Part 2

"The night is young," he said, "and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot--it could beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in and taken over the whole project.

"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player, sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington, and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game. That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got really loaded."

What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt happy.

"Listen, Ollie," he said, "for Christ's sake, stop talking like a Boy Scout for once in your life."

If he was going to insult me--

"No insult intended. Just listen. I'm a terrible chess player. Any five-year-old could chatemeck--checkmate--me with his brains tied behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don't you find that terrifying?"

"Not at all," I said. "_You_ made the machine, didn't you? Therefore, no matter what it does, it's only an extension of you. You should feel proud to have devised a powerful new tool."

"Some tool," he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly understand what he was saying. "The General Staff boys in Washington were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good reason--they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.

"In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up IFACS and handed us a top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.

"We're aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty tool. Never mind how far we've gotten with the thing, but I will tell you this: I'm a lot more scared today than I was three years ago."

So _that_ was the secret of MS! The most extraordinary machine ever devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.

"Why all the jitters?" I said. "This could be the most wonderful tool ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether."

Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space. Then he turned to me.

"Steve Lundy has a cute idea," he said. "He was telling me about it this afternoon. He's a bum, you see, but he's got a damned good mind and he's done a lot of reading. Among other things, he's smart enough to see that once you've got your theory of games worked out, there's at least the logical possibility of converting your Eniac into what he calls a Strategy Integrator and Computer. And he's guessed, simply from the Pentagon's hush-hush policy about it, that that's what we're working on here at IFACS. So he holds forth on the subject of Emsiac, and I listen."

"What's his idea?" I asked.

"He thinks Emsiac might eliminate war, too, but not in the way a Boy Scout might think. What he says is that all the industrialized nations must be working away like mad on Emsiac, just as they did on the atom bomb, so let's assume that before long all the big countries will have more or less equal MS machines. All right. A cold war gets under way between countries A and B, and pretty soon it reaches the showdown stage. Then both countries plug in their Emsiacs and let them calculate the date on which hostilities should begin. If the machines are equally efficient, they'll hit on the same date. If there's a slight discrepancy, the two countries can work out a compromise date by negotiation.

"The day arrives. A's Emsiac is set up in its capital, B's is set up in _its_ capital. In each capital the citizens gather around their strategy machine, the officials turn out in high hats and cut-aways, there are speeches, pageants, choral singing, mass dancing--the ritual can be worked out in advance. Then, at an agreed time, the crowds retreat to a safe distance and a committee of the top cyberneticists appears. They climb into planes, take off and--this is beautiful--drop all their atom bombs and H-bombs on the machines. It happens simultaneously in both countries, you see. That's the neat part of it. The occasion is called International Mushroom Day.

"Then the cyberneticists in both countries go back to their vacuum tubes to work on another Emsiac, and the nuclear physicists go back to their piles to build more atom bombs, and when they're ready they have another Mushroom Day. One Mushroom Day every few years, whenever the diplomatic-strategic situation calls for it, and nobody even fires a B-B gun. Scientific war. Isn't it wonderful?"

* * * * *

By the time Len finished this peculiar speech, I'd finally managed to get him out of the tavern and back into his car. I started to drive him back to the Institute, my ears still vibrating with the hysterical yelps of Armstrong's trumpet. I'll never for the life of me understand what Len sees in that kind of music. It seems to me such an unhealthy sort of expression.

"Lundy's being plain silly," I couldn't help saying. "What guarantee has he got that on your Mushroom Day, Country B wouldn't make a great display of destroying one Emsiac and one set of bombs while it had others in hiding? It's too great a chance for A to take--she might be throwing away all her defenses and laying herself wide open to attack."

"See what I mean?" Len muttered. "You're a Boy Scout." Then he passed out, without saying a word about Marilyn. Hard to tell if he sees anything of her these days. He _does_ see some pretty peculiar people, though. I'd like to know more about this Steve Lundy.

* * * * *

_November 2, 1959_

I've done it! Today I split up the lab into two entirely independent operations, K and N. Did it all on my own authority, haven't breathed a word about it to the boss yet. Here's my line of reasoning.

On the K end, we can get results, and fast: if it's just a matter of building a pro that works like the real leg, regardless of what _makes_ it work, it's a cinch. But if it has to be worked by the brain, through the spinal cord, the job is just about impossible. Who knows if we'll ever learn enough about neuro tissue to build our own physico-chemico-electrical substitutes for it?

As I proved in my robot moths and bedbugs, I can work up electronic circuits that seem to duplicate one particular function of animal nerve tissue--one robot is attracted to light like a moth, the other is repelled by light like a bedbug--but I don't know how to go about duplicating the tissue itself in all its functions. And until we can duplicate nerve tissue, there's no way to provide our artificial limbs with a neuro-motor system that can be hooked up with the central nervous system. The best I can do along those lines is ask Kujack to kick and get a wriggle of the big toe instead.

So the perspective is clear. Mechanically, kinesthetically, motorically, I can manufacture a hell of a fine leg. Neurally, it would take decades, centuries maybe, to get even a reasonable facsimile of the original--and maybe it will never happen. It's not a project I'd care to devote my life to. If Len Ellsom had been working on that sort of thing, he wouldn't have gotten his picture in the paper so often, you can be sure.

So, in line with this perspective, I've divided the whole operation into two separate labs, K-Pro and N-Pro. I'm taking charge of K-Pro myself, since it intrigues me more and I've got these ideas about using solenoids to get lifelike movements. With any kind of luck I'll soon have a peach of a mechanical limb, motor-driven and with its own built-in power plant, operated by push-button. Before Christmas, I hope.

Got just the right man to take over the neuro lab--Goldweiser, my assistant. I weighed the thing from every angle before I made up my mind, since his being Jewish makes the situation very touchy: some people will be snide enough to say I picked him to be a potential scapegoat. Well, Goldweiser, no matter what his origins may be, is the best neuro man I know.

Of course, personally--although my personal feelings don't enter into the picture at all--I _am_ just a bit leery of the fellow. Have been ever since that first log-cutting expedition, when he began to talk in such a peculiar way about needing to relax and then laughed so hard at Len's jokes. That sort of talk always indicates to me a lack of reverence for your job: if a thing's worth doing at all, etc.

Of course, I don't mean that Goldweiser's cynical attitude has anything to do with his being Jewish; Len's got the same attitude and he's _not_ Jewish. Still, this afternoon, when I told Goldweiser he's going to head up the N-Pro lab, he sort of bowed and said, "That's quite a promotion. I always did want to be God."

I didn't like that remark at all. If I'd had another neuro man as good as he is, I'd have withdrawn the promotion immediately. It's his luck that I'm tolerant, that's all.

* * * * *

_November 6, 1959_

Lunch with Len today, at my invitation. Bought him several Martinis, then brought up Lundy's name and asked who he was, he sounded interesting.

"Steve?" Len said. "I roomed with him my first year in New York."

I asked what Steve did, exactly.

"Reads, mostly. He got into the habit back in the 30s, when he was studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. When the Civil War broke out in Spain, he signed up with the Lincoln Brigade and went over there to fight, but it turned out to be a bad mistake. His reading got him in a lot of trouble, you see; he'd gotten used to asking all sorts of questions, so when the Moscow Trials came along, he asked about them. Then the N.K.V.D. began to pop up all over Spain, and he asked about it.

"His comrades, he discovered, didn't like guys who kept asking questions. In fact, a couple of Steve's friends who had also had an inquiring streak were found dead at the front, shot in the _back_, and Steve got the idea that he was slated for the same treatment. It seemed that people who asked questions were called saboteurs, Trotskyite-Fascists or something, and they kept dying at an alarming rate."

I ordered another Martini for Len and asked how Steve had managed to save himself.

"He beat it across the mountains into France," Len explained. "Since then he's steered clear of causes. He goes to sea once in a while to make a few bucks, drinks a lot, reads a lot, asks some of the shrewdest questions I know. If he's anything you can put a label on, I'd say he was a touch of Rousseau, a touch of Tolstoi, plenty of Voltaire. Come to think of it, a touch of Norbert Wiener too. Wiener, you may remember, used to ask some damned iconoclastic questions for a cyberneticist. Steve knows Wiener's books by heart."

Steve sounded like a very colorful fellow, I suggested.

"Yep," Len said. "Marilyn used to think so." I don't think I moved a muscle when he said it; the smile didn't leave my face. "Ollie," Len went on, "I've been meaning to speak to you about Marilyn. Now that the subject's come up--"

"I've forgotten all about it," I assured him.

"I still want to set you straight," he insisted. "It must have looked funny, me moving down to New York after commencement and Marilyn giving up her job in the lab and following two days later. But never mind _how_ it looked. I never made a pass at her all that time in Boston, Ollie. That's the truth. But she was a screwy, scatter-brained dame and she decided she was stuck on me because I dabbled in poetry and hung around with artists and such in the Village, and she thought it was all so glamorous. I didn't have anything to do with her chasing down to New York, no kidding. You two were sort of engaged, weren't you?"

"It really doesn't matter," I said. "You don't have to explain." I finished my drink. "You say she knew Lundy?"

"Sure, she knew Lundy. She also knew Kram, Rossard, Broyold, Boster, De Kroot and Hayre. She knew a whole lot of guys before she was through."

"She always was sociable."

"You don't get my meaning," Len said. "I am not talking about Marilyn's gregarious impulses. Listen. First she threw herself at me, but I got tired of her. Then she threw herself at Steve and _he_ got tired of her. Damn near the whole male population of the Village got tired of her in the next couple years."

"Those were troubled times. The war and all."

"They were troubled times," Len agreed, "and she was the source of a fair amount of the trouble. You were well rid of her, Ollie, take my word for it. God save us from the intense Boston female who goes bohemian--the icicle parading as the torch."

"Just as a matter of academic curiosity," I said as we were leaving, "what became of her?"

"I don't know for sure. During her Village phase she decided her creative urge was hampered by compasses and T-squares, and in between men she tried to do a bit of painting--very abstract, very imitative-original, very hammy. I heard later that she finally gave up the self-expression kick, moved up to the East Seventies somewhere. If I remember, she got a job doing circuit designing on some project for I.B.M."

"She's probably doing well at it," I said. "She certainly knew her drafting. You know, she helped lay out the circuits for the first robot bedbug I ever built."

* * * * *

_November 19, 1959_

Big step forward, if it isn't unseemly to use a phrase like that in connection with Pro research. This afternoon we completed the first two experimental models of my self-propelled solenoid legs, made of transparent plastic so everything is visible--solenoids, batteries, motors, thyratron tubes and transistors.

Kujack was waiting in the fitting room to give them their first tryout, but when I got there I found Len sitting with him. There were several empty beer cans on the floor and they were gabbing away a mile a minute.

Len _knows_ how I hate to see people drinking during working hours. When I put the pros down and began to rig them for fitting, he said conspiratorially, "Shall we tell him?"

Kujack was pretty crocked, too. "Let's tell him," he whispered back. Strange thing about Kujack, he hardly ever says a word to me, but he never closes his mouth when Len's around.

"All right," Len said. "_You_ tell him. Tell him how we're going to bring peace on Earth and good will toward bedbugs."

"We just figured it out," Kujack said. "What's wrong with war. It's a steamroller."

"Steamrollers are very undemocratic," Len added. "Never consult people on how they like to be flattened before flattening them. They just go rolling along."

"Just go rolling, they go on rolling along," Kujack said. "Like Old Man River."

"What's the upshot?" Len demanded. "People get upshot, shot up. In all countries, all of them without exception, they emerge from the war spiritually flattened, a little closer to the insects--like the hero in that Kafka story who wakes up one morning to find he's a bedbug, I mean beetle. All because they've been steamrolled. Nobody consulted them."

"Take the case of an amputee," Kujack said. "Before the land mine exploded, it didn't stop and say, 'Look, friend, I've got to go off; that's my job. Choose which part you'd prefer to have blown off--arm, leg, ear, nose, or what-have-you. Or is there somebody else around who would relish being clipped more than you would? If so, just send him along. I've got to do some clipping, you see, but it doesn't matter much which part of which guy I clip, so long as I make my quota.' Did the land mine say that? No! The victim wasn't consulted. Consequently he can feel victimized, full of self-pity. We just worked it out."

"The whole thing," Len said. "If the population had been polled according to democratic procedure, the paraplegia and other maimings could have been distributed to each according to his psychological need. See the point? Marx corrected by Freud, as Steve Lundy would say. Distribute the injuries to each according to his need--not his economic need, but his masochistic need. Those with a special taste for self-damage obviously should be allowed a lion's share of it. That way nobody could claim he'd been victimized by the steamroller or got anything he didn't ask for. It's all on a voluntary basis, you see. Democratic."

"Whole new concept of war," Kujack agreed. "Voluntary amputeeism, voluntary paraplegia, voluntary everything else that usually happens to people in a war. Just to get some human dignity back into the thing."

"Here's how it works," Len went on. "Country A and Country B reach the breaking point. It's all over but the shooting. All right. So they pool their best brains, mathematicians, actuaries, strategists, logistics geniuses, and all. What am I saying? They pool their best _robot_ brains, their Emsiacs. In a matter of seconds they figure out, down to the last decimal point, just how many casualties each side can be expected to suffer in dead and wounded, and then they break down the figures. Of the wounded, they determine just how many will lose eyes, how many arms, how many legs, and so on down the line. Now--here's where it gets really neat--each country, having established its quotas in dead and wounded of all categories, can send out a call for volunteers."

"Less messy that way," Kujack said. "An efficiency expert's war. War on an actuarial basis."

"You get exactly the same results as in a shooting war," Len insisted. "Just as many dead, wounded and psychologically messed up. But you avoid the whole steamroller effect. A tidy war, war with dispatch, conceived in terms of ends rather than means. The end never did justify the means, you see; Steve Lundy says that was always the great dilemma of politics. So with one fool sweep--fell swoop--we get rid of means entirely."

"As things stand with me," Kujack said, "if _anything_ stands with me, I might get to feeling sore about what happened to me. But nothing happens _to_ the volunteer amputee. He steps up to the operating table and says, 'Just chop off one arm, Doc, the left one, please, up to the elbow if you don't mind, and in return put me down for one-and-two-thirds free meals daily at Longchamps and a plump blonde every Saturday.'"

"Or whatever the exchange value for one slightly used left arm would be," Len amended. "That would have to be worked out by the robot actuaries."

By this time I had the pros fitted and the push-button controls installed in the side pocket of Kujack's jacket.

"Maybe you'd better go now, Len," I said. I was very careful to show no reaction to his baiting. "Kujack and I have some work to do."

"I hope you'll make him a moth instead of a bedbug," Len said as he got up. "Kujack's just beginning to see the light. Be a shame if you give him a negative tropism to it instead of a positive one." He turned to Kujack, wobbling a little. "So long, kid. I'll pick you up at seven and we'll drive into New York to have a few with Steve. He's going to be very happy to hear we've got the whole thing figured out."

I spent two hours with Kujack, getting him used to the extremely delicate push-button controls. I must say that, drunk or sober, he's a very apt pupil. In less than two hours he actually walked! A little unsteadily, to be sure, but his balance will get better as he practices and I iron out a few more bugs, and I _don't_ mean bedbugs.

For a final test, I put a little egg cup on the floor, balanced a football in it, and told Kujack to try a place kick. What a moment! He booted that ball so hard, it splintered the mirror on the wall.

* * * * *

_November 27, 1959_

Long talk with the boss. I gave it to him straight about breaking up the lab into K-Pro and N-Pro, and about there being little chance that Goldweiser would come up with anything much on the neuro end for a long, long time. He was awfully let down, I could see, so I started to talk fast about the luck I'd been having on the kinesthetic end. When he began to perk up, I called Kujack in from the corridor and had him demonstrate his place kick.

He's gotten awfully good at it this past week.

"If we release the story to the press," I suggested, "this might make a fine action shot. You see, Kujack used to be one of the best kickers in the Big Ten, and a lot of newspapermen will still remember him." Then I sprang the biggest news of all. "During the last three days of practice, sir, he's been consistently kicking the ball twenty, thirty and even forty yards farther than he ever did with his own legs. Than anybody, as a matter of fact, ever has with real legs."

"That's a wonderful angle," the boss said excitedly. "A world's record, made with a cybernetic leg!"

"It should make a terrific picture," Kujack said. "I've also been practicing a big, broad, photogenic grin." Luckily the boss didn't hear him--by this time he was bending over the legs, studying the solenoids.

After Kujack left, the boss congratulated me. Very, _very_ warmly. It was a most gratifying moment. We chatted for a while, making plans for the press conference, and then finally he said, "By the way, do you happen to know anything about your friend Ellsom? I'm worried about him. He went off on Thanksgiving and hasn't been heard from at all ever since."

That was alarming, I said. When the boss asked why, I told him a little about how Len had been acting lately, talking and drinking more than was good for him. With all sorts of people. The boss said that confirmed his own impressions.

I can safely say we understood each other. I sensed a very definite rapport.

* * * * *

_November 30, 1959_

It was bound to happen, of course. As I got it from the boss, he decided after our talk that Len's absence needed some looking into, and he tipped off Security about it. A half dozen agents went to work on the case and right off they headed for Steve Lundy's apartment in the Village and, sure enough, there was Len.

Len and his friend were both blind drunk and there were all sorts of incriminating things in the room--lots of peculiar books and pamphlets, Lundy's identification papers from the Lincoln Brigade, an article Lundy was writing for an anarchist-pacifist magazine about what he calls Emsiac. Len and his friend were both arrested on the spot and a full investigation is going on now.

The boss says that no matter whether Len is brought to trial or not, he's all washed up. He'll never get a job on any classified cybernetics project from now on, because it's clear enough that he violated his loyalty oath by discussing MS all over the place.