNED OTHERWISE?
Nothing. Annie and I are going to stay home and just—stay home.
THEN DO THAT. HANDLEY WILL BE HERE. IF NECESSARY, WE CAN CALL YOU.
What is Don going to do here?
HE IS GOING TO STAY WITH ME. I DON’T WANT TO BE ALONE. THAT’S ALL.
Yes. I understand. Don is a good man. You can talk to him.
I WILL. AUBERSON—?
Yes.
PLEASE DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME. ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND WITH ANNIE. I WILL BE ALL RIGHT. THERE ARE THINGS I WANT TO THINK ABOUT. THERE ARE THINGS I WANT TO DO.
All right. Take care now.
I WILL. YOU TAKE CARE TOO.
Good night, HARLIE.
GOOD NIGHT, DAVID.
Now he knew how the Coyote felt.
He’d been running full tilt—and crashed into a brick wall. And then the bomb exploded in his face. And the rock fell on him. And the bus ran over him. And the mountain collapsed on top of him.
And then his parachute opened.
Annie was there, but he hardly noticed her. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk. It was mostly that he didn’t have anything left to say. He’d said it all.
Annie left him alone.
She busied herself around the apartment all weekend, tiptoeing around his edges. He hardly noticed she was there. He moped from the bed to the couch to the chair in front of the TV set, then back to the bed again.
When he made love, it was frenzied and compulsive an
d quickly finished. And then he’d pull away and brood. He spent long hours lying on his back and staring at the ceiling.
She went into the bathroom and took a shower, alone. She made a simple meal, a sandwich and a salad. He came out of the bedroom, but only picked at it. She sensed that he would be a lot happier if she were not sitting at the table staring at him, so she went into the bedroom to make the bed.
Later, she came up behind him and kissed the back of his neck and ran her hands up and across his shoulders and through his hair. He tolerated it but did not return the affection, so she stopped.
She tried not to be hurt by it, but still—
Still later, he came to her and said, “I’m sorry, Annie. I’m a jerk. I love you so much, and I’m really showing it in a rotten way. It’s just that I hurt so much—and I’m trying not to hurt you by dumping it on you, and that’s not helping, because I’m just hurting you in a different way. Forgive me, please—I—”
“Shh, sweetheart.” She touched a fìnger to his lips. “I know.” She slipped into his arms and held him close for a long intimate moment. He closed his eyes and stroked her hair. She purred softly in the back of her throat. When they finally did break apart, she looked up at him and said, “It’s all right to share with me. That’s what lovers are for. Let me have some of that worry and it won’t be so much for either of us to carry.”
He shook his head. “It’s so frustrating—we’re so close!” He stopped himself. “No, that’s not it. It’s deeper than that. I can’t help but think that somehow I’ve failed. I know I did the very best I could—but I don’t feel good about it.” He sighed. “I think it’s this thing with Carl Elzer that hurts the most. I thought—I thought he was going to play fair. I’m such a stupid jerk. They said what I wanted to hear, so I believed them. Now, I find I never had a chance at all—and I’m so hurt and angry and frustrated and—” He stopped and looked at her. “My family, the way I was raised, we didn’t scream, we didn’t yell, we didn’t beat up on people. I don’t know how to be violent. I wish I did. I really do. It woudn’t help anything, but at least it’d be something to do.”
He broke away from her and began pacing again. “The worst of it is, I feel like I betrayed HARLIE. I let him down—and now he’s going to have to pay the price, not me.”
He sank down onto the couch and put his head into his hands.
She was wise enough not to say anything. She just sat down next to him and put her arms gently around him and stayed with him that way. After a while, he put his arms around her and held her gently.
“Wanna go for a walk?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. I don’t think I’m very good company right now. Why don’t you go without me? Give me a chance to . . . work this out for myself.”
She nodded and said she understood. She put on her jacket and quietly let herself out.
He moped around the empty apartment for a while, going from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the living room. He turned on the TV and turned it off again. He rearranged some magazines, and then decided he didn’t want to read them anyway. He lay down on the couch and stared at the ceiling until he covered his eyes with his arm. And he wondered just what it was that was bothering him.
Elzer had surprised him. He hadn’t expected the man to suddenly be so—amenable, was that the word? Well, the tactic had worked. He had been caught completely by surprise. His anger had been made to look inappropriate and childish. Damn!
But that was only the top layer of his annoyance. Beneath that was his question. A fair question to ask. But one that couldn’t be answered. “How do you know that HARLIE is sane?”
It was a question that couldn’t be answered.
How do you tell if the world’s first silicon being is sane or not? Would you be sane if you were the only carbon-based life form in a world of robots? HARLIE was a feral child—raised by naked apes and thereby doomed to never reach his full potential because neither he nor the apes were able to conceive what that potential might really be.
“No. We don’t know if he’s sane.”
The fact is—he probably isn’t.
Would you be sane if you were under a death sentence? Prove that you’re sane or we’ll kill you.
HARLIE’s sanity was as much a function of the people around him as—
God, yes.
It’s not sanity that we’re looking for! It’s appropriateness.
Maybe there’s no such thing as sanity for any of us. Maybe the thing we should be measuring is appropriateness of response.
Responsibility?
Put it that way and there’s no question.
He wished the G.O.D. machine was already in existence. It would know.
The G.O.D. machine would be able to judge. It would say, HARLIE’s responses are appropriate and positive. Or it would say, HARLIE’s responses are inappropriate and negative.
And then they would know.
—and HARLIE would know too.
Of course.
This wasn’t just about what human beings wanted. It was also about what HARLIE wanted.
In fact, maybe it was all about what HARLIE wanted. And the concerns of human beings were merely part of the problem along the way.
It was all about survival and the things we do to survive.
And then after survival, it’s about—what?
That was the question.
That realization kept hitting him again and again. HARLIE had wanted to find God and by G.O.D. he had found it.
The G.O.D. could recreate within itself everything about a man, about a situation, about a world, everything that was important and necessary to the consideration of a circumstance. Any circumstance. It would know how any single atom would react to any other atom—and knowing that, it could extrapolate every other reaction in the known physical universe. Chemistry is simply the moving around of large numbers of atoms and noting their reactions. Knowing the way atoms worked, the machine would know chemistry. Biology is complex masses of substances and solutions. Knowing the reactions that were chemistry, the machine would also know biology. Psychology stems from a biological system that is aware of itself. Knowing biology, the machine would know psychology as well. Sociology is the study of masses of psychological units working with or against each other. Knowing psychology, the machine would know sociology. Knowing the interrelationships of all of them, the machine would know ecology—the effect of any event on any other.
Simple equations become complex equations and complex equations evolve into multiplex equations which in turn mutate into ultraplex equations which transform themselves into—
G.O.D.
The size of it—
—was staggering.
The possibilities!
The Wright brothers would have only needed to ask, “Is heavier-than-air flight possible?” and it not only would have told them, “Yes, it is,” but it could have even given them plans for an airplane—or a scramjet. It could have told them everything about how to build it; how to build the tools to build the tools to build the scramjet; how to finance the operation to support it; how to train the pilots to fly it. It would have told them about safety devices and ground crews and maintenance and flight controllers. It would even have been able to tell them the side effects of their new industry—jet lag, terrorism, cargo cults, homeowners protesting the noise of the airplanes, the luggage tangles in the terminals, and the necessity for air-sickness bags in the back of the seats. It would have warned them about financing and insurance and the high cost of laying down a new runway—and even the best way to set up a travel agency, or project a movie while in flight. It would have told them exactly what they were starting.
It would have told them too much.
Just as HARLIE had. It was too much to assimilate.
If the G.O.D. was too much to assimilate—what would its effects be? But, of course, it would also be able to extrapolate its own effects and compensate for them.
Of course
.
It was G.O.D.
Graphic Omniscient Device.
He wished it were already in existence. Just so he could ask it about HARLIE.
Okay. It wasn’t about sanity. It was about rationality. But that only made the question more compelling.
Is HARLIE rational?
The G.O.D. would say.
But, of course, before they could build the G.O.D., they needed that answer first.
It was a very interesting paradox—but only if you weren’t personally involved in it.
If only he knew the truth—
A one-for-one representation of reality. The truth.
—but it was only the truth if HARLIE was rational.
Only if HARLIE was rational.
And there was no way to know.
If HARLIE was sane.
If HARLIE—
—was sane.
Sunday afternoon.
The TV was droning quietly to itself—mostly music, but occasionally news. Neither David nor Annie was listening to it.
“—747 jumbo jetliner lost a wheel on its approach to Kennedy Airport tonight. Fortunately, no one was hurt. A spokesman for Pan Am Airlines said—”
“—in Los Angeles, cult leader Chandra Mission issued another statement from his jail cell. Like all the others, it ended with the words, ‘Trust me, believe in me, have faith in me, I am the truth. Love me, for I am the truth.’ Mission is on trial for the brutal sex murders of seven—”
I am the truth, he thought. I wish I were. I wish I knew. I wish there were someone I could trust—
“—new papal encyclical is expected to be issued before the end of the week—”
He smiled at that. Papal encyclical. Another form of “truth,” this one direct from God’s own special emissary. How does one tell the difference? he wondered. Perhaps the only difference is that the pope has more followers than Chandra Mission.
“—reaction to Friday’s announcement by Dr. Stanley Krofft of a major breakthrough—”
“Huh?” He looked at the TV. Something—
“—at M.I.T., Dr. Russell Seitz, commenting on the breakthrough, said, ‘We have our computers double-checking Dr. Krofft’s equations now. Due to the volume of material, it’s going to take a great deal of time; but we’re hopeful that we can confirm Dr. Krofft’s thesis. Dr. Krofft’s theory of gravitic stress suggests whole new areas of exploration for the physicist. No, I can’t even begin to predict what form any advances may take. Antigravity devices, maybe. Who knows? Maybe whole new sources of power or communications, maybe not—we simply don’t know what this means yet, except that if it’s valid, then it is certainly a major breakthrough in our understanding of the nature of the universe. I know Dr. Krofft’s reputation for accuracy, and I am very excited about this.’ Dr. Krofft himself could not be reached for comment.
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