The Nail and the Oracle (22 page)

“What’s that mean? Zero what?”

“Zero-sum, you trace? Like-uh-poker. You have poker out there in the wilderness?”

“Well, sure.”

“Kay. You and I play poker, everything won plus everything lost equals zero. Hey?”

“Uh—well, yes.”

“Fine. Now, nonzero-sum is like, well, baseball. The scores add up to more than zero.”

“I see.”

“Good-eo.” The flack pointed to the bulkhead, where the score floated: N
ORTH
7 S
OUTH
5. “Thass provisional, you und’stan’. Now, if we score it zero-sum, we give each one 50 points—you got to have something to play with, same like poker, you find me? Now, Adam got 7, Florio got 5, provisional. Two points apart. If scoring’s zero-sum, we take two points f’m Florio and give ’em to Adam. Score North 52, South 48.”

“Uh, I think I’ve got it.”

“Now, nonzero-sum. They get jus’ what they earned, sept for one thing—underdog gets 50—point bonus.”

“You mean if it’s scored that way Adam would get his seven points, but Florio would get 55?”

“You oiled up and squeakless, Mr. O.,” said the flack. Mr. Ourser recognized this as some sort of compliment and all but smiled. “But
why should the underdog get 50 points?”

“Crowd likes his style.”

“So by pushing one of those buttons”—he pointed to the bulkhead—“the crowd votes on whether to score it zero-sum or nonzero-sum.”

The public-address system gave its muezzinlike cry once more, followed by a long chime. “Ten seconds. You want to push?”

“You do it.”

The flack pushed the nonzero-sum button and leaned back. In two or three seconds the final first-quarter score appeared: S
OUTH
55 N
ORTH
7. Florio’s rescue of Adam had pleased the crowd. “Adam, he not goin to love that no way nohow negativ-eo,” Bil Ferry said.

The infield abruptly took on its spokes of color, the sky went out, the Quoit appeared, and the players were magically in place again. The crowd sighed and settled itself.

This time there was no meeting and salutation. Florio shot across and into the Spot the second it was in North’s territory. Adam sprang at him and, grasping him by the shoulders, flung him out before he had been in the green more than two seconds. Florio, surprisingly, raced away from him to the other side of the Track, by the center line, and lay down laughing on the Track.

Bil Ferry, and the whole stadium, shouted. Mr. Ourser was perplexed. “What’s he doing?”

“He just laying there,” chortled the flack. “Once was a champ name of Cream used to do that. War o’nerves, trace me? He snatched Adam away f’m the core, right? Now he give Adam the chance to do same thing. Adam got to. Look how mad he is, and he got to!”

“But suppose Adam just doesn’t?”

“Oh, he got to. You think the crowd stand f’ that?’ ”

“Florio made a damn fool of him. You said—”

“Oh—Watch the game, classmate.”

The mighty Quoit nutated on. Its brilliant scarlet core knifed along the Track. The stadium grew hushed, as if at the bidding of a slowly turned volume control. Florio lay back on the Track, put his hands behind his head, and laughed up at the darkened sky. Adam the Great stalked over and stood looking down on him, glowering
and (as seen in the trideo) chewing hard on his own teeth. The green-and-orange Spot arrived. The blue glow of the Quoit arrived. Adam still looked down, motionless.

And then, unbelievably, the red core cut Florio right in two, from groin to crown and through both the wrists which were behind his head. In the trideo tank Mr. Ourser saw the two halves of his body fall open like a book, the complex of colors which flooded out flashing on its glazed cut surfaces.

There seemed then to be a silence that went on forever, though it could not have been long. The Quoit disappeared and the sky came into being when the core had advanced only another two or three yards. The only thing that would come to Mr. Ourser’s lips was a whispered, “I thought they never stopped the Quoit.” And came Bil Ferry’s whispered answer, “But the game’s over now,” and as whispers they could be clearly heard.

Then there was a wild, inconsolable screaming that seemed to set off an explosion in every human being in the place. Teenagers began vaulting over the rail into the control pit; Mr. Ourser saw some confused fighting going on down there and uniformed men being trampled. The crowd, in ones, in twos, then by dozens and hundreds, began to jump over the barriers and pour onto the arena.

Adam the Great stood for perhaps a minute after the bisection of his opponent, his hands on his hips and his jaws working. He slowly raised his head and watched the people leaping, falling, vaulting onto the greensward. Then his eyes widened and he turned and sprinted for the invisible gateway in the North outfield. He reached it yards ahead of the nearest spectators and seemed to be scrabbling at thin air. He ran around in a half circle and tried again, with the same result.

Mr. Ourser now understood why the teenagers had dropped into the control pit—it was to lock those exits. Adam, fleeing across toward the South exit, apparently understood this, because he suddenly stopped trying. Right in the center of the arena he stopped and crouched at bay. More people came. They closed in, slowly. He whirled, and those behind him jumped back, but others jumped forward. He got his hands on a man and whirled with him and threw
him. He knocked down two more. He ran then, and was tripped and went down.

There was a huge hooting sound. Bil Ferry paled. “Less cut out, classmate. Ther’ll be police helis over here like flies in four seconds flat,” he said. They stumbled out, the Primitive clinging to his burden to the last, up the aisle, out to the slideway stage.

Mr. Ourser looked back.

Someone in the wild flailing melee in the control pit had pulled the big red handle. The Quoit was in motion through the crowd. Nothing of that was ever to stay with Mr. Ourser but one sharp picture: a young, slender, bald girl sitting on the sward with the crowd milling around her, holding a severed and bloodless leg in both hands and laughing and laughing and laughing …

The slideway, the parking lot, the hovercraft. When at last they were clear of the stadium and out on a feeder road, Bil Ferry said to the Primitive, in tones of outrage that echoed back through the years to the once-familiar syllables: “I say, that’s not cricket.”

“Mr. O.,” he said, “that wasn’t Quoit. That wasn’t Quoit.”

“I know. I know,” said Mr. Ourser, comforting him.

And it was at that moment that Mr. Ourser destroyed the Primitives forever. He did not do it all at once, but he did it completely. “Do you suppose,” he said, “that a Quoit installation—just a simple one—might be put in a wilderness location?”

“I c’n have Survey an’ Estimate out there in the morning, y’ronner,” said Bil Ferry. (He never called Mr. Ourser “classmate” again, that being a concession to the ideal of equality and used only on members of classes lower than one’s own. A prospect, now, a real prospect, was “y’ronner” no matter what his station.) “I c’n also up your priorities one notch for the trade goods.”

So Mr. Ourser opened his burden—an attaché case—and got out his shopping list, and with the improved priorities they were able to fill it, even to the timer for a 1962 RCA Whirlpool washing machine, even to the set of points for a 1964 Mercury.

Despite the improvements, the Pentagon in 1970 was still the Pentagon, with more places to walk than places to sit. Not that Jones had a legitimate gripe. The cubical cave they had assigned to him as an office would have been more than adequate for the two-three days he himself had estimated. But by the end of the third week it fit him like a size-6 hat and choked him like a size-12 collar. Annie’s phone calls expressed eagerness to have him back, but there was an edge to the eagerness now which made him anxious. His hotel manager had wanted to shift his room after the first week and he had been stubborn about it; now he was marooned like a rock in a mushroom patch, surrounded by a back-to-rhythm convention of the Anti-Anti-Population Explosion League. He’d had to buy shirts, he’d had to buy shoes, he’d needed a type-four common-cold shot, and most of all, he couldn’t find what was wrong with ORACLE.

Jones and his crew had stripped ORACLE down to its mounting bolts, checked a thousand miles of wiring and a million solid-state elements, everything but its priceless and untouchable memory banks. Then they’d rebuilt the monster, meticulously cross-checking all the way. For the past four days they had been running the recompleted computer, performance-matching with crash-priority time on other machines, while half the science boys and a third of the military wailed in anguish. He had reported to three men that the machine had nothing wrong with it, that it never had had anything wrong with it, and that there was no reason to believe there ever would be anything wrong with it. One by one these three had gone (again) into ORACLE’s chamber, and bolted the door, and energized the privacy field, and then one by one they had emerged stern and disappointed, to tell Jones that it would not give them an answer: an old admiral, an ageless colonel, and a piece of walking legend
whom Jones called to himself the civilian.

Having sent his crew home—for thus he burned his bridges—having deprived himself of Jacquard the design genius and the twenty-three others, the wiring team, all the mathematicians, everyone, Jones sighed in his little office, picked up the phone again and called the three for a conference. When he put the instrument down again he felt a little pleased. Consistencies pleased Jones, even unpleasant ones, and the instant response of all three was right in line with everything they had done from the time they had first complained about ORACLE’s inability to answer their questions, all through their fiddling and diddling during every second of the long diagnostic operation. The admiral had had an open line installed to Jones’ office, the colonel had devised a special code word for his switchboard, the civilian had hung around personally, ignoring all firm, polite hints until he had turned his ankle on a cable, giving Jones a reason to get him out of there. In other words, these three didn’t just want an answer, they
needed
it.

They came, the admiral with his old brows and brand-new steel-blue eyes, the colonel with starch in his spine and skin like a post-maneuver proving-grounds, the civilian limping a bit, with his head tilted a bit, turned a bit, a captivating mannerism which always gave his audiences the feeling that history cared to listen to them. Jones let them get settled, this admiral whose whole career had consisted of greater and greater commands until his strong old hand was a twitch away from the spokes of the helm of the ship of state; this colonel who had retained his lowly rank as a mark of scorn for the academy men who scurried to obey him, whose luxurious quarters were equipped with an iron barracks bed; and this civilian with the scholarly air, with both Houses and a Cabinet rank behind him, whose political skills were as strong, and as deft, and as spiked as a logroller’s feet.

“Gentlemen,” said Jones, “this may well be our last meeting. There will, of course, be a written report, but I understand the—uh—practicalities of such a situation quite well, and I do not feel it necessary to go into the kind of detail in the report that is possible to us in an informal discussion.” He looked at each face in turn and
congratulated himself. That was just right. This is just between us boys. Nobody’s going to squeal on you.

“You’ve dismissed your crew,” said the civilian, causing a slight start in the admiral and a narrowing of the colonel’s eyes and, in Jones, a flash of admiration. This one had snoopers the services hadn’t even dreamed up yet. “I hope this is good news.”

“Depends,” said Jones. “What it means primarily is that they have done all they can. In other words, there is nothing wrong with ORACLE in any of their specialties. Their specialties include everything the computer is and does. In still other words, there’s nothing wrong with the machine.”

“So you told us yesterday,” gritted the colonel, “but I got no results. And—I want results.” The last was added as an old ritual which, apparently, had always gotten results just by being recited.

“I followed the procedures,” said the admiral, intoning this as a cardinal virtue, “and also got no results.” He held up a finger and suspended operations in the room while he performed some sort of internal countdown. “Had I not done so, ORACLE would have responded with an ‘insufficient data’ signal. Correct?”

“Quite correct,” said Jones.

“And it didn’t.”

“That was my experience,” said the civilian, and the colonel nodded.

“Gentlemen,” said Jones, “neither I nor my crew—and there just is not a better one—have been able to devise a question that produced that result.”

“It was not a result,” snapped the colonel.

Jones ignored him. “Given the truth of my conclusion—that there is nothing wrong with the machine—and your reports, which I can have no reason to doubt, there is no area left to investigate but one, and that is in your hands, not mine. It’s the one thing you have withheld from me.” He paused. Two of them shifted their feet. The colonel tightened his jaw.

The admiral said softly, but with utter finality, “I can
not
divulge my question.”

The colonel and the civilian spoke together: “Security—” and
“This is a matter—” and then both fell silent.

“Security.” Jones spread his hands. To keep from an enemy, real or potential, matters vital to the safety of the nation, that was security. And how easy it was to wrap the same blanket about the use of a helicopter to a certain haven, the presence of a surprising little package in a Congressional desk, the exact relations between a certain officer and his—
argh!
This, thought Jones, has all the earmarks of, not
our
security, but three cases of
my
security … I’ll try just once more.

“Thirty years ago, a writer named William Tenn wrote a brilliant story in which an Air Force moon landing was made, and the expedition found an inhabited pressure dome nearby. They sent out a scout, who was prepared to die at the hands of Russians or even Martians. He returned to the ship in a paroxysm, gentlemen, of laughter. The other dome belonged to the U.S. Navy.”