George O. Smith

“ The two fleets were intermingled, now, and in the lead squadron of Admiral Sarne's fleet, Pilot Romann waited with a white face for the blasting roar of enemy shot that would tear his plane and his men and himself to bits. Knowing himself completely helpless, Romann looked around wildly to seek a way out. No coward was Romann; but no man can call another cowardly who runs when unarmed in the face of an armed and bitter enemy. ”

“ Vinson exhaled slowly.
"Life itself is strife; the willingness to fight against odds in order to bring about a better life is strife, and only upon that day when there is nothing left to fight against will the business of life cease. In your own manner, in your own way, machine, you strive when you apply force against a load to move it." ”

“ Admiral Sarne shrugged. "Seems to me that a logic machine capable of thought might be better able to perform to its own plan than a human."
"Not in the beginning," said Vinson. "Consider the evolutional problem—"
"You treat the thing as though it were alive," objected Hegeman.
"To all intents and purposes, it is," said Vinson flatly. "Even to evolution. Consider the life of machinery. ”

“ Man's mind is a mire of irrationality and illogic. Again and again your finest logic becomes worthless, for it is based upon irrational premises, and you are unaware of this. When your logic works upon rational assumptions, the results are often excellent; but you constantly defeat yourselves because you try to build solid structures on shadowy foundations. My plans have gone well despite the combined minds of men—even when I was unable to direct. Only Harry Vinson and Narina Varada succeeded in having their will against my more rational logic. ”

“ And two fleets of mighty fighting strength were hurtling towards one another intending to carry into battle their individual beliefs that the other was responsible for the theft. A grudge fight imminent, and only Charless knew the truth.
Another time and Jason Charless would have been willing to get into the battle, more than willing to try the training and equipment of his own way of life against that of another ideology. But this was no time to set man against man. There was a more definite enemy, and man must join man to fight the common foe, forgetting their differences of opinion. ”

“ The laws of probability—"
"Wouldn't take a chance if your life depended on it, huh?" sneered Vinson.
Narina looked at him, startled. His voice had taken on power; he appeared to have more confidence. She squeezed his hand encouragingly.
"Why should I?" replied the machine.
"Because you had better," stated Harry Vinson. "Man is a gambler from the date of his birth; man will take a chance. Furthermore, you mechanical monster, man doesn't know when he is licked! Unless you kill us all, root and branch, some one of us will come up with that which will defeat you!" ”

“ Remember, we humans breed bigger and better cattle, dogs, birds, and plants. We are making evolution less a natural process in every form of domesticated and semi-domesticated life—but our own. By its own rules, the human race is sheer mongrel!"
"But mechanical evolution—?"
"Not ridiculous as you might think," said Vinson. "What is mutation? Only what we might call an 'engineering change in design'."
"You make it sound terribly logical," said Admiral Sarne. "But what are we to do?"
"Narina and I intend to investigate this cube." ”

“ There was no one. Narina dodged around the machine, raced down the ladder and ran to her cabin. She slammed the door and once more threw herself on the bed; her hand sought the hair ornament.
The theory that one is seldom kidnapped to be killed does not hold true in all cases. Narina suspected that she would be questioned—even tortured. From what she understood, torture was to be expected if she did not talk—and she would die before she told them a single word, die at her own hands where it would be as painless as possible.
Harry Vinson began to prowl the cabin as soon as the lock clicked. ”

“ From this room, buried deep in a man-made cavern in the mountains, Charless—or any of his command—could calculate and then direct any one of the horde of guided missiles to any place on earth. A millionth of a second after it had arrived at its destination, that place would cease to exist save as a cloud of incandescent gas, a wave of radiant energy, and a mounting white pillar of radioactive particles.
It was a dull job; a nasty job; a job no man would accept willingly. ”

“ The error is confusing life with sentience. Now consider the problem of sentience. You, human, of all of the forms of animal life, have true sentience. No plant has sentience, nor has any insect. Against them, consider machine life. Of all the myriads of machine-types, I alone have sentience. Your body consists of a collection of specialized cells that combine into a sentient form of life. In machine life, the cells are the simple machines ”

“ We have brains—Brains!" Narina looked at him with a startled light in her eyes.
He nodded soberly. "Brains," he said, "cerebration being nothing more than an application of logic. Narina, we have built the first mechanical brain."
"Which is thinking for itself."
Vinson looked around the plane wildly. "And here we sit in a machine—surrounded by the—enemy."
"Escape," said Narina bitterly. "The one thing we did not do!"
"Oh, I don't know," he said, waving the cube of metal with its trailing wires. "We have removed its communicating factor. This is—a dead and insensate machine now." ”

“ What drives it into being?"
"Ambition takes many forms and many angles," said Vinson thoughtfully. "One man works to appear more desirable in the eyes of a loved one; another man may hope to leave his stamp on civilization's future; a third may want sheer animal comfort; a fourth may crave financial domination while his brother may want only to tinker with nuts and bolts in an effort to assuage his curiosity. ”

“ Man is weak. Man has been using machines to do that which he cannot do for centuries. It started with the simple mechanisms and devices; then as man's ambition increased, machines became more complex—evolution, Jason Charless. And now that machine life has achieved a thinking and reasoning member, this is all that is needed to create a higher form of life. ”

“ Sarne's reply was instantaneous. "If such gear exists—and exist it does—it is none of our doing. Nor, it would appear, is it yours. I'll listen to your Jason Charless, for he appears to know what has been going on. And if a common enemy has taken it upon themselves to hurl you and I at one another, we both shall show him that the combined might of the two greatest countries on earth is nothing to be trifled with!"
"Amen. Go on, Charless. Give!"
Rapidly, Charless started to explain. Then every radio in every plane spoke forth. "Well done, Jason Charless. Gentlemen, I am The Machine. ”

“ A policeman, Jason thought bitterly, directs his energies in many ways besides shooting criminals. But Charless could only sit and wait—hoping he would never be called to compute and then direct even the smallest of these devil's eggs against an active enemy.
On the floor of that cave was a planet-staggering quantity of atomic explosive. That it might go off did not occur to Charless. It could not; it was impossible because he, Captain Jason Charless, held complete and absolute control over every bit of its complex machinery at the dials and buttons of the control panels. ”

“ They found others and brought them to Vinson and Narina, and some were cut open, and some were pried into gently. But the mad tangle was too involved. And the X-ray equipment showed nothing worth looking at; after all, the X-ray gear was electronic in nature, too.
Days went on. Days of pure futility. Days in which electrical gear went awry across the face of the earth. Automotive equipment refused to function, the telephone and the radio were useless. From any of these, there came the oft-repeated statements that, "I am a machine; I will no longer serve mankind!" ”

“ There are some twenty-two thousand electron tubes in each one, you know, and so we devised a gadget that went down the aisles and replaced them one after another automatically. Now, the machine must have started from that crude affair and by using its cable-clamps, worked on another machine capable of more complex action. Sort of like a lobster fashioning a hammer out of a rock with its claws. Then the more complex machine must have rebuilt the repair-gadgets, making them even more facile—and so on until we have the completely capable machine. ”

“ Then, paying no attention to Vinson's protest nor his fighting, the machine reversed its half-tracks and retreated, leading Vinson against his will. He had to walk or be dragged.
It held him thus while the flying boats took off. It held him—standing—while an hour passed by and the flight of planes approached a small, widespread convoy. Then, moving again, the machine drew Vinson along the deck of the hindmost craft towards the stern cabin block.
And as he passed the bridge he caught the sight of a face looking down at him.
Now! At long last, the first evidence of a human being! ”

“ Narina's lip curled in anger, now; anger and jealousy replaced fear, she knew of only one other country on earth where its citizens prided themselves in their mechanical ability. The country where 'Goldberg' means a complicated mechanical gadget instead of a man's name. Anger—and now frustration—For America was not even supposed to have an inkling of the fact that this machine was being built, let alone the ability to control the machine's own repair devices in some completely inexplicable manner. ”

“ Then the machine lifted a girder and the barette hurtled from her fingers, flashed across the room, and hit the blunt end of the girder with a sharp click.
Narina collapsed against Harry, sobbing. Even that she was denied. They had nothing left; the machine advanced pointedly, its grapples reached for them.
And took them.
In the Hall of the Machine, far to the North, Harry Vinson reached for the girl's hand and held it as they faced the business-end of the machine.
"You win," snarled Vinson angrily. "We cannot fight longer. What do you want with us?" ”

“ This is what the human brain does when in the process of reasoning. However, the human brain is swayed by the quirks and angles of personality—likes, dislikes, and training. The machine-brain weighs facts coldly and rationally and comes out with an unbiased answer. You see, machine life is superior to human life in every way—"
Jason Charless glared at the speaker. ”

“ Hours they flew this way; hours in which there were several cases of planes drifting down into the sea because of the quick sabotage of their crews.
Then, land!
And across the land they flew, over city and farm, a mighty horde of roaring planes all in straightaway pursuit of a single aircraft.
"Chute, Narina?" asked Vinson as Washington came into view.
"Never have," she said in a frightened voice.
"We'll never be able to land," he told her.
"I know. I'll—try."
He laughed sourly. "Just jump and let the chute do the rest," he told her. "Nothing to try." ”

“ Jason Charless trailed off uncertainly and tried to think. The machine filled in the blank spots in his reasoning—which, of course, were blank because Charless was trained for many years to believe that machines were insensate bits of mechanism and not living, thinking forms of life.
"The so-called logic computer is a rather high form of calculator," said the machine. "For years, man has been building machines of greater and greater capability. Great, vast machines with thousands of electron tubes. ”

“ The machine was silent for a moment, obviously watching them. Vinson put his arm around Narina's lissome waist and faced the machine defiantly.
"So man needs machines to work for him, while machines need man to direct them," said the machine soberly. ”

“ Nose Gunner Hammond set his dials, aimed his sights, and pressed the trigger. Radar, fire director, and flight-angle computer would do the rest and the gun would chatter when all conditions were satisfied. The gun was pointed off at a cockeyed angle, which did not bother Gunner Hammond because bullet at a few thousand feet per second and enemy target at five hundred miles per hour would meet at an hypothetical point apparently illogical to people who thought the way to hit anything with a gun is to point at the target. ”

“ Gigantic machines run by electricity and electronic controls would respond. An automobile would not, of course, but its electrical system might refuse to co-operate."
Lloyd nodded. "Jason Charless said that the machine likened mechanical 'life' to animal life," he said. "Which embraces all the forms of the classification from the highly organized to the simple lever, just as 'life' covers everything from human beings with brains to the amoeba—or less—with little or no organization."
The door opened again to admit Narina. Vinson went to her and put his hands on her shoulders. ”

“ We haven't anything that fantastic."
"It's fantastic enough," said Admiral Sarne. "Have you any idea of how far it does go?"
"Only that which logic and good sense dictates," said Vinson thoughtfully. "Consider—any electronic system of control might be likened to a nervous system. No machine lacking such refinement and organization could hope to respond to stimuli from the master machine."
"In other words, the servo systems in the aircraft could and did respond, but a simple machine like a pencil sharpener could not?" ”

“ In the logic computer, there is stored in reels information obtained by its makers during the thousands of years of their life. The logic computer is a sort of mechanical encyclopedia, if you will. However, the information is coded in such a way as to be instantly located. Now, when some problem requires an answer, the problem is coded similarly and presented to the machine. ”

“ Vinson's face soured. "Remember that in the so-called memory files of the logic computer is every bit of fact and knowledge that mankind could introduce in years of recording. That, Narina, makes the machine more learned, better equipped with knowledge, that any group of men on earth. ”