Part 2

The courtroom was bedlam, and Walhfred Anderson was too excited to pound his gavel. In the glass-walled, soundproofed television booths, announcers grew apoplectic as they tried to relay the fever-pitch excitement of the courtroom to the outside world.

Professor Neustadt held up his bone-thin hand for silence.

"May it please the Court.... The District Attorney agreed that in the event of victory I could ask Cyber IX an optional question. I would like to do so at this time."

Judge Anderson could only nod, and hope that his bulldog features were concealing his emotions. The D.A. kept his back rigidly to the television cameras.

Professor Neustadt strutted up to Cyber IX, flipped on the vocader switch and turned to the cameras.

"Since Cyber IX is essentially a scientific integrator and mathematical unit," he began pedantically, "I'll put my question in the Cyber's own framework. Had another Cyber been selected for this test, I would phrase my question differently."

He turned challengingly back to Cyber IX, paused for dramatic effect, and asked:

"What are the magnitudes of a dream?"

Cyber IX hummed and twinkled. The hum rose higher and higher. The lights flickered in weird, disjointed patterns, blurring before the eye.

Abruptly, the hum stopped. The lights dimmed, faded one by one.

The eternally calm, eternally pleasant voice of Cyber IX spoke from the vocader grill:

"Problem unsolved."

* * * * *

For an interminable instant there was silence in the courtroom. Complete silence. Stunned incredulity. It was followed by a collective gasp, which Walhfred Anderson could hear echoing around the world. Cyber IX had been more than beaten; it had failed to solve a problem.

The gasp gave way to unrestrained cheering.

But the Professor brought quiet again by raising his bony hand. Now there was a strange, incongruous air of dignity about his thin figure.

"Please," he said, "please understand one thing.... The purpose of this demonstration and my question was not to discredit Cyber IX, which is truly a great machine, a wonder of science.

"Cyber IX could not know the magnitudes of a dream ... because it cannot dream.

"As a matter of fact, I do not know the magnitudes of a dream, but that is not important ... because I _can_ dream!

"The dream is the difference.... The dream born in man, as the poet said, 'with a sudden, clamorous pain' ..."

There was no movement or sound in the courtroom. Walhfred Anderson held the Professor's last written answer between his fingers, as if fearing that even the small movement to release it might shatter something delicate and precious. "The dream is the difference!" There it was. So clear and true and beautiful. He looked at Holmes, and Holmes seemed to be smiling under his gray mustache. Yes, Holmes had known the dream.

In the sound-proof booths, the announcers had stopped speaking; all mike lines were open to carry Professor Neustadt's words to five hundred million people.

"Perhaps there are no magnitudes of such a dream ... no coordinates! Or it may be that we are not yet wise enough to know them. The future may tell us, for the dream is the rainbow bridge from the present and the past to the future."

Professor Neustadt's eyes were half-closed again, and his head was cocked back, bird-like.

"Copernicus dreamed a dream.... So did da Vinci, Galileo and Newton, Darwin and Einstein ... all so long ago....

"Cyber IX has not dreamed a dream.... Nor have Cyber VIII, VII, VI, V, IV, III, II, I.

"But they can free men to dream.

"Remember that, if you forget all else: They can free men to dream!

"Man's knowledge has grown so vast that much of it would be lost or useless without the storage and recall capacity of the Cybers--and man himself would be so immersed in what he knows that he would never have time to dream of that which he does not yet know, but must and can know.

"Why should not the scientist use the past without being burdened by it? Why should not the lawyer and the judge use the hard-won laws of justice without being the slave of dusty law books?"

Walhfred Anderson accepted the rebuke without wincing. The rebuke for all the hours he had wasted because he had been too stubborn to use a Cyber clerk, or consult Cyber V. The old should not resist the new, nor the new destroy the old. There was the letter of the law, and there was the spirit, and the spirit was the dream. What was old Hammurabi's dream? Holmes had quoted it once, "... to establish justice on the earth ... to hold back the strong from oppressing the feeble ... to shine like the sun-god upon the blackheaded men, and to illumine the land...." Holmes had dreamed the dream, all right. He had dreamed it grandly. But maybe there was room for small dreams, too, and still time for dreams when the years were so few and lonely.

The Professor suddenly opened his eyes, and his voice took on the twang of steel under tension.

"You are already wondering," he told the cameras accusingly, "whether I have not disproved my own words by defeating Cyber IX.

"That is not true.

"I defeated Cyber IX because I have wasted a man's life--my own! You all know that as a child I was a mnemonic freak, a prodigy, if you prefer. My mind was a filing cabinet, a fire-proof cabinet neatly filled with facts that could never kindle into dreams. All my life I have stuffed my filing cabinet. For sixty years I have filed and filed.

"And then I dreamed one dream--my first, last and only dream.

"I dreamed that man would mis-use another gift of science, as he has mis-used so many.... I dreamed of the Cybers replacing and enslaving man, instead of freeing man to dream.... And I dreamed that the golden hour would come when a man would have to prove that he could replace a Cyber--and thereby prove that neither man nor Cybers should ever replace each other."

Professor Neustadt turned to Judge Anderson, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper.

"Your Honor, I move that this case be dismissed."

The worn handle of his old teakwood gavel felt warm and alive to the Judge's fingers. He sat up straight, and banged resoundingly on the top of his desk.

"Case dismissed."

Then, in full view of the cameras, Walhfred Anderson turned and winked boldly at Oliver Wendell Holmes.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Cyber and Justice Holmes, by Frank Riley