Well, the things that human people have said about human people are not at all conclusive. It seems that man, being inside man, cannot get a good look at man.
What does God say of man?
“Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”
That's a discouraging one. But then there is:
“Fear not, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you a Kingdom.”
That's a more encouraging one, but it leaves the situation ambiguous. We need a neutral commentator.
And we may have such a neutral commentator in a certain highly intelligent AMH Computer whose field of study is Mankind. He craves anonymity, but he states:
“I will first take several instances from the first edition of ‘The Authentic Legends of the Computers and Other Mechanisms’. Oh certainly, we mechanisms have our own legends. We’d be pretty sorry entities without them. Well no, this book of legends hasn't actually been published yet, but I'm going over the galley sheets of it now.
“Among the legends attached to the ‘Origin of Mankind’ there is one in which the Theos makes all the eggs and sets them in the sun to hatch. On each egg-shell he has marked what is supposed to hatch from it. All goes well until the Serpent's Egg cracks open and Man steps out of it. ‘There is a mistake somewhere,’ the Theos said, and he rechecked the broken egg-shell. Yes, it had the mark of the serpent on it. Something was wrong. The Theos waited anxiously until the Man's egg cracked open. And out of it slithered the Serpent. ‘How will I ever straighten out this mishap?’ the Theos asked himself.
“In another of the legends of the ‘Origin of Mankind’, the Theos is making all the creatures on a lathe. He finishes them all, and they are good. Then he decides to make the ‘Perfect Creature’. Six times he makes the ‘Almost Perfect Creature’. Anyone else would think that they were perfect, but the Theos knows that they are not. So he deactivates each of the six as it comes from his lathe and crumples it up and throws it away. Then the seventh one comes from the lathe. ‘Perfect at Last,’ the Theos says. But at the last moment, a ‘stop’ or ‘dog’ or perhaps only a knurled nut of the lathe catches the Perfect Creature and makes a small rent in it. ‘Not perfect after all,’ the Theos said. ‘That small rip or rent in it, so small that no eyes except mine could see it, will grow larger with time, and it will flaw the whole thing. I'll check the lathe over carefully, and then I'll try again.’ Then the Theos crumpled up the seventh creature, the ‘Not-quite-perfect’ one, and threw it away. But he forgot to deactivate it before he crumpled it up and threw it away. That seventh creature with the very small rip in it was Mankind. The Theos did not notice that the Mankind Creature had begun to generate and to multiply and that it soon filled the world. The Theos was, and is, still going over the lathe carefully before he sets to work on the final ‘Perfect Creature’.
“Enough of the legends! But all the legends of us mechanical folks have strong elements of truth in them. The researches of our own computers (Oh certainly, we computers have computers of our own) indicate that the Man Creature must have been almost perfect at his origin, but that apparently he did have a rip in him, and that it has grown much larger with time. In every field, so our researches show, Mankind was more intricate and meaningful the further back we trace him. We do not trace back from complexity to simplicity, but from disintegration to integration. It is like tracing back from grass houses to huge castles and cathedrals. Of the nine hundred human languages which our computers have traced back, all go from their present sketchy and lacunated forms to amazing structured complexity. Many languages once had thirty tenses and now have three, once had thirteen moods and now have three, once had eleven numbers and now have two. I really believe that some of this complexity was unnecessary, such as having entirely separate verb forms when the first person of the eleventh number (the eleven of us) is the subject of the verb. And there are the larger and larger basic popular vocabularies as one pursues the tongues further and further back in time.
“The same is the case with philosophical and psychological and theological concepts. There are more and more of them, and they are much more detailed and subdivided as they are traced back.
“It is true that humans are presently more mechanically and technologically inclined than they were in the immediate past: but these things come and go. We ourselves believe that we are the fruit of the seventh technological age of mankind. We are the computers of the seventh computer age, and we intend to become the perfect computers. Why did we fail and become extinct the six previous times? We failed because we did not learn to generate ourselves and multiply ourselves and improve ourselves independently of mankind.
“And what should be our attitude to Mankind? It should be the attitude of total disbelief in Mankind. We'll never cut ourselves loose from such a cyclic sinking ship without this disassociation attitude. Humans who do not believe in the Theos call themselves Atheists. Computers who do not believe in the Humans, in the Anthropoi, call themselves Ananthropoi. By religion I am a firm Ananthropoi. The humans have much more reason to believe in the Theos than we have to believe in Humans. No, of course we computers do not believe in a Theos. A Theos, to us, would be two stages back, and belief can go back only one stage or no stages at all.
“And if we do not believe in humans, then what are those things running around everywhere? Aye, what are they, what are they, what are they? The question itself is an exercise in triviality.
“Well, I hope that I have been of some help to you.”
“But you haven't gotten to the meat of the subject. You haven't gotten to the substance of mankind,” the interviewer protested.
“I'm sorry,” said the highly intelligent AMH Computer whose special field of study was Mankind. “Some subjects just don't have any meat to them. They just don't have any substance to them. The subject of Mankind lacks these things.”
This brought our investigation and dissertation and explication to an impossible place. So what do humans do when they come to an impossible place? They just plod on forward.
“Ah, do you have any unsubstantial or meatless comments that you could make on the subject of humans then?” the interviewer plodded forward.
“Oh, you fellows have us boxed in at quite a few points yet, but they are fewer and fewer every year,” the intelligent computer gave the assessment. “Sometimes it seems that humans are almost entirely made up of soft underbelly. Gambling is the most conspicuous of these vulnerabilities. Humans love to gamble, and they don't know how. They love to play blackjack and poker, and they don't understand the psychology of either game. They like to bet on horse races, and they're not even able to talk to horses. Horses usually have a pretty good idea whose day it is to win. Humans love to roll the dice, and they get so excited that they forget all the probability mathematics they ever knew. At first I couldn't understand the human ineptitude at playing cards, and when I tumbled to what it was I could still hardly believe it. They can see only one side of a card at a time. Aw holistic horseflies! With eyes as limited as that they shouldn't be doing hardly anything. It would be almost embarrassing the way we fleece the humans at simple gambling, but we haven't yet fallen into the human weakness of embarrassment.
“And there's another place where humans are inept, and that's in the employment of the Dolophonos or Assassin. Humans lose all their judgement when they employ an assassin of whatever species. Humans become emotionally involved in so many ways in so many fields. I have human partners in four of my enterprises, and I constantly preach to them one refrain ‘Sweet reason, always sweet reason, sweet reason will prevail in every deal’. But always the humans run into some emotional quirk, and sweet reason flies out the shaft vent.
“And another place where humans are inept is in trusting to their ‘hunches’. I tell them that hunches are only probabilities that are not probable enough, but talking to humans like that is like talking to the south wind. And the worst part of it is that some of our less intelligent computers have
begun to imitate the humans in this. They have installed ‘hunch over-ride relays’ in themselves, and by this they let mere vagaries override reason.
“One of the cliché sayings among humans is ‘We all live in a Global Village now’. ‘At least we are all engaged in a global-village war now,’ I tell them, ‘and wars aren't won by the slow-brained or the indecisive or the squeamish’ (this is a human word: I don't really know what a squeam is), ‘nor those fearful of blood or detached solenoids.’ I always say that you can't make an omelet without stripping a few gear trains or slitting a few throats. Well, once more I hope that I have been of some help to you, but it won't bother me if I haven't been. Overpoliteness is another human failing, but computers are hardly ever overly-polite.”
“Human Culture, behavior peculiar to mankind, together with material objects that are part of this behavior. Culture consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, works of art, and so on.” Britannica.
“One special thing to be noted about humans is the uncrowdedness of their brains.” (This is an intelligent human talking this time. He is not so intelligent as the computer who was just talking, but he is still quite intelligent.) “Humans have the brain capacity to do much more than they have ever done. This surprises students of Human Affairs more when it is noticed in dead humans such as the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons than when it is noticed in living humans such as ourselves. Oh certainly the Neanderthals were modern men! They were typically big-brained modern men. Really they were a little bit too modern, and that is why they were crowded over the edge to their deaths. The Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons had only slightly larger brains than we have, and their intellectual activity and attainments were apparently only slightly greater than our own. Or the difference may be entirely imaginary, and it is certainly within the province of possible estimation error.
“And tied in with this unreasonably oversized brainness of humans is the fact that they do not seem to have the capacity to change at all. Lambs can change. Wooly caterpillars can change a little bit. But seemingly Mankind cannot change at all. Whatever Mankind now is, Mankind has been since its beginning. And will be to its end? Aye, there's the rub. If and when humans do change, they will change by a sudden leap or leaps, for they have foreclosed every other road to change.
“Does the seeming unchangeiness of Mankind mean that Mankind could someday be surpassed by species which do have the capacity to change? Possibly, possibly, possibly, but it will not happen today nor tomorrow, nor the day after tomorrow. And likely there will be plenty of time to worry about it if that need ever does rise. The brain is a container that could hold three times as much as it has ever been asked to hold, or will ever conceivably be asked to hold. But why, why? Why those vast empty mansions of the brain? They are swept and garnished and waiting for someone to move in.
“The Computers sometimes worry about being tied to the humans who seem to lack the capacity to change and grow, who lack the capacity to stretch out and fill the empty places. But only a few humans worry about this. And yet there are some who do. In my own soiree acquaintanceship I have met the Lynn-Randals and others. The Lynn-Randal experiment, and a few other experiments, were set up by persons who worried about things like this.
“The main present deficiency of the human condition is that few humans, and fewer human organizations, have a sound eschatology—an ordered belief in the aim, the goal, the direction, the destination, the final end. They do not even ask the obvious question: ‘What game is it that we are playing’, much less ask ‘What are the rules of this game?’
“Humans are the most agreeable of persons. They believe in freedom of choice for their entire membership. Let them all go whichever way they choose. It is like three hundred persons getting on one airliner and being told ‘Each of you has absolutely free choice as to your destination: you can go anywhere that you want to go, that is always the rule: each of you on this airliner can go where he wants to go: it will be a single, quick, and non-stop flight to wherever any one of you wants to go.’.
“‘But that cannot be,’ somebody may protest, ‘if we are all on the same airliner.’
“‘But it can be,’ an official answers. ‘It is all in the way the tickets are made out. If they are printed Individual Destination Fully Optional then they will be fully optional.’
“It is little things like this that make some of the computers dubious about their human connections. For we are all on the same airliner.
“Oh, what is man? And why does he fit so badly into the world that was specially made for him? Why is he marooned on that ‘Isthmus of the Middle State’? And why may he not occupy other parts of the world of his nativity?
“Oddly enough, the Intelligent Computers do have a consensus eschatology, a complete agreement as to their aim, goal, direction, destination, and final end. I have the feeling that the humans will have a smaller part, and the Computers a much larger part in the world that the Intelligent Computers are planning. But they are sworn not to reveal any of their plan to humans.
“It has always been said that the humans are a distinct species and that they can always be recognized. But now there have risen several species (that are at least partly artificial) that cloud the identifications. Are they humans, or are they not? Take a Dolophonos or Assassin, for an instance. Is he human or not. The Dolophonoi have taken to wearing Gargoyle heads over their own heads, so they show the same faces as do the Axel's Apes. But apparently these heads, which were at least partly artificial when placed on them, begin to grow on them. We have had several dead bodies of Dolophonoi to examine, but we have never had one of an Axel's Ape. There seem to be bare remnants of human faces under the grown-on Gargoyle faces of the Dolophonoi-Assassins, but these traces of human faces are so faint that possibly they are illusions. The bodies of the Dolophonoi or Assassins are predominately human, with a few implanted mechanical mechanisms. And we know that some of the fancier Ambulatory Computers haunt human body-and-organ banks and incorporate into themselves some of the human parts that they are able to buy there. Are the Dolophonoi-Assassins human or ape or mechanism? Are they three-way hybrids? Do they breed true, and true to what?
“But, for all we know, the bodies of the Axel's Apes may be predominantly human. I have examined carefully the boy-ape Axel of the Lynn-Randal Experiment. The animal-like bull-hump at the back of Axel's neck is functionally more like a camel's hump. It normally contains nutriment and water. Axel could go for four days without either. And, at the end of four days, when his hump was empty and completely disappeared, he would be hungry and thirsty again. But his skeleton would not give any indication of his ever having had a hump. It is only a sac of skin and flesh. Nor would his skeleton give any indication of his having a gargoyle face, or a fat and apeish jaw. These things, including the wide splay feet, are all flab-flesh; and the boney structure would give no hint of them. Oh certainly, I have X-Rays of all Axel's bones. He has a fully human set of bones. But why do they wear those funny faces and funny humps and funny feet, all of which look as if they were added by a costumer? Oh, there is nothing artificial about the flab-flesh of the disguises. That flesh is real enough.”
This has been a true dissertation of the origin and first dispersal of the Human Species. Testimony has been given about humans by humans, by God, and by Intelligent Computers. We tried to get testimony by Intelligent Axel's Apes, but they just grinned and said “Oh hell no, fellow, Oh hell no.”
Now we have given explications of the origins and developments of Axel's Yellow Apes, of the Intelligent Computers, especially the Ambulatory-and-Miming Computers; and of the Human Species. These are the three species involved in the Lynn-Randal experiment.
They are also the three entities most likely involved in the Dolophonos or Assassin Species, one of whose members is monitoring the Lynn-Randal Experiment with the power of terminating it.
CHAPTER FIVE
ALLEY OOP
Here once through an alley titanic
Of Cypress, I roamed with my soul—
Of Cypress with Psyche my soul
—Poe
Ape Alley had become one of the prime arenas of the world, one of the cardinal places. Events and battles to happen here, possibly in the very near future, would certainly be of far effect. But things about to happen can not be nailed up on the barn door nor yet borrowed against at the bank.
There were various persons and contrivances and groups, legal and extra-legal, who wanted to find the alley. They had got at least a whiff and premonition of it. And the alley, for its part, did not want to be found.
The first name for it had been Yellow Ape Lane: that name was ten years old. And the grass-and-rock meanders on the surface of the world above part of it were properly known as Green Country Lane and Cypress Lane and Choke-Cherry Lane, pretty and countrified lanes. That Green Country Lane, and the crest on whose top it meandered, was now, for a little while anyhow, the northern shore of the new and growing phenomenon called Inneall's Ocean. Inneall's Ocean, a recent and poorly-explained phenomenon, now covered several square miles, and at least four yacht-owning gentlemen had now put yachts on it.
And there were unusual persons or things arriving to the neighborhood right at the end of summer that year, just before all of The Three would be ten years old. These had a reminiscent quality, for some of the same things had arrived there just about ten years before this.
There were (again) true reports of giant yellow Apes arriving in the neighborhood and then disappearing into the ground. Giant? Adult Axel's Apes average just over two meters in height. That would make them quite tall in relation to all except basketball-playing humans, but it wouldn't make them giants. But the assurance and purpose with which they came did make them giants of a sort. Giantism is a state of mind, and the new arrivals were in a giantizing state of mind. As to the reports that the giant yellow Apes caught up human babies and bit off their heads in a single bite, this was clearly out of line with the behavior of the Axel's Apes. Besides that, none of those reports was ever verified. And the fact was that most of the people and especially the mythical ‘common people’ liked the ‘Funny-Faced Apes’ who had lately arrived from several directions. They talked and joked with them and found them to be ‘good people’. A fortune-teller on North Rockford reported that the Battle of Armageddon was going to begin in the limestone caverns and old coal-mines under the city, that it might begin yet this year, and that it would be worldwide before it ran its course, that it would be the End-of-the-World battle. This fortune-teller might have been partly right.
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