“Meaningless? You mean that literally?” said Jablonsky.
“Literally. What would you expect? The trouble with you two was that you weren’t out in the thick of it. You never left Multivac, Max, and you, Mr. Director, never left the Mansion except on state visits where you saw exactly what they wanted you to see.”
“I was not as unaware of that,” said Swift, “as you may have thought.”
“Do you know,” said Henderson, “to what extent data concerning our production capacity, our resource potential, our trained manpower--everything of importance to the war effort, in fact--had become unreliable and untrustworthy during the last half of the war? Group leaders, both civilian and military, were intent on projecting their own improved image, so to speak, so they obscured the bad and magnified the good. Whatever the machines might do, the men who programmed them and interpreted the results had their own skins to think of and competitors to stab. There was no way of stopping that. I tried, and failed.”
“Of course,” said Swift, in quiet consolation. “I can see that you would.”
This time Jablonsky decided to light his cigarette. “Yet I presume you provided Multivac with data in your programming. You said nothing to us about unreliability.”
“How could I tell you? And if I did, how could you afford to believe me?” demanded Henderson, savagely. “Our entire war effort was geared to Multivac. It was the one great weapon on our side, for the Denebians had nothing like it. What else kept up morale in the face of doom but the assurance that Multivac would always predict and circumvent any Denebian move, and would always direct and prevent the circumvention of our moves? Great Space, after our Spy-warp was blasted out of hyperspace we lacked any reliable Denebian data to feed Multivac and we didn’t dare make that public.”
“True enough,” said Swift.
“Well, then,” said Henderson, “if I told you the data was unreliable, what could you have done but replace me and refuse to believe me? I couldn’t allow that.”
“What did you do?” said Jablonsky.
“Since the war is won, I’d tell you what I did. I corrected the data.”
“How?” asked Swift.
“Intuition, I presume. I juggled them till they looked right. At first, I hardly dared, I changed a bit here and there to correct what were obvious impossibilities. When the sky didn’t collapse about us, I got braver. Toward the end, I scarcely cared. I just wrote out the necessary data as it was needed. I even had the Multivac Annex prepare data for me according to a private programming pattern I had devised for the purpose.”
“Random figures?” said Jablonsky.
“Not at all. I introduced a number of necessary biases.”
Jablonsky smiled, quite unexpectedly, his dark eyes sparkling behind the crinkling of the lower lids. “Three times a report was brought me about unauthorized uses of the Annex, and I let it go each time. If it had mattered, I would have followed it up and spotted you, John, and found out what you were doing. But, of course, nothing about Multivac mattered in those days, so you got away with it.”
“What do you mean, nothing mattered?” asked Henderson, suspiciously.
“Nothing did. I suppose if I had told you this at the time, it would have spared you your agony, but then if you had told me what you were doing, it would have spared me mine. What made you think Multivac was in working order, whatever the data you supplied it?”
“Not in working order?” said Swift.
“Not really. Not reliably. After all, where were my technicians in the last years of the war? I’ll tell you, they were feeding computers on a thousand different space devices. They were gone! I had to make do with kids I couldn’t trust and veterans who were out-of-date. Besides, do you think I could trust the solid-state components coming out of Cryogenics in the last years? Cryogenics wasn’t any better placed as far as personnel was concerned than I was. To me, it didn’t matter whether the data being supplied Multivac were reliable or not. The results weren’t reliable. That much I knew.”
“What did you do?” asked Henderson.
“I did what you did, John. I introduced the bugger factor. I adjusted matters in accordance with intuition--and that’s how the machine won the war.”
Swift leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out before him. “Such revelations. It turns out then that the material handed me to guide me in my decision-making capacity was a man-made interpretation of man-made data. Isn’t that right?”
“It looks so,” said Jablonsky.
“Then I perceive I was correct in not placing too much reliance upon it,” said Swift.
“You didn’t?” Jablonsky, despite what he had just said, managed to look professionally insulted.
“I’m afraid I didn’t. Multivac might seem to say, Strike here, not there; do this, not that; wait, don’t act. But I could never be certain that what Multivac seemed to say, it really did say; or what it really said, it really meant. I could never be certain.”
“But the final report was always plain enough, sir,” said Jablonsky.
“To those who did not have to make the decision, perhaps. Not to me. The horror of the responsibility of such decisions was unbearable and not even Multivac was sufficient to remove the weight. But the point is I was justified in doubting and there is tremendous relief in that.”
Caught up in the conspiracy of mutual confession, Jablonsky put titles aside, “What was it you did then, Lamar? After all, you did make decisions. How?”
“Well, it’s time to be getting back perhaps but--I’ll tell you first. Why not? I did make use of a computer, Max, but an older one than Multivac, much older.”
He groped in his own pocket for cigarettes, and brought out a package along with a scattering of small change; old-fashioned coins dating to the first years before the metal shortage had brought into being a credit system tied to a computer-complex.
Swift smiled rather sheepishly. “I still need these to make money seem substantial to me. An old man finds it hard to abandon the habits of youth.” He put a cigarette between his lips and dropped the coins one by one back into his pocket.
He held the last coin between his fingers, staring absently at it. “Multivac is not the first computer, friends, nor the best-known, nor the one that can most efficiently lift the load of decision from the shoulders of the executive. A machine did win the war, John; at least a very simple computing device did; one that I used every time I had a particularly hard decision to make.”
With a faint smile of reminiscence, he flipped the coin he held. It glinted in the air as it spun and came down in Swift’s outstretched palm. His hand closed over it and brought it down on the back of his left hand. His right hand remained in place, hiding the coin.
“Heads or tails, gentlemen?” said Swift.
---
One of the side effects of the growing respectability of science fiction was that it began to appear in markets where, a few short years earlier, the Sanitation Department would have been called in to remove any such manuscripts that had inadvertently found their way into the editorial office.
I’ll never forget the shock that rumbled through the entire world of science fiction fandom when, after World War II, our own Robert A. Heinlein broke the “slicks” barrier by having an undiluted science fiction story of his published in The Saturday Evening Post.
Nowadays, it is routine to find science fiction writers and their science fiction in such wide-circulation markets as Playboy. Indeed, the competition of the mass markets is such that the small specialty science fiction magazines find it hard to hold on to the more experienced writers and they do not benefit, as they ought, from the field’s new-won respectability. It is unjust!
But the strangest market for science fiction, in my opinion, was the advertising columns of that excellent (and, for me, indispensable) periodical, Scientific American. It seems that a company called Hoffman Electronics Corporation got the idea of running
a series of advertisements that would include a two-page (minus one column) illustrated science fiction story--real science fiction stories by the acknowledged masters. The final column would then be used to promote their product in a dignified manner. There was no direct tie-in between story and advertising and the writer was to have carte blanche, except that it would be nice to have the story involve communications in one form or another (since communications technology was what Hoffman was selling) .
The challenge was interesting and artistic integrity was preserved, so when I was asked to do a story for the program, I accepted and wrote “My Son, the Physicist.” As you see, it deals with communications but is in no way a “commercial” for such things. Hoffman accepted the story without changing a word or a comma and it ran not only in the ad columns of Scientific American but in Fortune as well.
It was an experience, you may be sure, because it is not likely that my by-line would ever have appeared in either magazine otherwise. Not under a piece of science fiction, anyway.
I am a little uneasy, though, as to how well the idea worked out. There were only six such advertisements altogether, as far as I know, and then they stopped. Well, maybe they just had difficulty getting appropriate stories. I don’t know.
First appearance--Scientific American, February 1962. @, 1962, Hoffman Electronics Corporation.
My Son, the Physicist
Her hair was light apple-green in color, very subdued, very old-fashioned. You could see she had a delicate hand with the dye, the way they did thirty years ago, before the streaks and stipples came into fashion.
She had a sweet smile on her face, too, and a calm look that made something serene out of elderliness.
And, by comparison, it made something shrieking out of the confusion that enfolded her in the huge government building.
A girl passed her at a half-run, stopped and turned toward her with a blank stare of astonishment. “How did you get in?”
The woman smiled. “I’m looking for my son, the physicist.”
“Your son, the--”
“He’s a communications engineer, really. Senior Physicist Gerard Cremona.”
“Dr. Cremona. Well, he’s-- Where’s your pass?”
“Here it is. I’m his mother.”
“Well, Mrs. Cremona, I don’t know. I’ve got to-- His office is down there. You just ask someone.” She passed on, running.
Mrs. Cremona shook her head slowly. Something had happened, she supposed. She hoped Gerard was all right.
She heard voices much farther down the corridor and smiled happily. She could tell Gerard’s.
She walked into the room and said, “Hello, Gerard.”
Gerard was a big man, with a lot of hair still and the gray just beginning to show because he didn’t use dye. He said he was too busy. She was very proud of him and the way he looked.
Right now, he was talking volubly to a man in army uniform. She couldn’t tell the rank, but she knew Gerard could handle him.
Gerard looked up and said, “What do you-- Mother! What are you doing here?”
“I was coming to visit you today.”
“Is today Thursday? Oh Lord, I forgot. Sit down, Mother, I can’t talk now. Any seat. Any seat. Look, General.”
General Reiner looked over his shoulder and one hand slapped against the other in the region of the small of his back. “Your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Should she be here?”
“Right now, no, but I’ll vouch for her. She can’t even read a thermometer so nothing of this will mean anything to her. Now look, General. They’re on Pluto. You see? They are. The radio signals can’t be of natural origin so they must originate from human beings, from our men. You’ll have to accept that. Of all the expeditions we’ve sent out beyond the planetoid belt, one turns out to have made it. And they’ve reached Pluto.”
“Yes, I understand what you’re saying, but isn’t it impossible just the same? The men who are on Pluto now were launched four years ago with equipment that could not have kept them alive more than a year. That is my understanding. They were aimed at Ganymede and seem to have gone eight times the proper distance.”
“Exactly. And we’ve got to know how and why. They may--just--have-- had--help.”
“What kind? How?”
Cremona clenched his jaws for a moment as though praying inwardly. “General,” he said, “I’m putting myself out on a limb but it is just barely possible non-humans are involved. Extra-terrestrials. We’ve got to find out. We don’t know how long contact can be maintained.”
“You mean” (the General’s grave face twitched into an almost-smile) “they may have escaped from custody and they may be recaptured again at any time.”
“Maybe. Maybe. The whole future of the human race may depend on our knowing exactly what we’re up against. Knowing it now.”
“All right. What is it you want?”
“We’re going to need Army’s Multivac computer at once. Rip out every problem it’s working on and start programming our general semantic problem. Every communications engineer you have must be pulled off anything he’s on and placed into coordination with our own.”
“But why? I fail to see the connection.”
A gentle voice interrupted. “General, would you like a piece of fruit? I brought some oranges.”
Cremona said, “Mother! Please! Later! General, the point is a simple one. At the present moment Pluto is just under four billion miles away. It takes six hours for radio waves, traveling at the speed of light, to reach from here to there. If we say something, we must wait twelve hours for an answer. If they say something and we miss it and say ‘what’ and they repeat--bang, goes a day.”
“There’s no way to speed it up?” said the General.
“Of course not. It’s the fundamental law of communications. No information can be transmitted at more than the speed of light. It will take months to carry on the same conversation with Pluto that would take hours between the two of us right now.”
“Yes, I see that. And you really think extra-terrestrials are involved?”
“I do. To be honest, not everyone here agrees with me. Still, we’re straining every nerve, every fiber, to devise some method of concentrating communication. We must get in as many bits per second as possible and pray we get what we need before we lose contact. And there’s where I need Multivac and your men. There must be some communications strategy we can use that will reduce the number of signals we need send out. Even an increase of ten percent in efficiency can mean perhaps a week of time saved.”
The gentle voice interrupted again. “Good grief, Gerard, are you trying to get some talking done?”
“Mother! Please!”
“But you’re going about it the wrong way. Really.”
“Mother.” There was a hysterical edge to Cremona’s voice.
“Well, all right, but if you’re going to say something and then wait twelve hours for an answer, you’re silly. You shouldn’t.”
The General snorted. “Dr. Cremona, shall we consult--”
“Just one moment, General,” said Cremona. “What are you getting at, Mother?”
“While you’re waiting for an answer,” said Mrs. Cremona, earnestly, “just keep on transmitting and tell them to do the same. You talk all the time and they talk all the time. You have someone listening all the time and they do, too. If either one of you says anything that needs an answer, you can slip one in at your end, but chances are, you’ll get all you need without asking.”
Both men stared at her.
Cremona whispered, “Of course. Continuous conversation. Just twelve hours out of phase, that’s all. God, we’ve got to get going.”
He strode out of the room, virtually dragging the General with him, then strode back in.
“Mother,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me, this will take a few hours, I think. I’ll send in some girls to talk to you. Or take a
nap, if you’d rather.”
“I’ll be all right, Gerard,” said Mrs. Cremona.
“Only, how did you think of this, Mother? What made you suggest this?”
“But, Gerard, all women know it. Any two women--on the video-phone, or on the stratowire, or just face to face--know that the whole secret to spreading the news is, no matter what, to Just Keep Talking.”
Cremona tried to smile. Then, his lower lip trembling, he turned and left.
Mrs. Cremona looked fondly after him. Such a fine man, her son, the physicist. Big as he was and important as he was, he still knew that a boy should always listen to his mother.
---
I have a role which I state loudly on every possible occasion. The role is, that I never write anything unless I am asked to do so. That sounds awfully haughty and austere, but it’s a fake. As a matter of fact, I take it for granted that the various science fiction magazines and certain of my book publishers have standing requests for material, so I write for them freely. It’s just the scattering of others that have to ask.
In 1964, I was finally asked by Playboy to write a story for them. They sent me a dim photograph of a clay head, without ears, and with the other features labeled in block letters, and asked me to write a story based on that photo. Two other writers were also asked to write a story based on that same photo and all three stories were to be published together.
It was an interesting challenge and I was tempted. I wrote “Eyes Do More Than See,”
In case I have given the impression in the previous introductions in this volume that my writing career has been one long succession of triumphs ever since “Nightfall”; that with me, to write is to sell; that I wouldn’t recognize a rejection slip if some fellow writer showed me one--rest easy, it is not so.
“Eyes Do More Than See” was rejected with muscular vigor. The manuscript came flying through my window all the way from Chicago, bounced off the wall and lay there quivering. (At least that’s how it seemed.) The other two stories were accepted by Playboy, and a third story, by someone hastily called in to backstop me, was also accepted.