She collapsed into his arms.
Later--much later--as Nina was about to leave him for her own suite, he
asked, "Honeycomb, what did you lose that caused Fernando to give you
that necklace?"
"I nearly lost you," she replied from the doorway. "I bet him Maria
wouldn't get you that night. And lost. So Fernando sent the necklace as
compensation."
"Quite a large compensation," said Lindsay drily.
Nina shrugged. "Not for Fernando," she told him. "After all, I pay him
enough. He's my number one political boy. 'Night, darling."
* * * * *
Lindsay was on the verge of a breakdown himself by noon the next day,
after Computation Minister du Fresne, looking uglier than ever, had
finished conducting President Giovannini's official party through the
rooms and passages of Giac. If Nina hadn't been by his side during and
after the swift rocket trip to Death Valley, he might have collapsed.
It was she who had removed the glittering star from his breast before
breakfast in the Sherwood Forest mansion that morning. "You needed
something to wear for show last night," she had told him.
"Then it's not mine?" he had countered absently.
"Of course it is," she had assured him. "But Secretary General Bergozza
is going to make the official investiture after the test."
Lindsay had meekly surrendered the bauble, barely noticing. His brain
was straining to recall what he could of symbolic logic--a subject that
had never particularly interested him. For some reason it kept working
back to Lewis Carroll, who, under his real name of Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson, had been the founder of symbolic logic back in the nineteenth
century, along with the renowned Dr. Poole.
About all he could remember was the following problem:
(1) Every one who is sane can do Logic;
(2) No lunatics are fit to serve on a jury;
(3) None of _your_ sons can do Logic.
The Universal was "persons". The symbols were: a--able to do Logic;
b--fit to serve on a jury; c--sane; d--your sons.
And the answer, of course, was: None of _your_ sons is fit to serve on a
jury.
For some reason this, in turn, made him think of the ancient conundrum
that employed confusion to trip its victims: What's the difference
between an iron dog in the side yard of a man who wants to give his
little daughter music lessons but is afraid he can't afford them next
year, and a man who has a whale in a tank and wants to send him for a
wedding present and is trying to pin a tag on him, saying how long he
is, how much he weighs and where he comes from, but can't because the
whale keeps sloshing around in the tank and knocking the tag off?
This time, the answer was: One can't wag his tail, the other can't tag
his whale.
"None of _your_ sons is fit to tag a whale--or wag a tail," he said
absently.
"What was that?" Nina asked.
"Nothing, nothing at all," he replied. "Merely a man going out of his
mind."
"It will never miss you," she replied brightly. But her brightness
became a bit strained as the day wore on. The trip, for Lindsay, was
sheer nightmare. _No sane man can wag his tail_, he kept thinking.
Even such fugitive grasping at Logical straws vanished when he saw the
immense squat mass of Giac, rising like a steel-and-concrete toad from
the wastes of the California desert. It seemed absurd even to think that
such an imposing and complex structure should have been reared on the
mathematics of the immortal author of _Alice in Wonderland_, _Through
the Looking Glass_ and _The Hunting of the Snark_.
For Giac _was_ imposing, even to a man biased against computers from
birth. Nor did du Fresne's smugness help Lindsay's assurance a bit. He
explained how each of the block-large preliminary feeders worked--one
for mathematical symbols, one for oral recording, a third for written
exposition. Each worked simultaneously and in three different ways--via
drum-memory banks, via punched tapes, via the new "ear-tubes" that
responded to sound.
Then there were the preliminary synthesizers, each of which unified in
vapor-plutonium tubes the findings of its three separate feeders. Next,
a towering black-metal giant filling three walls of a cubical room
twenty metres in each dimension, came the final synthesizer, which
coordinated the findings of the preliminary synthesizers and fed them
into Giac itself.
The master machine was the least imposing of all. It stood like an
alabaster stele in the center of an immense chamber arranged like a
theater-in-the-round. But du Fresne, peering through his strawberry
spectacles, said gloatingly, "Don't be deceived by the size, ladies and
gentlemen. All but what you see of Giac is underground. It is contained
in an all-metal cell one million cubic metres in volume. And it is
infallible."
Fortunately Lindsay was given a half hour of final preparation in one of
the small offices with which the above-ground building was honeycombed.
Nina came with him--by request.
"I can't do it," he told her abruptly.
"Don't worry, darling, you'll think of something," she said. She tried
to embrace him but he was too worried to respond. After awhile she said,
"Why not put a direct question. Ask it if it's infallible."
"It could hardly tell a lie on itself," he replied.
"What if such a question involved destruction of part of itself in the
answer?" she asked.
"It might--though I presume du Fresne and his boys have prepared it for
such jokers. And anyway, what sort of question would do that? Got any
ideas?"
"That's your department," she said helpfully. "You're the computer
smasher of this team."
"But that was pure luck," he said half-angrily. "One can't wag his
tail.... The other can't serve on a jury."