The Mechanical Monarch Read online

  “Then he’s dead?”

  “Perhaps. What difference does it make? If the hull didn’t split and release his air, killing him instantly, then he will still die. He’s locked in a wrecked ship with little air, little water, no food. We didn’t think that he’d need food on a three-day trip. Whatever happens, dead or not, we’ll never see him again.”

  “I see.” Adams gulped, then, the training of a lifetime asserting itself, straightened his back and strode towards the door. “We must assume that he died in the blast. The radio wouldn’t have cut out the way it did if the control cabin had remained intact. I must report this. Will he fall into the Sun?”

  “I doubt it. With its present speed and course the ship will continue into outer space. It may hit an Asteroid, be thrown off course by impact with-a meteor, or it may be drawn into the gravitational field of some planet. We don’t know yet, but it doesn’t matter now, does it? Curt is dead. My friend is dead—and I helped to kill him.”

  He left the room then, walking on unfeeling feet, his thin features twisted - with inner anguish, his weak eyes staring blankly before him. Outside the stuffy room the Moon cast a soft radiance over the firing area, and he stared at it, hating its once-friendly face.

  Curt was dead.

  He sat, a stiffened corpse in the wreck of a ship which had been his dream, and his empty eyes stared at the cold glory of the glittering stars. They were cruel those stars. They kindled dreams in the hearts of men and they snatched those dreams away. Once, a long time ago now it seemed, two boys had stared at those stars and had dreamed of blazing a trail of fantastic adventure between the spinning orbs of alien worlds. Boyish dreams, but to them they had been very real. Curt and Comain. Together in incredible adventure, and now . . .

  Curt was dead.

  He bumped into a man, not seeing him, not seeing anything, and, stumbling a little, continued on his way into the night. The man stared after him, frowning, half-decided to follow the tall, thin person with the deathly white face. He shrugged, feeling a little troubled, a little uneasy, and, at the same time, a little disgusted. It was not often that a grown man walked the desert crying like a child.

  CHAPTER VI

  The man had a thick neck, thick wrists, thick body, and eyebrows so thick that they looked like a bar of black metal resting above his eyes. His clothes hugged the body of a prizefighter but his voice, when he spoke, was the voice of an educated man.

  "Mr. Comain?”

  “Yes?” Comain hesitated on the porch of the small house he rented, key in his hand, and looked at his visitor. The man smiled.

  “Shall we go inside?” There was no accent and his tones were cultured and yet Comain knew that the man was not speaking his native tongue. There was a certain preciseness, an unnatural perfection only to be acquired by an adult learning a foreign language and being satisfied with: nothing but perfection. That very perfection, the way he spoke, betrayed the very thing which he had striven to hide. Comain shrugged and opened the door.

  Inside, the house was a mess. Comain lived alone and lived only for his work. Heavy technical books cluttered the tables, filled the chairs, spilled on to the faded carpet on the floor and rested like multi-coloured boxes, on rows of sagging chairs. Parts of semi-dismantled apparatus lay on a bench and a sheet of black insulation was studded with the blank faces of registering dials.

  The stranger looked around, cleared some of the books from a chair, dusted the seat, and sitting down, took a cigarette from a gold-chased, silver case. He offered it to the lean man and Comain shook his head.

  “No thank you.” He dragged a stool from beneath the table and sat down, resting his elbows on the scarred wood. "What can I do for you?”

  “For me?” The man smiled. “Perhaps it is I who can do something for you.” He hesitated. “Permit me to introduce myself, my name is Smith, John Smith.” He frowned at Comain s involuntary smile. “I amuse you?”

  “Your lack of imagination does.”

  “How so?”

  “Your choice of name is hardly one to arouse confidence. American?”

  "No.”

  "English?”

  “Does that matter?"

  “It could,” said Contain deliberately. “Even though I am no longer working for the government yet I still come beneath Security regulations. Either you are very naive or you take me for a fool.” He rose and headed towards the door. “I think that you had better go now.” The stranger didn’t move.

  “You move too fast,” he murmured, “and in the wrong direction. I have no intention of asking you to betray your trust.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Smoke plumed from the slim cigarette. “Please sit down, there is much we need to discuss." He waited until Comain, moving with a slow reluctance, resumed his position on the stool. “You see,” said Smith casually, “the people whom I represent know quite a bit about you. They know that you were employed on rocketry and that you left the field five years ago. They also know that you are probably the most advanced expert in the field of cybernetics and electronic computating machines. They are not interested in anything but that.” He flipped ash from his cigarette. “I am here to offer you employment in that field.”

  “I see." Comain stared at the littered room. “Is this a clumsy attempt to bribe me? I may be a scientist and I know that the popular conception of all scientists is that they are misguided idealists without any awareness of what goes on outside their circle, but I am not wholly a fool. Admittedly I no longer work for the government, in fact I work for no one but myself, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to turn traitor to any foreign power offering me a job.”

  “Did I mention the world ‘traitor’?” Smith shook his head. “Believe me when I say that is the last thing required of you. No. I am simply here to make you an offer, an offer which, as a gentleman, you are at perfect liberty to refuse without ill-feeling.” He shrugged. “It is not so long ago that such offers from one nation to a citizen of another were common. Now, owing to the fanatical regulations, it is not so common.”

  “It is a crime to accept,” snapped Comain. “I shouldn’t even listen to you, you know that.”

  “Why not?” Smith gestured with his cigarette. “Please, let us not be stupid about this. After all, what am I doing? I am making you an offer, is that a crime? I am talking to you, is that wrong? Would it be wrong for you to listen to me? Can you deny the existence of a fact, negate it, by refusing to admit its place in the scheme of things? Really, Comain, as a scientist you should know better.”

  “Your logic does not impress me,” said Comain coldly. He stared at his visitor. “I will admit that no harm can come by my listening to what you have to say, but I must warn you, I will not promise to respect your confidence. I am still a citizen and this is still my country.”

  “A patriot?” Smith stared curiously at the scientist. “After all that has been done to you?”

  “So I lost my job and they kicked me out of the research laboratories. So what?” Comain didn’t try to hide- his bitterness. “They didn’t like it when I refused to follow their orders, work along the same old useless lines, and when I tried to show them where they were wrong they fired me.” “Misuse of equipment,” murmured Smith. “Insubordination and an incorrect attitude towards the problem as a whole.” He shrugged. “The commercial field perhaps, or no, they are even more stringent.”

  “I was blacklisted.” Comain wiped his thick lenses. “General Electric. Du Ponts. Amalgamated Power. They all turned me down.” He laughed with brittle anger. '“Make one wrong step in this set-up and you’re out on your ear—for good!”

  “I see.” Smith looked down at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “So you work at home.” He glanced at the equipment, his heavy features expressionless. “Have you had success?” “How could I?” Comain’s shoulder sagged with the weight of bitterness. “Look at the stuff. Junk! Rubbish from the surplus stores. Discarded because it was no. good. How can I build a delicate mechan
ism from that?”

  “But your theories, they have progressed?”

  “A little.” Enthusiasm warmed the bleak voice as Comain

  spoke of his dream. “You know what I’m after, of course?” “A thinking machine, is it not? A robot?” Smith waved his cigarette. “I am not a scientist, remember, but I have a grasp of the general pattern.”

  “A thinking machine.” Comain shrugged. “Say it like that and it’s easy. A robot. Say it that way and it’s easier still.” “But there are thinking machines. The big electronic computators, the initial machines?” Smith paused and held out the butt of his cigarette. Comain took it from him and crushed it out on the floor.

  “You are suffering from the same delusion most people suffer from. You mention the MANIAC, the EINAC, and other initial machines. You talk of electronic computators, and all you’re really talking about are glorified adding machines. They do not think. They perform routine operations, perform them at incredible speeds, but that is all. There isn’t a single machine in existence which can be truly called a ‘thinking machine.’ In fact, the general trend among the operators of such machines is to restrict what they mean by the term ‘thinking’ as something the machines cannot do.rf

  “But . . .” Smith looked bewildered. “I understood . . Comain shrugged.

  “You understood that I am working on the problem of thinking machines, and so I am.” He leaned a little further across the littered table. “Let us look at the problem and see what it is we’re up against. First, it isn’t enough just to construct a machine which will hold information. We already have such machines, we call them libraries. It isn’t enough to build a collection of glass and wire which can add faster, or compute faster than the human brain. We have that sort too, from the adding machines in offices to the big, initial machines at Washington. They are merely work horses. They can do nothing but what they are designed to do, and only routine mathematical work at that. They are no more thinking machines than a selenium switch which turns on the light when it grows dark can be called a thinking machine. The principle is the same in both cases, relays operated by external stimuli. A true thinking machine needs something more than that."

  “I follow you,” murmured Smith and his big body settled more comfortably in the chair. Comain shrugged.

  “I’m telling you nothing which you could not learn from outside sources. The problem is well known, opinion only differs as to how it should be solved.”

  “Of course, and your solution?”

  “I haven’t got one—not yet.” The lean man stared at the litter of dismantled equipment lying all over the ground floor of the small house. “To find the answer it is essential to go back to the basics. What is thought? What is that subtle something which makes a man different from all other animals? His brain is the same, structurally the same at least, and his body functions just like that of any animal. He is an animal but—he can think. When we discover just how and why —then we will be able to build true thinking machines.”

  “I don’t quite follow.” Smith frowned, the thick eyebrows writhing over his forehead. “Surely if a sufficiently complicated -machine were built, incorporating the sum total of human knowledge, we would have the answer?”

  “Would we?” Comain almost sneered. “You think so? Answer this then. How would you define the word ‘food’?” “As something to eat.”

  “So. Is wood food? Termites eat wood and so it must be classified beneath that title. Is iron food? Rust corrodes, ‘eats’ iron. Is salt? Sodium chloride is made of two poisons and would it be logical to assume that two poisons can be eaten with safety?” Comain smiled at his visitor’s expression. “You see, we, human beings, that is, have a very efficient and compact system of idea association. When we think of ‘food’ we may think of a steak, or an egg, or a stick of celery. It doesn’t matter because we know that food isn’t just the thing we think of. That only serves as a memory-identification to bring all our knowledge of what food is, what it does, how it tastes, all the knowledge we have ever learned about food, to the forefront of our consciousness. A machine can’t think like that. Every item has to be fed in separately.

  Food to a machine is a steak or an egg, or a stick of "celery. Not and/or either. That is only one word, remember, one concept. When you think of the thousands of words, the concepts, the ideas which the average brain handles during the course of a single day, then you will perhaps realise just what we’re up against.”

  “So the problem is insoluble then?*1

  “I didn’t say that.” Comain rose and began pacing the room, pausing now and then to touch or examine some piece of equipment. “Perhaps we shall never be able to build a replica of a human brain. We don’t want to. There would be no point in doing it when there are so many efficient units already in existence.”- He smiled at Smith’s expression. “I refer to men, of course, there are millions of them, each with a ' Highly efficient brain. No. What we must do is to build something better than we already have? A machine, able to think, able to absorb knowledge, to use that .knowledge to increase its data, and to apply that knowledge in the best possible way.”

  “I begin to see what you are driving at,” said the big man slowly. “A machine, of course, would not die. Therefore it would be possible to add tremendously to its store of data and if it could correlate that information . . .” He looked at the thin man. “Deus Machina?”

  “In a way, but it is up to men to prevent the machine ever becoming a God.” Comain returned to the table and sat down. “You are right when you talk of potential immortality for the machine. There is no reason why it should not last a million years, and at that time it could be absorbing knowledge, finding new facts, solving all those problems which we simply haven’t time to solve. The way things are now a scientist can’t learn fast enough to have any time left for research. Aside from that, the fields are becoming too specialised. A worker in biology, say, can’t spare the time to learn about radioactives, and yet the field of radiant energy probably holds the answer to cellular breakdown, cancer, anaemia, and virulent disease. A metallurgist knows little about bacteria, and yet it has been shown that bacteria, certain strains

  that is, have an effect on metal. Time is the answer, Smith. Time. And we just haven’t got enough of it.”

  He waved away the stranger’s offer of a cigarette and sat, fuming with inward pain as he stared at the litter of junk around him. Time. Five years ago he had listened to his one friend die in the loneliness of space and within him the Joss was a constant, unhealing wound. Trouble had followed, inevitably as, driven by a complex emotion stemming from both the subconscious death wish born of self-guilt and the desire to join Rosslyn, and the attitude of authority which, after the fatal space flight, had abandoned true rocketry for the establishment of space stations, he had kicked over the traces.

  There had been that time when he had wasted a month’s research by unauthorised investigation into the reactions of metal-eating bacteria on the heavy metals. There had been the fight with a laboratory assistant, a fight which had left him weak and ill from both physical punishment -and frustrated hate. The word had passed to the psychologists, then to Security, and he was dismissed from all access to vital information as an unstable risk. The rest had followed automatically.

  The succession. of commercial jobs, each worse than the last, ending finally in court proceedings for the theft of five grammes of platinum wire. He had got off with a fine and a warning—and Security lived on his neck for the next two years.

  ' Now?

  He stared at the junk, the salvaged pieces from surplus stores, the crude, too crude equipment and resisters. Scaled-down voltmeters when he needed to measure micro-volts. Hand-made radiation counters when he needed encephalo-graphs. Steel-chassis when he needed non-magnetic conductors. The futility of what he was trying .to do made him feel sick.

  “It is hard, is it not?” Smith gestured with his cigarette and Comain realised that the thick man had followed his thoug
hts. “Genius should not be hampered by petty worries and spite of little men. When you have built your predictor

  “Predictor?” Comain stared at the big man and his eyes narrowed a little behind their thick lenses. “Who said anything about that?”

  " “But your machine will include prediction, will it not?” “Maybe.” Comain nervously ran his tongue over his dry lips. “I’m beginning to get it now,” he said thoughtfully. “You aren’t interested' in the full potentials of a thinking machine. All you want is a predictor, and I can guess why.” “Indeed?”

  “You want it for war. You want to use it to blast humanity to dust. You want it to gain an edge over the other nations.” “Perhaps.” The big man smiled through the smoke of his cigarette. “Did the first man to discover fire intend his discovery to be used for incendiary bombs? Of course he didn’t. And neither do we want to use your machine for war but, if it can be so used . . .” He shrugged. “This is a hard world, my friend, and we must be realists. Your friend died in space but did he risk his life so that the Moon could be used as a military base, or did he risk, and lose it, so that the old dream of interplanetary flight could be advanced? We cannot dictate how our discoveries are to be used, Comain, but does that mean no new discoveries should be made? And there is a proverb, I think. Half a loaf is better than none. To build your machine, no matter for what ostensible purpose, is bet-ten than not to build it at all. But—it will be a predictor, will it not?”

  "It will.”

  “Are you certain of that? Our reports . . .” He smiled. “You understand how these things are. Fear has crushed the free exchange of scientific knowledge so that it is difficult to be certain about many matters.”

  “The machine, if and when built, will be the finest predictor in existence.” Comain didn’t look at his visitor. “Aside from the thinking ability, all that is necessary to make a fairly accurate prediction is plenty of data, the more the better. If the weather stations had access to hidden reports as