The Eye of the Sibyl and Other Classic Strories (25 page)

Stafford wondered, What do you say to a machine when it acquires a belief in witchcraft? This isn’t New England in the seventeenth century. Are we supposed to make Sousa walk over hot coals without being burned? Or get dunked without drowning? Are we supposed to
prove
to Genux-B that Sousa is not Satan? And if so, how? What would it regard as proof?

And where did it get the idea in the first place?

He said to the engineer, “Ask it how it discovered that Herbert Sousa is the Evil One. Go ahead; I’m serious. Type out a card.”

The answer, after an interval, appeared via the government-issue ballpoint pen for all of them to see.

“That trinket?” Stafford demanded, incredulous. “That charm bracelet bit of plastic? You call that a living being?”

The question, put to Genux-B, got an immediate answer.

“This poses an interesting question,” one of the FBI men said. “Evidently it regards itself as alive—putting aside the question of Herb Sousa entirely. And we built it; or, rather, you did.” He indicated Stafford and the engineer. “So what does that make us? From its ground premise we created living beings, too.”

The observation, put to Genux-B, got a long, solemn answer which Stafford barely glanced over; he caught the nitty-gritty at once.

“What it boils down to,” the engineer said dryly, “is this. The computer writes off its own existence—naturally—as an act of legitimate miracle-passing. But what Sousa has got going for him in those gum machines—or what it thinks he’s got going—is unsanctioned and therefore demonic. Sinful. Deserving God’s wrath. But what further interests me is this: Genux-B has sensed that it couldn’t tell us the situation. It knew we wouldn’t share its views. It preferred a thermonuclear attack, rather than telling us. When it was forced to tell us, it decided to call off the Red Alert. There are levels and levels to its cognition… none of which I find too attractive.”

Stafford said, “It’s got to be shut down. Permanently.” They had been right to bring him into this, right to want his probing and diagnosis; he now agreed with them thoroughly. Only the technical problem of defusing the enormous complex remained. And between him and the engineer it could be done; the men who designed it and the men who maintained it could easily take it out of action. For good.

“Do we have to get a presidential order?” the engineer asked the FBI men.

“Go do your work; we’ll get the order later,” one of the FBI men answered. “We’re empowered to counsel you to take whatever action you see fit.” He added, “And don’t waste any time—if you want my opinion.” The other FBI men nodded their agreement.

Licking his dry lips, Stafford said to the engineer, “Well, let’s go. Let’s destruct as much of it as we need to.”

The two of them walked cautiously toward Genux-B, which, via the output line, was still explaining its position.

Early in the morning, as the sun began to rise, the FBI flapple let Stafford off at the roof field of his conapt building. Dog-tired, he descended by descy to his own tier and floor.

Presently he had unlocked his door, had entered the dark, stale-smelling living room on his way to the bedroom. Rest. That was needed, and plenty of it… considering the night of difficult, painstaking work dismantling crucial turrets and elements of Genux-B until it was disabled. Neutralized.

Or at least so they hoped.

As he removed his work smock, three hard brightly colored little spheres bounced noisily from a pocket to the floor of the bedroom; he retrieved them, laid them on the vanity table.

Three, he thought. Didn’t I eat one?

The FBI man gave me three and I chewed one up. I’ve got too many left, one too many.

Wearily, he finished undressing, crept into bed for the hour or so of sleep left to him. The hell with it.

At nine the alarm clock rang. He woke groggily and without volition got to his feet and stood by the bed, swaying and rubbing his swollen eyes. Then, reflexively, he began to dress.

On the vanity table lay four gaily colored balls.

He said to himself, I
know
that I put only three there last night. Perplexed, he studied them, wondering blearily what—if anything—this meant. Binary fission? Loaves and fishes all over again?

He laughed sharply. The mood of the night before remained, clinging to him. But single cells grew as large as this. The ostrich egg consisted of one single cell, the largest on Terra—or on the other planets beyond. And these were much smaller.

We didn’t think of that, he said to himself. We thought about eggs that might hatch into something awful, but not unicellular organisms that in the old primitive way divide. And they are organic compounds.

He left the apartment, left the four gum balls on the vanity table as he departed for work. A great deal lay ahead of him: a report directly to the President to determine whether all Genux-B computers ought to be shut down and, if not, what could be done to make certain they did not, like the local one, become superstitiously deranged.

A machine, he thought. Believing in the Evil Spirit entrenched solidly on Earth. A mass of solid-state circuitry diving deep into age-old theology, with divine creation and miracles on one side and the diabolic on the other. Plunged back into the Dark Ages, and by a man-made electronic construct, not by one of us humans.

And they say humans are prone to error.

When he returned home that night—after participating in the dismantling of every Genux-B-style computer on Earth—seven colored spheres of candy-coated gum lay in a group of the vanity table, waiting for him.

It would create quite a gum empire, he decided as he scrutinized the seven bright balls, all the same color. Not much overhead, to say the least. And no dispenser would ever become empty—not at this rate.

Going to the vidphone, he picked up the receiver and began to dial the emergency number which the FBI men had given him. And then reluctantly hung up.

It was beginning to look as if the computer had been right, hard as that was to admit. And it had been his decision to go ahead and dismantle it.

But the other part was worse. How could he report to the FBI that he had in his possession seven candy-coated balls of gum? Even if they did divide. That in itself would be even harder to report. Even if he could establish that they consisted of illegal—and rare—nonterrestrial primitive life forms smuggled to Terra from God knew what bleak planet.

Better to live and let live. Perhaps their reproduction cycle would settle down; perhaps after a period of swift binary fission they would adapt to a terran environment and stabilize. After that he could forget about it. And he could flush them down the incinerator chute of his conapt. He did so.

But evidently he missed one. Probably, being round, it had rolled off the vanity table. He found it two days later, under the bed, with fifteen like it. So once more he tried to get rid of them all—and again he missed one; again he found a new nest the following day, and this time he counted forty of them.

Naturally, he began to chew up as many as possible—and as fast. And he tried boiling them—at least the ones he could find—in hot water. He even tried spraying them with an indoor insect bomb.

At the end of a week, he had 15,832 of them filling the bedroom of his conapt. By this time chewing them out of existence, spraying them out of existence, boiling them out of existence—all had become impractical.

At the end of the month, despite having a scavenger truck haul away as much as it could take, he computed that he owned two million.

Ten days later—from a pay phone down at the corner—he fatalistically called the FBI. But by then they were no longer able to answer the vidphone.

While rolling a fifty-gallon drum of water from the canal to his potato garden, Bob Turk heard the roar, glanced up into the haze of the midafternoon Martian sky and saw the great blue interplan ship.

In the excitement he waved. And then he read the words painted on the side of the ship and his joy became alloyed with care. Because this great pitted hull, now lowering itself to a rear-end landing, was a carny ship, come to this region of the fourth planet to transact business.

The painting spelled out:

The final word had been painted largest of all.

I better go tell the settlement council, Turk realized. He left his water drum and trotted toward the shop-area, panting as his lungs struggled to take in the thin, weak air of this unnatural, colonized world. Last time a carnival had come to their area they had been robbed of most of their crops—accepted by the pitchmen in barter—and had wound up with nothing more than an armload of useless plaster figurines. It would not happen again. And yet—

He felt the craving within him, the need to be entertained. And they all felt this way; the settlement yearned for the bizarre. Of course the pitchmen knew this, preyed off this. Turk thought, If only we could keep our heads. Barter excess food and cloth-fibers, not what we need… not become like a lot of kids. But life in the colony world was monotonous. Carting water, fighting bugs, repairing fences, ceaselessly tinkering with the semi-autonomous robot farm machinery which sustained them… it wasn’t enough; it had no—culture. No solemnity.

“Hey,” Turk called as he reached Vince Guest’s land; Vince sat aboard his one-cylinder plow, wrench in hand. “Hear the noise? Company! More sideshows, like last year—remember?”

“I remember,” Vince said, not looking up. “They got all my squash. The hell with traveling shows.” His face became dark.

“This is a different outfit,” Turk explained, halting. “I never saw them before; they’ve got a
blue
ship and it looks like it’s been everywhere. You know what we’re going to do? Remember our plan?”

“Some plan,” Vince said, closing the jaw of the wrench.

“Talent is talent,” Turk babbled, trying to convince—not merely Vince—but himself as well; he talked against his own alarm. “All right, so Fred’s sort of half-witted; his talent’s genuine, I mean, we’ve tried it out a million times, and why we didn’t use it against that carny last year I’ll never know. But now we’re organized. Prepared.”

Raising his head Vince said, “You know what that dumb kid will do? He’ll join the carny; he’ll leave with it and he’ll use his talent on their side—we can’t trust him.”

“I trust him,” Turk said, and hurried on toward the buildings of the settlement, the dusty, eroded gray structures directly ahead. Already he could see their council chairman, Hoagland Rae, busy at his store; Hoagland rented tired pieces of equipment to settlement members and they all depended on him. Without Hoagland’s contraptions no sheep would get sheared, no lambs would be distailed. It was no wonder that Hoagland had become their political—as well as economic—leader.

Stepping out onto the hard-packed sand, Hoagland shaded his eyes, wiped his wet forehead with a folded handkerchief and greeted Bob Turk. “Different outfit this time?” His voice was low.

“Right,” Turk said, his heart pounding. “And we can take them, Hoag! If we play it right; I mean, once Fred—”

“They’ll be suspicious,” Hoagland said thoughtfully. “No doubt other settlements have tried to use Psi to win. They may have one of those—what do you call them?—those anti-Psi folks with them. Fred’s a p-k and if they have an anti-p-k—” He gestured, showing his resignation.

“I’ll go tell Fred’s parents to get him from school,” Bob Turk panted. “It’d be natural for kids to show up right away; let’s close the school for this afternoon so Fred’s lost in the crowd, you know what I mean? He doesn’t
look
funny, not to me, anyhow.” He sniggered.

“True,” Hoagland agreed, with dignity. “The Costner boy appears quite normal. Yes, we’ll try; that’s what we voted to do anyhow, we’re committed. Go sound the surplus-gathering bell so these carny boys can see we’ve got good produce to offer—I want to see all those apples and walnuts and cabbages and squash and pumpkins piled up—” He pointed to the spot. “And an accurate inventory sheet, with three carbons, in my hands, within one hour.” Hoagland got out a cigar, lit up with his lighter. “Get going.” Bob Turk went.

As they walked through their south pasture, among the black-face sheep who chewed the hard, dry grass, Tony Costner said to his son, “You think you can manage it, Fred? If not, say so. You don’t have to.”

Straining, Fred Costner thought he could dimly see the carnival, far off, arranged before the upended interplan ship. Booths, shimmering big banners and metal streamers that danced in the wind … and the recorded music, or was it an authentic calliope? “Sure,” he muttered. “I can handle them; I’ve been practicing every day since Mr. Rae told me.” To prove it he caused a rock lying ahead of them to skim up, pass in an arc, start toward them at high speed and then drop abruptly back to the brown, dry grass. A sheep regarded it dully and Fred laughed.

A small crowd from the settlement, including children, had already manifested itself among the booths now being set up; he saw the cotton candy machine hard at work, smelled the frying popcorn, saw with delight a vast cluster of helium-filled balloons carried by a gaudily-painted dwarf wearing a hobo costume.