Meanwhile the who?-where? had tossed out a dozen cards. He glanced
through them, hesitated at the name "Willard Farquar," looked at the
sleeping girl, then quickly tossed them all into the addresso-robot and
plugged in the steno-robot.
The buzz-light blinked green and he switched the phone to audio.
"The President is waiting to see Maizie, sir," a clear feminine voice
announced. "He has the general staff with him."
"Martian peace to him," Jorj Helmuth said. "Tell him I'll be down in a
few minutes."
* * * * *
Huge as a primitive nuclear reactor, the great electronic brain loomed
above the knot of hush-voiced men. It almost filled a two-story room in
the Thinkers' Foundation. Its front was an orderly expanse of controls,
indicators, telltales, and terminals, the upper ones reached by a chair
on a boom.
Although, as far as anyone knew, it could sense only the information
and questions fed into it on a tape, the human visitors could not
resist the impulse to talk in whispers and glance uneasily at the great
cryptic cube. After all, it had lately taken to moving some of its
own controls--the permissible ones--and could doubtless improvise a
hearing apparatus if it wanted to.
For this was the thinking machine beside which the Marks and Eniacs and
Maniacs and Maddidas and Minervas and Mimirs were less than Morons.
This was the machine with a million times as many synapses as the human
brain, the machine that remembered by cutting delicate notches in the
rims of molecules (instead of kindergarten paper-punching or the Coney
Island shimmying of columns of mercury). This was the machine that had
given instructions on building the last three-quarters of itself. This
was the goal, perhaps, toward which fallible human reasoning and biased
human judgment and feeble human ambition had evolved.
_This was the machine that really thought--a million-plus!_
This was the machine that the timid cyberneticists and stuffy
professional scientists had said could not be built. Yet this was the
machine that the Thinkers, with characteristic Yankee push, _had_
built. And nicknamed, with characteristic Yankee irreverence and
girl-fondness, "Maizie."
Gazing up at it, the President of the United States felt a chord
plucked within him that hadn't been sounded for decades, the dark and
shivery organ chord of his Baptist childhood. Here, in a strange sense,
although his reason rejected it, he felt he stood face to face with
the living God: infinitely stern with the sternness of reality, yet
infinitely just. No tiniest error or wilful misstep could ever escape
the scrutiny of this vast mentality. He shivered.
* * * * *
The grizzled general--there was also one who was gray--was thinking
that this was a very odd link in the chain of command. Some shadowy and
usually well-controlled memories from World War II faintly stirred his
ire. Here he was giving orders to a being immeasurably more intelligent
than himself. And always orders of the "Tell me how to kill that man"
rather than the "Kill that man" sort. The distinction bothered him
obscurely. It relieved him to know that Maizie had built-in controls
which made her always the servant of humanity, or of humanity's
right-minded leaders--even the Thinkers weren't certain which.
The gray general was thinking uneasily, and, like the President, at a
more turbid level, of the resemblance between Papal infallibility and
the dictates of the machine. Suddenly his bony wrists began to tremble.
He asked himself: Was this the Second Coming? Mightn't an incarnation
be in metal rather than flesh?
The austere Secretary of State was remembering what he'd taken such
pains to make everyone forget: his youthful flirtation at Lake Success
with Buddhism. Sitting before his _guru_, his teacher, feeling the
Occidental's awe at the wisdom of the East, or its pretense, he had
felt a little like this.
The burly Secretary of Space, who had come up through United Rockets,
was thanking his stars that at any rate the professional scientists
weren't responsible for this job. Like the grizzled general, he'd
always felt suspicious of men who kept telling you how to do things,
rather than doing them themselves. In World War III he'd had his fill
of the professional physicists, with their eternal taint of a misty
sort of radicalism and free-thinking. The Thinkers were better--more
disciplined, more human. They'd called their brain-machine Maizie,
which helped take the curse off her. Somewhat.
* * * * *
The President's Secretary, a paunchy veteran of party caucuses, was
also glad that it was the Thinkers who had created the machine, though
he trembled at the power that it gave them over the Administration.
Still, you could do business with the Thinkers. And nobody (not even
the Thinkers) could do business (that sort of business) with Maizie!
Before that great square face with its thousands of tiny metal
features, only Jorj Helmuth seemed at ease, busily entering on the
tape the complex Questions of the Day that the high officials had
handed him: logistics for the Endless War in Pakistan, optimum size for
next year's sugar-corn crop, current thought trends in average Soviet
minds--profound questions, yet many of them phrased with surprising
simplicity. For figures, technical jargon, and layman's language were
alike to Maizie; there was no need to translate into mathematical
shorthand, as with the lesser brain-machines.
The click of the taper went on until the Secretary of State had twice
nervously fired a cigaret with his ultrasonic lighter and twice quickly
put it away. No one spoke.
Jorj looked up at the Secretary of Space. "Section Five, Question
Four--whom would that come from?"
The burly man frowned. "That would be the physics boys, Opperly's
group. Is anything wrong?"
Jorj did not answer. A bit later he quit taping and began to adjust
controls, going up on the boom-chair to reach some of them. Eventually
he came down and touched a few more, then stood waiting.
From the great cube came a profound, steady purring. Involuntarily the
six officials backed off a bit. Somehow it was impossible for a man to
get used to the sound of Maizie starting to think.
* * * * *
Jorj turned, smiling. "And now, gentlemen, while we wait for Maizie
to cerebrate, there should be just enough time for us to watch the
takeoff of the Mars rocket." He switched on a giant television screen.
The others made a quarter turn, and there before them glowed the rich
ochres and blues of a New Mexico sunrise and, in the middle distance, a
silvery mighty spindle.
Like the generals, the Secretary of Space suppressed a scowl. Here
was something that ought to be spang in the center of his official
territory, and the Thinkers had locked him completely out of it. That
rocket there--just an ordinary Earth satellite vehicle commandeered
from the Army, but equipped by the Thinkers with Maizie-designed
nuclear motors capable of the Mars journey and more. The first
spaceship--and the Secretary of Space was not in on it!
Still, he told himself, Maizie had decreed it that way. And when
he remembered what the Thinkers had done for him in rescuing him
from breakdown with their mental science, in rescuing the whole
Administration from collapse he realized he had to be satisfied. And
that was without taking into consideration the amazing additional
mental discoveries that the Thinkers were bringing down from Mars.
"Lord," the President said to Jorj as if voicing the Secretary's
feeling, "I wish you people could bring a couple of those wise little
devils back with you this trip. Be a good thing for the country."
Jorj looked at him a bit coldly. "It's quite unthinkable," he said.
"The telepathic abilities of the Martians make them extremely
sensitive. The conflicts of ordinary Earth minds would impinge on them
psychotically, even fatally. As you know, the Thinkers were able to
contact them only because of our degree of learned mental poise and
errorless memory-chains. So for the present it must be our task alone
to glean from the Martians their astounding mental skills. Of course,
some day in the future, when we have discovered how to armor the minds
of the Martians--"
"Sure, I know," the President said hastily. "Shouldn't have mentioned
it, Jorj."
Conversation ceased. They waited with growing tension for the great
violet flames to bloom from the base of the silvery shaft.
* * * * *
Meanwhile the question tape, like a New Year's streamer tossed out
a high window into the night, sped on its dark way along spinning
rollers. Curling with an intricate aimlessness curiously like that
of such a streamer, it tantalized the silvery fingers of a thousand
relays, saucily evaded the glances of ten thousand electric eyes,
impishly darted down a narrow black alleyway of memory banks, and,
reaching the center of the cube, suddenly emerged into a small room
where a suave fat man in shorts sat drinking beer.
He flipped the tape over to him with practiced finger, eyeing it as
a stockbroker might have studied a ticker tape. He read the first
question, closed his eyes and frowned for five seconds. Then with the
staccato self-confidence of a hack writer, he began to tape out the
answer.
For many minutes the only sounds were the rustle of the paper ribbon
and the click of the taper, except for the seconds the fat man took to
close his eyes, or to drink or pour beer. Once, too, he lifted a phone,
asked a concise question, waited half a minute, listened to an answer,
then went back to the grind.
Until he came to Section Five, Question Four. That time he did his
thinking with his eyes open.