Part 1

The Thinking Machine

by Raymond F. Jones

_Like Robert Heinlein and Harry Bates, Raymond F. Jones can point with pride to a major Hollywood production based upon one of his stories, and more science fantasy anthology inclusions over the past seven or eight years than there are blackbirds in an electronic wizard’s pie. And now he takes a look at the future as excitingly prophetic as the chill alien face which stared remorselessly out at us from the silver screen in_ THIS ISLAND EARTH _and left us wondering far into the night how long the human race would survive._

=“Leave everything to me!” the Machine seemed to whisper. “Love and marriage, your daily bread.” But there will always be rebels.=

They gave Rick Theron a party before he left.

It wasn’t a rational thing to do, or even completely legal. But they were Agros, Sixth Rating, and it was the kind of thing to be expected among their class. The Watch Police knew it was going on, and didn’t even bother to validate the report to the regional observatory.

So they darkened the windows in Sol Hanara’s house and invited all the people from the neighboring farms--the friends that Rick Theron had known since he was a child--and gave a farewell party. It was a special doings to show the special kind of feeling they had for Rick.

Not that they wouldn’t have liked to do the same thing for everyone who went. They would. But it was for Rick that all those accumulated and repressed desires were unloosed.

Rick’s father, Sard Theron, drove one of the farm’s big cargo planes down from Rillo to RiGrand. He got clearance for the flight as a cargo of livestock, but even the traffic officials knew that he was picking up a dozen other families from farms along the way. It didn’t really matter. The Lonestar Region was among the top producing areas in the country. No one could expect its Agros to be civilized as well.

The big plane rolled to a stop, the last of three bringing guests to the party, and the farm families climbed down to the solid surface of the RiGrand field. They could smell the night-borne scent of the Gulf waters and see the distant shimmering of moonlight on its surface.

Rick had always loved it down here. He’d wished ever since he was a boy that his family could have transferred assignments to a farm nearer the water, but his father preferred the big, open country of Rillo for cattle and roughage crops and the gathering in of a plentiful harvest.

Now Rick was through with both kinds of country. He stood a moment at the foot of the plane stairs sucking the moist Gulf air into his lungs. This was probably the last night he’d ever see this wonderful RiGrand Agro area.

“There he is!”

He heard the sounds of voices and running feet, and saw the shapes of moving figures in the half light. They came up and swarmed over him, slapping him on the back.

“How’s it feel to have your farming days over?”

“Hear you’re picked to pair with a Mech!”

“You’ll get fed and brushed like a prize sire--what a life!”

“They say those Mech women are charged like a parogun. You have to say ‘yes’m’ and ‘no’m’ or you’re likely to get your head smoked off.”

“Lay off it!” Rick roared, half annoyed by the banter that was supposed to be friendly enough but which had the effect of small, hot needles in his skin.

A vacuum of sound swelled outward in the wake of his voice. “Sorry, guys,” he said. “I didn’t mean it to come out that way. I just don’t like it being the last night of my life at RiGrand.”

“Sure, we don’t like it, either. Guess there’s better ways of showing it than being damned fools. Let’s go in and have a tall drink.”

They crowded around, taking his arms, urging him on. These were the fellows he’d grown up with on the vast farms and ranches of the Lonestar Agro Region. They knew how he felt. Or at least they were trying. Most of them couldn’t really know. They’d never leave. They’d spend the rest of their lives here.

For some inconceivable reason the Machine had picked _him_ to leave. To pair with a Mech. What kind of breed was that supposed to produce? A Rillo range sire and a salt grass heifer!

He went along into the enormous guest hall of the RiGrand ranch. The families left the drinking table and surged about him, shaking his hand and offering congratulations as if something wonderful had happened to him. It was enough to make a man think they _wanted_ him to leave.

But he knew how they felt. It was just a part of growing up, to them. Maybe the trouble with him was that he didn’t want to grow up.

Mendon Carter, RiGrand’s Chief Agro, stood up on the drinking table to propose a toast. His mane of white hair was entangled with points of quivering, silver light. “To Rick Theron!” he cried. “May a thousand Agro sons call him father!”

It wasn’t a good toast. Not for a man who was going to pair with a Mech. But Mendon Carter was trying, in the best way he knew how, to supply an expression of their love which Rick would have to remember and sustain him in the years ahead. Until the time, at least, when he would finally all but forget that he had ever been an Agro.

“To Rick!” the others shouted, even more loudly than they intended, in order to cover their embarrassment at Mendon’s inept toast.

But Rick pretended there was no cause for discomfort. He leaped to the table beside Mendon and held his glass high. “To my sons!” he cried. “I’ll send every one of them back to Lonestar!”

That eased their tension, and gave them license to be as gay as they liked. They answered back with shouts of laughter and good wishes as Rick jumped down from the table, his eyes intent upon the figure he had been searching for ever since he came in.

She was standing against the far wall, her face bright with laughter that pained him. He forced his way through the crowd to Barie’s side.

“For a little while I thought you weren’t here,” he said.

“You knew better than that,” Barie answered. “Come on.” She took his arm. “The orchestra’s going to play. You aren’t going to dance with anyone but me tonight. And after tonight you’ll never dance with me as long as you live.”

She stepped closer and he took her in his arms as the squeaky, tootling orchestra assembled by Mendon Carter at one end of the room took up its beat.

II

It wasn’t a good orchestra and never would be. It was just some of the farm boys who liked to get together on Saturday nights and beat out a little whimsey. Sometimes it was at RiGrand; sometimes at Rillo or Worth-Dallas. At best it was a five hundred mile round trip, and of course the Watch Police knew all about it. They didn’t expect anything better from Agros, Sixth Rating.

They were doing something called “The Lass at the Mech-Shake Ball.”

Barie bounced happily to its senseless, repetitious rhythm. Rick felt the warm touch and vibration of her body against him, but he couldn’t keep time.

“What’s the matter?” Barie said finally. “Don’t you want to dance with me tonight?”

To everyone but him it seemed like a time for dancing. “I want to get out of here,” he said.

He took her out to the patio under the open sky, where the stars were so sweet and clear it made something ache inside a man. They wouldn’t look like that anywhere else in the world, even if you roamed the world over.

He stopped with Barie just beyond an arbor, from which they could see the distant sheet of restless water against the horizon. He touched her and drew her close to him. She looked up, smiling, and patted his cheek.

“I don’t think you want to go very badly,” she said.

“Am I supposed to?”

“It’s like growing older every year. You may not want to, but it happens just the same.”

“You mean there’s nothing we can do when a machine a thousand miles or more from here says one day that Rick Theron is to leave the land he loves and go to a city he never wanted to see and there be paired with a Mech he never wanted to know?”

Barie laughed softly and pressed a little closer to him. “Rick, you talk so silly. I guess that’s why I’ve always liked you. Even the first time we met, when Dad took me with him to Rillo to talk about cattle with your father. I remember I thought I’d never seen a boy who talked like you. I remember how you spoke of the cattle and the land as if they were your very own. You were nine then. Do you remember?”

Didn’t she know? Didn’t she know he remembered every glimpse he’d ever had of her, every sound her voice had made in his hearing? He gripped her arm tightly in his big, rough hand. His eyes swept the fields and the grassy plain that led down to the sea.

“Is there anything wrong with having and owning something for your very own?” he demanded.

“Who’d want to? You’re hurting my arm, Rick.”

He released her. “I’d want to,” he said. “I’d want some land, some cattle that were mine and couldn’t be taken away. Something to love and take pride in.”

He turned her so that he could see her eyes by the light from the sky. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, even yet, do you?” he said.

Barie shook her head. “I don’t understand you, Rick. Sometimes you frighten me with your talk that I can’t make any sense out of. Why should you want to _own_ something? It already belongs to you. You work the land. You turn in its production. You make your living here.”

“Except that now I have to go away and never come back again.”

“It makes no difference!” Barie cried. “Wherever you go you’ll have something to do, something to produce, something that will get you your living. If the Machine says you belong in another place, paired to a certain Mech, then that’s right. There’s no argument with it. The Machine can think better than any man ever could! You know that’s so.”

He regarded her for a long moment. Then swiftly he took her into his arms and pressed his mouth hard against hers. She clung to him, answering his yearning. But even in the midst of her embrace he felt a coldness somewhere that was like a little stab of terror in his mind.

He raised his face from hers. “Does the Machine know how to think about love?” he said softly.

“It must.” Barie shrugged and straightened in his arms. “It says a certain Mech girl is more right for your arms than I am.”

“And don’t you _hate_ it for saying that?”

“Hate it for knowing more than our poor, stupid brains do? Hate it for being right? Would it make sense if you and I went ahead and made a dreadful mistake that would bring us misery all our lives?”

“Barie, do you really believe that? In your heart--?”

“I think I almost hate _you_ when you pretend to be so blind,” Barie said. “You know it’s true as well as I do.”

“Barie--Barie--has it all been so empty? Has it all been meaningless--since that day when I was nine and showed you what land and cattle could really mean to a man?”

He had to turn away to keep her from sensing the sudden, quick sob that welled up from the depths of him. And then she came to him and stroked his long hair with her soft fingers.

“Of course it has not been meaningless and empty,” she said. “It’s been wonderful. We’ve been happy. Our childhood has been sweeter because of each other. And now it is time to grow up. Do you want childhood to last forever, Rick?”

He stood looking down at her face--at her long black hair teasing about her shoulders in the soft night wind and her wide dark eyes so full of trust for the world to which they were born that she would not listen even to her own heart.

It added to the smouldering, uncertain hate in his own heart against that same world.

“Is it childishness that we love each other?” he demanded almost roughly.

For a moment the expression of calm acceptance on her face seemed to break. “It must be,” she whispered at last, “because no one keeps it. We have everything else; we mustn’t expect to keep childhood. And even if we wanted to, what could we do about it?”

“We can go away! Listen to me, Barie. There hasn’t been much time to plan, but I’ve been thinking of this ever since the notification came. Tonight’s our chance.”

“What are you talking about? Go where?”

“The Machine doesn’t do the thinking for the whole world. There are savages it doesn’t care about. We could be one with them!”

“How?”

He pointed to the dark shapes of the planes beyond the farmhouse. “I’ve planned for us to take one of them. We can fill it with spare tanks of fuel and fly it as far south as the Andes. They’d never find us there. They’d never want to!”

She seemed to hesitate a long time, watching the direction of his glance. “How would you get it ready? The escort comes for you in the morning. There isn’t time--”

“_They’ll_ help me load fuel.” He nodded toward the farmhouse where the music was thumping ecstatically. “Say you’ll go with me, Barie! It’s our only chance!”

“All right,” she whispered. “If you can get them to help with making the plane ready, I’ll go.”

III

Rick almost ran from her, bumping into two figures standing at a corner of the house, smoking. It was Len and Sam from his own farm.

“It’s not fair,” Len complained jokingly, “to spend all your time with Barie. After all, you _are_ going to be paired with a Mech in a couple more days!”

“I’m not!” he cried in exultation. “I’m going with Barie. I need your help.” In a tumble of words he told them what he planned. “Get a half dozen more guys from inside the house, Sam. Len, you come and help me get started. We’ll pump the tanks full and figure out a way to feed them from spare barrels inside the plane. There ought to be enough barrels around the farm.”

But neither of the men had moved. “Come on!” he said.

“You can’t,” said Sam. “You know better, Rick. It isn’t right. The Machine’s told you what’s best. We like you too much to help with a fool thing like this. You and Barie--we like you both too much.”

He saw it then, he thought. Sam had always liked Barie. Maybe he figured with Rick out of the way the Machine might give her to him.

“It takes something like this to find out who your friends are,” Rick cried. “There are plenty of guys who _will_ help me!”

“We’re your friends,” said Len quietly. But he was gone from hearing.

One by one, or in groups of two or three, they were approached by him in the hall or out in the yard. They were appalled by the stupidity of the thing he asked them to do. He was stunned by their repeated refusal.

In panic, he looked about him. There was still dancing in the hall, but it was muted now, and the jumping, frantic rhythm had reduced to a low beat that was more felt than heard. Their eyes were upon him, averting as he stared back in defiant bewilderment.

He had not asked them all, but word had gone around from mouth to ear, until all knew his frantic decision.

He held them in his stare when he had asked his last man, and knew it was futile to ask any longer. He whirled from the room and raced out to the hangars alone.

The night was half gone and he had only until daylight to work, but he had to try. He unreeled the fuel hose and fed it to the partially empty tanks of the plane. While it throbbed with the pump’s pulsations, he ransacked the tool and supply sheds for drums to fill the cabin.

He gathered some, but there didn’t seem to be nearly enough. What he had he wrestled up the landing stairs and through the doorway. He lashed them down and went searching for more, then came back to change the hose connection on the tanks.

The dancing had ceased inside the house. All the guests, those who were his friends and had known him all his life, came out and stood in silent knots watching his frantic movements silhouetted against the night sky as he tried to prepare the plane alone.

But it was too much of a task. Dawn came, and he hadn’t found enough barrels. He hadn’t filled those he had, and he hadn’t devised the way to feed their contents to the main tanks from inside the plane.

He was licked, but he was still trying when they saw the plane of the Watch Police against the brightening sky, coming to take him to the re-orientation center.

He climbed down in defeat and looked slowly about the ring of sober faces of his friends who had watched and refused to help. “I could have done it,” he cried, “if you’d given me a hand. I leave behind no friends at Lonestar--only enemies!”

And then it came to him for the first time, apparently, that Barie could have helped, but she hadn’t. He turned to her, in the forefront of the group, and seemed to read in her eyes the thing he had always known was there but didn’t dare to admit.

She had known it would be this way. She had never intended going with him.

“You can’t keep childhood forever, Rick. I had to show you that,” she said. “It was the last good thing I could do for you!”

Six days ago he’d had nothing in his heart but love for the land--and for Barie. He’d expected he’d have the right to pair with her. If you were an Agro, you could afford such hopes. The Machine didn’t bother Agros too much. It let them pair often with the ones they had chosen themselves.

Only a few were denied it. And fewer still were taken away from the Region altogether, to pair and spend the rest of their lives elsewhere. Rick remembered those who had gone. Stan More, Daly Croden--not more than a couple of dozen since he’d been aware of the kind of world he lived in, and the things that sometimes happened to people.

Now, he was one of them, borne through the sky to an alien land that he had never seen, never wanted to see. It had happened to him.

He watched the unfamiliar landscape through the windows of the plane. A couple of Watch Police were his companions, but they were busy over a game and paid no attention to him. His thoughts remained with the world he was leaving behind.

There was something wrong with it. He had never been able to put his finger on it, but he had always been the odd one, the strange one who didn’t fit. He wanted things of his own--in a world where each man could say that all the Earth was his, if he remembered his neighbor could say it too. He didn’t believe that the great Machine, which they told him did the thinking for mankind, could think out his own problems as well as he could.

Somehow this wrongness in the world had destroyed Barie. That was the sign by which he knew it was the world and not he who was in error. It could make her stand and say it was right for someone else to take her place in his arms.

Barie--Barie--

It had taken from him every reason for living.

He had no idea what was ahead of him, but in his mind there burned a single decision that would cover anything that came up. He would do everything in his power to obstruct the goals and purposes to which the Machine assigned him. He would break, and destroy, and disobey until they either crushed him or let him go back. And he had never heard of any who went back.

With this decision clearly made, his mind was free to speculate on what he might find. He knew the traditional stories that circulated among the Agros regarding the Mech cities and their vast production centers. He’d heard tales of the monstrous, unthinkable mechanical brain that had finally brought order out of the chaos of human civilization.

The thinking machine, as the Agros called it, had direct control over the life of every human being on the face of the Earth. At birth, a tape of data based on brain and chromosome mapping was filed with the central library which fed the machine. Here it was instantly available for optimum meshing with similar data from all other men and women currently alive.

In as much detail as the machine considered necessary then, the subsequent lives of the people were planned. Their station, occupation, matings, permission to reproduce--all of these activities and thousands more, at the machine’s option, were precisely dictated and controlled.

Rick was vaguely aware of the history of the changeover from chaos and war to order and peace. It had come about as a natural byproduct of the Second Industrial Revolution. Men had been searching for the answer for all the ages of history, and then suddenly they had it without even looking for it.

Automation. Robots took the place of clerks and mechanics in the factories. Machines could remember ten thousand times as many facts as the most efficient human and apply those facts without error. There was dislocation and unrest, but eventually the economy settled down just as it had in the First Industrial Revolution.

And then the Great Idea that was so obvious and yet so long delayed. Automation in government. Millions of accurate data on tape to determine the need for a new law or change in the old one. No Senator or Representative could hope to match knowledge with such a device. But the one impregnable argument held for many years: This was mere machine calculation. You couldn’t depend for lawmaking on an operation in which no judgment was involved. Human beings had to be governed by human beings. There was no other way.

But finally this limitation, too, was overcome. Marcroft’s invention of the judgment circuit made it possible to construct a machine capable of duplicating human thought. The chain was complete.

The changeover was almost painless. Automation, conscription, emergency regulation had been with the world so long that it had become the normal way of life. Here at last was a device that could, without error, direct a man’s life in the most useful channels, and do it for _all_ men on the globe, without favoritism or bias. Here at last was the millennium for which all the prophets and seers had searched.

Only a few, like Rick Theron, felt, burning within them, aching remnants of something that was not satisfied or taken into account by the Machine.

IV

Rick Theron had never been away from the farms before in his life and his first sight of the shining city of Sanlou almost took his breath away and made him forget momentarily his hate and his resolution to defy the Machine. His longing for the fields and ranges, the patient cattle and green crops dimmed a trifle. He hadn’t known a city could be beautiful, too.

The plane dropped from the sky almost at the base of its outermost tall building. Only then was he aware that the Watch Police had been observing him closely for a long time.

The plane rolled to a stop.

“Okay. This is it, farmboy,” one of them said. “Let’s go in and get the manure cleaned off your feet for the last time.”

There was no clear impression of what followed immediately--a thousand blurred details of registration, identification, movement through pleasing corridors and rooms, a complete physical examination that included everything but a count of his body cells. Then, at the end of the day, a moment of rest in the chambers of the Orientation Officer to whom he had been assigned.

The man was tall, like Rick. He had lighter hair, but a countenance that was no less rugged, as if he knew what it was to work with his hands under the open sky.

“I’m Jackson,” he said. “Bernard Jackson. We’re going to work in pretty close association for the next few months, so we might as well take it as easy as possible. I know a few things about you, but I’d like to hear more. And then I’ll tell you anything you want to know about your position here. Fair enough?”

Rick found himself liking the man, just as he had the city, in spite of his determination to hate everything which had taken him from the farms.

But caution warned him against confiding fully in Jackson. He told the story of his life, briefly, confining himself to those aspects of it which the man must already know. He said nothing of Barie and his terrible disappointment in losing her.

Even this seemed to be known, however. “There was a girl, wasn’t there?” said Jackson. “A girl named Barie?”

Rick hesitated. “Yes--there was.”

“How do you feel about parting from her?”

He shrugged and then remembered Barie’s own words. “You can’t keep childhood forever.”