By Kate Wilhelm
Kate Wilhelm, who appeared in orbit 1 with “Staras Flonderans,” in orbit 2 with “Baby, You Were Great” in orbit 3 with “The Planners “ offers another complex and fascinating story, in which fantasy and reality so intermingle that they can no longer be distinguished. When asked why she writes this way, the author suggests a look at the front page of the daily newspapers.
* * * *
We are three. We drive along the coast slowly until Paula says, “This one.” Then we get out of the car and walk around the house nonchalantly, wade through the dunes to the ocean and swim there alone, away from the crowds that form a solid crust like soiled snow up and down the public beaches. How Paula knows this house is empty, but not that one, we don’t know. She is never wrong. Subliminal signs that only she can perceive? A shade drawn wrong, a chair outside that should have been moved from the sun, a garment, long since dried, sun-bleached even, still flapping in the wind? We never know, and she can’t tell us.
Paula is the windsong, quick, nimble, restless, long hair salt-dulled most of the time, too thin, sharp elbows, knees, cheekbones, collarbones. No makeup; she is in too much of a hurry. A nail breaks and she bites it even again. She never pauses to examine anything; her restless gaze flicks here and there, noting perhaps, not lingering, and she says, “We have to go back. A storm is coming.” How does she know?
Gregory says she noticed the grey in the water far out near the horizon. That and the feel of the wind on her skin, and the way the clouds scudded now, all were clues for her. But he can’t tell when a storm is coming. Gregory is her twin brother. Both are fifteen this summer. Gregory is the rock around which the wind sings and flutters, departing to pry into this and that, but always whirling back again. Gregory can give reasons for most of her conclusions, but he can’t reach the conclusions intuitively as she can.
Dan Thornton stirred in his seat and opened his eyes slowly. There was no sound that had roused him, nothing out of the ordinary. He listened for a moment to the familiar soft humming of the computer at his right side and before his gaze turned to it he knew the rippling play of lights would be normal. The instrument panel before him showed nothing abnormal either, no flashing amber light, or worse, the steady throbbing of the red light. Systems okay. He yawned and stretched. Time to make the routine checks. He opened and closed relays, turned the television camera on and studied the passengers, all piled in boxes like rows of frozen goods on a supermarket shelf; he turned the camera off again. Readings on his instruments, all normal. He got out the food capsules carefully, and put them on a sectioned dish and slid it into the recon unit. He waited until the light went on, killing two more minutes, then slowly drew out the dish of scrambled eggs and bacon, toast and honey. He dropped another capsule into a cup and slid it in, then sat down with his breakfast. Presently he had coffee and his first cigarette. He looked over the book titles on the spools. He dropped the spool he selected and some of the thread-tape unwound as it rolled across the cabin. He kicked it hard and abruptly sat down. The computer was calling him.
The alarm clock hummed, and Thornton woke up groggily, feeling the ache of unrested muscles. He turned off the clock before it could start its second phase: a raucous buzz that sounded like fifty men with fifty saws clearing a swath through a forest. His hand left the clock and groped for his notebook and he wrote down the dream details before they began to flit away. He paused and tried to remember something: a dream within the dream? Nothing came of it, and he wrote about the cabin he had seen, and the books on spools like thread. The re-constituter for food struck him as a particularly good idea, one he had never encountered before. He finished the dream sequence and only then stretched and felt each muscle protest again.
He padded in bare feet across the room to the bathroom and stood under a hot shower for ten minutes. The icy follow-up failed to revive him and he knew that his efficiency would be at about 60% of normal unless he look his zoorn-wowie pills. He looked at the small bottle disdainfully, but swallowed two capsules and only then looked at his face.
“This is the way we start most of our days, old man,” he said to the face. “Aches, try to shock the system into awareness, then the pep pills and a gallon of coffee. It’s no good, old man. You know it’s no good.”
The old man in the mirror didn’t answer, and he was almost sorry. The day the image did answer, he’d quit, just walk out and never come back, and that would be nice. Shaving, he repeated to himself, emphasizing each syllable of it, “That would be nice!”
At the office he was met by his secretary who handed a memo to him. Meeting for nine sharp. The Secretary would be present. End. He crumpled it and nodded to Jeanne. It was 8:45.
“Coffee?” he asked.
The girl nodded as he started through the doorway to his inner office, a cubicle ten by ten. “I poured a cup, and there’s more in the pot,” Jeanne said. “Shall I start on the mail?”
“Sure, honey. And, Jeanne, try to winnow it way down, huh?”
She smiled sympathetically and he started on the coffee. He tried not to look at his desk, which Jeanne had cleaned up as much as possible, but which still was a jumble of plans, memoes, doodles, slide rules, schematics . . . The coffee was blistering hot, strong, black. The day began to seem less infernal. When he left for the conference in ten minutes he was carrying his third coffee with him. He grinned at Jeanne, and his stride was purposeful and his back straight.
There were fifteen men at the conference that morning, and all of them looked as bad as Thornton, or worse. They had all been driving on twelve-to-eighteen-hour days for seven months now, and the end was not in sight Thornton could almost envy the union-protected maintenance men. He nodded to others and there were low greetings and hurried conversations in the shorthand that passed for talk. He thought, one bomb right here, right now, and poof, there goes the Special Institute for Applied Research.
He saw that the Secretary was already in the room, cloistered by several bodies near the window, speaking in his low monotone to Halvern, the Director of the Institute. The clock chimed softly and Halvern moved toward the long table, the Secretary following, still talking, like a priest mumbling incomprehensible prayers.
Introductions were unnecessary since the Secretary had been there before. Thornton thought of his bomb and enlarged it a bit in his mind, still not The Bomb, of course, but slightly bigger than the one he had contemplated earlier. Would the war stop then? He knew it would not, but there would be those on the outside who would sanctify him. He grinned at the thought, and for a moment he was afraid the grin had reached the outside of his face. But there were no looks askance, and deliberately he turned his thoughts from that line and became attentive to what the Secretary was saying:
“...imperative that we solve this final problem before negotiations are finalized. When the talks begin, our activities in the field will be curtailed...”
Thornton added: and we have stalled the Secretary-General about as long as possible.
“Naturally we are trying to bring about peace talks as rapidly as possible on the surface anyway where we can point to our efforts, but it is difficult to negotiate with an enemy that is so xenophobic. You mean he hates our guts, with reason, and he doesn’t believe a word we say. I repeat, the President has informed me that it is imperative that we complete our plans for the Phalanx and try it out under battle conditions so that we will better be able to assess its potential in the event we are faced with a major land war. . .”
Thornton turned him off then, letting his gaze slide from the Secretary’s hand-tooled-leather face to the window that framed a vista of Tennessee hills touched with early spring. Dogwoods and redbuds were in bloom, and a strong wind whipped them unmercifully. Kite wind. Sailing wind. Sailing ... He smiled inside and wished he could go sailing along the coast on the curious flat-bottomed skiff Gregory had picked up somewhere in the distant, almost forgotten past. Twenty-five years ago, by God! For a moment the thought of his boyhood friend stirred something, and his hand toying with a pencil tightened its grip painfully.
He wrenched his attention back to the Secretary who had left the familiar rah, rah, team talk, and was on something new finally. “I am scheduling the first simulated battle test for one month from today, and the first actual battle test for sixty days subsequent to that date.” There was more of it, but Thornton perversely blocked it out. So they should all work for twenty hours a day instead of eighteen. He shrugged inwardly and decided that he didn’t care. With wow-zooie pills and coffee they would all stay on their feet until they collapsed, and it didn’t matter what shape they would be in when the year was over. One year in the Institute, one year off resting, then back to the university to pick up the threads of classwork, lectures on Advanced Programming Theory, and his own small quiet lab. And back to his family, of course.
Thornton returned to his office after the meeting and was confronted with the meaningless garble from other departments that he had to translate into a program. Very deliberately he didn’t try to understand most of the problems that he worked with. He didn’t want to know what the Phalanx would be able to do and what it would not.
He divided his day into thirds: the first third, from 8:45 until 1:00, he worked on the advanced programming that was his to do: after lunch, 1:30 until 5:30, he went over the papers prepared by others, sometimes accepting them, often sending them back; from 7:30 until exhaustion stopped him he worked with the computer searching for errors. Then dream-laden sleep until 7:30 the next morning. At 5:30, three days a week, he spent half an hour with his analyst, and it was to him that he reported any interesting ideas that had come to him during his dreams, awake or asleep. His analyst, Dr. Feldman, believed implicitly in the creative ability of the unconscious to serve up workable ideas which generally were brushed aside because they were far afield of the patient’s area of interest. Now that he was aware of the sort of things that Feldman was looking for, Thornton also searched his dreams and his reveries for those ideas, and was surprised to find how many of them there were. Surprised and excited. This was something that he planned to take from the Institute with him when he left. Most of it he planned, swore he would leave behind him forever.
* * * *
He told Feldman the dream without consulting his notes: “I was in the cabin of a spaceship, carrying cryo-passengers to a distant star system. I was responsible for them. Everything was functioning smoothly.” He told in detail how he had prepared his breakfast, and then went on to the book incident. “It was a variation of the microfilm process, I suppose, simplified somewhat. I read the title the way you would read the label on a spool of thread; it even had the feel and texture of a spool of thread. I dropped it, though, and woke up then. My clock went off.”
Feldman didn’t interrupt him, simply nodded when Thornton came to the end of it. When Thornton pulled out his notebook and read from his notes, he was chagrined to find that he had omitted parts of the dream.
Feldman said, “The dream that you remember, what kind of a dream was it?”
“Kind? Oh, I see. I think it was black-and-white. I don’t remember any color. I didn’t feel it particularly, I don’t think.”
“Yes. Could you come out of it at any time? Did you realize that you were dreaming?”
“I don’t think so. I have done that, and noted it afterward, but not this time.”
Feldman worked on the dream within a dream, but Thornton couldn’t remember if there had been one or not. Short of hypnosis, Feldman decided, it would stay repressed for the time being. Thornton and Feldman had discussed dreams in the past, and he knew that Feldman believed there were three major types of dreams: the hypnagogic dreams that float in and out of awareness on falling asleep, and on awakening, the kind that fade in and out of a short nap when you know you are dreaming and even take a hand in directing the dream sometimes. Then there was the next stage where the dreamer had no control, but was really more an observer than a participant, although he could be both at the same time, watching himself from a distance. The third kind was the sort that Thornton rarely had, or if he had, seldom remembered: the dream that is a reality in itself, the dream that can result in a heart attack if it is a nightmare, or in orgasm if it is sexual, the dream that exists, that can change the dreamer just as a living experience can.
Feldman was smiling happily when Thornton looked at him at the end of the questioning, and Thornton knew that finally he was proving interesting to the psychiatrist. After seven months of unshakable normalcy, he had done something interesting. He felt a stab of fear and wished he hadn’t told the dream completely, had let it go at the remembered version, but even as he thought it, he knew that it would have been impossible. Feldman would have known, and resistance would have delighted him even more than mere repression. For a moment he hated the smiling man, but it passed, and he grinned back briefly.
“You think I’m going to earn my keep after all?” he asked.
“When you have something come up after this length of time, I must assume that there is the possibility that it can be connected with the work here, yes. We shall see. I am scheduling you for an hour tomorrow, starting at five. Is that convenient?”
The question was rhetorical.
“You should give thought to the spool of thread that you tried to rid yourself of,” Feldman said. “As you fall asleep, think to yourself, spool of thread, spool of thread. Who knows, perhaps it will come to you.” He held open the door and Thornton left.
Thornton knew that early in their dealings Feldman had had him in deep hypnosis, that he had few secrets from the man, that probably Feldman had left him with some posthypnotic cues, and he wondered if it had been a suggestion, or an order, that he should think of a spool of thread, and even as he wondered about it, he knew that coming from Feldman a suggestion could have the force of an order given at gunpoint. His smile was without mirth as he remembered what Feldman had said once when asked why he didn’t merely hypnotize all his patients and have them recite their dreams and fears to him.
“Ah, but the associations, the meanings would be lost then, perhaps. Why do you repress this and not that? This is what is interesting, not what you repress particularly, although it can be. No, I might nudge you from time to time, but I want you to bring them out with the proper associations, the associations that only you can make.”
* * * *
Spool of thread, spool of thread . . .
He remembered, dreamed, of losing his first tooth, and the thread his mother had tied around it, her gentle insistence, that he pull it himself, and her promise, after a look of surprise and amusement that, yes, they would send it to his father. He drifted out of the dream-reverie and was wide awake thinking about his father who had been a good man, kind and wise, a colonel in the army. He got out of bed and paced his tiny room smoking furiously, but the image of his father naked and bruised, shaved clean, dragging one foot, being pulled hobbling down a street crowded with Oriental faces that were grimaces of hate, the image remained, just as he had watched it on television. A good man, he repeated soberly. But he might have done the things they accused him of doing. He might have.
He swallowed a pill and returned to bed and found himself repeating: spool of thread, spool of thread. He wanted to get up again, but the pill was quick and he felt lethargy stealing over him. He would be achy in the morning, always was achy when he resorted to sleeping pills. Spool of thread . . .
He dreamed discordant, meaningless dreams, fantasies without basis in reality. And slept deeper, and was less restless on the single bed.
We walk through the museum arm in arm and it is Paula who is leading us, although she is in the middle. Her steps are light and quick, and she talks incessantly. She pauses before the paintings of the new artist, Stern, and she squints and cocks her head this way and that, then she pulls us on to the next one. She is changed now, her hair still long and straight, but shining clean, and she has done something to her face, something so subtle that I can’t decide what it is. I find myself staring at her again and again, and she smiles at me, and for an instant I find the wild girl who lived for the ocean only five years ago. Then it is gone and she is saying, “It’s such a joke! He’s wonderful! Don’t you see it?” There are fifty paintings, arranged in aisles that meet and interconnect so that it is hard not to repeat an aisle. There is no arrow pointing this way, no numbers on the paintings, but Paula has led us through them to the end, and she is laughing with delight. The artist is there, regarding Paula with deep and penetrating interest. She runs to him and kisses him on his bearded cheek and says, “Thank you. I won’t tell.” And she doesn’t tell. Gregory goes back to the beginning and works his way slowly to us once more, and when he comes back, his eyes share her mirth, but he won’t tell either. I know that he can explain it although she can’t, but he needed her to tell him there was something to explain. I return later and study the paintings alone for a long time, and I don’t know what they found. I am lost there. The paintings are grotesque, hideous and meaningless, and the arrangement is meant to befuddle, not to enlighten.
Paula loves the city as she loved the beaches. She runs and dances through the streets joyously, tasting what no one else tastes, smelling what no one else smells, seeing what is not there for my eyes to see. She sings in the city like a fresh breeze from the ocean.
Paula plans to leave school in the spring. She wants. . . she doesn’t know what she wants, but it is not in school. She will travel, perhaps marry. I feel tightness in my throat and I ask if she will marry me and she stops, frozen, and finally after a long time she says no. I am angry with her and stalk away. Gregory says that she is like a bird now, she must fly here and there before she stops and love would stop her. I hate them both, their closeness, their awareness of each other. I want to kill them both. Especially Paula. My hands are fists when she comes near me and the smothering waves of love-hate immobilize me at a place where the pain is unendurable.
She knows. Paula is like a spring wind then, gentle and soothing, and I am filled with her presence. For two weeks we are together and she is in every cell of me, deep in me where she can never escape now. Then she is gone. Gregory knows where, I think, but he doesn’t tell me. He plods with his books, getting every detail of every subject letter-perfect, but he never originates anything, never offers anything and he is like a shadow without the wind. I know his loss is greater than my own, but I don’t care about that. I return to California where I am still in school, and the jet is my scream of anguish that I cannot utter for myself. I want her out of my life. I want never to see her again. I want her dead so that no one else can have her.
* * * *
Dan Thornton strode across his mammoth office and began pushing buttons on a four-by-eight-foot console on one side of his desk. Three doors flew open from other rooms, and shaking men entered; he waved them to seats and waited for the Secretary.
“I have your answer,” he said to the Secretary on his arrival. “It is simply this . . .” He was dying, his throat lightening and choking him, his heart pounding harder and harder. . . .
He sat up shivering. He reached for the notebook and the light, and wrote quickly and lay down again. He thought he had been wakeful off and on most of the night, and now the sky was lightening, a pale grey touched with peach tones. He squeezed his eyes tighter, desperately wanting sleep to return, deep, untroubled sleep, and he knew that it would not.
* * * *
Feldman said slowly, “You are aware of what the Phalanx is, yet you consistently deny any real knowledge of it to yourself. Why is that?”
Thornton shrugged. He thought of his wife and three children and talked of them for a few minutes until Feldman stopped him.
“I know about them. You told me early about them, and it is on your file. Tell me about the spool of thread.”
He free-associated for a while; he had learned to do it quite well, but privately he thought it was nonsense. He paid little attention to his own voice when he free-associated. It wasn’t as if he were being analyzed for a medical purpose, he had told himself early in the business. Feldman was paid to keep tabs, that was all. He had nothing to hide, nothing of interest to learn about himself, so he cooperated, but didn’t pay much attention.
Feldman said, “Maze,” and he answered, “Art Museum.” He sat straight up on the couch. He was shivering. Feldman nodded to him when he swung around to look. “So that is that,” Feldman said. “What it is actually I don’t know, but you do now, don’t you?”
Thornton shook his head violently, shivering hard. He remembered the feeling of being lost at an art exhibit years ago. “It was so meaningless,” he said. “This exhibit was arranged like a maze and the artist came over to me while I was standing there feeling stupid, and he told me that it meant nothing. I had worked hard trying to puzzle it out, and he said it had no meaning. It was arranged like a maze.”
Feldman looked disappointed. His silence invited Thornton to keep talking, but there was nothing more to say about it. Thornton said, “The Phalanx is the final solution to the problem of modern warfare. It is an armored computer bank designed to control at least twenty-five sub-units at this time, and it will have the capacity to control n subunits when it is completed. The subunits to this point have been built to scout jungle trails, and go through undergrowth where there are no trails searching out the enemy. They come equipped with flame throwers, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, communications units, infrared sensors, mass sensors, mine laying, or mine detection devices, chemical analysis labs, still and movie cameras, audio sensors and transmitters...”
He became aware of Feldman’s bright, unblinking gaze and he paused and grinned at the analyst. Softly he added, “But the main problem with the Phalanx is that it doesn’t know what a smile is on a friendly face. It can’t distinguish between friend and enemy. It can’t tell if the metal it senses is a gun or a hoe. It has no way of knowing if the mass-burdened heat source is a man with a howitzer or an ass with a load of firewood. And no matter how many changes the psycho-cybernetics lab sends to me, I can’t program those things into it.”
Thornton stood up and stretched. His gaze followed a low, long shaft of sunlight coming through the Venetian blind where a slat was crooked. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. He sensed that Feldman made a motion toward him, but there was no effort to stop him, or to force him to complete his hour.
“Tomorrow at five,” Feldman said, and that was all.
* * * *
His thighs burned as he climbed. He had wanted to climb the hill ever since the first tracery of white blossom had appeared high on its side, but no time, no time. And now his thighs burned. He should write to Ethel tonight. Hadn’t even opened her last letter yet. He had put it down somewhere and had forgotten it. On the dresser in his room? On his desk? He groaned to himself at the thought of his desk, and he slipped on a moss-covered rock and banged his knee. Sitting on the damp pungent ground he rocked back and forth nursing the knee for a few minutes, catching his breath. He had come farther than he realized. Below him, almost hidden, he could see the Institute building. It had started as a low, long simple two-story building, but had been extended in three directions, like dominoes, and at the end of one of the newer additions there was construction going on. He had a vision of it worming its way over the hills, growing like a snake through the mountains, creeping through valleys, over crests, following watercourses ... He closed his eyes and composed part of the letter to Ethel. It would be dull, he decided, faltering after the initial hope-you-are-well bit. Ethel was a good woman, but dull. God, she was dull. He remembered the shock he had felt the day he understood that Ethel had settled in on herself, that she would change no more, only become more what she was, more dogmatic, less malleable to change of any sort, more picture-pretty and smug. Ethel was forty. She had been forty on her twenty-fifth birthday, would be forty on her eightieth. But she was good, kind, considerate, a good mother, a faithful and helpful wife, good social animal. . .
They could say that about him. A good man. Plodding maybe, but a good man. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Good to his kids, a real father.
He leaned back against a treetrunk and watched the sunset without thinking.
A good man.
The breeze on his cheek was warm and fragrant with spring. Gradually he forgot about the cold, damp ground beneath him. He thought about the three kids. Bang, bang, bang, three years, three kids. That was the way they had wanted it. Have them all together, raise them together and be done with that part of it. By the time we’re both forty, they’ll be almost grown and we’ll still be young. Well, he was forty-four, and they were all grown. But he wasn’t young. Ethel wasn’t young. Both of them were good, good, good, but they were not young. He dreamed of romping with the kids, and he knew the romping was wrong. They were glad when he tired of it and left them. He dreamed of his daughter’s soft cheek against his, as she whispered secrets to him, and his yawn that had driven her away. Yet, he did love her with an intensity that sometimes had startled and frightened him. Perhaps that was why he had driven her away. He remembered her flying past him on her bicycle, hair streaming behind her, thin legs pumping harder and harder . . .
We go down the coast in the skiff with the wind driving us hard. Feeling of fear, exhilaration, alertness, watching for the sudden wave that could topple us. Paula’s hair streaming out in the wind, hitting my face, stirring something in me, making me look at her through different eyes for a moment. And the intolerable ache that was Paula. The searing, burning, unbearable pain that meant Paula, and the release that was just as sudden and even more intense.
He jerked from the tree and was on his feet. He shuddered once and started down the hill. He had been dreaming of his wife and the kids. Of his daughter ... A flush of deep shame swept over him and he stumbled blindly back to the Institute.
* * * *
“Dr. Thornton, there has to be a way to program these abstracts, as you call them.” Melvin Jorgenson paced. He was a restless man. Even pacing failed to satisfy his need to move, and in his hands he carried and played with a pen whose point he extended and retracted over and over, each time making an audible click. Thornton noticed that he was pacing in time to the click, or was he clicking in time to his tread? He said nothing, and waited. Maybe they were going to fire him.
The Director was there also, and it was to him Jorgenson was addressing himself, although he prefaced his remarks with Thornton’s name. The Director looked unhappy.
“You know that we have been experimenting with various techniques,” Jorgenson said, glancing at Thornton, but still talking to the Director. “We have a simple psycho-modular unit in operation now, much like the one you described in your book of several years ago. That gave us the necessary line to follow, but as I say, this is a simple unit.”
He continued to talk and pace and by listening to him very carefully, and ignoring the clicks as much as possible, Thornton finally understood that there was to be a major revision in the Phalanx, and he was to program the revised version with all the data that already had gone into the obsolete model. He started to laugh and continued to laugh until someone, the Director himself, brought him water. He said that he had strangled on a smothered cough, that he had caught cold when he had fallen asleep out in the woods a few nights ago. He allowed Jorgenson to lead him to the new unit ready to be connected to the Phalanx, and he asked the right questions, intelligent questions, and he made intelligent notes and finally said, sure, why not?
* * * *
“The Phalanx,” he wrote in his diary (because writing it, even though he would have to destroy what he had written afterward, set it in his mind: once written, never forgotten, he had learned early in his school career, and so had gone through school laboriously copying passages, notes, sometimes almost whole textbooks; he had remembered all of it, still remembered all of it), “is apparently a small building, and only on close approach can you see that there are treads under it, hidden by sides that come almost to the ground. There are pseudo-windows, a pseudo-exterior that can be made to conform to any local style of building. Inside...” He put the pen down and walked to the window. It was raining hard. He was slightly feverish; he really had caught a cold, and he had taken the afternoon off on the instructions of the infirmary doctor. He was supposed to be sleeping now, but the sound of the rain was unsettling instead of soothing, and he wanted to be out in it, walking bareheaded under the driving, stinging sheets of water. He thought yearningly of the pneumonia that would almost certainly follow, and the discharge from present duties, and the long rest afterward. Rest, travel, sunbathing, reading, being conducted through the computer laboratories of major countries throughout the world. His name would be magic after a year on the project, even if they hadn’t brought it off yet. Eventually they would, and then everyone connected with it would be known, not to the public, but to their peers, where it mattered. He pulled the blind over the window and returned to the diary.
“Inside the ‘house’ are the computer, its weapons and sensors, with a monitor board in the center. Here it is that we are forced to maintain human surveillance. A man has to oversee the data that are brought in, has to be able to jump over intervening bits of data to connect those things that have no apparent reason for being linked together. For instance, if a fire is to be started to clean out an area, the man has to note the weather—a fire during a thunderstorm is a futile gesture. He has to note the wind, the placement of other units, the relative value of migratory birds in the area, for example. Or the possibility of livestock that will be killed by smoke downwind from the area. All of these we can program in, if we can Formulate them in clear, unambiguous language. We don’t dare let the Phalanx get confused.”
His dropped his pen again and went to the bathroom and took his temperature. It was up, 102.6. He lay down. He was thinking of the statements that could confuse the Phalanx unless all parts were satisfied: A.B, A+B, A/B, A^B, A=B . . . They couldn’t do it. How describe a smile in clear and unambiguous language? The Phalanx couldn’t be unmanned. Nor could it be manned in the usual sense. The Phalanx and its offspring were to be the call boxes, like the police telephones that were spaced all over cities. Imagine, he told himself, what it would be like if the call box on the corner not only alerted the precinct station, but watched suspicious characters, measured and weighed them, analyzed them, noted what weapons they carried, made countless other observations about them, came to a decision that they were okay, or not okay, and if not, then apprehended them, or killed them. Imagine that. What if it made a mistake and burned down a city block in error? Sorry ‘bout that.
But if they could make it work, wouldn’t it be good? Wouldn’t it be better than armies over the face of the earth? Good, good, good . . .
Dan Thornton couldn’t lift his arm because they had pinned gold braid on it. Real gold. They got the other arm and he wanted to beg off, but they insisted, refusing to hear his pleas. With the fastening of the braid on his other arm all he could do was stand, trying not to sway, knowing the weight would topple him if he swayed. He was paralyzed from goodness, he thought.
They had this old brain hanging around, see. The guy died on the operating table, abdominal surgery, and his head was intact, going to waste. So they put the brain in this jar of nice warm nutrients and fed it now and then and it went on ticking away, thinking its own thoughts. Then they put electrodes in it, this is the sight center, this the kinaesthetic...And they put return wires and hooked them to an EEG and they watched the pens go up and down, up and down, and they kept getting cuter with it until they could get that little old brain to tell them what was on its mind. Not much, as it turned out. You see, that little old brain had gone crazy as a bedbug from the various things they had done to it, but still those pens went up and down, up and down, and it couldn’t stop, couldn’t refuse to cooperate, couldn’t do anything but soak up the nutrients and sit there ticking away.
“Doesn’t he look natural, like he might get up and talk to us any minute.”
But don’t look behind that eyeball, ma’am. Empty behind it. That one too, and that.
Most of them go mad, if not immediately, then as soon as they are hooked to the computer that is sending messages at the rate of a million bits a second. They had time, and psycho-modular units to work with. They found a unit that did not go mad when they linked it to a computer. It was a simple computer, however.
If chips are black and white, and this object is green, then this object is not a chip. If tiles are red and blue, and this object is green, then this object is not a tile. And so on, and on, and on, at the rate of one million bits a second. The brain ticked away and did not go mad. They made it more complex. The object was green and round. Then more complex: green, round, and weighs n grams . . . The brain did not go mad. Yet. They hooked it to the Phalanx, and the brain went mad.
Dan Thornton stood with his arms dangling, paralyzed by his own goodness and the heavy gold braid that testified to the goodness and watched the brain go mad. How they could tell it was going mad was by the way it made the pens go up and down, up and down. It was drawing paper dolls, all joined at feet and hands.
We stare at each other across a roomful of people and somehow we come together without either of us moving. I hold her tight against me and murmur into her hair that smells of sea winds and sunshine, and my murmur has no words, but says that I love her. “It’s been a long time, Dan,” she says. Her eyes are shining and I feel that she is happy to see me. Again she is different. The wild girl is deeper, harder to find now, but still there. She says, “Let’s go somewhere else.” We walk the streets, her hand in mine, our steps matched, even though she has to take long strides to keep up. We walk for hours, see the night out, watch silently when the last star is lost in a lightening sky.
We talk and I find myself defending my father. She stops me with cool fingers pressed against my lips. “You are shocked that you can love someone who is capable of evil,” she says, as if surprised at me. “We are all capable, it’s just that most of us never get the chance to do more than small evil things.” I argue that he wasn’t evil, that he never hurt anyone in his life. She is skipping at my side, not listening, and I know she thinks I am foolish. I am angry with her, almost as angry as when she said she would not marry me. I ask her again and she shakes her head. I ask her what she is doing, how she is living and she is amused that I don’t know of her. She puts a slim book into my hand, says I should not open it until she is gone again, and that won’t be until Monday.
The weekend is an agony of pleasure, and on Monday she is gone. The book is poetry that I cannot understand. They say she is brilliant, a genius, that she is the eyes and ears of the world. And I can’t understand her poetry.
Two weeks later I marry Ethel and we plan to have three children right away.
* * * *
“Doctor Thornton, if you’ll just raise your hips a bit. That’s right.”
He was being taken somewhere on a stretcher on wheels. It was too hard to try to understand, so he let himself be carried and cared for, and sometime later he knew that he had the pneumonia that was to release him and send him home. After the serious part of it passed and he was told to take it easy and soak up sun on the wind-protected sunporch, he thought about the project, and he knew he wouldn’t ask to be relieved from it. The Institute brought in Carl Brundage, an old friend of his to substitute for him until he was well enough to resume a full schedule. Carl stopped in to talk when he had time, and that helped the slow days along.
“The major mistake is in the lack of selectivity in the psycho-modular units they are forced to use. Most of them belong to enlisted men, untrained minds that probably never used a tenth of their potential. You have to think of that one unit as pre-programmed, you see. It can accept no new training, can’t learn anything, can’t develop any of its potential; it is the coordinator, that’s all. The mistake lies in thinking that it is more than that. But that’s all it needs to be,” he added, deep thought furrows aging his face for a moment. Something . . . ? Whatever the thought had been, it had not come to consciousness, however, and he shrugged. It would. He knew the workings of his own brain, knew that he might feel twinges of this sort off and on for a while, then a new idea would hit him and the twinges would go away until another new idea was born.
“Are you going to be allowed to watch the first test on Monday?” Carl asked.
“Sure. But it will be a failure.” Moodily he repeated that to himself after Carl had left to do the work that he, Thornton, was supposed to be doing.
He rested over the weekend, sleeping deeply and heavily under massive sedation. Monday was clear and warm with high cirrus clouds forming milky streaks in a perfect sky. The wind velocity was five to ten miles an hour, air temperature a mild 71. Thornton rode in a jeep to the demonstration site, twelve miles from the Institute building, in a narrow gouged-out valley, where spring was arriving later than on the more exposed hillsides. Pale green spears of unfolded leaves tipped the trees and the dogwoods still bore tiers of snowy flat blossoms.
The Phalanx sat in the center of the small valley, looking like a miner’s cabin. At the signal given by the Director the sides of the Phalanx rose slightly, enough for ten small, rounded subunits to roll out from the interior. The subunits were called the bugs. They were painted randomly in browns and greens, and when they moved away from the Phalanx, they merged with the earth and the undergrowth and were invisible. The test was to be in two parts; the first was without the psycho-modular unit hooked in, the second with it.
Scattered in the valley and on three sides of the surrounding hills were Institute men, taking the part of the enemy. Thornton had expected to be one of them, and he was grateful for the pneumonia that had turned him into a spectator. The ten bugs were only part of the force the Phalanx could control. Two of them carried sprays that threw out an arc of a water-dye mixture; in battle that would be fibre. Two others recorded on film and soundtrack everything in a radius of up to ten miles, terrain permitting. Another moved along with a radar antenna spinning, homing in on a helicopter that thundered overhead, while its companion followed a flight of birds, then picked up a jet making a pencil-thin contrail.
Each bug apparently functioned as planned. Thornton waited. The sun heated his thighs and he remembered how they had burned on the climb up the hill the day he had caught the cold. His driver, one of the junior programmers, shifted excitedly and pointed to one of the bugs that was leaving the ground, skimming over the top of bushes, over a runoff stream. The Phalanx had everything under control. It didn’t fall apart until three rabbits were flushed from the bushes and ran straight at the mine detecting bug. The dye thrower swung around and sprayed the rabbits, and with them the mine detector that was immediately frozen in its tracks. The Phalanx had been programmed to put out of commission any of the subunits that were scored on. Following the rabbits the dye-thrower rolled over a “mine,” and it also was immobilized.
One by one the subunits proved vulnerable to the unexpected, and within half an hour the Phalanx sat alone, unprotected, and the men moved in and “captured” it.
Thornton watched the slumping figure of the Secretary and the unbowed figure of the Director who was gesturing expansively. The second session would take place after lunch, after the psycho-modular unit was hooked in and the men resumed their positions.
With the psycho-modular unit in place, the test was more impressive. Some of the men on the hills were “killed” by the dye-throwers, others were “gassed,” but none were taken prisoner. The Phalanx was not equipped to take prisoners. This time the Phalanx refused to be fooled by rabbits deliberately introduced by the men, and it sent a unit after the men themselves. It shot down three crows and two jets, and a hawk. When it went mad in less than an hour it had the subunits destroy each other, and turn on the Phalanx itself.
While technically a failure, the second session of the test gave great satisfaction.
There was a rally that night, conducted by the Secretary himself.
Thornton’s son was of draft age, or would be in a month. He could understand the tenor of the country that clamored for an end to the draft, an end to the endless wars, an end to the frustrations that dulled the young men and made them restless in school, made them marry too young, drive too hard and fast, experiment with drugs and danger wherever it was presented to them. He didn’t need or want the Secretary to outline this for him, but the Secretary did. His voice was sad and rousing by turns. Thornton used his illness as an excuse and left early.
* * * *
The work continued. The psycho-modular units continued to go mad. Thornton convalesced without incident and discontinued the heavy sedation, and went back to a shortened work-day. He also went back to his sessions with Dr. Feldman.
There was an air of excitement at the Institute now. Success was in the smell of the spring air turning into summer, and the scientists and technicians were lightheaded. Thornton too. Carl was almost embarrassingly grateful to him for having become ill so that he had been called in. He worked like a man possessed, trying to spare Thornton all he could. Thornton knew that other departments were working even harder than his own. The psycho-cyberneticist and the perception psychologist must not sleep at all, he thought one night when he met them both in the hall. He had returned for his notebook, after napping for three hours. He would return to sleep, but they seemed prepared for an all-night stint.
How does man know what he sees? How does the brain communicate with itself; with the hormonal system; with the autonomic nervous system . . . ? He didn’t envy them their work. When they found another answer, he got it in the language of formulae and symbols that he then translated to binary digital language and put in the Phalanx. This was tested, and if it was wrong, he took it out again, and they went back to the original problem.
Thornton dreamed often of the Phalanx and its bugs now. “Are the others reporting dreams about it?” he asked Feldman.
“They dream of everything,” the analyst said.
Thornton wondered if Feldman were curious about why his dreams seemed never to concern sex. “When I was young,” he said, “I was as horny as anyone, I guess. But now . . . After I got married and settled down, it seemed less important I guess I’m one of those fortunate people who isn’t driven by sex so much. I’ve hardly missed Ethel at all,” he added. It surprised him to say it and know that it was true. Of course, when he had been ill, he had missed her. She would have been good to have around then. She had a way with sick people, soothing, gentle, comforting. But normally his work was enough, and the momentary pangs of longing seemed almost directionless, certainly not aimed specifically for her. Or anyone else.
“Were you ever in love?” Feldman asked when the silence lengthened.
“Sure. A couple of times. High-school stuff; then, of course there was Ethel.”
“What about the high-school stuff? Any particular girl who stands out now?”
He couldn’t remember the name of any one girl he had admired in high school.
That night he had three programs to check. Carl had admitted mistakes in them. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Carl had said, flinging the papers down on Thornton’s desk. “And I can’t find the garbage.” He had been disgusted with himself for letting the error slip past in the first place, and even more so for not finding the error after it was known to be there.
The three programs comprised a whole; the error could be in the first of them, throwing off the next two; or it could be in the last step of the third program. There were over fifteen hundred steps involved.
Thornton worked on it until 1 a.m., knocked off half an hour to stretch and have a sandwich, then went back to it again. At 3 a.m. he realized that Feldman was pushing him for some reason that he couldn’t fathom. For months his relationship with Feldman had been casual, in the line of duty, but now it was different. The difference in Feldman was like the change that came over a cat that had been playing with a ball and was presented with a mouse. The same gestures, but with a new intensity, a new concentration. He wandered out into the night to smoke and let his room clear of the smoke there. He was coughing badly with each cigarette, the after-effect of pneumonia, he guessed.
He had talked to the psycho-cyberneticist about the selection of the psycho-modular unit, and Jorgenson had been in bitter agreement with his theory that they could expect no great strides forward until they were allowed to select for themselves. He knew the Director had brought it up with the Secretary, but no word had filtered down as yet about the outcome. Meanwhile the units continued to go mad and the Phalanx tried to commit suicide periodically.
He didn’t like the phrase, “tried to commit suicide,” but it was how they all talked about it. He remembered his mother and her suicide that followed the execution of his father. He remembered the pictures of the mangled children that had arrived in the mail, and the letters, and phone calls, and his mother’s anguish and final surrender. He would not have got through that period without Paula and Gregory. His hand froze in the process of lifting his cigarette to his lips.
Paula! He hadn’t thought about Paula for twenty years. Not since he had gone to hear her speak and read her poetry. Ethel had been so bored by it. They hadn’t stayed for all the program, but later he had gone back and met Paula at the reception that followed. She never appeared surprised to find him, he had thought then when her face lighted with pleasure at his approach. Never surprise, only pleasure to see him again. He almost asked her if she loved him then, but he didn’t. Again she seemed different, wiser, but not only that. In touch with something that he couldn’t grasp, perhaps. Tuned in, the students said of her, adoring her and what she wrote for them.
He inhaled deeply, coughed hard and held onto a tree until he had his breath back. Coughing made him dizzy, made his head swell and throb. He thought fleetingly of himself dying, dead, and Paula coming to the funeral, weeping over his lifeless body, pleading for another chance with him. A bitter smile twisted his face and he pulled hard on the cigarette, finishing it, not caring if he coughed or not. Another paroxysm, and he knew that he did care. He waited for it to pass and then returned to his room and the programs that had to be corrected.
Toward dawn he threw himself down on his bed and fell asleep instantly.
We pull ourselves up the steep rocks of the cliff and when we get to the top we have no breath left for talking. Paula is sweating, and she rubs the back of her hand over her face carelessly, leaving a smudge of dirt there from her forehead to her chin. I lie back with my eyes closed, trying not to cry yet. Hoping never to cry over my mother. Paula says, “Mom and Dad say you can live with us until you go to school in the fall. Okay?”
It isn’t really a question. I can go with them or I can go with my aunt and uncle who came from Ohio for the funeral. The state won’t let me stay alone yet because I am only seventeen. My aunt told me that much. She is angry because my mother, her sister, killed herself. It was irreligious of her. It was selfish of her. I despise my aunt.
I feel Paula’s toe digging my side and I squirm, wanting not to cry. She giggles and the bare toe prods again, digs and wiggles against my side. I look at her and I know that I won’t cry now. I jump up and grab her, meaning to shake her, but I just hold her, and she stops giggling. We don’t move for a long time until Gregory interrupts us. He hasn’t noticed anything so maybe it wasn’t so long, but that moment goes on and on.
When we go back to my house my aunt is angry with me. She says I am selfish for leaving now when people have been coming by to pay respects. She is going to lecture me, but Paula goes to her and puts her dirty hand on my aunt’s smooth, clean sleeve, and Paula says something I can’t hear. Then she says, “It’s going to be all right. We’ll take care of him.” My aunt bursts into tears and falls down in a chair crying like that, shaking, ugly with crying, and Paula, Gregory and I leave her there.
Thornton woke up, remembering the dream in detail. He made notes of it for Feldman’s benefit. He rolled over again and went back to sleep.
* * * *
The work went slowly, and badly. They had plateaued and apparently could go no further. But all of them could see the next step so clearly, and all of them knew that without the next step the project was a failure. The Secretary returned and huddled with the Director and several other top men, and following this meeting there was something not so open, something uglier about the Project. No leaks came from the meeting, and there was a dearth of rumors for once. A new brain was installed, and hope rose as it continued to function after twenty-four hours, then thirty-six hours. A field test was scheduled, but before it could be held, the brain went mad.
Gloom settled heavier over the men, and mistakes were made that would have been unthinkable four months in the past. They analyzed the results of the last psycho-modular unit and its stresses and the final breaking point, and it was then that Thornton learned that this brain had been especially selected. He knew vaguely who Lester Ferris had been, but he didn’t know how he had died, or when, or how his brain had come into the possession of the Institute. Ferris had been a child prodigy, a brilliant mathematical physicist who had shaken up the world of physics at the age of fifteen. Crippled in body, with a mind that sang, he had drawn the attention of the entire world with theories that might be proven in some distant future, or might never be proven, but were unmistakably original and brilliant. He had settled down at the Institute for Advanced Study at the age of twenty-five, and as far as Thornton knew no more had been heard from him.
Thornton began reading the daily papers that were brought to the Institute, and every time they had a brain that was more successful than the previous ones, he searched the obituaries, but he didn’t ask anyone any questions. No one was asking questions.
He and Feldman went over the incident of his mother’s suicide several times, and slowly he found that he was remembering things about Paula that he had forgotten completely. Feldman knew her work and was impressed that Thornton had been her lover. Thornton found that he could talk of it freely, as if it had happened to someone else.
Sometimes Thornton went for walks in the woods, now dark green and summery, harboring snakes behind rocks and logs, alive with rabbits, birds, insects that sang and whirred and buzzed. He didn’t do it as often as he would have liked because there was no time. His year was running out. The second test was due within weeks, and although the idea of a battle test had been abandoned, the field test was still on the schedule. They were learning what kinds of brains were best suited for the symbiotic relationship with the computer that was called Phalanx, but they were unable to find just the right one. The brains continued to go mad.
* * * *
They had a Delphi session, with each man answering questions about the sort of mind, the kind of mentality that would work with the Phalanx. Thornton bit his pencil and slowly filled in the answers to the printed questions. Afterward they read them aloud and talked about them. The papers were gathered by the Director.
“What do you think now of Paula Whitfield?” Feldman asked.
“Oh, she’s a promiscuous bitch. Exciting, probably very beautiful still. She was, you know, but in a wild, unpremeditated way. Not the cover-girl look of studied loveliness.”
Feldman nodded. “Your wife is very lovely,” he said after a moment. He was making idle talk now that the hour was almost over and Thornton had been wrung out.
“Ethel is beautiful,” Thornton said. It surprised him. She really was. He had a letter from her in his pocket then. She would meet him and they would drive to Florida and go from there to Nassau. She was excited about the trip. She was lonesome for him.
“Is Paula Whitfield really promiscuous?” Feldman asked curiously. “There’s no hint of that in her work.”
“She sleeps around,” Thornton said, hearing the contempt in his voice. “She’s got a couple of illegitimate kids, you know.” He shrugged and got up. “I guess that’s unfair. I don’t really know what she’s like now. It’s been twenty years since I saw her. A genius with the morals of an alley cat. That’s what she was then.”
He opened the door. Feldman said, “Tomorrow, five, one hour. Okay?” Thornton looked back and nodded, and Feldman added, “Why did you put her down as the one mind that could exist with the Phalanx?”
* * * *
He ate little dinner, and walked afterward. He hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. He visualized the sheet of questions and his answers, and he knew that his memory would reproduce it faithfully for him. He hadn’t put her name down. The questions had all led to that one, of course: Can you name anyone who you think would qualify as a psycho-modular unit?
He had left it blank.
He saw it again in his mind, and it was blank.
He felt a stab of fear. What was Feldman after?
He wouldn’t recommend Paula, even if the thought had occurred to him. When Gregory died, eighteen years ago, she had written that crazy poem about the boy who chose death rather than killing. Gregory had died under enemy fire. He had mailed her the firing pin of his rifle, then had walked upright until he was felled. Stupid act of insanity. It had made all the papers, his death, and the bitter poetry that had flowed from Paula afterward. She was practically a traitor, as Gregory certainly had been. Again he wondered what Feldman was trying to do. He returned to his desk and worked until midnight.
He dreamed that night of the psycho-modular unit fixed in the island inside the house that was the Phalanx. It was a sealed tank that looked very much like an incubator, with rubber gloves built into it so that the operators could push their hands into them and handle the thing inside. There were six pairs of the gloves. To one side of the tank a screen, not activated now, had been placed to show electroencephalograph tracings. Thick clusters of wires led to desks close by, and on them were screens that showed chemical actions, enzymic changes, temperature of the nutrient solution and any fluctuations in its composition. Inside the tank were wires that ended in electrodes in the brain, the input and output wires, and they too were tapped so that men at desks could know exactly what was going in and out.
* * * *
The Phalanx had been in steady operation for seven days and nights. The lights twinkled steadily, and in the back the EEG tracings were steady. The technicians had replaced the walls about the computer so that it was a house within a room, a tank within the house, a brain within the tank. There was still work to be done, still many programs to plan and translate and feed to the Phalanx, but any good programmer could do them now. They were talking about increasing the number of bugs to an even four dozen, and no one doubted that the computer could keep them all under control.
Thornton stood in the doorway looking at it for the last time. His work was done, his year over. Others would be interviewed now, or already had been, and they would feel the excitement coursing through them at the chance to work at the Institute for a year. He turned and left, picking up his bag at the main door. A car was outside to take him to the gate where Ethel would meet him. Feldman was on the steps waiting. He thrust a book into Thornton’s hand.
“A goodbye present,” he said. Thornton wondered if he had seen tears in the analyst’s eyes, and decided no. It had been the wind. The wind was blowing hard. He rode to the main gate, and when he left the car and walked through, he dropped the book. He got in his own car and drew Ethel to him.
“I was so afraid you’d be different,” she said after a moment. “I didn’t know what to expect after your year among geniuses. I thought you might not want to come out at all.” She laughed and squeezed his hand. “I am so proud of you! And you haven’t changed, not at all.”
He laughed with her. “You too,” he said. He wondered if there had always been that emptiness behind her eyes. She pressed on the accelerator and they sped down the road away from the Institute.
Behind them the wind riffled through the book until the guard noticed it lying in the dust and picked it up and tossed it in a trashcan.