In his office high in the tower of Orientation Center, Dr. Bernard
Jackson put down the report of the Twelfth Sector Watch Police and
sighed. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, his
features haggard with strain.
“Action completed,” he said finally to Dr. Flora Johns, who occupied a
chair nearby. “Everything went precisely according to schedule. I hope
it works out. I liked those two. Remember what he called himself and
the girl? A Rillo range sire and a salt grass heifer! I’ve got an idea
he’ll change his mind about her before long!”
“I fail to see why it was necessary to order the Police to deliberately
shoot her,” Flora Johns said with a tartness that verged on bitterness.
“She might have been killed. We don’t know yet how serious the injury
was. The Police aren’t that good at shooting a moving target from a
plane.”
“It was a necessary risk. You know that. You read the Machine’s
instructions.”
“But I don’t always believe them!”
“It was necessary because he would have taken her to the first
Outlander Settlement, left her there, and gone on his own way. And if
he had suggested anything else she would have opposed it.
“It was absolutely necessary to put her in a state of complete
dependency on him for a long enough period to enable her to overcome
her resistance to his presence. The injury was the only available
means.”
“So says that idiot Machine!”
Dr. Jackson smiled.
“Careful, Flora--even the walls have ears. Or so it is said.”
“I don’t care! If the Machine was going to drag us in for
insubordination it would have happened long ago. Sometimes I wonder
just what the devilish thing is up to, anyway!”
“That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he said
slowly. “And I think that with this present case I’ve been able to
figure it out.”
“What have you figured out?”
“The Machine has recognized from the beginning that we’ve asked it for
more than it could deliver. We’ve always assumed that we had succeeded
in creating a Machine that could think like a man. We forgot there
are two answers to the problem of creating equal thinking in men and
machines.
“We haven’t built a Machine that thinks like a man. Instead, we’ve
developed a generation of men that think like machines!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just that. We’ve leveled men and machines to the same category, but
not by raising machine thinking. We’ve done it by lowering men. So
today we have thinking machines, all right. Millions of them. All over
the globe. We call them men!”
“The Machine has its judgment circuits--”
“Fortunately, yes. And this gives it just sufficient ability to
recognize its own failure--and wisdom enough to turn the problem back
where it belongs.
“What essential difference there is between true human thought, and
the kind of thought we’ve developed in the Machine, I don’t know. And
I don’t think the Machine knows. But it’s throwing the problem back to
the only possible source of solution: human beings. Don’t you see?”
Dr. Flora Johns was staring through the windows of the tower to the
glistening city beyond. “If only you were right!” she whispered.
“I have to be right!” Dr. Jackson exclaimed. “It’s the only possible
answer. If it weren’t, you and I would have been ordered drawn and
quartered long ago. But the Machine picked us--and scores of others
like us.
“It keeps us in our present positions and gives out wholly insane
instructions--by accepted understanding of its purposes. It gives out
pairings like this one we’ve just handled. And provides a clear path
for their escape to the Outlander settlements, and insures that they
will stay together in spite of themselves. I tell you the Machine is
bent on seeing that we somehow rectify our own mistakes and make men
out of those millions of thinking machines that inhabit the world!”
“But to what purpose?” Flora Johns cried. “We’ll be going back to the
chaos from which we escaped by the very creation of the Machine. It
has showed us how to insure peace, prosperity, happiness. We’ve got
the perfection of society that men struggled for thousands of years to
obtain!”
Dr. Jackson shook his head.
“No. What we _have_ got isn’t it. We may have come close, but for all
practical purposes we’ve run up a blind alley. We can thank whatever
Providence is watching over us that the Machine has been capable of
recognizing that fact.
“Our failure is in turning over final thought and judgment to something
outside ourselves. Until we are able to take the responsibility and
work out answers with our own personal gray matter, we have not solved
the problem. Certainly, our existing solution is a failure.
“Maybe a definite, positive solution is unobtainable. Perhaps the only
answer is in the continued searching for an answer. I don’t know, and
I feel certain the Machine doesn’t know. But it’s trying to develop a
sector of humanity that might be able to find out!”
“It sounds right,” Flora Johns whispered again, and now her eyes were
aglow. “It _has_ to be right!”