The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  “What the devil—”

  “Shut up. You’ll get it in a minute. I ought to know this. I was matched into your feelings for half an hour at a time at Pluto Station. It took me four days to figure out what happened. Your concepts aren’t visual, they are kinesthetic. You don’t handle the problems of dynamics and kinetics with arbitrary words and numbers related by some dead thinker, you use the raw direct experience that your muscles know. You think with muscle tension data. I didn’t dare follow you that far. I don’t even guess what primitive integration center you have reactivated for that kind of thinking. I can’t go down there. My muscle tension data abstracts in the forebrain. That’s where I keep my motives and my ability to identify with other people’s motives. If I borrowed your ability, I might start identifying with can openers.”

  “What the—”

  “Pipe down,” said Pierce, still talking rapidly. “You’re following me and you know it. You aren’t stupid but you’re conditioned against thinking. You don’t admit half you know. You’d rather kid yourself. You’d rather be a humble dope and have friends, than open your eyes and be an alien and a stranger. You’d rather sit silent at a station bull session and kick yourself for being a dope, than admit that they are word-juggling, talking nonsense. Listen, Cliff—you are not a dope. You may not be able to handle the normal symbol patterns of this culture, but you have a structured mind that’s integrated right down to your boots! You can solve this emergency yourself. So what if your personality has been conditioned against thinking? Everybody knows the standard tricks for suspending conditioning. Put in cortical control, solve the problem first, whatever it is, and then be dumb afterwards if that’s what you want!”

  After a moment Cliff laughed shakily. “Shock treatment, you call it. Like being whacked over the head with a sledge hammer.”

  “I think I owed you a slight shock,” Pierce said grimly. “May I go?”

  “Wait a sec, aren’t you going to help?”

  Pierce sounded irritable. “Help? Help what? You have more brains than I have, solve your own problems: pull yourself together, Cliff, and don’t give me any more of this raving about a whole station full of people going bats! It’s not true!” He switched off.

  Cliff sat down on the nearest thing resembling a chair, and made a mental note never to antagonize psychologists. Then he began to think.

  Once upon a time the New York Public Library shipped a crate of microfilm to Station A. The crate was twenty by twenty and contained the incredible sum of the world’s libraries. With the crate they shipped a librarian, one M. Reynolds to fit the films into an automatic filing system so that a reader could find any book he sought among the uncounted other books. He spent the rest of his life trying to achieve the unachievable, reduce the system of filing books to a matter of perfect logic. In darker ages he would have spent his life happily arguing the number of bodiless angels that could dance on the point of a pin.

  The station people became used to seeing him puttering around, assisted by his little boy, or reading the journal of symbolic logic, or, temporarily baffled, trying to clear his mind by playing games of chess and cards, in which he beat all comers.

  Once he grew excited by the fact that computers worked on a numerical base of two, and sound on the log of two. Once he grew interested in the station’s delicate system of automatic controls and began to dismantle it and change the leads. If he had made a wrong move, the station would have returned to its component elements, but no one bothered him. They remembered the chess games, and left the automatics to him. They were satisfied with the new reading desks, and after a while there was a joke that if you made a mistake they would give you a ham sandwich, and a joke that the automatics would deliver pretty girls and blow up if you asked for a Roc’s egg, but still no one realized the meaning of Doc Reynolds’ research.

  After all, it was simply the proper classification of subjects, and a symbology for the library keyboard that would duplicate the logical relations of the subjects themselves. No harm in that. It would just make it easier for the reader to find books—wouldn’t it.

  Once again Cliff stood under the deep assault of sound. This time it was tapes of two of Archy’s best jazz concerts, strong and wild. Once again the rhythms fitted themselves into the padded beat of his heart, the surge of blood in his ears, and other, more complex rhythms of the nerves, subtly altering and speeding them in mimicry of the pulse of emotions, while flute notes played, with the sound of Reynolds’ automatics, automatics impassioned, oddly fitting and completing the deeper surges of normal music.

  Cliff stood, letting the music flow through him, subtly working on the pattern of his thought. Suddenly it was voices, a dreamlike clamor of voices surging up in his mind and closing over him in a great shout, and then passing, and then the music was just music, very good music with words. He listened calmly, with enjoyment.

  It ended, and he left the room and went whistling down the corridor walking briskly, working off some energy. It was the familiar half ecstatic energy of learning, as if he had met a new clarifying generalization that made all thought much simpler. It kept hitting him with little sparks of laughter as if the full implication of the idea still automatically carried their chain reaction of integration into dim cluttered corners of the mind releasing them from redundancy and the weariness of facts.

  He passed someone he knew vaguely, and lifted a hand in casual greeting.

  “Reep beeb,” he said.

  It was a language.

  The people of Station A did not know that it was a language, they thought they were going pleasantly cuckoo, but he knew. They had been exposed a long time to the sound of Reynolds’ machines. Reynolds had put in the sound system and brought it down to audible range to help himself keep track of the workings of it, and the people of Station A for five years had been exposed to the sounds of the machine translating all their requests into its own symbolic perfect language before translating it back into action, or service, or English or mathematics.

  It had been an association in their minds, and latent, but when Archy included frequency symbol themes in his jazz, they had come away humming the themes, and it had precipitated the association. Suddenly they could not stop humming and whistling and clicking, it seemed part of their thought, and it clarified thinking. They thought of it as a drug, a disease, but they knew they liked it. It was seductive, irresistible, and frightening.

  But to Cliff it was a language, emotional, subtle and precise, with its own intricate number system. He could talk to the computers with it.

  Cliff sat before the computer panel of his working desk. He did not touch it. He sat and hummed to himself thoughtfully, and sometimes whistled an arpeggio like a Reynolds’ automatic making a choice.

  A red light lit on the panel. Pluto had been contacted and had reported. Cliff listened to the spiel of the verbal report first as it was slowed down to normal speed. “I didn’t know you could reach us,” said the medico. “Ole is dead. Smitty has one hand, but he can still work. Danny Orlando—Jacobson—” rapidly the doctor’s weary voice went through the list reporting on the men and the hours of work they would be capable of. Then it was the turn of the machinery and orbit report. The station computer translated the data to clicks and scales and twitters, and slowly the picture of the condition of Pluto Station project built up in Cliff’s mind.

  When it was complete, he leaned back and whistled for twenty minutes, clicking with a clicker toy and occasionally blowing a chord on a cheap harmonica he had brought for the use, while the calculator took the raw formulas and extrapolated direction tapes for all of Pluto Station’s workers and equipment.

  And then it was done. Cliff put away the harmonica, grinning. The men would be surprised to have to read their instructions from directional tapes, like mechanicals, but they could do it.

  Pluto Station Project was back under control.

  Cliff leaned back, humming, considering what had been done, and while he hummed the essen
tially musical symbology of the Reynolds’ index sank deeper and deeper into his thoughts, translating their natural precision into the precision of pitch, edging all his thinking with music.

  On Earth teemed the backward human race, surrounded by a baffling civilization, understanding nothing of it, neither economics nor medicine or psychology, most of them baffled even by the simplicity of algebra, and increasingly hostile to all thought. Yet through their days as they worked or relaxed, the hours were made pleasant to them by music.

  Symphony fans listened without strain while two hundred instruments played, and would have winced if a single violin struck four hundred forty vibrations per second where it should have reached four hundred forty-five. Jazz fans listened critically to a trumpeter playing around with a tune in a framework of six basic rhythms whose relative position shifted mathematically with every note. Jazz, symphony or both, they were all fans and steeped in it. Even on the sidewalks people walked with their expressions and stride responding to the unheard music of the omnipresent earphones.

  The whole world was steeped in music. Saturated in music of a growingly incredible eloquence and complexity, of a precision and subtlety that was inexpressible in any other language or art, a complexity whose mathematics would baffle Einstein, and yet it was easily understandable to the ear, and to the trained sensuous mind area associated with it.

  What if that part of the human mind were brought to bear on the simple problems of politics, psychology and science?

  Cliff whistled slowly in an ordinary non-index whistle of wonderment. No wonder the people of Station A had been unable to stop! They hummed solving problems, they whistled when trying to concentrate, not knowing why. They thought it was madness, but they felt stupid and thick-headed when they stopped, and to a city full of technicians to whom problem solving was the breath of life, the sensation of relative stupidity was terrifying.

  The language was still in the simple association baby-babbling stage, not yet brought to consciousness as a language, not yet touching them with a fraction of its clarifying power—but it was raising their intelligence level.

  Cliff had been whistling his thoughts in index, amused by the library machine’s reflex bookish elaboration of them, for its association preferences had been set up by human beings, and they held a distinct flavor of the personalities of Doc Reynolds and Archy. But now, abruptly the wall speaker twittered something that carried an over-positive opinion in metaphor. “Why be intelligent? Why communicate when you are surrounded by cows? It would drive you even more bats to know what they think.” The remark trailed off and scattered in twittering references to cows, bats, nihilism, animals, low order thinking and Darwin, which were obviously association trails added by the machine, but the central remark had been Archy himself. Somewhere in the station Archy was tinkering idly and unhappily with the innards of his father’s machine, whistling an unconsciously logical jazz counterpoint to one of the strands of twittering that bombarded his ears.

  It was something like being linked into Archy’s mind without Archy being aware of it. Cliff questioned, and suggested topics. The flavor of the counterpoint was loneliness and anger. The kid felt that Cliff and Mike had deserted him in some way, for his father had died when he was in high school, and Cliff and Mike had long given up tutoring him and turned him over to his teachers. His father had died, and Cliff and Mike were not around to talk with or ask advice, so leaving Archy to discover in one blow of undiluted loneliness that his mental immersion in science and logic was a wall standing between him and his classmates, making it impossible to talk with them or enjoy their talk, making it impossible for his teachers to understand the meaning of his questions. Archy had reacted typically in three years of tantrum, in which he despairingly hated the world, hated theory and thinking, and sought opiate in girls, dancing, and a frenzied immersion in jazz.

  He had not even noticed what his jazz had done to the people who listened.

  Cliff smiled, remembering the abysmal miseries of adolescence, and smiled again. Everyone else in the station was miserable, too. There was Dr. Brandias, who should have been trying to solve the problem of the jazz madness, miserably turning over the pages of a light magazine in the next cubicle, pretending not to notice Cliff’s strange whistling and harmonica blowing.

  “Brandy.”

  The medico looked up and flushed guiltily. “How are you doing, Cliff?”

  “Come here. I’ve something to tell you.”

  – It began with a lesson tour, pointing and describing an Index. It became a follow-the-leader with each action in turn described in index—and it progressed.

  The I. B. M. man, doggedly looking for Archy Reynolds through the suddenly deserted station, at last wandered in to the huge gym at 1.3 G and was horrified to see Archy Reynolds and Cliff Baker leading the entire staff of Station A in a monstrous conga line. Archy Reynolds was beating a drum with one hand and clicking castanets with the other, while the big sober engineer blew weird disjointed tunes on a toy harmonica and the line danced wildly. The I. B. M. man shut his eyes, then opened them grimly.

  “Mr. Reynolds,” he called. He was a brave man, and tenacious. “Mr. Reynolds.”

  Archy stopped and the whole dance stopped with him in deadly silence, frozen in mid step.

  “What can I do for you?”

  The I. B. M. man pulled three reels of tape from his brief case. “Señor McCrea showed me Dr. Reynolds’ basic tapes, and I took a transcription. Now about the patent rights—” He took a deep breath and swung his glance doggedly across the host of watching faces back to the lean impassive face of the young man who held the rights to Reynolds’ tapes. “Could we discuss this in private?”

  Instead of replying, the young man exchanged a glance with Cliff Baker, and they both began whistling rapidly, then Archy Reynolds stepped back with a gesture of dismissal and Cliff Baker turned, smiling.

  “One condition,” he said, and now the intonations of his deep, hesitant voice were as alien as the voices of all others of the station, although earlier in the hall he had sounded comparatively sane to the I. B. M. man. “Only one condition, that I. B. M. leave the sound-frequency setup Reynolds has in his plans at audible volume, no matter how useless the yeeps seem to an engineer. Except for that, it’s all yours.” He smiled and the people in the lines behind him began restlessly swaying from one foot to another. Archy Reynolds began to pound on his drum.

  “What?” gasped the I. B. M. man.

  “You can have the patent rights,” Cliff replied over the din. “It’s all yours!”

  The dance was beginning again, the huge line slowly mimicking the actions of the leaders. As the I. B. M. man hesitated at the door, staring back at the strange sight, Cliff Baker was showing his wife some intricate step, and the others mimicked in pairs.

  The big engineer glanced toward the door, hesitated and hummed, clicked and whistled weirdly in a moment of complete stillness, then threw back his head and laughed. All eyes in the assemblage swiveled and came to rest on the I. B. M. man, and all through the hall there was a slow chuckle of laughter growing towards a howl.

  Madness!

  He stumbled through the door and fled, carrying in his brief case the human race.

  Feedback

  “WHY DID LEONARDO write backward?” The year was 1995. A pupil had asked the question.

  William Dunner switched on the lights suddenly, showing the class of ten-and twelve-year-olds blinking in the sudden glare.

  “He was in danger of his life,” he said seriously. “Here”—he tapped the pointer against the floor—“give that last slide again.”

  The pupil at the back of the room worked the slide lever, and Da Vinci’s Last Supper, which still showed dimly on the screen, vanished with a click and was replaced by an enlarged sketch of a flying machine. Under the sketch was time-dimmed writing, the words oddly curled and abbreviated. It was backward, as if the slide had been put in the wrong way.

  “He was writing ide
as that no one had ever written before,” said William Dunner. The teacher was tall, angular, and somewhat awkward in his stance. He stared at the faded cryptic writing, selecting his words with the care of someone selecting footsteps along the edge of a precipice. “Da Vinci had seen things that should not have been there—the symmetry of sound waves—the perfect roundness of ripples spreading through each other, and, high up on a mountain he had found sea shells, as if the sea and the land had not always been where they were, but had changed places, and perhaps some day the sea would again close over the mountain top, and mountains rise from the depth of the sea. These thoughts were against the old beliefs, and he was afraid. Other men, later, saw new truths about nature. They were not so brilliant as he, but they risked their lives to teach and write them, and they gave us the new world of science we have today. Leonardo had great thoughts, but he wrote them down in silence and hid them in code, for if the people guessed what he thought, they might come and burn him, as they had burned some of his paintings. He was afraid.”

  He tapped the base of the pointer on the floor and the slide vanished with a click and was replaced by the Last Supper. Again the dim figure of Christ sat at the long table with his friends.

  A chubby little girl put up her hand.

  “Yes, Marilyn?”

  “Were they Fascists? I mean, the people that Leonardo was scared of?” It was an obvious identification. Fascists tortured people and suppressed ideas. The pupils who knew a little more history stirred and giggled to show that they knew better.

  “Stand up, please,” he said gently. She stood up. It did not matter what the question or answer was, as long as they stood up. Standing up while the class sat, being alone on stage in the drama club he had started for them: learning to stand and think alone.

  “No, not Fascism. It wasn’t their government which made them cruel.” Mr. Dunner made a slight sad clumsy gesture with the hand that held the pointer. “You might say it is a democratic thing, for in defending the old ways people feel that they are defending something worthy and precious.” He ran his gaze across their faces as though looking for something, and said firmly, “Logically, of course, nothing is wrong which does not injure a neighbor, but if you attack a man’s beliefs with logic, he sometimes feels as if you are attacking his body, as if you are injuring him. In Leonardo’s time they held very many illogical beliefs which were beginning to crumple, so they felt constantly insecure and attacked, and they burned many men, women and children to death for being in league with Satan, the father of doubts.”