Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Giovannini finished it for him. "You had no idea people on Earth were so damned neurotic," he said, and sighed. Then, "Lindsay--call me Johnny, will you? All my friends do--Lindsay, for generations now people by and large have been forfeiting confidence in themselves to confidence in computers.

  "They have had good reason. Computer judgment has been responsible for the first true age of world peace in history. It may not be healthy but it's a damn sight healthier than war. And it has transformed this republic from an unwieldy group of states into a controlled anarchy that can be run by pushbuttons under ordinary conditions."

  He paused while the Martian lit a cigarette, then went on with, "Thanks first to Sylac, then to Elsac, we learned that Vermont was happiest under its Town Meeting method, North Carolina needed its oligarchy, while my native state, California, is much better off divided in two. Texas became happy with its triple legislature--they never are happy unless they have a little more of everything down there. It was the same in other countries--Canada, South America, Spain...."

  "And England?" Lindsay said softly.

  The president sighed again. "England," he admitted, "is a bit of a problem--out of all proportion to its size and current importance. But the British are stubborn about their institutions. They've hung onto a Royal Family a hundred years longer than anyone else. We can hardly expect them to give up their beloved socialism so soon."

  "Just as long as Mars is not expected to pay for this indulgence, it's quite all right with my people," Lindsay told him.

  "What's your first name--Zalen?" the president asked. "Well, Zalen, I know it's a problem but we all have to give a little or crowd somebody out. Zalen, people are getting killed on account of you right now."

  "I've nearly been killed a couple of times myself."

  "I know. Regrettable," said Giovannini. "The UW crowd never has understood security. That's why I had to kidnap you, Zalen. Couldn't have you killed, you know. Not now anyway."

  "Glad you feel that way, Johnny." Lindsay told him drily. "But hasn't it occurred to you that if people here are so easily set off it might be a good idea to knock out this computer business once and for all?"

  The president puffed on his cigarette. Then he said, "Zale, twenty years ago, maybe even ten, it could have been done. Now it's too late. Which is why the ninety-billion-dollar investment in Giac. We've got to give them an absolute computer, one that will remove forever the basic distrust of computer judgment that underlies the neuroses you just mentioned."

  "Quite possibly," said Lindsay. "But I haven't actually done a damned thing myself to undermine computer judgment. The mistakes have been made by the so-called experts who have fed their machines inadequate information. Those mistakes were infantile. They suggest some sort of neurosis on the part of the feeders. They could be mistake-prone, you know."

  President Giovannini chuckled again. "Of course they're mistake-prone, Zalen," he said. "Some of them, anyway. And it's getting worse. That's the real reason for Giac. Wait'll you see it!"

  "You think I'm going to be around that long, Johnny?" Lindsay asked. "I understand I'm to be sent back to Mars--if I live that long."

  "No, Lindsay, we need you--I'll explain in a moment. And we aren't going to let you die and become a martyr for generations of anti-computerites. We can't have that now, can we?"

  "I'll go along with you on it," said Lindsay, wondering what the president was leading up to.

  "Good!" The president beamed at him. "Zalen--I want you to be the first person to put Giac through a public test. That's how much I trust that machine. I want you, the man who has fouled up two computers, including Elsac, to try her out."

  * * * * *

  And Lindsay could only nod. The governors of Mars might not approve but after the uproar he had caused on this mission they could hardly object. President Giovannini's scheme was fully up to that renowned statesman's reputation for political astuteness. The more Lindsay thought it over the more beautiful was its simplicity.

  Mere word that he was to conduct the first public test would quell the rioting. And unless Lindsay could show this mightiest of all symbolic logic computers to be fallible, computer rule would be entrenched on Earth as never before.

  But what if, in some way, he succeeded in confounding the computer? Lindsay shuddered as he thought of the rioting he had so recently witnessed on the vidar-screens.

  His face must have revealed his distress for the president said, "You're worn out, Zalen. Can't have that, you know. Not with the big test coming tomorrow."

  Lindsay barely remembered leaving the president and being led to a sleeping chamber somewhere in the vast mansion. When he woke up it was dark and Nina was perched on the edge of his contour couch, looking unexpectedly demure in a grey bolo with white collar and cuffs.

  He said, as articulate as usual when she surprised him, "Hi."

  "About time you woke up," she said. "Do you know you snore?"

  "I can't help it," he told her. Then, coming fully awake, "How the devil did you get here?"

  "I walked," she informed him succinctly. She stood up, her magnificent figure silhouetted against the light. "Better get dressed--your duds are over there." She nodded toward a walldrobe. "I'll wait in the bathroom." She breezed out.

  When he looked at the clothing he was to wear he sensed that Nina had selected it for him. It was a little brighter in color, a little more daring in cut, than what he would have picked for himself.

  Nina was placing jewels carefully in her hair, which she had released to form a sleek halo around her magnificent head, when he entered the bathroom. A small palisade of glittering jeweled hairpins protruded from her mouth. She had shed her demure bolo and stood revealed in glittering black bodice-bra and evening skirt-clout.

  After placing the last jewel in her hair she swung about and said, "There--how do I look?"

  "Gorgeous," he told her.

  "You look a bit dull," she said. She dug a box out of a travel-bag placed in a corner of the room. "Here," she said. "Put this on--left side."

  "This" proved to be a magnificent sunburst decoration, a glittering diamond-encrusted star. He said, "What is it?"

  "Grand Order of the United Worlds--a fine diplomat you are! I picked it up for you this afternoon before flying here. Just stick it on...." She came over, took it from him, pressed it firmly against his bolo till the suction grips caught hold.

  He put his arms around her. She let him hold her a moment, then pushed clear in the immemorial gesture of women dressed for a party who do not want to have their grooming mussed. "Not now," she said. "We'll have plenty of time."

  "Not for what's worrying me," he said. "Nina, I've got to put Giac through its paces in front of the whole world tomorrow. And I don't know what to ask it. I've got a blind spot where symbolic logic is concerned."

  "Don't fret yourself," said the girl calmly. "I'm not worried about you. Not after what you've managed to do to all the other computers you've faced. Come on--we're having dinner with the president."

  "Who the hell are you anyway?" he asked her bluntly. "You don't even look the same."

  She laughed. "I should hope not," she told him. "After all, I could hardly grace the president's table as a mere UW secretary--or as a New Orleans top model. Come on!"

  He went--and got his second shock when President Giovannini greeted Nina with a manner as close to obsequiousness as that professionally free-and-easy politician could muster. He said, "My dear Miss Norstadt-Ramirez. I do hope you'll forgive me for ordering such summary action this morning. If I'd had the slightest idea...."

  "I was boiling," Nina told him. "I was just about ready to order Aetnapolitan to pull the props out from under you when the riots started. Then I blessed your shiny little head and came up here."

  "I am honored," said the president.

  * * * * *

  Lindsay, walking through the proceedings in a fog, was even more laconic than a clipped British envoy who, along with a recovered Senator Anderson,
was a member of the party.

  "Don't take it so hard," Anderson whispered. "Nina is just about the best-kept secret in this hemisphere. If I weren't one of the few who's been in on it all along...." He shrugged eloquently.

  Lindsay said nothing. He couldn't. So Nina--his fresh slatternly secretary, the courtesan of the world capital--was also Coranina Norstadt-Ramirez, the heiress who owned almost half of Earth!

  He felt like a quadruply-plated idiot. He knew about Norstadt-Ramirez--who didn't, whether on Earth or Mars or the space-stations circling Venus while that planet's atmosphere was being artificially altered to make it fit for human habitation?

  She was a fantastic glamorous lady of mystery, the ultimate heiress, the young woman to whom inexorably, thanks to North America's matriarchal era during the twentieth century, the control of most of its mightiest corporations and trust funds had descended.

  And she was Lindsay's secretary. No wonder, he thought miserably, she had never sounded quite sincere about calling him boss. Why, she virtually owned his home planet as well. He watched her covertly across the table, poised, amused, alert, occasionally witty--and so damnably attractive. He wished he were dead.

  She caught his regard, scowled and stuck her tongue out at him. He thought. Why, you little...!

  Somehow she got them out of the chatter after dinner, got him back to his suite. There, regarding him sternly, she said, "Zale, you aren't going to be stuffy about this, are you?"

  "I can't help it," he replied. "If you'd only told me...."

  He read sympathy in her green eyes. But she merely shrugged and said, "Result of a lifetime of keeping myself under wraps." She sat on a contour chair, patted a place for him alongside.

  She said, "I'm the richest single person there has ever been--you know that. It isn't my fault. It just happened. I didn't deserve or want or need it. But it is a hell of a responsibility. Since I'm responsible for so much it seemed important to me to know how people felt. After all we act because we feel. And thanks to a few good friends like Fernando Anderson I've been able to get away with it."

  "Why me?" he asked her. "Why pick on me?"

  Her expression softened. One of her hands crept into his. "One of the nicest things about you, Zale, is the fact that you don't realise just how special you are."

  "I'm not so special on Mars," he told her.

  "No?" Her eyebrows rose delightfully. "A quarter of a billion Martians select you as their first Plenipotentiary to the UW and you're not special? Zale, you're an absolute woolly lamb.

  "There's more to it than that. I've never been to Mars. I should have, but I simply haven't had the time. So I decided the best way to find out about Mars at second hand was to work with you in some capacity that would let you be yourself."

  "A filthy, underhanded, thoroughly feminine trick," he said gently and kissed her. Then, frowning into her green eyes, "But why are you so dead set against computer judgment?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" she asked. "I've got a tremendous stake in this world. Kicking around it as I have I've been able to see what is happening. I'm damned if I'm going to have my property managed and run by a bunch of people who make mistakes because they're too neurotic to make decisions. Look at them!" Her voice became edged with disgust.

  Lindsay said, "I see. Listen, honey, I'd like to sleep with you tonight."

  She looked surprised but not displeased by his bluntness. "Of course, darling," she told him.

  "How much will it cost me?" he asked her.

  She froze--then her eyes began to fill and she sniffled. He said, "You know I didn't mean that. Dammit, I just wanted to show you you're a neurotic yourself."

  She slapped him hard enough to tilt him off the contour chair. She rose haughtily, still sniffing. Lindsay stretched out a hand and caught one of her ankles and tripped her up. She tottered, gave vent to a startled, "Awk!", fell backward into the pool-tub.

  He dived in after her, caught her when she came up, spluttering, gripped her shoulders hard. Her eyes blazed green fire at him. She said, "How dare you do that to me, you moron!"

  He said, "If I hadn't I'd probably never have seen you again."

  She collapsed into his arms.

  Later--much later--as Nina was about to leave him for her own suite, he asked, "Honeycomb, what did you lose that caused Fernando to give you that necklace?"

  "I nearly lost you," she replied from the doorway. "I bet him Maria wouldn't get you that night. And lost. So Fernando sent the necklace as compensation."

  "Quite a large compensation," said Lindsay drily.

  Nina shrugged. "Not for Fernando," she told him. "After all, I pay him enough. He's my number one political boy. 'Night, darling."

  * * * * *

  Lindsay was on the verge of a breakdown himself by noon the next day, after Computation Minister du Fresne, looking uglier than ever, had finished conducting President Giovannini's official party through the rooms and passages of Giac. If Nina hadn't been by his side during and after the swift rocket trip to Death Valley, he might have collapsed.

  It was she who had removed the glittering star from his breast before breakfast in the Sherwood Forest mansion that morning. "You needed something to wear for show last night," she had told him.

  "Then it's not mine?" he had countered absently.

  "Of course it is," she had assured him. "But Secretary General Bergozza is going to make the official investiture after the test."

  Lindsay had meekly surrendered the bauble, barely noticing. His brain was straining to recall what he could of symbolic logic--a subject that had never particularly interested him. For some reason it kept working back to Lewis Carroll, who, under his real name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, had been the founder of symbolic logic back in the nineteenth century, along with the renowned Dr. Poole.

  About all he could remember was the following problem:

  (1) Every one who is sane can do Logic;

  (2) No lunatics are fit to serve on a jury;

  (3) None of your sons can do Logic.

  The Universal was "persons". The symbols were: a--able to do Logic; b--fit to serve on a jury; c--sane; d--your sons.

  And the answer, of course, was: None of your sons is fit to serve on a jury.

  For some reason this, in turn, made him think of the ancient conundrum that employed confusion to trip its victims: What's the difference between an iron dog in the side yard of a man who wants to give his little daughter music lessons but is afraid he can't afford them next year, and a man who has a whale in a tank and wants to send him for a wedding present and is trying to pin a tag on him, saying how long he is, how much he weighs and where he comes from, but can't because the whale keeps sloshing around in the tank and knocking the tag off?

  This time, the answer was: One can't wag his tail, the other can't tag his whale.

  "None of your sons is fit to tag a whale--or wag a tail," he said absently.

  "What was that?" Nina asked.

  "Nothing, nothing at all," he replied. "Merely a man going out of his mind."

  "It will never miss you," she replied brightly. But her brightness became a bit strained as the day wore on. The trip, for Lindsay, was sheer nightmare. No sane man can wag his tail, he kept thinking.

  Even such fugitive grasping at Logical straws vanished when he saw the immense squat mass of Giac, rising like a steel-and-concrete toad from the wastes of the California desert. It seemed absurd even to think that such an imposing and complex structure should have been reared on the mathematics of the immortal author of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and The Hunting of the Snark.

  For Giac was imposing, even to a man biased against computers from birth. Nor did du Fresne's smugness help Lindsay's assurance a bit. He explained how each of the block-large preliminary feeders worked--one for mathematical symbols, one for oral recording, a third for written exposition. Each worked simultaneously and in three different ways--via drum-memory banks, via punched tapes, via the new "ear-tubes" that r
esponded to sound.

  Then there were the preliminary synthesizers, each of which unified in vapor-plutonium tubes the findings of its three separate feeders. Next, a towering black-metal giant filling three walls of a cubical room twenty metres in each dimension, came the final synthesizer, which coordinated the findings of the preliminary synthesizers and fed them into Giac itself.

  The master machine was the least imposing of all. It stood like an alabaster stele in the center of an immense chamber arranged like a theater-in-the-round. But du Fresne, peering through his strawberry spectacles, said gloatingly, "Don't be deceived by the size, ladies and gentlemen. All but what you see of Giac is underground. It is contained in an all-metal cell one million cubic metres in volume. And it is infallible."

  Fortunately Lindsay was given a half hour of final preparation in one of the small offices with which the above-ground building was honeycombed. Nina came with him--by request.

  "I can't do it," he told her abruptly.

  "Don't worry, darling, you'll think of something," she said. She tried to embrace him but he was too worried to respond. After awhile she said, "Why not put a direct question. Ask it if it's infallible."

  "It could hardly tell a lie on itself," he replied.

  "What if such a question involved destruction of part of itself in the answer?" she asked.

  "It might--though I presume du Fresne and his boys have prepared it for such jokers. And anyway, what sort of question would do that? Got any ideas?"

  "That's your department," she said helpfully. "You're the computer smasher of this team."

  "But that was pure luck," he said half-angrily. "One can't wag his tail.... The other can't serve on a jury."

  She looked alarmed. "Darling," she said, "you aren't--"

  "Not yet, Honeycomb," he said, "but give me time.

  "It's got to be something about this Mars-Earth problem," he went on after a long silence. "Listen: how can Mars develop if it's in the spot of the Red Queen--has to run like hell just to stay where it is thanks to Earth's dumping policies?"

  * * * * *