Sam Merwin

“ 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. ”

“ Nina whispered, "What in hell does it mean?"
Lindsay whispered back, "It's a bit of the iron dog and the whale, a bit of the Red Queen, a bit of the suicide idea—and something else. Let's see if it works."
Lindsay watched du Fresne, whose moment of triumph was marred by his obvious discomfort. The twisted little man was very busy running the question into its various forms for submission to the feeder units, whose mouths gaped like hungry nestlings along part of one side wall. ”

“ Du Fresne's sallow face went white at this pleasantry. As Minister of Computation his entire being was wrapped up in the immensely intricate calculators that forecast all decisions for the huge North American republic. Obviously battling anger, he said, "Don't laugh at Elsac, Lindsay. It has never been wrong—it can't be wrong."
"I'm not laughing," said Lindsay quietly. "But no one has ever fed me to a computer. ”

“ Lindsay asked.
Anderson shrugged. "A penalty of their insularity," he replied. "The reason for this little meeting, Zalen, is to explain that not all of us are in favor of supporting Britain and its absurd production bungling at the expense of Mars. A few of us are becoming singularly fed up with the computer neurosis that seems to have this planet in its grip."
Maria leaned forward, her dark eyes brilliant in their intensity. She said, "Can't you see, Zalen, that is why we are so concerned with your possible assassination? We fear the whole of Earth is on the lip of a nervous breakdown. ”

“ When he had gone Lindsay looked at the girl, who returned his gaze quite openly for a long moment before her eyes fell away. He said, "Somehow the senator and you seem an odd combination."
She made no pretense of misunderstanding but said candidly, "Perhaps I am neurotic in my distrust of computers but I cannot help that. Those of us who have any true sensitivity unblunted by the psycho-mechanistics of the era all share this distrust. It is natural, since we are few and weak, that we should seek what allies we can find among the strong." ”

“ Lindsay wondered how any people possessed of a planet so rich could be afflicted with such poverty of soul. Or was this very opulence the cause? His own planet was comparatively poor—yet nervous breakdowns were few and far between. There the ugly strove for beauty, instead of the reverse.
He parked the copter on the garage-plat, pressed the button, and watched it sink slowly out of sight to its concealed hangar. Like all Martian natives to leave for Earth, he had been warned about the intense heat and humidity that assailed most of the mother planet, especially in the UW capital. ”

“ She can't stand being thought of as a third-rate lover. That's why she's always been jealous of me—because I have top-model rating and she could never make it. She's too damned concerned with pleasing herself to please anyone else. She flunked out at fourteen."
"Then why didn't you pull it?" Lindsay asked her, astonished.
"Because," Nina said thoughtfully, "I'm not conditioned to think that way. It's horribly rude here on Earth to stir up other people's allergies. As you reminded me last night, you rat, we're all people in glass houses." ”

“ For those you need human speculation, human debate, above all human judgment!"
President Giovannini, able politician that he was, had joined Lindsay at the microphone, put an arm across his shoulders, said, "I feel humble—yes, humble—in the great lesson this great envoy from our sister planet had taught us. What they can do on Mars we can do on Earth." ”

“ On entering Maria unfastened her harness and coverall and stood before them, a sweet-bodied dark-eyed girl in her early twenties, clad in shorts and halter. "Lord!" she exclaimed, pushing dark hair back from her broad low forehead, "It feels good to relax. Zalen, I want to talk to you."
"Delighted," said Lindsay, mildly surprised at the use of his Martian first name.
"I've got something to tell him first," said Anderson, unhitching his own harness and emerging as a lean medium-sized man in good condition for his forty years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, frowning, "But if the computer was wrong because of incomplete knowledge at the Colosseum, what was wrong at Doc Craven's?"
Lindsay said, "I'm damned if I know."
"We've got to know, with the president ready to put Giac to work."
"I meant to tell you about that," said Lindsay.
"Don't worry," Nina informed him. "Your table at the Pelican was wired."
"Why are you against computers?" Lindsay asked her.
She dropped her smoke in a disposal-tray, said, "Never mind why—let's just accept the fact that I am. And not for Fernando Anderson's reason either. He just wants power." ”

“ Lindsay, who had been thinking wistfully that if Nina would only do something about that hair, the thickness of her middle, and her bilious complexion, she might be fairly good looking, blinked. He said, "Why in hell do you work for them then?"
She shrugged disinterested shoulders, told him, "It's a job." She yawned, unabashed, added irrelevantly, "You know, boss, the trouble with you is you look like a gladiator. They won't take you seriously unless you wear specs and a harness."
"Over my dead body," he told her. "What's wrong with athletes anyway? ”

“ Maria's mob wants war. They believe they can light the powder train by arranging the assassination of a Martian Plenipotentiary.
"Meanwhile your speech yesterday and your fouling up Doc Craven's computer this afternoon, and whatever you did at the tennis tonight, have the Computer crowd screaming for your recall before you upset their little red wagon." She paused, added, "Naturally Maria's crowd wants to have you killed before you become a mere private citizen of Mars. Once you're removed from office you aren't important enough to cause a war." ”

“ Lindsay knew something of modern Soviet history, of course. There had been no real counter-revolution. Instead the gradual emergence of the scientists over their Marxist political rulers had been a slow process of erosion.
Once computer rule was inaugurated in the North American Republic and swept the Western World, the scientists had simply taken over real power. The once-powerful Politburo and its sub-committees became obsolete.
Alenkov was stressing this very point. He said, "So you see, we, the best blood of Russia, are forced by these machines to live the lives of outcast children. ”

“ Lindsay began.
"Contrary to what you're thinking, their leaders are not villains," Anderson told him. "They are men and women obsessed with an ideal that has hampered them for almost two centuries. And they are incapable of accepting any conclusion counter to their ideals."
"Even to impoverishing an entire planet?" ”

“ As a consequence, interplanetary diplomatic relations were somewhat strained—until a nimble-witted young man from Mars came up with the answer to the "sixty-four dollar" question.
Zalen Lindsay stood on the rostrum in the huge new United Worlds auditorium on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain and looked out at an ocean of eye-glasses. Individually they ranged in hue from the rose-tinted spectacles of the Americans to the dark brown of the Soviet bloc. Their shapes and adornments were legion: round, harlequin, diamond, rhomboid, octagonal, square, oval ”

“ It is this continued failure of computers to come up with a logical answer in the full frame of interplanetary conditions that has done much to make the people of my planet feel that no computer is trustworthy to make decisions involving human beings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She lit a cigarette and said, "Now—how the hell are you fouling up the computers?"
"I'm not," he told her promptly. "At least not in the case of the tennis match. I just happened to know something about Pat O'Ryan the people who fed facts to the computer didn't."
"That goon Pat!" she said. "He's so damned dumb."
"You know him well?" he asked with a trace of jealousy.
"I know him." She dismissed it with a flick of her cigarette. "It's a good thing you knew judo too, boss. But what did you do to him that fouled up the match?" ”

“ On Mars we raise animals for food, not for sport—we consider human beings as the only fit athletic competition for other humans—and we see small purpose in expending our resources mining beryllium or other metals for payment that is worse than worthless. In short, we will not be a dumping ground for Earth's surplus goods. ”

“ Destruction of the computers would not cure Earth. It might easily increase the reliance of Earthfolk upon their cybernetic monsters. What was needed to effect a cure was destruction of human confidence in and reliance upon these machines.
And how in hell, he wondered, was he going to manage that?
To a man from level, water-starved Mars the sight of New Orleans still ablaze with lights at five o'clock in the morning was something of a miracle. Mars had its share of atomic power-plants, of course, but such sources had proved almost prohibitively costly as providers of cheap power. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Lacking a man she could love, walled in by the high officialdom of her father's lofty position, she had turned to him in the same way she turned to the anti-computer movement—as a way of feeling less lonely for a while. ”

“ When President Giovannini gets his new Giac computer working we might as well shut up shop. And the announcement that Giac is in operation may come at any time now."
Lindsay studied him, then said, "Your real complaint then, Fernando, is that the computers deprive you of patronage and power."
"That's about it," said the senator from New Mexico. "We'll be reduced to the level of the political commissars of the Soviet nations. The scientists and symbolic logicians who feed and tend the computers will actually be running the country. And the world." ”

“ He left shortly afterward on a note of sadness, rousing himself only to say to Lindsay, "Ambassador, you are a very lucky man." His eyes caressed Nina's near-nude figure.
"That," Lindsay told him, "is what you think."
When he had departed Lindsay suddenly realized he was exhausted. He sank back in a contour chair and let fatigue sweep over him. But Nina paced the bathroom floor like a caged cat. Finally she went to the wall-talkie, gave a number in a low voice.
She pushed some sort of signal button several times, then swore and said, "Better not sleep now, boss. We're cut off." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Maria made a despairing gesture. "Oh, dear!" she exclaimed. "You don't understand, Zalen. On Mars you have both room and time to settle your political conflicts. And you don't have computers."
"We have some pretty sharp rows," Lindsay told her. "But we don't have anyone assassinated." He paused, looked at them both, added, "Do you have many of them here?"
"Not many," said Anderson. "But there is a growing tendency to go along with computer verdicts, no matter how extreme." ”

“ The Senator said, "There is, unfortunately, no question as to the accuracy of computer answers. The trouble seems to lie in some special condition, local to Britain, that effects computers."
"But if the British computers are wrong, why doesn't somebody do something about it?" Lindsay asked.
Anderson said, "If it were that simple, Zalen...." His smile was rueful. "Unfortunately our English friends—or their rulers at any rate—are determined that socialism is the only government suitable to their country. ”