Why, then, had he said nothing?
One thing is certain. Nothing Nothing Priss would do at the billiard table could be accidental. He was an expert and the billiard ball did exactly what he wanted it to. I was standing right there. I saw him look at Bloom and then at the table as though he were judging angles. Priss would do at the billiard table could be accidental. He was an expert and the billiard ball did exactly what he wanted it to. I was standing right there. I saw him look at Bloom and then at the table as though he were judging angles.
I watched him hit that ball. I watched it bounce off the side of the table and move into the zero-gravity volume, heading in one particular direction.
For when Priss sent that ball toward the zero-gravity volume-and the tri-di films bear me out-it was already aimed directly at Bloom"s heart!
Accident? Coincidence?
...Murder?
True Love
My name is Joe. That is what my colleague, Milton Davidson, calls me. He is a programmer and I am a computer program. I am part of the Multivac-complex and am connected with other parts all over the world. I know everything. Almost everything.
I am Milton"s private program. His Joe. He understands more about programming than anyone in the world, and I am his experimental model. He has made me speak better than any other computer can.
"It is just a matter of matching sounds to symbols, Joe," he told me. "That"s the way it works in the human brain even though we still don"t know what symbols there are in the brain. I know the symbols in yours, and I can match them to words, one-to-one." So I talk. I don"t think I talk as well as I think, but Milton says I talk very well. Milton has never married, though he is nearly forty years old. He has never found the right woman, he told me. One day he said, "I"ll find her yet, Joe. I"m going to find the best. I"m going to have true love and you"re going to help me. I"m tired of improving you in order to solve the problems of the world. Solve my my problem. Find me true love." problem. Find me true love."
I said, "What is true love?"
"Never mind. That is abstract. Just find me the ideal girl. You are connected to the Multivac-complex so you can reach the data banks of every human being in the world. We"ll eliminate them all by groups and cla.s.ses until we"re left with only one person. The perfect person. She will be for me."
I said, "I am ready."
He said, "Eliminate all men first."
It was easy. His words activated symbols in my molecular valves. I could reach out to make contact with the acc.u.mulated data on every human being in the world. At his words, I withdrew from 3,784,982,874 men. I kept contact with 3,786,112,090 women.
He said, "Eliminate an younger than twenty-five; an older than forty. Then eliminate an with an IQ under 120; an with a height under 150 centimeters and over 175 centimeters."
He gave me exact measurements; he eliminated women with living children; he eliminated women with various genetic characteristics. "I"m not sure about eye color," he said, "Let that go for a while. But no red hair. I don"t like red hair."
After two weeks, we were down to 235 women. They all spoke English very well. Milton said he didn"t want a language problem. Even computer-translation would get in the way at intimate moments.
"I can"t interview 235 women," he said. "It would take too much time, and people would discover what I am doing."
"It would make trouble," I said.
Milton had arranged me to do things I wasn"t designed to do. No one knew about that. "It"s none of their business," he said, and the skin on his face grew red. "I tell you what, Joe, I will bring in holographs, and you check the list for similarities."
He brought in holographs of women. "These are three beauty contest winners," he said. "Do any of the 235 match?"
Eight were very good matches and Milton said, "Good, you have their data banks. Study requirements and needs in the job market and arrange to have them a.s.signed here. One at a time, of course." He thought a while, moved his shoulders up and down, and said, "Alphabetical order."
That is one of the things I am not designed to do. Shifting people from job to job for personal reasons is called manipulation. I could do it now because Milton had arranged it. I wasn"t supposed to do it for anyone but him, though.
The first girl arrived a week later. Milton"s face turned red when he saw her. He spoke as though it were hard to do so. They were together a great deal and he paid no attention to me. One time he said, "Let me take you to dinner."
The next day he said to me, "It was no good, somehow. There was something missing. She is a beautiful woman, but I did not feel any touch of true love. Try the next one."
It was the same with all eight. They were much alike. They smiled a great deal and had pleasant voices, but Milton always found it wasn"t right. He said, "I can"t understand it, Joe. You and I have picked out the eight women who, in all the world, look the best to me. They are ideal. Why don"t they please me?"
I said, "Do you please them?"
His eyebrows moved and he pushed one fist hard against his other hand. "That"s it, Joe. It"s a two-way street. If I am not their ideal, they can"t act in such a way as to be my ideal. I must be their true love, too, but how do I do that?" He seemed to be thinking all that day.
The next morning he came to me and said, "I"m going to leave it to you, Joe. All up to you. You have my data bank, and I am going to tell you everything I know about myself. You fill up my data bank in every possible detail but keep all additions to yourself."
"What will I do with the data bank, then, Milton?"
"Then you will match it to the 235 women. No, 227. Leave out the eight you"ve seen. Arrange to have each undergo a psychiatric examination. Fill up their data banks and compare them with mine. Find correlations." (Arranging psychiatric examinations is another thing that is against my original instructions.) For weeks, Milton talked to me. He told me of his parents and his siblings. He told me of his childhood and his schooling and his adolescence. He told me of the young women he had admired from a distance. His data bank grew and he adjusted me to broaden and deepen my symbol-taking.
He said, "You see, Joe, as you get more and more of me in you, I adjust you to match me better and better. You get to think more like me, so you understand me better. If you understand me well enough, then any woman, whose data bank is something you understand as well, would be my true love." He kept talking to me and I came to understand him better and better.
I could make longer sentences and my expressions grew more complicated. My speech began to sound a good deal like his in vocabulary, word order and style.
I said to him one time, "You see, Milton, it isn"t a matter of fitting a girl to a physical ideal only. You need a girl who is a personal, emotional, temperamental fit to you. If that happens, looks are secondary. If we can"t find the fit in these 227, we"ll look elsewhere. We will find someone who won"t care how you look either, or how anyone would look, if only there is the personality fit. What are looks?"
"Absolutely," he said. "I would have known this if I had had more to do with women in my life. Of course, thinking about it makes it all plain now."
We always agreed; we thought so like each other.
"We shouldn"t have any trouble, now, Milton, if you"ll let me ask you questions. I can see where, in your data bank, there are blank spots and unevennesses."
What followed, Milton said, was the equivalent of a careful psychoa.n.a.lysis. Of course, I was learning from the psychiatric examinations of the 227 women-on all of which I was keeping close tabs.
Milton seemed quite happy. He said, "Talking to you, Joe, is almost like talking to another self. Our personalities have come to match perfectly."
"So will the personality of the woman we choose."
For I had found her and she was one of the 227 after all. Her name was Charity Jones and she was an Evaluator at the Library of History in Wichita. Her extended data bank fit ours perfectly. All the other women had fallen into discard in one respect or another as the data banks grew fuller, but with Charity there was increasing and astonishing resonance.
I didn"t have to describe her to Milton. Milton had coordinated my symbolism so closely with his own I could tell the resonance directly. It fit me.
Next it was a matter of adjusting the work sheets and job requirements in such a way as to get Charity a.s.signed to us. It must be done very delicately, so no one would know that anything illegal had taken place.
Of course, Milton himself knew, since it was he who arranged it and that had to be taken care of too. When they came to arrest him on grounds of malfeasance in office, it was, fortunately, for something that had taken place ten years ago. He had told me about it, of course, so it was easy to arrange-and he won"t talk about me for that would make his offense much worse.
He"s gone, and tomorrow is February 14, Valentine"s Day. Charity will arrive then with her cool hands and her sweet voice. I will teach her how to operate me and how to care for me. What do looks matter when our personalities will resonate?
I will say to her, "I am Joe, and you are my true love."
The Last Answer
Murray Templeton was forty-five years old, in the prime of his life, and with all parts of his body in perfect working order except for certain key portions of his coronary arteries, but that was enough.
The pain had come suddenly, had mounted to an unbearable peak, and had then ebbed steadily. He could feel his breath slowing and a kind of gathering peace washing over him.
There is no pleasure like the absence of pain-immediately after pain. Murray felt giddy lightness as though he were lifting in the air and hovering.
He opened his eyes and noted with distant amus.e.m.e.nt that the others in the room were still agitated. He had been in the laboratory when the pain had struck, quite without warning, and when he had staggered, he had heard surprised outcries from the others before everything vanished into overwhelming agony.
Now, with the pain gone, the others were still hovering, still anxious, still gathered about his fallen body- -Which, he suddenly realized, he was looking down on.
He was down there, sprawled, face contorted. He was up here, at peace and watching. He thought: Miracle of miracles! The life-after-life nuts were right.
And although that was a humiliating way for an atheistic physicist to die, he felt only the mildest surprise, and no alteration of the peace in which he was immersed.
He thought: There should be some angel-or something-coming for me.
The Earthly scene was fading. Darkness was invading his consciousness and off in a distance, as a last glimmer of sight, there was a figure of light, vaguely human in form, and radiating warmth.
Murray thought: What a joke on me. I"m going to Heaven.
Even as he thought that, the light faded, but the warmth remained. There was no lessening of the peace even though in all the Universe only he remained-and the Voice.
The Voice said, "I have done this so often and yet I still have the capacity to be pleased at success."
It was in Murray"s mind to say something, but he was not conscious of possessing a mouth, tongue, or vocal cords. Nevertheless, he tried to make a sound. He tried, mouthlessly, to hum words or breathe them or just push them out by a contraction of-something.
And they came out. He heard his own voice, quite recognizable, and his own words, infinitely clear.
Murray said, "Is this Heaven?"
The Voice said, "This is no place as you understand place."
Murray was embarra.s.sed, but the next question had to be asked. "Pardon me if I sound like a jacka.s.s. Are you G.o.d?"
Without changing intonation or in any way marring the perfection of the sound, the voice managed to sound amused. "It is strange that I am always asked that in, of course, an infinite number of ways. There is no answer I can give that you would comprehend. I am-which is all that I can say significantly and you may cover that with any word or concept you please,"
Murray said, " And what am I? A soul? Or am I only personified existence too?" He tried not to sound sarcastic, but it seemed to him that he had failed. He thought then, fleetingly, of adding a "Your Grace" or "Holy One" or something something to counteract the sarcasm, and could not bring himself to do so even though for the first time in his existence he speculated on the possibility of being punished for his insolence-or sin?-with h.e.l.l, and what that might be like. to counteract the sarcasm, and could not bring himself to do so even though for the first time in his existence he speculated on the possibility of being punished for his insolence-or sin?-with h.e.l.l, and what that might be like.
The Voice did not sound offended. "You are easy to explain-even to you. You may call yourself a soul if that pleases you, but what you are is a nexus of electromagnetic forces, so arranged that all the interconnections and interrelationships are exactly imitative of those of your brain in your Universe-existence-down to the smallest detail. Therefore you have your capacity for thought, your memories, your personality. It still seems to you that you are you."
Murray found himself incredulous. "You mean the essence of my brain was permanent."
"Not at all. There is nothing about you that is permanent except what I choose to make so. I formed the nexus. I constructed it while you had physical existence and adjusted it to the moment when the existence failed."
The Voice seemed distinctly pleased with itself, and went on after a moment"s pause. " An intricate but entirely precise construction. I could, of course, do it for every human being in your world but I am pleased that I do not. There is pleasure in the selection."
"You choose very few then."
"Very few."
"And what happens to the rest. "
"Oblivion! Oh, of course, you imagine a h.e.l.l."
Murray would have flushed if he had the capacity to do so. He said, "I do not. It is spoken of. Still, I would scarcely have thought I was virtuous enough to have attracted your attention as one of the Elect."
"Virtuous? Ah, I see what you mean. It is troublesome to have to force my thinking small enough to permeate yours. No, I have chosen you for your capacity for thought, as I choose others, in quadrillions, from all the intelligent species of the Universe."
Murray found himself suddenly curious, the habit of a lifetime. He said, "Do you choose them all yourself or are there others like you?"
For a fleeting moment, Murray thought there was an impatient reaction to that, but when the Voice came, it was unmoved. "Whether or not there are others is irrelevant to you. This Universe is mine, and mine alone. It is my invention, my construction, intended for my purpose alone."
"And yet with quadrillions of nexi you have formed, you spend time with me? Am I that important?"
The Voice said, "You are not important at all. I am also with others in a way which, to your perception, would seem simultaneous."
"And yet you are one?"
Again amus.e.m.e.nt. The Voice said, "You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?"
Murray said dryly, "I"ll think about it. It may become comprehensible."
"Exactly. That is your function. You will think."
"To what end? You already know everything, I suppose."
The Voice said, "Even if I knew everything, I could not know that I know everything."
Murray said, "That sounds like a bit of Eastern philosophy-something that sounds profound precisely because it has no meaning."
The Voice said, "You have promise. You answer my paradox with a paradox-except that mine is not a paradox. Consider. I have existed eternally, but what does that mean? It means I cannot remember having come into existence. If I could, I would not have existed eternally. If I cannot remember having come into existence, then there is at least one thing-the nature of my coming into existence-that I do not know.
"Then, too, although what I know is infinite, it is also true that what there is to know is infinite, and how can I be sure that both infinities are equal? The infinity of potential knowledge may be infinitely greater than the infinity of my actual knowledge. Here is a simple example: If I knew everyone of the even integers, I would know an infinite number of items, and yet I would still not know a single odd integer."
Murray said, "But the odd integers can be derived. If you divide every even integer in the entire infinite series by two, you will get another infinite series which will contain within it the infinite series of odd integers."
The Voice said, "You have the idea. I am pleased. It will be your task to find other such ways, far more difficult ones, from the known to the not-yet-known. You have your memories. You will remember all the data you have ever collected or learned, or that you have or will deduce from that data. If necessary, you will be allowed to learn what additional data you will consider relevant to the problems you set yourself."
"Could you not do all that for yourself?"
The Voice said, "I can, but it is more interesting this way. I constructed the Universe in order to have more facts to deal with. I inserted the uncertainty principle, entropy, and other randomization factors to make the whole not instantly obvious. It has worked well for it has amused me throughout its entire existence.
"I then allowed complexities that produced first life and then intelligence, and used it as a source for a research team, not because I need the aid, but because it would introduce a new random factor. I found I could not predict the next interesting piece of knowledge gained, where it would come from, by what means derived."
Murray said, "Does that ever happen?"