Conditioned Reflex

(by Lester del Key]

Paul Ehrlich looked up from his wheat cakes in time to see his father exploding upward out of his chair and heading for the kitchen. By barking his shins against the table leg, he barely managed to catch the older man’s arm and swing him forcibly back. The sharp pain did nothing to decrease his irritation.

“Dammit, justin, 1 told you to stop bothering Gerda, and 1 meant it! She has trouble enough trying to get her work done in six—

teen hours without your upsetting her. Now sit down and eatand let her alone!”

“Someday, Paul, I’m going to teach you I can still thrash you!” Justin Ehrlich dropped into the chair, but the rebellion on his face remained. “The butter is sour! I told her I would not eat sour butter!”

“Then you’ll go without, unless you want to build us a cream separator so the milk won’t have to stand long enough for the cream to rise. You can’t make sweet butter from sour cream. Besides, butter is a luxury; we’re lucky to have cows.”

“Yeah. Gotta get a bull, though.” Harry Raessler sopped up the last dribble of beet syrup with a scrap of pancake and pointed glumly through the crude glass window to the world outside the log and mud-brick house. “Tain’t the same world you was born to, Mr. Ehrlich. My wife sure tries, but she’s only got two hands. C’mon, Paul, we better get busy on that barn roof.”

Paul nodded and followed his partner out, with a feeling of relief at leaving his father’s contrariness behind. The old man must be getting senile, if his guess at the meaning of the word was correct. Complaints and grumblings! They were leading a life that would have been heaven to most of the people still aliveand few men over fifty were included in that group. He shook his head again, and went on splitting shakes off big pine blocks, while Harry began pounding the crookedness out of their small collection of rusty nails.

There had been a time when his father had seemed almost godlike to him, and he had to admit that their present wealth was only partly due to his own efforts. Justin had fled to MacQuarie Island when he foresaw the Fifth War, and his provision for the stay had proved as adequate as his selection of retreat had been wise. For over twenty years he had continued his research there, until the war burned from nations to villages and flickered out. And only then had he consented to the long, dangerous voyage.

But however well he had foreseen the consequences of the war, he had refused to adapt to them, once they were back, and the burden had been Paul’s from then on. Nineteen years of the hell of material energy had done its worst, and starvation had killed half of the world’s surviving sixty million. Now they had reverted to a rude cross between early pioneer and normal farmer, and life was going on. At least there was land enough, much of it still good, though the materials to farm it were mostly destroyed.

Still, Paul had done well enough. In the two years since the boat

had docked and he had traded it for other things, he had tramped the country, bartering his way to the security of half this place, and pulling his father with him. And now, after three months’ partnership with the Raesslers, Justin …

“Paul! Drat it, Paul, where are you? Oh!” The old man came storming imperiously around the barn corner, swearing at the rubble under his feet and interrupting his son’s bitter musing. “I thought you told me my equipment came yesterday. Where the devil did you hide it?”

Paul grimaced as he missed his stroke with the ax and ruined a roof shake. “In the woodshed. The men were too tired to go fooling around carrying it further, after ferrying it up the Snake River. And stop grumbling! You’re lucky we had enough to pay barter for that job; I wouldn’t fight the Snake for ten bulls and a tractor!”

“Lucky? Why do you think I picked the cargo for trade before I holed up? Why did I waste half my time getting you to study the agriculture books I took with me? Luck! D’you think I couldn’t see what was coming? Though I never thought you’d pick a godforsaken place like this. Now if I”

“Sure,” Paul interrupted him. “I know, you’d have rediscovered the Garden of Eden, with railroads! When you find better land, a safer place, or one where the people are half as well back to normal, I’ll go with you. It only took me two years to find this… . Your junk is in the woodshed, Dad!”

Justin grunted and then went hurrying off, muttering something about darned impertinence, while Harry looked up with a doubtful frown. “Shouldn’t talk that way to your dad, Paul. After all, he did fix it up a blame sight better for you than most of us got. Someday you’ll probably own all Idaho, soon’s we get a little further. Right now, we gotta farm any which way, but at least you know better. Runnin’ away from the fightin’ don’t make the rest of us much shakes at it.”

“Yeah, I know, Harry, but… Let’s get up on the roof. We have more than enough here to patch it.”

They were halfway up the ladder when a series of piercing screams from the woodshed culminated in a final whoop, and the figure of Justin came boiling out toward them. Paul sighed wearily, motioned Harry on up, and began climbing down to face the fury. Peace, it was wonderful! Not only did the old man do no work, when every hand was bitterly needed, but it was becoming impossible for others to work around him.

“All right, what is it?” he asked as he stepped through the door into which his father had retreated again.

“Look. Ruined! Absolutely ruined! I packed that typewriter myself, and now look at it!”

It was a sight, all right. Aside from a broken frame, twisted keys, and a thoroughly mangled mess of levers and wires, it bore almost no resemblance to a typewriter. “If I ever get my hands on your porters! Boiling in oilhot lead in their bootsI’ll fry them… . The only typewriter I had, and look at it!”

The corner of the boy’s lip twisted down, but he chuckled grimly at his father’s rage. “If you want to swim down the Snake after them, go ahead. But it’d probably do more good to do your writing by hand.”

“WhatI” Justin stopped at the top of his shriek, closed his mouth, and with the obviously masterful control needed in handling children, forced his voice to be reasonable. “We’ll have to get another. Boise has been picked over, but I understand it escaped the worst, and nobody was looking for typewriters. You’ll drive me to Boise tomorrow and we’ll dig till we find one.”

He swung back into the woodshed and began sorting through his other belongings, while Paul headed back toward the barn and the common sense of Harry. That last request, when the fields needed spraying and cultivating, would be too thick for even Raessler to swallow. Nuts to Boise!

But surprisingly, Harry took a different view of the matter. He screwed his face into thoughtfulness and rolled a cigarette before answering, but his tone was acquiescent when the words finally came. “Better go ahead, Paul. When a witch wants machinery, maybe it’s a good idea he should get it.”

“A what?”

“A witchfeller that goes in for hexin’ and magic; like them that useta put ghosts out to fight against the soldiers. No, that’s right, you wouldn’t know about ityou wasn’t here. Anyhow, people roundabouts figger your dad’s a witch. Mighty handy thing to have on your side, witches. You’d best drive him in; I’ll spray the potatoes and Gerda’ll help, maybe.”

“Magic is bunk,” Paul told him sourly. “Your ghosts were probably some crude form of invisibility. I didn’t learn too much of the old science, but I know enough not to believe in such things. And I’m not going to Boise. Come on, let’s finish the roof before it gets too hot up here.”

Gerda had enough to do without spraying potatoes, and Harry was already doing more than his share of the work. If Justin wanted to waste time, let him do it alone.

There was no wind in Boise, and the sweat was rolling down Paul’s face as he dropped into the shade of the wagon and began unwrapping the lunch Gerda had fixed. Justin picked through a few more bits of rubble, then joined him. For once, the older man was doing more than his share, and he was tired enough to swallow three bites of his sandwich before he gagged and spat.

“Sour butter! I told Gerda no butterdry, like her bread!”

“So you pick on my sandwiches; yours are in the other bag. And Gerda’s a darned good cook.” Paul washed his sandwich down with the warm, bitter home brew and studied the rubble of the former city with a large measure of doubt. “This has been picked dry, and we haven’t the faintest idea where to look. Pure luck turned up that can of ANTU; if it’ll kill rats as you say, it pays for the trip. But we won’t find anything else. Why not give up?”

“Because I haven’t found a typewriter! What’s that?”

Paul shook his head and handed the little thing over. “Search me. I hoped you’d know some use for it. Funny-looking can.”

“Umm. Magnetronic memory relay, looks like, under the dirt. Uh-huh, it is.” Justin regarded it doubtfully, started to throw it away, and then gazed at it with new interest. “Know what that is, or have you forgotten?”

From somewhere in his memory, Paul dredged up the general idea. Science had stumbled on it accidentally, shortly after magnetic current was rediscovered and put to use. A colloidal suspension of metals in silicon jelly was provided with nodes; then connecting any two nodes would create a conducting, permanent link in the jelly, just as two related facts cause a permanent and reusable link between brain cells. It could be taught by experience, after a fashion, since the linkages became increasingly more conductive with use. It had proven quite satisfactory in replacing telephone relays.

Justin nodded. “And adding machines. This is a double ten-node affair, so that’s what it came from. Mostly, all business machines were sold in the same place, so I hope you’re bright enough to remember where you found it.”

It took them less than half an hour to sink the hole behind the wagon an additional six feet through the soft trash. Justin’s pick broke into the concrete first, and there was nothing weak about his attack on a four-foot circle; the boy’s arms were aching from pulling

the stuff out when the cement finally broke. His father disappeared in a shower of agonized curses and dust!

“Woof …” There was a fine vigor to his swearing, so no damage could have been done, and a second later the older man’s head appeared below. “Come on, we hit a cellar they missed. Stinks, but the air’s clearing. Throw me the lantern… . Umm, two cellars, wooden framing cracked open between. Ladder over here ought to reach if I can get it through the hole.”

But Paul wasted no time waiting for ladders. He’d seen the rake sticking out a packing box, and the ax bits spilled from another frame of rotting wood. Axes and rakes! Another box fell open, revealing useless pick handles, but a half-rotted shelf was stacked with the incalculable treasure of a hardware store’s supplies. Not much, since the cellar seemed to have felt the edge of an energy beambut enough to bring him to a speechless halt as he groped for realization of their luck.

Justin grumbled, seeing nothing to interest him. The crumbling section of wooden partition broke through with a few strokes of his pick, and he was climbing through. Paul came in answer to his yell, but there was nothing except tiers of rotted paper and big books of some kind. Then his father jumped from an alcove and pointed to a stretch of ruined, earth-packed tunnel under the overlying concrete layer, running along the wooden partition.

“Used to be a stationery supply and business machine store over this. See that box? One of the adding machines the gadget came from. No good without magnetic generators, but if we dig that out…”

Paul turned back to his treasures. “You dig it out. If I have time after I load the other stuff, I’ll come and help; though I can’t see much chance in that mess. Unless you’d take time out to help load?”

But as usual, Justin’s idea of co-operation was to follow his own interests, and the sound of the pick and shovel went on while Paul rigged a block and tackle to raise the loot. He loaded the wagon by himself, sweating over the inefficient hoist, and came back to find there was nothing else to be gleaned, even though he explored into the hard-packed dirt with his pick.

“Paul, you lazy loafer, quit goldbricking and give me a hand!” His father was practically dancing in the hole between basements, his lips caked with sweat and dirt, but his voice as imperious as ever.

At the moment, though, Paul was too well pleased to let even that irritate him, and he followed the other through the twisting, dangerous tunnel, to come up against an opened box that held what was obviously a typewriter, and a sound one.

“Old keyboard, useless,” Justin said, as he stooped to get his hands under it. “Dvorak keyboard was standard for fifty years, and they still made these things. Darned reactionaries. The good one’s just beyond, see! Now if you … Ugh! Wheeo! I’ll drag it out, and then there’s another crate on your side of the partitionjust machinery, but I can use it. Here! Or can you slide it along by yourself?”

“Maybe. Yeah, I guess so. … Oof! Maybe we’d better break it open and leave the crate.”

“And lose half the pieces when it opened? Nonsense!” The old man grunted his way over the worst of the tunnel, saving his breath for cursing judiciously, until they were back to floor level. “May be more -stuff hereat least it’s one of the few unbeamed places the ruin pickers missed. When we get this up, you load it, and I’ll cover our tracks. Then maybe, if you stop raising damnfool objections to your father’s better judgment, I’ll tell you why I had to have a typewriter. I’d have done it years ago if you hadn’t been so infernally curious.”

But Paul was listening with only half his mind when the work was done and he took his place beside the two cows that were both draft and milk animals. His father was seated on the big crate, with his precious typewriter in his hands, almost at peace with the world, and the wagon’s converted truck wheels jumped and wobbled over the ruins that had been a road leading homeward. His mind was far more concerned with the load than with the story.

Stripped of justification, exaggeration, and distortion, it was simple enough. His father had apparently had a typist copying his dictated material, and the normal errorsor abnormal ones, as he told ithad led to a fight. There had been a lawsuit, another fight, a broken arm for the typist, and an injunction for Justin to cease and desist from slandering the typist by insisting a machine could do better work. It was all highly colorful and complicated, but it had ended with the old man swearing that he would build such a machine, and setting out to do so.

“And now, by the Lord Harry, with a decent typewriter, I’m going to prove for once and for all that he was just what I called him. Paul, you’re going to see the typing an editor would appreciate. No errors, no erasures, no misspellings, and no passages left out! I’ll finish the novel, and finish it right!”

Paul chuckled. “You mean you spent twenty years on thatall the

time and trouble on the Island? Yeah, you would, though I’ll admit it’s probably why we’re alive today. Too bad more people weren’t rich enough to get out as you did.”

“Rich and smart enough, don’t forget,” Justin corrected him with relative gentleness. His triumph was still strong upon him. “And if they had, they’d have taken the trouble along with them. You get a hundred people and you have an administration; get that, and it bogs down till it has to join the war to cover itself up! Sure I spent twenty-yearsI’d have spent a thousand, if I had them. I told him I’d prove he was everything I said, and I will!”

“Hardly, Justin. He’s dead. You might look for his heirs, but I don’t think you’d have much lucknot even in twenty more years. Haw, Bessy!” He guided the cows over a hole in the road, noting their complaining, but deciding that they could wait three more hours for milking, probably. Might have to waste a little in partial milking, but they were more than halfway home.

Justin’s peal of triumph cut through his thoughts and brought his mind back to his father. “Think I’m a fool, Paul? I told you I wasn’t one of your lily-livered modern nincompoops! The swine had a daughterwonderful girl, son, wonderful; appreciated me! No, I won’t have any trouble finding his heir. You’re it!”

Paul shook his head, but he joined in the old man’s laughter. For a moment he could feel a distorted form of the old awe for his father, though he knew the situation was ridiculous. Maybe Justin was a witch; at least, the whole Boise affair smacked of miracles. But witch or not, he was the only one of his kind!

Harry Raessler seemed to agree, as he took one look at the laden wagon and began hitching up their other two cows while most of it was unloaded. Definitely a witch, and a remarkable one! If Mr. Ehrlich would come along, maybe they’d have the good luck to find the stock traders he’d heard about still around, and even get a fairly good bargain. Gerda came out and smiled shyly, assuring the old man that there was no butter on the supper she had packed for him, and everything was sweetness and light.

Of course, it couldn’t last. A heavy rain caught Harry and Justin returning, and ruined all plans to dig in Boise by making the roads impassable. Their triumphant acquisition of the entire stock of the tradersa bull, three horses, and a few hogs and chickenslost some of its pleasures when the stallion proved to have killer instincts and the two half-starved mares proved to be completely unbroken.

Then in the morning, Justin had developed a case of sniffles, and

discovered that the cream for his barley-coffee was turning sour! Everything came back to normal with a thump. Gerda retired to the kitchen in tears and Paul packed his father to his room with words he half regretted, half wished had been stronger.

Now Harry came back over the field and cut into his thoughts with a dark look at the clouds forming overhead. “Might as well get back, Paul. No use sprayin’ when it’s gonna rain. Well, we need it, though why it can’t be spread out more even …”

“Yeah. You might ask my father; he’s the expert on contrariness.” Paul had begun to forget under the back-breaking pumping of the sprayer, but it all came back as they headed for the house. “Umm, what’d the man from Payette want? You were arguing over an hour.”

“Wanted to buy our wrecked mower, to fix up one they found. I been holdin’ out for a better offer, but now, we don’t need anything they gotso I’m tradin’ a couple of crosscut saws and some ax bits for theirs. Heck, with that we can get swap-help from the whole section, a week’s work for a day’s mower use… . And Paul, don’t you go forgettin’ it was your dad got us all that. He don’t owe us one hour’s work. I told you a witch was a good thing to have.”

“He owes Gerda a civil tongue! Dammit, I don’t mind too much doing his work, even without our sudden luck. But I can’t stand his taking his spite out on you two.”

“Yeah. It’s kinda tough on her, what with the kid comin’ and all. But mostly, she’s glad he’s here. We’re gettin’ too rich, and most likely the rumor’s gettin’ spread around. Bandits hear that, and you wake up dead some nightunless they know you’ve got a witch, when they stay plenty far away… . Go on in, I’ll unhitch the cows.” The rain was beginning to fall, but they had already reached the barn, and the machine-gun sound of a typewriter drifted toward them. Harry cocked an ear toward it, with the awe of a man who could only read by spelling out the words, but he made no comment.

Paul was slightly surprised at the speed of the typing, himself, as he entered the house and began the slow filing of an adjustable slide for what might eventually be a hand corn-planter. His father must have developed some trick of pre-typing on a correctible tape that could be fed in finished form into the typewriter; no human fingers could move that rapidly. It was ingenious, but hardly worth twenty years of work; any engineer would have scorned wasting a week on it! and he’d thought his father was a scientist!

Still, even that might have been justified if the book had been some new mathematical theory that would necessitate almost impossible accuracy and freedom from typographical errors. Instead, it was to be a novela romantic, swashbuckling novel of the kind popular before the war, when there were still publishing houses and people with leisure to devote to escape mechanisms.

Paul gritted his teeth and forced himself to relax his pressure on the file before he ruined the slide. He’d seen real scientists in his two years of life as a wandering trader. There was old Kinderhook and Gleason, working with young Napier during the few hours when they were not slaving for their existence in the fields. They were fighting a losing battle, but at least they were fighting. And somehow, with month-long calculations a machine could have performed in seconds, they were bringing the old, involved theories down to a level where they might possibly be handled with the scanty materials remaining. While such men were attempting miracles with no resources, his father sat comfortably dictating a stupid, anachronistic novel!

But the rapid typing had become sporadic, now that he listened again, and there was a mutter of cursing, followed by a brief burst of typing, and a yell. “Paul! Paul!” He climbed to his feet with a disgusted sigh and went toward the room before the other could come storming out to disturb the whole household.

“Yeah, what is it this time?”

His father stood in the middle of the floor before a complicated mess of machinery. There was a small wood-fired steam boiler and engine, set up on flat rocks and puffing smoke out the window, a humming dynamo, and the typewriter, all connected to a squat black box with tiny arms over the type keys and an arm bent up near the platen. Justin shook his fists impotently at the box.

“Ruined, d’you hear, ruined! If I had a boat, I’d find those idiot porters! Twenty years of work, and the misbegotten”

Paul grunted wearily. “And if I had a boat, I’d let you go chasing down the Snake after them. What the deuce is this mess?”

“This mess,” his father told him with heavy sarcasm, “is a voice-operated typewriterand one that works! Or did work! not like the hundred tons of junk the Institute had that couldn’t punctuate or separate homonymsor be operated by more than a single trained speaker. My Vocatype worked, until it was shipped here. Now it’s ruined!”

In spite of himself, the boy was impressed, though he couldn’t be sure without testing whether by the achievement or the mere claim to it. He picked up the microphone, slid in paper, pressed the button, and spoke quick words into the machine. “The mill wright could

not attend the sacred rite, but he could write the right letter to right the false impression. Two apples fell to the ground, too rapidly. The man with the bow had to bow to the queen.”

There were no mistakes!

“But a billion relays …” And the box couldn’t weigh over a hundred pounds! He stood frozen in wonder, waiting for his father’s explanation. This time he gave the account full attention, even to the boasting.

The voice analyzer and key magnets were old stuff, as were the scanning eyes to detect failure from the typewriter and the transformer that changed electricity into magnetic current. The rest was as simple as its theory was complex. A thousand-node magnetronic memory tube of his father’s own constuction occupied a little corner of the box and did the real work. Between its nodes, half a million links could be formed, serving as nodes for over a hundred billion sub-links that broke down to quintillions of sub-sub-links. It was of unusual size and complexity, but it had taken only a few months to build.

The rest of the long years had been spent in pronouncing words and striking keys until the tube developed a conditioned reflex for every one of the words in the abridged dictionary and could begin the seemingly hopeless task of learning to choose between alternate forms and somehow find a pattern of punctuation that worked. No normal man would have believed it possible, and only the stubborn-est man in the world would have kept trying until success crowned his herculean labors.

“Now it’s ruined,” Justin finished, and the attention and surprise of his son must have mollified his anger, for there was only bitterness left in his voice. He picked up a sheet of his shorthand notes and began dictating, while the machine raced along slightly behind him. ”’… as sure as my name’s Patrick Xenophon …’ Look! Read that! ‘… as sure as my name’s Patrick Xavier … !’ Twenty times I’ve said Xenophon and twenty times it’s written Xavier. All my conditioning of its reflexes ruinedall to be done over! No knowing how many other errors it contains now!”

Paul scratched the letters off the page with the point of his knife, and filed in the proper ones by hand typing. “That wouldn’t occur to you, I suppose,” he began, when a click from the machine called his eyes back. It had tossed the sheet out, inserted a fresh one, and begun typing the page again. When it finished, its original version was back before them!

Justin stared at his creation for long moments in horrified surprise, while his shoulders drooped slowly. Then, with a broken sound, he handed over the pages of his notes and finished copy and moved quietly out of the room. Moments later, Paul saw him moving slowly through the rain down the path to the barn, with Gerda at his heels. And the girl was smiling!

Paul looked from the machine to their retreating forms and down at the pages he held. Then he dropped limply into the chair.

Gerda came in hours later to force his supper on him and light the lamp, but he only grunted his thanks, and went on reading. Surprisingly, it was a marvelous piece of escape literature, masterfully written. Once the words on the first page had penetrated his dazed mind, continuing was as inevitable as breathing. In a way, it was a pity it could never be published; the need of really effective escapism had never been greater.

And it was effective, in a strangely soothing way. At first he had meant to stop after the first chapter, but by then he knew the need of the relaxation it afforded, and he went on, letting the real world around him disappear from his mind. Besides, if its writing had meant twenty years of work for its creator, there should be at least one person who could get some good out of it!

He put down the last page and went over to the machine, where the unfinished book ended. ”’… as sure as my name’s Patrick Xavier …’” Patrick Xavier O’Malley, it should have beenor Patrick Xenophon… .

“Justin! Hey, Justin!” His bellow was almost the equal to his father’s usual cry, but he had no chance to think of the similarity. When the door opened, his finger was already on the passage, and shaking it under the older man’s eyes. “You did name him Xavier, not Xenophon! Look at page four!”

Justin took one startled look at the page and picked up the microphone. This time there was no hesitation as the Vocatype followed his words to the end of the page and kicked out the finished product. Then he chuckled.

“Sometimes I almost think I’m stubborn, Paul. I’d have sworn I was right, so I didn’t think of checking. Do you realize what this meansa machine that is designed to take dictation, but won’t do it unless the dictation is consistent with its facts? Why, it’s a perfect secretary. Teach it a little mathematics and think of the errors it would save when writing up a piece of research. Paul, for once you’ve actually made yourself useful!”

The boy opened his mouth to answer that, but Justin gave him no chance. He was caressing the machine and fairly burbling.

“Now we can finish the book,” he told it, and gave it another affectionate pat. “Nice machineexcellent machine! We’ll show him that his grandfather was a bigoted moron yet! By the way, boy, how was the yarn?”

“Perfect,” Paul answered, and swung out of the room and toward his bed without trusting himself to further insanity. Only his father could have invented such an impossibility as a machine capable of showing the rudiments of intelligence. And only Justin would have used it to finish a romance that could never be published.

But as he crawled between the sheets, he was less sure of his father’s misuse of it. Perhaps, somewhere in its mysterious sub-linkages it contained potential intelligence, but it could never be made available in their lifetimes. Thought is useless without a medium of communication, and while it could learn facts, language is a protoplasmic by-product, filled with such abstract and fact-confusing variables as truth or goodness.

He dreamed of standing on a cliff while a blind man offered him a shiny new robot, if he could only describe green and orange.

It was barely dawn when Justin’s hand on his shoulder roused him, and for a moment he thought he was still on the Island. Reality came back, though, as he groped for his overalls. His father’s eyes were red with lack of sleep, but filled with a gamut of emotions.

Justin broke the silence in a voice that was more gentle than he had used for years.

“I know what you think of me, Paul, but I never forgot the real world. Knowing I’d fail, I fought for decency as few men have ever fought, and it wasn’t until the last minute that I fled… . No, let me tell it my way… . Integrating the administration of an advanced technological world is inconceivably complexeven the men doing the job have only a vague idea of how complex! The broad policies depend on the results of lesser departments, and so on through fifty stages, vertically and in untold horizontal subdivisions. Red tape isn’t funny; it’s necessary and horrible. Complication begets complication, and that begets disconnection from reality. Mistakes are made; no one can see and check them in time, and they lead to more errors, which lead to war.

“For a while, they fight against it. And then they simply fight! I did all I could, and I failed. On the Island, there was nothing to do about it, so I built the Brain. Here, why should I struggle to re-create

the old vicious cycle that will wind up with the whole race wiped out? I tried to prepare you, but I couldn’t prepare myself for this.”

“If you’d explained …” Paul began weakly, but his father brushed it aside, and went on.

“But now something can be done. Government can work. All it needs is a brain to handle the red tapenot better, but more complicated than human brainsa few tremendous minds with perfect memories to hold the multitudinous interlocking correlated compartments. Let men make the decisions, but let robot brains free men to do it wiselyand move instantly, where red tape would take years! Paul, we’ll give them the brains.”

“No, Dad,” the boy said softly, and cursed the inherited stubbornness that refused to leave his father in the newfound fantasy world. “Maybe someday, they’ll have those brains, and you’ll be responsible. But not in our time. You taught me enough semantics to know just how impossible the job of giving your gadget even a shadowy knowledge of words is going to be.”

There was no sign of disappointment on the old man’s face. It stiffened, and the perverse stubbornness reappeared, but he made no answer. Instead, he motioned his son after him and went silently across to the Vocatype room. On the machine was a little slip of paper, and there were other bits under the readjusted scanning eyes.

“The trouble is, you think knowing that electricity works a motor is science, Paul. It isn’t. Science is the process of reducing all things to their lowest common denominator and building systematically from there. I had the training before I turned novelist, and I still have it. I didn’t waste the night dreaming. Check that list of words while you watch.” Justin handed the slip over, and began arranging pieces of colored paper under the eyes of the scanner.

“What?” he asked as the machine sprang to humming life. “What?”

Fresh paper fed into the typewriter, and the words came slowly: “A blue triangle and a red circle are on a white square. A black circle is on a what? What?”

“Hexagon,” Justin answered quietly.

“A black circle is on a hexagon. The hexagon is orange. What color is orange? The hexagon is orange? What color is orange?”

Paul’s startled eyes narrowed as he stared at the blue sheet of pa-ner “Oranpe isn’t listed amnnp the words!”

A ” ” <’ ” O

“Of course notI never taught it to the Brain. But it pulled the same trick on me before I woke you up.” The old man pressed the

microphone button and addressed the machine. “Orange is the color of the hexagon. The hexagon is orange. What color is orange?”

The keys clicked. Then the page ripped out and a new one was inserted. With no further stalling, words began spilling onto the paper:

The Luck of O’Mdley Page 119

had to be true; the fact was as certain as the axioms of geometry, or the basics of physics. Invariably, a mixture of red and yellow is orange.

It skipped a space and added another line. “The hexagon is red and yellow. The hexagon is orange. What color is the hexagon?”

“Orange. Red and yellow make orange,” Justin assured the doubtful machine, and shut it off. “You see, it has a perfect memory, as well as a sense of analysis. And it would have to have some vague sense of word purpose to separate homonyms, as I see it now. Anyhow, I’ve already established the fuzzy distinction between a and the, so it may take years, but not centuries… . And that’s that for today. Let’s see if we can find something to eat!”

Paul’s brain was reeling giddily as he watched his father begin slicing the bread, but the broad plan was already crystallizing, and he had no doubt of its success. They’d have to get Gleason, Kinderhook, and Napier to join them here, where the newfound wealth would permit leisure for their all-important work. At first they would have to depend on swap-help, but as wealth created wealth, they could expand. The Brain could be turned into a calculator infinitely better than the older ones with a little teaching, since mathematics is an exact language. And with the materials they could somehow find now, the slow beginnings of science would provide still more wealth to build on.

They’d have to organize a community out of its present anarchy, so some could be assigned to farm and others to teach and to think. That would be hard in a world that had learned to shun all forms of government from bitter experience. But while the Brain was as yet no perfect administrative machine, it would be mighty magic among the superstitious people. His father could coach it and develop his reputation as a witcri until the obvious advantages Oi organization made such deception useless.

Perhaps it would be better to keep the Brain a secret, though. But

in any event, the knowledge and hope for the future it offered would make all the rest possible

“Um-hmm,” Justin muttered around a mouthful of bread. “I think everything’s going to be all right now, son. But when I see Gerda”

And Paul’s dream collapsed! It had been a nice illusion, but no stable future could be built on a hatred of sour butter. He swung toward his father, and his mouth was white and tense, so that the words had to be forced from his teeth. “I told you to let her alone, Justin! If I ever”

“Umm. But you might take a look out the window and wait till I finish,” the old man answered, and there was a grin on his lips. “While I was trying to figure out what was wrong with the Brain, I got around to unpacking that other crate I found on your side of the partition. Gerda and I had a time replacing the motor with a crank, but we made it.”

Paul swallowed his rage slowly, and turned to look through the little pane of glass toward the barn. At first he saw only the bobbing back of Harry, but as the man stepped aside, the other thing became visible. Gerda apparently wanted to try her hand, for she was smiling as she began turning the crank. Two streams of liquid spurted into the waiting pails. The cream separator was working quite satisfactorily!

“As I was saying, before you interrupted, when I see Gerda …” Justin took another bite of the yellow-smeared bread and smacked his lips approvingly. “When I see her, I must compliment her on what she churned last night. Very nice. I never could stand sour butter!”

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