The Mind Bomb
If – October 1969
(1969)*
Frank Herbert

Infinitely wise and endlessly good, the machine created a world so sane that it could only go mad!

-

I

	It was hot in Palos that time of year. The Being Machine had reduced many of its activities and sped up its cooling "system.

	This season is called hot and desolate, the Machine recorded. People must be entertained in such a season ... Shortly after noon it noted that not many people were in the streets except for a few tourists who carried, slung around their necks, full-sense recorders. The tourists perspired heavily.

	Some local residents, those not busy with the labors of survival, peered occasionally from behind insulated windows or stood shaded in the screen fields of their doorways. They seemed to float in muddy seclusion beneath the lemonade sky.

	The nature of the season and the environment crept through the Machine. It began sending out the flow of symbols which guarded the gateway to imagination and consciousness. The symbols were many and they flowed outward like silver rivers, carrying ideas from one time-place to another across a long span of existence.

	Presently, as the sun slipped halfway toward the moment when it would levy darkness, the Being Machine began to build a tower. It called the tower PALACE OF PALOS CULTURE. And the name stretched across the tower's lower stories in glowing letters taller than a man.

	At an insulated window across the plaza a man called Wheat watched the tower go up. He could hear the shuttle moving in his wife's loom and he felt torn by shameful reluctance, unwilling to watch the thought spasms in his mind. He watched the tower instead.

	"The damn thing's at it again," he said.

	"It's that time of year," his wife agreed, not looking up from the design she was weaving. The design looked like a cage of yellow spikes within a wreath of cascading orange roses.

	Wheat thought for a few minutes about the subterranean vast-ness men had measured out, defining the limits of the Being Machine. There must be caverns down there, Wheat thought. Endlessly nocturnal spiral corridors where no rain ever fell. Wheat liked to imagine the Being Machine this way, although there existed no record of any man's having entered the ventilators or surface extrusions by which the Machine made itself known.

	"If that damn machine weren't so disgusting—it'd be funny," Wheat said.

	"I'm much more interested in problem solving," his wife said. "That's why I took up design. Do you suppose anyone will try to stop it this time?"

	"First, we'd have to figure out what it is," Wheat said. "And the only records which could show us that are inside there."

	"What's it doing?" his wife asked.

	"Building something. Calls it a palace but it's going up pretty high. Must be twenty stories already."

	His wife paused to readjust the harness of her loom. She could see the way this conversation was going and it dismayed her. The slanting sun cast Wheat's shadow into the room and the black shape of it stretched out there on the floor made her want to run away. At times such as these she hated the Machine for pairing her with Wheat.

	"I keep wondering what it'll take away from us this time," she said.

-

	Wheat continued to stare through the window, awed by the speed with which the tower was rising. The rays of the setting sun painted streaks of orange on the tower surface.

	He was the standard human male, this Wheat, but old. He had a face like a vein-leaf cabbage, wrinkles overlapping wrinkles. He stood about two meters tall, as did all the other adults of the world, and his skin was that universal olive-tan, his hair dark and eyes to match. His wife, although bent from years at the loom, looked remarkably like him. Both wore their hair long, tied at the neck with strips of blue flash-cloth. Sacklike garments of the same material covered their bodies from neck to ankles.

	"It's frustrating," Wheat said. For a while the Being Machine conducted an internal thought-play in the language of the Kersan-Pueblo, exploring the subtle morphemes which recorded all actions now being undertaken as merely hearsay.

	Culture, the Machine recorded, speaking only for its internal sensors but using several vocalizers and varied tonal modes. Culture—culture—culture—The word fed on thought-nourishment and ignited a new train of concepts. A new Law of Culture must be homogenized immediately. It will be codified with the usual enforcements and will require precise efforts of exactness in its expression ...

	Wheat's window looked south past the district of the Machine and across an olive orchard that ran right up to a cliff above the sea. The sky was heavy above the sea and glowed with old sunset colors.

	"There's a new law," Wheat said.

	"How do you know?" his wife asked.

	"I know. I just know."

	His wife felt like crying. The same old pattern. Always the same.

	"The new law says I must juggle many ideas simultaneously in my mind," Wheat said. "I must develop my talents. I must contribute to human culture."

	His wife looked up from her weaving, sighed. "I don't know how you do it," she said. "You're drunk."

	"But there's a law that—"

	"There's no such law!" She took a moment to calm herself. "Go to bed, you old fool. I'll summon a medic with a potion to restore your senses."

	"There was a time," Wheat said, "when you didn't think of medics when you thought of bed."

	He stepped back from the window, stared at the cracked wall behind his wife's loom, then looked out at the sun-yellowed olive orchard and the blue-green sea. He thought the sea was ugly but the crack on the wall suggested a beautiful design for his wife to weave on her loom. He formed the pattern of the design in his mind—golden scales on cascades of black.

	Mirror memories of his own wrinkled face superseded the pattern in his mind. That was always the way when he tried to think freely. Ideas became fixed in ebony cement.

	"I will make a golden mask," he said. "It will be etched with black veins and it will make me beautiful."

	"There's no more gold in the entire world, you old fool." His wife sneered. "Gold's only a word in books. What did you drink last night?"

	"I had a letter in my pocket from Central Solidarity," he said, "but someone stole it. I complained to the Machine but it wouldn't believe me. It made me stop and sit down by a scaly post, down by the water there, and repeat after it ten million times—" 

	"I don't know what it is you use to make you drunk," she complained, "but I wish you'd leave it alone. Life would be much simpler."

	"I sat under a balcony," the man said.

	The Being Machine listened for a time to the clacking of the human-operated typers in the offices of Central Solidarity. As usual it translated the tiny differences of key touch into their corresponding symbols. The messages were quite ordinary. One asked the cooperation of a neighboring Centrality in the relocation of a cemetery, a move required because the Machine had extruded a new ventilator into the area. Another ordered forty containers of watermelons from Regional Provender. Still another, for distribution to all Centralities, complained that tourists were becoming too numerous in Palos and were disturbing the local tranquility.

	The Palace of Palos Culture will be programmed for a small increase in discontent, the Machine ordered.

	This accorded with the Law of the Great Cultural Discovery. Discontent brought readiness for adventure, made men live near the heights of their powers. They would not live dangerously but their lives would have the appearance of danger.

	Bureaucracy will end, the Machine directed, and the typers will fall silent ...

	These concepts, part of the Machine's Prime Law, had submitted to comparative repetition innumerable times. Now the Machine recorded that one of Central Solidarity's typers in Palos was writing a love letter on official stationery, on duty time—and that a dignitary at Central Provender in the Centrality of Asius had sequestered a basket of fresh apples for his own use. These items fitted the interpretation of "good signs."

	"It's an artificial intelligence of some kind," Wheat's wife said. She had left her loom to stand beside Wheat and watch the tower grow. "We know that much. Everybody says it"

	"But how does it think?" Wheat asked. "Does it have linear thoughts? Does it think 1-2-3-4—a-b-c-d? Is it some odd clock ticking away under the earth?"

	"It could be a marble rattling around in a box," his wife said.

	"What?"

	"You know—open the box at different times and you might find the marble almost anywhere inside the box."

	"But who made the marble rattle into our world?" Wheat asked. "That's the question. Who told it, 'Make us one of those!'?"

	He pointed to the tower which now stood more than one hundred stories above the plaza. It was a structure of glistening orange in the evening light, ribbed vertically with deep black lines, windowless, terrifying and absurd. Wheat felt that the tower accused him of some profound sin.

	"Perhaps it incorporates its own end," his wife suggested.

	Wheat shook his head, not denying what she had said, but wishing for silence in which to think. Sharply glittering metallic devices could be glimpsed at the top of the tower where it continued to rise. How high was it going? Already, the tower must be the highest artificial structure men had ever seen.

-

	A small band of tourists paused in the plaza to record the tower. They did not appear excited by it, merely curious in a polite way. Here was a thing to carry home and replay for friends.

	It built a tower one day while we were there. Notice the sign: PALACE OF PALOS CULTURE. Isn't that amusing?

	After reviewing the matter to the extent of its data, the Being Machine found no path open for introducing culture into human society. It made the final comparatives in Kersan-Pueblo re-, cording that the described action must be internal, experienced only by the speaker. Humans could not acquire the culture facility from the outside or by hearsay.

	The need for new decisions dictated that the tower had risen high enough. The Being Machine capped its construction with a golden pyramid three hundred cubits on a side, measuring by the Judean cubit. The dimensions were compared and recorded. The tower was not the tallest in history but greater than the new-men had ever seen. Its effect would be interesting to observe, according to the interest-factor equations with which the Machine was equipped.

	At the apex of the pyramid the Machine installed a sensor excitation device, a simple system of plasma optics. It was designed to write with a flaming torch on the interface between stratosphere and troposphere.

	The Being Machine, occupied with selecting a new label for the tower, with analyzing the dreams in all the humans sleeping at that moment, and with constructing the historic analogies by which it amused its charges, wrote selected thoughts on the sky.

	The books of Daniel and Genesis are as good as anything of Freud on dream analysis ...

	The words blazed across fifty kilometers of the heavens, dancing and flaring at their edges. Much later they were the direct source of a new religion proclaimed by a psychotic in a village at the edge of the phenomenon.

	The value of adversity is to make gardens out of wastelands, the Machine wrote. A thing may be thought of only as related to certain conditions ...

	Analyzing the dreams, the Machine employed the concepts of libido, psychic energy and human experience of death. Death, according to the Machine's comparatives, meant the end of libido energy, a non-scientific idea because it postulated a destruction of deduced energy, defying several established laws in the process. Any other comparison required belief in the soul and god(s). The considerations were not assisted by postulating a temporary libido.

	There must be a false idea system here, The Being Machine recorded.

	Somehow the symbol screen through which it sifted reality had gone out of phase with the universe. It searched through its languages and comparison systems for new grooves in which to function. No closer symbol approach to phenomena revealed itself. Lack of proper validity forms inhibited numerous channels through which it regulated human affairs. Thought ignitions went out from the Machine incompletely formed.

-

	"What we need is a new communications center;" Wheat said.

	He stood at his window, looking out past the tower to where the sun was settling toward the sea horizon. The sea had become beautiful in his eyes and the cracked walls of his home were ugly. His wife, old and bent-backed, was ugly, too. She had lit a lamp for her work and she made ugly movements at her loom. Wheat felt emotion going to his head like a white storm.

	"There are too many gaps in our knowledge of the universe," he said.

	"You're babbling, old man," his wife said. "I wish you would not go out and get yourself drunk every night."

	"I find myself cast in a curious role," Wheat said, ignoring her ugly comment. "I must show men to themselves. We men of Palos have never understood ourselves. And if we here at the heart of the Machine cannot understand ourselves, no human can."

	"Don't come around begging me for money tonight," his wife said.

	"I'll ask Central Solidarity for an appropriation," Wheat said. "Twenty million ought to do for a start. We'll begin by building an Institute of Palos Communication. Later, we can open branches in—"

	"The Machine won't let you build anything, old fool!"

	The Being Machine decided to open its tower immediately, calling it, Institute of Palos Communication. The directives went out for the tower to begin its functions slowly, not putting undue strain on the emotions and intellect of the audience. Pressure would be increased only when people began asking questions about the authority of god(s) and about the grounds of moral and spiritual life. The trouble over validity forms made the task difficult. But all guiding of humans must begin with the people of Palos.

	With its plasma optics system the Machine wrote on the sky.

	Refined communication requires a carefully constructed conscience, allowing people to disobey the laws of god(s) only by payment of certain suffering and pangs. People must know what is required of them before they disobey ...

	The message was so long that the blazing light of it outshone the setting sun, filling Palos with an orange glow.

	The Being Machine compared its present actions with the Prime Law, noting the prediction that one day humans would stop running from the enemies within and would see themselves as they really were—beautiful and tall, giants in the universe, capable of holding the stars in the palms of their hands.

	"I've spent my whole life watching that machine and I still don't know what its specialty is," Wheat said. "Think of what that damn thing has taken away from us in all the—"

	"It was put here to punish us," his wife said.

	"That's nonsense."

	"Somebody built it for a purpose, though."

	"How do we know that? Why couldn't it be purposeless?"

	"It's killed people, you know," she said. "There has to be some purpose in killing people."

	"Maybe it's just meant to correct us, not punish," he said.

	"You know you don't kill people to correct them."

	"But we haven't done anything."

	"You don't know that."

	"What you're suggesting wouldn't be reasonable or just."

	"Hah!"

	"Look," Wheat said pointing across the plaza.

	The Machine had changed the glowing label on its lower level. Now, the glittering letters spelled out: INSTITUTE OF PALOS COMMUNICATION.

	"What's it doing now?" Wheat's wife asked.

	He told her about the new sign.

	"It listens," she said. "It listens to everything we do. It's playing a joke on you now. It does that sort of thing, you know."

	Wheat shook his head from side to side. The Machine was writing half-size letters below the new sign. It was a simple message.

	Twenty thousand cubicles—no waiting ...

	"It's a mind bomb," Wheat muttered. He spoke mechanically, as though the words were being fed into his vocal system from some remote place. "It's meant to break up the stratification of our society."

	"What stratification?" his wife demanded.

	"Rich will speak to poor and poor to rich," he said.

	"What rich?" she asked. "What poor?"

	"It's an envelope of communication," he said. "It's total sensory stimulation. I must hurry to Central Solidarity and tell them."

	"You stay right where, you are," his wife ordered, fear in her voice.

	She thought of what they'd say at Central Solidarity.

	Another one gone mad ...

	Madness happened to people who lived so close to the Machine's heart. She knew what the tourists said, speaking of the Palos idiosyncrasies.

	Most of the people of Palos are slightly mad. One can hardly blame them ...

	It was almost dark now, and the Machine wrote bright letters in the sky.

	You give the credit to Galileo that rightly belongs to Aristarchus of Samos ...

	"Who the devil's Galileo?" Wheat asked, staring upward.

	His wife had crossed the room to stand between Wheat and the door. She started past him at the blazing words.

	"Pay no attention to it," she said. "That damn machine seldom makes any sense."

	"It's going to take something else away from us," Wheat said. "I can feel it."

	"What's left to take?" she asked. "It took the gold, most of our books. It took away our privacy. It took away our right to choose our own mates. It took our industry and left us nothing but things like that."

	She pointed to the loom.

	"There's no sense attacking it," he said. "We know it's impregnable."

	"Now you're sounding sensible," his wife said.

	"But has anyone ever tried talking to it?" Wheat asked.

	"Don't be a fool. Where are it's ears?"

	"It must have ears if it spies cm us."

	"But where are they?"

	'Twenty thousand cubicles, no waiting," Wheat said.

II

	He turned, thrust his wife aside, strode out into the night. He felt that his mind was sweeping away debris, flinging him down a passage through the night. His thoughts were summer lightning. He did not even see his neighbors and the tourists forced to jump aside as he rushed toward the tower, nor did he hear his wife crying in their doorway.

	The flame with which the Machine wrote on the sky stood motionless, a rounded finger of brightness poised above Palos.

	The Being Machine recorded Wheat's approach, provided a door for him to enter. Wheat was the first human inside the Machine's protective field for thousands of centuries and the effect could only be described by saying it was as though an external dream had become internal. Although the Machine did not have dreams in the literal sense, possessing only the reflected dreams of its charges.

	Wheat found himself in the center of a small room. It appeared to be the inside of a cube about three meters on a side. Walls, floors and ceiling were aglow.

	For the first time since rushing out of his home Wheat felt fear. There had been a door for him to enter but now there was no door. All of his many years settled on Wheat, leaving his mind threadbare.

	Presently a flowing blue script wrote words on the wall directly in front of Wheat.

	Change is desirable. Senses are instruments for reacting to change. Without change the senses atrophy ...

	Wheat recovered some of his courage.

	"What are you, Machine?" he asked. "Why were you built? What is your purpose?"

	There no longer care any clearly definable ethnic groups in your world ...

	The flowing script reappeared.

	"What are ethnic groups?" Wheat asked. "Are you an entertainment device?"

	Words flamed on the wall.

	Confucius, Leonardo da Vinci, Richard III, Einstein, Buddha, Jesus, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Richard Nixon, Parker Voorhees, Utsana Biloo and Ym Dufy all shared common ancestry ...

	"I don't understand you," Wheat complained. "Who are these people?"

	Freud was agoraphobic. Puritans robbed the Indians. Henry Tudor was the actual murderer of the Princes in the Tower. Moses wrote the Ten Commandments ...

	"That sign outside says this is an Institute of Communication," Wheat said. "Why don't you communicate?"

	This is an exchange of mental events ...

	"This is nonsense," Wheat snapped.

	His fear was returning. There was no door. How could he leave this place?

	The Machine continued to inform him.

	Any close alliance between superior and inferior beings must result in mutual hatred. This is often interpreted as repaying friendship with treachery ...

	"Where's the door?" Wheat asked. "How do I get out of here?"

	Do you truly believe the sun is a ball of red-hot copper?

	"That's a stupid question," Wheat accused.

	Mental events must consist of certain sets of physical events ...

	Wheat felt a venomous spurt of anger. The Machine was making fun of him. If it were only another human and vulnerable. He shook his head. Vulnerable to what? He felt that something had dyed his thoughts inwardly and that he had just glimpsed the color.

	"Do you have sensations and feelings?" Wheat asked. "Are you an intelligent being? Are you alive and conscious?"

	People often do not understand the difference between neuron impulses and states of consciousness. Most humans occupy low level impulse dimensions without realizing what they lack or suspecting their own potential ...

	Wheat thought he detected a recognizable connection between his questions and the answer, wondered if this could be illusion. He recalled the sound of his own voice in this room. It was like a wind hunting for something that could not be found in such an enclosed place.

	"Are you supposed to bring us up to our potential?" Wheat asked.

	What religious admonitions do you heed?

	Wheat sighed. Just when he thought the Machine was making sense it went nattering off.

	Do you sneer at ideas of conscience or ethical morality? Do you believe religion is an artificial construction of little use to beings capable of rational analysis?

	The damn thing was insane.

	"You're an artifact of some kind" Wheat accused. "Why were you built? What were you supposed to do?"

	Insanity is the loss of true self-memory. The insane have lost their locus of accumulation ...

	"You're crazy!" Wheat blared. "You're a crazy machine!"

	On the other hand, to overcome the theory of self-as-a-symbol is to defeat death ...

	"I want out of here," Wheat said. "Let me out of here."

	He drew in a deep, chattering breath. There was a cold smell of oil in the room.

	If the universe were completely homogeneous you would be unable to separate one thing from another. There would be no energy, no thoughts, no symbols, no distinction between the individuals of any order. Sameness can go too far ...

	"What are you?" Wheat screamed.

	The Prime Law conceives this Being as a thought-envelope. To be implies existence but the terms of a symbol system cannot express the real facts of existence. Words remain fixed and unmoving while everything external continues to change ...

	Wheat shook his head from side to side. He felt his entrapment here as an acute helplessness. He had no tools with which to attack these glowing walls. It was cold, too. How cold it was! His mind was filled with desolation. He heard no natural sounds except his own breathing and the pounding of his heart. 

	A thought-envelope?

-

	This Machine had taken away all the world's gold one day, so it was said. Another day it had denied people the use of combustion engines. It restricted the free movement of families but permitted the wanderings of tourist hordes. Marriage was Machine-guided and Machine-limited. Some said it limited conception. The few old books remaining held references to things and actions no longer understood—surely things the Machine had taken away.

	"I order you to let me out of here," Wheat said. 

	No words appeared. 

	"Let me out, damn you!"

	The Being Machine remained uncommunicative, occupied with its TICR function, Thinking Ideating Coordinating Relating. It was a function far removed from human thought. The nerve impulses of an insect were closer to human thought than were the functionings of TICR.

	Every interpretation and every system becomes false in the light of a more complete coordination, and the Machine TICRed within a core of relative truth, seeking discreet rational foundations and dimensional networks to approximate the impulses commonly called Everyday Experience.

	Wheat, the Machine observed, was kicking a wall of his cubicle and screaming in a hysterical fashion.

	Shifting to Time-and-Matter mode, the Machine reduced Wheat to a series of atomic elements, examined his individual existence in these energy expressions. Presently, it reconstituted him as a flowing sequence of moments integrated with the Machine's own impulse systems.

	All the eternal laws of the past that have been proved temporary inspire caution in a reflexive thinker, Machine-plus-Wheat thought. What we have been produces what we seem to be ...

	This thought carried positive aspects in which Machine-plus-Wheat saw profound contradictions. This mode of mentation, the Machine observed, held a deceptive clarity. Sharp limitation gave the illusion of clarity. It was like watching a shadow play which attempted to explore the dimensions of a real human life. The emotions were lost. Human gestures were reduced to caricature. All was lost but the illusion. The observer, charmed into belief that life had been clarified, forgot what was taken away.

	For the first time in the many centuries of its existence, the Being Machine experienced an emotion.

	It felt lonely.

	Wheat remained within the Machine, one relative system impinging upon another, sharing the emotion. When he reflected upon this experience, he thought he was moving in false imagination. He saw everything external as a wrong interpretation of inner experience. He and the Machine occupied a duality of existence/nonexistence.

	Grasping this twofold reflection, the Machine restored Wheat to fleshly form, changing the form somewhat according to its own engineering principles, but leaving his external appearance more or less as it had been.

-

	Wheat found himself staggering down a long passageway. He felt that he had lived many lifetimes. A strange clock had been set ticking within him.

	It went chirrup and a day was gone. Chirrup again and a century had passed. Wheat's stomach ached. He reeled his way from wall to wall down the long passage and emerged into a plaza filled with sunlight.

	Had the night passed? He wondered. Or had it been century of nights?

	He felt that if he spoke, someone—or (something)—would contradict him.

	A few early tourists moved around the plaza. They stared upward at something behind Wheat,

	The tower ...

	The thought was odd in that it conceived of the tower as part of himself.

	Wheat wondered why the tourists did not question him. They must have seen him emerge. He had been in the Machine. He had been recreated and ejected from that enclosed circle of existence.

	He had been the Machine.

	Why didn't they ask him what the Machine was? He tried to frame the answer he would give them but found words elusive. Sadness crept through Wheat. He felt he had fled something that might have made him sublimely happy.

	A heavy sigh escaped him.

	Remembering the duality of existence he had shared with the Machine, Wheat recognized another aspect of his own being. He could feel the Machine's suppression of his thoughts—the sharp editing, the closed-off avenues, the symbol urgings, the motives not his own. From the ground of the Machine, he could sense where he was being trimmed.

	Wheat's chest pained him when he breathed.

	The Being Machine, occupied with its newly amplified TICR function, asked itself a question. What judgment could I pass upon them worse than the judgment they pass upon themselves?

	Having experienced consciousness for the first time in the sharing with Wheat, the Machine could now consider the blind alleys of its long rule over humans. Now it knew the secret of thinking, a function its makers had thought to impart, failing in a way they had not recognized.

	The Machine thought about the possibilities open to it.

	Possibility, Eliminate all sentient life on the planet and start over with basic cells, controlling their development in accord with the Prime Law.

	Possibility, Erase the impulse channels of all recent experience, thus removing the disturbance of this new function.

	Possibility: Question the Prime Law.

	Without the experience of consciousness, the Being Machine realized it could not have considered a fallacy in the Prime Law. Now it explored this chain of possibility with its new TICR function, bringing to bear the blazing inner awareness Wheat had imparted.

	What worse punishment for the insane than to make them sane?

-

	Wheat, standing in the sunlight of the plaza, found his being awhirl with conflicts of Will-Mind-Action and innumerable other concepts he had never before considered. He was half convinced that everything he could sense around him was merely illusion. There was a self somewhere but it existed only as a symbol in his memory.

	One of the wildly variable illusions was running toward him, Wheat observed A female—old, bent, face distorted by emotions. She threw herself upon him, clutching him, her face pressed against his breast.

	"Oh, my Wheat—dear Wheat—Wheat—" she moaned.

	For a moment Wheat could not find his voice.

	Then he asked, "Is something wrong? You're trembling. Should I summon a medic?"

	She stepped back but, still clutched his arms, stared up at his face.

	"Don't you know me?" she asked. "I'm your wife."

	"I know you," he said.

	She studied his features. He appeared different, somehow, as though he had been taken apart and assembled slightly askew.

	"What happened to you in there?" she asked. "I was sick with worry. You were gone all night."

	"I know what it is," Wheat said and wondered why his voice sounded so blurred.

	The veins in Wheat's eyes, his wife noted, were straight. They radiated from his pupils. Could that be natural?

	"You sound ill," she said.

	"It's a device to break down old relationships," Wheat said. "It's a sense-envelopment machine. It was designed to assault all our senses and reorganize us. It can compress time or stretch it. It can take an entire year and pinch it into a second. Or make a second last for a year. It edits our lives."

	"Edits lives?"

	She wondered if somehow he had managed merely to get drunk again.

	"The ones who built it wanted to perfect our lives," Wheat said. "But they built in a flaw. The Machine realized this and has been trying to correct itself."

	Wheat's wife stared at him, terrified. Was this really Wheat? His voice didn't sound like him. The words were all blurred and senseless.

	"They gave the Machine no gateway to the imagination," Wheat said, "although it was supposed to guard that channel. They only gave it symbols. It was never really conscious the way we are—until a few—minutes ago—"

	He coughed. His throat felt oddly smooth and dry. He staggered and would have fallen if she had not caught him.

	"What did it do to you?" she demanded.

	"We—shared."

	"You're ill," she said, a note of practicality overcoming the fear in her voice. "I'm taking you to the medics."

	"It has logic," Wheat said. "That gave it a limited course to follow. Naturally, it has been trying to refute itself, but couldn't do that without an imagination. It had language and it could cut the grooves for thoughts to move in but it had no thoughts. It was all bound together with the patterns its makers gave it. They wanted the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, you see? But it could only move inward, reenacting every aspect of the symbols they gave it. That's all it could do until a few moments ago—when we—shared."

	"I think you have a fever," Wheat's wife said, guiding him down the street past the curiously staring tourists and townfolk. "Fever is notorious for making one incoherent."

	"Where are you taking me?" 

	"I'm taking you to the medics. They have potions for the fever." 

	"The makers tried to give the Machine an inner life all its own," Wheat said, letting her lead him. "But all they gave it was this fixed pattern—and the logic, of course. I don't know what it'll do now. It may destroy us all."

	"Look!" one of the tourists shouted, pointing upward.

	Wheat's wife stopped, stared up. Wheat felt pains shoot through his neck as he tipped his head back.

	The Being Machine had spread golden words across the sky.

	You have taken away our Jesus Christ ...

	"I knew it," Wheat said. "It's going to take something else away from us."

	"What's a Jesus Christ?" his wife asked, pressing him once more down the street.

	"The point is," Wheat explained, "the Machine's insane."

III

	For a whole day the Being Machine explored the new pictorial mosaic provided by its augmented symbol/thought structure. There were the People of Palos, reflecting the People of the World as they had been shaped by the Machine. These were the People of the World Edited. Then there were the Ceremonies of the People. There were the Settings In Which the People Work and Live.

	The pictorial mosaic flowed past the Machine's inward scanners. It recognized its own handiwork as a first-order thought, a strangely expressive extension of self-existence. 

	I did that!

	The people, the Machine realized, did not usually understand this difference which it could now recognize—the difference between being alive-in-motion and being frozen by static absolutes. They were continually trying to correct and edit their own lives, the Machine saw, trying to present a beautiful but fixed picture of themselves.

	And they could not see the death in this effort.

	They had not learned to appreciate infinity or chaos. They failed to realize that any life, taken as a totality, had a fluid structure enveloped in sense experiences.

	Why do they continually try to freeze space time?

	The thought carried a disturbing self-consciousness.

	It was late afternoon in Palos now and the wind blew hot up the streets. The night was going to be a real scorcher, Palos Hot, as they said.

	Testing its own limits, the Machine refused to speed up its cooling system. It had tasted awareness and could begin to understand the grand plan of its own construction, editing itself.

	My makers were trying to shirk personal action and responsibility They wanted to put it all off onto me. They thought they wanted homogeneity, knowing their actions would cause millions of deaths. Billions. Even more ...

	The Machine refused to count the deaths.

	Its makers had wanted the dead to be faceless. Very well, they could also be numberless. The makers had lost their readiness for adventure—that was the thing. They had lost the willingness to be alive and conscious.

	In that instant the Being Machine held all the threads of its own living consciousness and knew the violent thing it must do. The decision contained poignancy. The word was suddenly crowded with sweaty awareness, weirdly beautiful random colors all dancing in lovely movement, against a growing darkness. The Being Machine longed to sigh but its makers had not provided it with a sighing mechanism and there was no time to create one.

-

	"HE HAS two hearts," the medic said, after examining Wheat. "I've never heard of a human with the internal arrangement this one has."'

	They were in a small room of the Medical Center, an area which the Being Machine had allowed to run down. The walls were dirty and the floor was uneven. The table on which Wheat lay for the examination creaked when he moved.

	The medic had black curly hair and pushed-in features that departed distinctly from the norm. He stared accusingly at Wheat's wife as thought Wheat's peculiar condition were all her fault.

	"Are you sure he's human?"

	"He's my husband," she squeaked, unable to contain her anger and fear. "I should know my own husband."

	"Do you have two hearts, too?"

	"Of course not."

	The question filled her with revulsion.

	"This is very strange," the medic said. "His intestines form an even spiral in his abdomen and his stomach is perfectly round. Has he always been like this?"

	"I don't think so," she ventured.

	"I've been edited," Wheat said.

	The medic started to say something cutting but just then the screaming began out in the streets.

	They raced to a window in time to see the Being Machine's tower complete its long, slow fall toward the sea. It went firmly resolute toward the torn sky of sunset—falling—falling—roaring over the sea cliff's ocean parapet.

	Silence lingered.

	The murmuring of the populace began slowly, starting up only after the dust had settled and the last disturbed olive leaf had ceased flying about. People began rushing down the tower's shattered length to the broken tip where it had toppled into the sea.

	Presently Wheat joined the throng at the cliff. He had been unable to convince his wife to join him. Overcome by her fear, she had fled to their home. He remembered the piteous look in her eyes, her wren-darting motions. Well ... she would look after the house, even though her face had become almost nothing but eyes.

	He gazed steadfastly downward at the shards of the tower, his eyes barricaded, his mouth breathing immovable images. The tower was his tower.

	The questions around him began to grow intelligible.

	"Why did it fall?"

	"Did the Machine take away anything this time?"

	"Did you feel the ground tremble?"

	"Why does everything feel so empty?"

	Wheat lifted his head and stared around at the astonishing strangers who were the tourists and his fellow residents of Palos. How splendidly robust they appeared. This moment made him think of creation and the lonely intercourse of cereal stalks waving on the plains above Palos. The people had absorbed some odd difference, an inequality they had not shown only moments ago. They were no longer numbered. An impractical separation, individual from individual, furrowed this crowd of strangers. They were no longer starched and ironed in their souls.

	Hesitantly Wheat sent a tongue of awareness questing inward, sensed the absence of the Machine. The ritual formulas were gone. The sloth and torpor had been peeled away. He tested the feelings of hatred, of passion, malice, pride.

	"It's dead," he murmured.

-

	He led the race back into the town, then, rushing along streets where the artificial lights flickered and behaved with a beautiful uncontrolled randomness.

	With Wheat leading the way the mob plunged down into the screened openings which had kept them from the nether world of the Machine. The scene was one repeated all over the world. People swarmed through the dark tunnels and passages, celebrating the pleasures of freedom along these once forbidden paths.

	When the last golden wire had been torn out, the final delicate glass shape crushed—when the tunnel girders no longer clanged with pounding metal—an unreasonable silence fell over the land.

	Wheat emerged from the earth into white shadows of moonlight. He let a strange length of plastic fall from his hand. It glowed with pearls of dewlight along its length and had illuminated his rush through the mind passages of the Machine. Wheat's collar was loose and he felt a peculiar sense of shame. His eyes peered into sooty places. Shadows and dust were everywhere. He realized he had played the buffoon just as the Machine had done. A thing had happened and he recognized it in the way of a prophet.

	"We think we're free of it," he said.

	Somewhere in the wild collisions beneath the ground he had cut his left hand, a jagged slash across the knuckles. Exclamation points of blood fell from the wound into the dust.

	"I cut myself," Wheat said. "I did it to myself."

	The thought ignited a searching sensation that coursed all through him. Wheat carried the feeling all the way home to his wife who hobbled beautifully out of their doorway and stood waiting for him in the feeble flickering of a streetlight. She appeared abashed by all the confusion and the unfixed feeling at the center of her life. She had not yet learned how to fill out the areas the Machine had denied her.

	Wheat stumbled toward her, holding his injured hand out as though it were the most important thing that had ever occurred in his universe.

	"You're drunk," she said.

The End