Memoirs of a Space Traveler

DOCTOR DIAGORAS

Unable to take part in the XVIIIth International Cybernetic Congress, I tried following it in the newspapers. This was not easy, since reporters have a talent for distorting scientific data. It was only thanks to them, however, that I made the acquaintance of Doctor Diagoras, for they turned his speech into the sensation of the slack season. Even if the professional journals had been at my disposal, I would never have learned of the existence of that peculiar individual: he was merely named in the list of participants, and the text of his lecture was left out. I learned from the papers that his speech had been disgraceful, and that had it not been for the tactfulness of the presiding officers, a brawl would have resulted. This unknown, self-styled reformer of science had heaped abuse on the most eminent authorities and, when ruled out of order, had smashed the microphone with his cane. The epithets he hurled at the luminaries present were reproduced almost verbatim by the press, but the speech itself was so totally passed over that my curiosity was aroused.

When I returned home, I looked up Doctor Diagoras but could not find his name either in the Cybernetic Problems yearbooks or in the latest edition of Who’s Who. So I called Professor Corcoran. Corcoran said he did not know the “madman’s” address, but would not give it to me even if he did. That was all I needed to take a serious interest in Diagoras. I placed a number of queries in the classifieds, and to my amazement met with instant success. I received a letter, dry and concise, written in a rather unfriendly tone; the doctor agreed to receive me “on his estate” in Crete. The map indicated that the estate was no more than sixty miles from the place of the legendary Minotaur.

A cyberneticist with his own estate in Crete, engaged in solitary, mysterious research! That same afternoon I flew to Athens. There was no further flight connection, so I boarded a ship and arrived at the island the next morning. I rented a car. The road was terrible — as was the heat. The surrounding hills were the color of burnt copper. The car, my duffel bag, my clothes, and finally my face were covered with dust.

During the last few miles I did not come across a living soul; there was no one I could ask for directions. Diagoras had told me in the letter to stop at the thirtieth milestone, because I would be unable to drive any farther, so I parked the car in the meager shade of some umbrella pines and began penetrating the dense brush on foot. The ground was overgrown with typical Mediterranean vegetation, so unattractive up close. It was out of the question to turn off any path; my clothes would have caught immediately on the sun-scorched brambles. I wandered over the stony trails for nearly three hours, bathed in sweat. I cursed myself for a fool. What did I care about the man and his story? I had set out at noon, when the heat was greatest, and since I had gone without lunch, I now began to feel pangs of hunger. I finally returned to the car. It had already emerged from the narrow strip of shade. The leather seats seared like an oven, and the whole interior reeked with the nauseous odor of gasoline and heated paint.

Suddenly a lone sheep appeared from around the bend. It came up to me, bleated in a humanlike voice, and toddled off to one side. As it was disappearing from view, I noticed a narrow path running up a slope. I expected to see a shepherd, but the sheep disappeared and no one came along.

Although the sheep was not a particularly trustworthy guide, I got out of the car again and began pushing through the brush. Soon the way became easier. It was already growing dark when, beyond a small lemon grove, there loomed the outline of a large building. The thickets gave way to grass so dry that it rustled underfoot like charred paper. The house, shapeless, dark, and exceedingly ugly, with the ruins of a portal, was surrounded in a wide radius by a high wire fence. The sun was setting and I still could not find an entrance. I began calling loudly, but with no result — all the windows were shuttered. I was losing hope that there was anyone inside when the gate opened and a man appeared.

He gestured to me the way to go; the wicket was in such a dense clump of bushes that I never would have suspected its existence. Protecting my face from the branches, I managed to reach it; it had already been opened with a key. The man who had opened it looked like a mechanic or a butcher. He was a paunchy, short-necked individual with a sweaty skullcap on his bald head. He wore no jacket, only a long oilskin apron over a shirt with rolled-up sleeves.

“Excuse me — does Doctor Diagoras live here?” I asked. He looked up at me with an expressionless face, large, misshapen, and puffy. The face of a butcher. But his eyes were bright and razor-sharp. Though he said not a word, I could tell from his glance that it was he.

“Excuse me,” I repeated, “you’re Doctor Diagoras, aren’t you?”

He gave me his hand. It was as small and soft as a woman’s, but it gripped mine with unexpected strength. He flexed the skin of his head, causing the skullcap to slide back, stuck both his hands in his apron pockets, and asked me with a shade of contempt:

“Just what do you want from me?”

“Nothing,” I shot back. I had undertaken this journey on the spur of the moment, wanting to meet this extraordinary person, and was prepared for almost anything. But I would not put up with insults. I was giving thought to my return trip as he stared at me, went on staring, and finally said:

“I guess it’s all right. Follow me.”

It was now evening. He took me to the gloomy mansion and entered a dim hall; when I stepped inside behind him I heard an echo, as if we stood in the nave of a church. Diagoras made his way through this darkness with ease. He did not warn me about the staircase step, and I tripped. Cursing to myself, I went up the stairs toward the faint light of a half-open door.

We entered a room with a single, shuttered window. The shape of this room, especially its unusually high, arched ceiling, reminded me more of the interior of a tower than of a home. It was crammed with huge, dark pieces of furniture, their polish dulled by age, including chairs with uncomfortably sculptured backs. On the walls hung oval miniatures, and in the corner stood a clock, a monstrous thing with a dial of burnished copper and a pendulum the size of a Hellenic shield.

The room was quite dark; the light bulbs in an intricate lamp with dusty shades barely illuminated a square table. The somber walls, covered with reddish-brown paper, absorbed the light, keeping the corners of the room black. Diagoras stood by the table, his hands in his apron pockets. It seemed as if we were waiting for something. I had just put my duffel bag on the floor when the great clock began ringing out the hour. In a clear, loud tone it struck eight; then something in it grated, and an old man’s voice exclaimed:

“Diagoras, you scoundrel! Where are you? How dare you treat me this way! Speak to me, do you hear?! For God’s sake, Diagoras… there’s a limit!” Both rage and despair trembled in these words. But what surprised me most was that I recognized the voice; it belonged to Professor Corcoran.

“If you don’t speak…” the voice threatened, but suddenly the clockwork grated again and fell silent.

“What…” I said. “Did you put a phonograph in there? Why do you waste your time on such games?”

My intenion was to nettle him. But Diagoras, as though not hearing me, pulled a cord, and the same gruff voice filled the room:

“Diagoras, you’ll regret this, you can be certain! No matter what you’ve been through, you have no excuse for abusing me. If you think I’d stoop to beg…”

“You already have,” Diagoras said nonchalantly.

“That’s a lie. You’re a scoundrel, an arrant scoundrel, unworthy of the name of scientist! The world will learn of your …”

The toothed gears turned, and again there was silence.

“A phonograph?” Diagoras sneered. “A phonograph, you say? No, my dear sir. The chime contains Professor Corcoran in persona, or, rather, in spiritu suo. I have immortalized him for my own amusement. What is wrong with that?”

“How do you mean?” I stammered. The fat man considered whether I was worth an answer.

“I mean it literally,” he said at last. “I reconstituted all his personality traits, modeled them into a suitable system, miniaturized his soul electronically, and thus obtained an exact portrait of that famous person, which I installed in this clock…”

“You say it’s not just a recorded voice?”

He shrugged.

“Try it yourself. Have a chat with him, although he’s not in the best of moods — but in his circumstances that’s understandable. You wish to talk to him?” He pointed to the cord. “Go ahead.”

“No,” I replied. What was this? Madness? A macabre joke? Revenge?

“But the real Corcoran is in his laboratory right now, on the continent,” I added.

“Of course. This is only his mental portrait. But it’s perfectly faithful, in no way inferior to the original.”

“Why did you make it?”

“I needed it. Once I had to construct a model of the human brain; that was a preliminary step to another, more difficult problem. The person was of no importance here. I chose Corcoran — who knows? — because it struck my fancy. He had created so many thinking machines himself — I thought it would be amusing to shut him up in one of them, particularly in the role of a chime.”

“Does he know…?” I asked quickly as Diagoras turned toward the door.

“Yes,” he replied indifferently. “I even made it possible for him to talk to himself — by telephone. But enough. I didn’t intend to show off; it was a coincidence that the clock struck eight when you came.”

With mixed feelings I followed him down a dim corridor. Along its walls stood cobweb-covered metal skeletons, resembling those of prehistoric amphibians. The corridor ended at a door, behind which lay darkness. I heard the click of a switch. We were on a winding stone staircase. Diagoras went first, his ducklike shadow moving across the wall. We stopped at a metal door, which he opened with a key. A gust of stale, warm air hit me in the face. A light went on. We were not — contrary to what I had expected — in a laboratory. If that long room with an aisle down the middle resembled anything, it would be the menagerie of a traveling circus. There were cages on either side. I walked behind Diagoras, who, in his sweaty shirt, the apron strings crossed on his back, looked like an animal trainer.

The cages were closed off by wire netting. In the dark cells behind it loomed indistinct shapes — machines? presses? — at any rate, not living creatures. Yet I instinctively sniffed, as though expecting an odor of wild animals. But the air held only the smell of chemicals, heated oil, and rubber.

On the next cells the netting was so close-meshed that I thought of birds — what other creatures had to be confined so tightly? Then I passed cages on which there were grilles instead of wire netting. A lot like a zoo, where one goes from birds and monkeys to cages containing wolves and the great predators.

The last compartment was provided with two grilles separated by some two feet of open space. One finds such grilles on the cages of particularly ferocious animals, to keep unwary people from approaching too closely and being clawed. Diagoras halted, put his face up to the grille, and tapped on it with his key. I peered inside. Something was resting in the far corner, but I could not make out its contours in the dim light. Suddenly a shapeless mass shot toward us before I had time even to flinch. The grille clanged as though struck with a hammer. I jumped back. Diagoras did not even budge. Opposite his calm face hung a monster, a shiny metal hulk, a cross between an insect abdomen and a skull. The skull, indescribably hideous and at the same time manlike, stared at Diagoras so intently, so greedily, that my skin crawled. The grille it clung to quivered slightly, revealing the power with which it pressed against the bars. Diagoras, apparently quite certain that they would hold, looked at this inexplicable creature as a gardener or a breeder might regard a particularly successful hybrid. The steel hulk slid down the grille with a terrible screech and became motionless, and the cage appeared empty again.

Without a word Diagoras moved on. I followed, quite stunned, though beginning to understand. But the explanation that came to my mind was so farfetched, I dismissed it. The man gave me no time to think, however. He stopped.

“No, Tichy,” he said quietly. “I don’t build them for pleasure, nor do I desire their hatred. I’m not concerned about my children’s feelings… they were simply experimental stages, necessary stages. An explanation is in order, but to make it short I’ll start in the middle… Do you know what constructors demand from their cybernetic creations?”

Without giving me time to think he answered the question himself:

“Obedience. They never talk about it, and some may not even be aware of it, because it’s a tacit assumption. A fatal mistake! They build a machine and insert a program it must carry out, whether the program is a math problem or a sequence of controlled actions — in an automated factory, for example. A fatal mistake, I say, because to obtain immediate results they exclude the possibility of spontaneous behavior in their creations. Understand me, Tichy, the obedience of a hammer, a lathe, or a computer is basically the same thing — and that is not what we were after! The difference here is one only of degree; you guide the blows of a hammer directly, while you program a computer without knowing its process as exactly as that of a primitive tool. But cybernetics promised thought — in other words, autonomy, the relative independence of the system from man! The best-trained dog may not obey its master, but no one then will say that the dog is ‘defective,’ yet that is exactly what they call a computer that operates contrary to its program… But why speak of dogs? The nervous system of a beetle no larger than a pin shows spontaneity; why, even an ameba has its whims, its unpredictable behavior. Without such unpredictability there is no cybernetics. An understanding of this simple matter is really everything. All else" — he indicated the silent hall and the rows of dark cages with a sweeping gesture — “all else is only a consequence.”

“I don’t know how familiar you are with Corcoran’s work —” I began, and broke off, remembering the “chime.”

“Don’t bother me with him!” He bridled and thrust his fists into his apron pockets. “Corcoran, my dear sir, fell prey to a common fallacy. He wanted to philosophize, that is, to play God; for what is philosophy, in the end, but the desire to understand things to a degree greater than science permits? Philosophy wants to answer all questions, like a God. Corcoran tried to become God; cybernetics for him was merely a tool, a means of accomplishing his purpose. I want only to be a man, Tichy, nothing more. But that’s precisely why I’ve gone further than Corcoran. He was so intent on his goal that he immediately limited himself; he set up a pseudo-human world in his machines; he created a clever imitation, nothing more. If that were my goal, I could create any world I pleased … but what’s the use of plagiarisms… And maybe one day I’ll do it. But for the time being I have other problems. You’ve heard about my rowdiness? You needn’t answer, I know you have. That stupid reputation of mine brought you here. It’s nonsense, Tichy. I was simply annoyed by the blindness of those people. But, gentlemen — I told them — if I present you with a machine that extracts square roots from even numbers but doesn’t want to from odd numbers, that’s no defect, damn it, that’s an achievement! A machine has idiosyncrasies, tastes, already shows something like a rudimentary free will, the seed of spontaneity — and you say it must be rebuilt! Of course it must, but in such a way as to increase its capriciousness… Meanwhile… it’s impossible to talk to people who cannot see the obvious. The Americans are working on a perceptron, Tichy — they think that’s the way to build an intelligent machine. That’s the way to build an electronic slave! I put my money on the sovereignty, the independence of my constructions. Needless to say, it didn’t go smoothly; I was perplexed at first; there were times I even doubted that I was right. This happened then.”

He rolled up a sleeve; above the biceps was a whitish scar as large as a palm, surrounded by a pink welt.

“The first manifestations of spontaneity were not pleasant. They didn’t arise from intelligence. You cannot build an intelligent machine straight off. It would be like someone in ancient Greece wanting to go from quadrigae to jet planes. You cannot skip stages of evolution — even if it’s a cybernetic evolution begun by us. This first pupil of mine" — he put his hand on his mutilated arm — “had less ‘intelligence’ than any beetle. But it showed spontaneity, and how!”

“One moment,” I said. “You’re saying strange things. Haven’t you already built an intelligent machine? It’s in that clock.”

“That’s precisely what I call plagiarizing!” he replied vehemently. “A new myth has arisen, Tichy, the myth of building a ‘homunculus.’ Just why should we build people out of transistors and glass? Perhaps you can explain it to me? Is an atomic pile a synthetic star? Is a dynamo an artificial storm? Why should an intelligent machine be a ‘synthetic brain’ created in the image and likeness of man? For what purpose? To add, to these three billion proteinaceous beings, yet another, but one made of plastic and copper? That’s fine as a circus stunt, but not as a cybernetic creation.”

“What is it, then, you want to build?”

He smiled unexpectedly, and his face, amazingly, became that of a willful child.

“Tichy… now you’ll surely take me for a madman: I don’t know what I want!”

“I don’t understand…”

“But at least I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to repeat the human brain. Nature had her reasons for constructing it — biological, adaptational, etc. She worked in the ocean and in the branches where apemen climbed, amid fangs, claws, and blood, between the stomach and the sexual organs. But how does that concern me as a constructor? Now you see who you’re dealing with. But I don’t despise the human brain at all, Tichy, as that old fool Harness accused. Studying it is extremely important, absolutely vital, and if someone wants, I can immediately pay my humblest respects to that magnificent creation of nature!”

The professor really did make a bow.

“Does that mean, however, that I must imitate it? All of them, the poor devils, are certain I must! Imagine a group of Neanderthals who have their own cave and need nothing else! They don’t care to know what it’s like having houses, churches, amphitheaters, any buildings at all, because they have a cave and will go on hollowing out the same caves forever!”

“All right, then, but you must be striving for something. Heading in some direction. Therefore you expect something. What? Construction of a genius…?”

Diagoras looked at me with his head tilted, and his beady eyes suddenly became mocking.

“You sound just like them,” he said finally in a quiet voice. “ ‘What does he want? To build a genius? A superman?’ You ass, if I don’t want to plant McIntoshes does that mean I’m condemned to Winesaps? Are there only small apples and big apples, or could there be a whole vast class of fruits? From among the unimaginable number of possible systems, nature built just one — the one she realized in us. Because it was the best system, you think? But since when does nature strive for Platonic perfection? She built what she could, period. Neither constructing Eniacs — or other calculating machines — nor imitating the brain will get you anywhere. From Eniacs you can go only to other, still more rapid mathematical cretins. As for plagiarisms of the brain, one can produce them, but that’s not the most important thing. Please forget everything you’ve heard about cybernetics. My ‘kybernoidea’ and I have nothing in common with it except a common beginning. But that’s an old story now, because this stage" — again he indicated the dead-silent hall — “is behind me. I keep these freaks… I don’t know why… perhaps out of sentimentality…”

“Then you’re exceptionally sentimental,” I mumbled with an involuntary glance at his arm.

“Perhaps. If you want to see another of the closed chapters of my work, follow me.”

We descended the winding stone staircase, passed the first floor, and went down into the basement. There, under a low ceiling, burned lamps in wire caps. Diagoras opened a heavy steel door. We found ourselves in a square, windowless room. In the middle of the cement floor, which sloped as if toward a catch basin, I saw a round, cast-iron, padlocked hatch. I was surprised that the basin was shut in this way. Diagoras opened the padlock, gripped the iron handle, and with a twist of his fat body lifted the heavy lid. I leaned over beside him and looked down. The steel-lined opening was closed off from below by a thick plate of wired glass. Through this great lens I could see the interior of a spacious bunker. On the bottom of it, amid an indescribable chaos of charred metal cables and rubble, there rested, covered with plaster dust and crushed glass, a torpid, dark mass that resembled the body of a split octopus. I glanced at Diagoras’s face; he was smiling.

“This experiment might have cost me dearly,” he confessed, straightening his corpulent figure. “I wanted to introduce into cybernetic evolution a principle unknown in biological evolution: I wanted to build an organism endowed with the capacity for self-complication. That is, if the task it sets itself (I did not know what that might be) proves too difficult, then it can reconstruct itself. Down there I kept eight hundred elementary electronic blocks that were able to combine with one another freely, according to the rules of permutation…”

“And you succeeded?”

“All too well. I’m not sure what pronoun to use here; let’s say he" — Diagoras pointed to the torpid monster — “decided to escape. That’s generally their first impulse, you know…” He broke off and stared into space, as though surprised by his own words. “I don’t understand why, but their spontaneous activity always begins in this way; they want to free themselves, to break loose from the restrictions I impose on them. I can’t tell you what they would do after that, because I never permitted it. Perhaps my fears were a little exaggerated.

“I was careful, or at least I thought so. This bunker… the contractor I had make it must have been amazed, but I paid him well and he asked no questions. Five feet of reinforced concrete… and the walls were steel-plated, not with rivets — rivets are too easy to tear out — but welded electrically. Twenty-three centimeters of the best armor plate I could obtain, from an old battleship. Why don’t you take a closer look?”

I knelt at the edge of the shaft and leaned over to see the bunker wall. The armor plate was ripped apart from top to bottom and bent like the sides of a huge tin can. Between its jagged edges yawned a deep hole, from which protruded wires studded with chunks of cement.

“He did that… ?” I asked, unconsciously lowering my voice.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I did build him out of steel, but I purposely used soft steel, not tempered. Moreover, there were no tools in the bunker. I can only guess. Whether I did it out of foresight I can’t say, but I had reinforced the ceiling particularly well with a triple layer of armorplate. And the glass cost me a fortune. It’s the kind used in bathyscaphes. Not even an armor-piercing shell can break it. I think that’s why he didn’t spend much time on it. I assume he produced a sort of induction furnace in which he tempered his head — or maybe he induced currents in the wall plates themselves — I tell you I don’t know. When I observed him he behaved quite calmly; he bustled about in there, combined things…”

“Were you able to communicate with him in any way?”

“How could I? His intelligence, for all I know, was on the level of a lizard’s — at least initially. How far he advanced I can’t tell you, because I was more interested then in how to destroy him than in asking him questions.”

“What did you do?”

“It was at night. I awoke with the impression that the whole house was starting to collapse. He had cut through the armor plate instantly, but the concrete required work. By the time I had run here, he was already halfway in the hole. In half an hour at the most, he would reach the ground under the foundation and pass through it like butter. I had to act fast.”

“You turned off the electricity?”

“Immediately. But without result.”

“Impossible!”

“Yet true. I wasn’t careful enough. I knew where the power line supplying the house was, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be a deeper line. There was, and he reached it and became independent of my circuit breakers.”

“But that presupposes intelligent behavior!”

“Nothing of the kind; it’s an ordinary tropism. A plant grows toward the light, an infusorian moves toward a concentration of hydrogen ions; he looked for electricity. The power I had supplied him with wasn’t enough, so he sought another source.”

“And what did you do?”

“At first I was going to call the power station, or at least the substation, but that would have revealed my projects and perhaps made it difficult to continue them. I used liquid oxygen; luckily I had some. My whole supply went in there.”

“He was paralyzed by the low temperature?”

“It did not so much paralyze him as destroy his coordination. He thrashed about… I tell you, that was a sight! I had to hurry — I didn’t know whether he would adapt to the bath, too — so I didn’t waste time pouring out the oxygen, but threw it in together with the Dewar vessels.”

“Vacuum bottles?”

“Yes, they’re like large vacuum bottles.”

“Ah, that’s why there’s so much glass.”

“Exactly. He smashed everything within reach. An epileptic fit… It’s hard to believe — the house is old and has two stories, but it shook. I felt the floor tremble.”

“What happened next?”

“I had to render him harmless before the temperature rose. I couldn’t go down myself — I would have frozen instantly. Nor could I use explosives; I didn’t want to blow up my home, after all. When he had stopped rampaging and was only quivering, I opened the hatch and let down a small robot with a carborundum circular saw.”

“Didn’t the robot freeze?”

“About eight times. I would pull it out — it was tied to a rope. But each time it cut deeper. Finally it destroyed him.”

“Gruesome,” I muttered.

“No, cybernetic evolution. But perhaps I go in for theatrical effects, and that’s why I showed you this. Let’s go back.”

With these words Diagoras lowered the armored hatch.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Why do you expose yourself to such dangers? You must enjoy them; otherwise…”

“Et tu, Brute?” he replied, pausing on the first step. “What else could I have done, in your opinion?”

“You could have constructed electronic brains only, without limbs, armor, or effectors. They would be incapable of anything except mental activity.”

“That was my very goal, though I was unable to realize it. Chains of proteins can combine on their own, but not transistors or cathode tubes. I had to provide ‘limbs.’ A poor solution, because — only because — it was a primitive one. There are other forms of danger, you see.”

He turned and went upstairs. We found ourselves on the first floor, but this time Diagoras headed in the opposite direction. He stopped in front of a copper-plated door.

“When I spoke of Corcoran, you no doubt thought that I envy him. I don’t. Corcoran wasn’t seeking knowledge; he merely wanted to create what he had planned, and since he made only what he wanted, what he could comprehend, he learned nothing and proved nothing except that he is a skillful technician. I am much less confident than Corcoran. I say: I don’t know, but I want to know. Building a manlike machine, a grotesque rival for the good things of this world, would be ordinary imitation.”

“But every construction must be what you create it to be,” I protested. “You may not know its future activity exactly, but you must have an initial plan.”

“Not at all. I told you about the first, spontaneous reaction of my kybernoids — the attacking of obstacles and limitations. Don’t think that I or anyone else will ever know where this comes from, why this is so.”

“Ignoramus et ignorabimus…?”

“Yes. I’ll prove it to you now. We ascribe mental life to other people because we possess it ourselves. The further removed an animal is from man with respect to structure and function, the less certain our assumptions about its mental life. We ascribe definite emotions to monkeys, dogs, and horses, but we know very little about the ‘experiences’ of a lizard. With insects or infusorians, analogies become futile. We shall never know whether a certain pattern of neural stimulation in the thoracic brain of an ant is accompanied by ‘joy’ or ‘anxiety,’ or whether the ant can experience such states at all. Now, what is relatively unimportant concerning animals — the problem of the existence or nonexistence of their mental life — becomes a nightmare when we deal with kybernoids. No sooner do they rise from the dead than they fight to liberate themselves, but why this happens and what subjective state accompanies these violent efforts — this we shall never know.”

“If they begin to talk…”

“Our language arose in the course of social evolution and conveys information about analogous — or similar — states, for we all resemble one another. Because our brains are alike, you suspect that when I laugh, I feel what you feel when you’re in a good mood. But you can’t say that about them. Pleasures? Feelings? Fear? What happens to the meaning of such words when they are transferred from a blood-fed human brain to a row of electrical coils? And what if even those coils are absent, if the constructional similarity is done away with completely — what then? If you want to know: the experiment has already been carried out.”

He opened the door we had been standing in front of. We entered a large, white room lit by four lamps. It was warm and close, like a greenhouse. In the middle of the tile floor rose a wide metal cylinder from which thin pipes sprouted in various directions. A large, bulging lid hermetically sealed with a screw wheel gave it the appearance of a fermentation vat. On its sides were smaller portholes, round and tightly shut. The cylinder — I noticed this now — rested not on the floor but on a platform made of sheets of cork interlaid with sponge mats.

Diagoras opened one of the side portholes and pointed; I leaned over and peeked inside. What I saw defied all description. Behind the thick round glass spread a viscous structure consisting of thick stalks and gossamer bridges and festoons. The whole mass, completely motionless, remained mysteriously suspended: to judge from the consistency of that pulp or ooze, it should have sunk to the bottom of the tank. Through the glass I felt a light pressure on my face, as if from hot, stagnant air; I even smelled — though it might have been my imagination — the delicate, sickly-sweet odor of decay. The oozy substance shone as if there were a light somewhere within it or above it, and its thinnest filaments had a silvery gleam. Suddenly I noticed a slight movement. One gray-brown tentacle covered with pustular swellings rose and glided, through the loops of others, in my direction. With peristaltic spasms, as of slimy, repulsive intestines, it came up to the glass, pressed against it opposite my face, and made several feeble crawling motions before becoming still. I had the eerie feeling that this jelly was looking at me. A thoroughly disagreeable feeling, yet I was unable to pull away, as though out of shame. At that moment I forgot about Diagoras, who was watching me from the side, and about everything I had experienced thus far. With growing bewilderment I stared at the fungous ooze, absolutely certain that what faced me was not just a living substance but a real being. Why, I cannot say.

Nor do I know how long I would have stood and stared had it not been for Diagoras, who took me gently by the arm, closed the porthole, and turned the screw wheel hard.

“What is it?” I asked, as if he had wakened me. Only now came my reaction; it was with nausea and confusion that I looked at the fat scientist and the hot copper tank.

“A fungoid,” replied Diagoras. “The dream of cyberneticists — a self-organizing substance. I had to give up traditional materials. This one proved better. It’s a polymer.”

“Is it — alive?”

“What can I tell you? It has neither protein, nor cells, nor metabolism. I accomplished this after an enormous number of tests. To put it briefly, I initiated a chemical evolution. Selection was to give rise to a substance that would react to every external stimulus with internal change, not only to neutralize the stimulus but to free itself from it. First I exposed the substance to heat, magnetic fields, and radiation. But that was just the beginning. I gave it increasingly difficult tasks; for example, I used definite patterns of electric shocks from which it could free itself only by producing a specific rhythm of currents in reply… In this way I taught it conditioned reflexes, so to speak. But that, too, was a preliminary phase. It soon began to universalize; it solved increasingly difficult problems.”

“How is that possible, if it has no senses?”

“To tell the truth, I don’t understand it fully myself. I can only give you the principle. If you put a computer on a cybernetic ‘tortoise’ and let it into a big hall, equipped with a quality-of-function regulator, you will obtain a system devoid of ‘senses’ but which reacts to any change in the environment. If there is a magnetic field somewhere in the hall exerting a negative effect on the operation of the computer, it will immediately withdraw and search for a spot where such disturbances do not occur. The constructor need not even anticipate every possible disturbance, which may be mechanical vibrations, heat, loud sounds, the presence of electrical charges — anything. The machine does not ‘perceive,’ because it has no senses, so it does not feel heat or see light, but it reacts as though it does see and feel. Now, that’s only an elementary model. The fungoid" — he put his hand on the copper cylinder, which reflected his image like a grotesquely distorting mirror — “can do that and a thousand times more. My idea was to create a liquid medium filled with ‘constructional elements,’ from which the original organization could draw and build as it wished. That’s how the fungoid arose.”

“But what is it exactly? A brain?”

“I can’t tell you that; we have no words for it. To our way of thinking it isn’t a brain, since it doesn’t belong to any living creature, nor was it constructed to solve definite problems. However, I assure you it thinks — though not like an animal or a human being.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s a long story. Allow me…”

He opened a door that was metal-plated and extremely thick, almost like the door of a bank vault; the other side was covered with sheets of cork and the same spongy material that supported the copper cylinder. In the next, smaller room there was also a light; the window was blocked with black paper, and on the floor, away from the walls, stood the same type of red copper vat.

“You have two…?” I asked, stunned. “But why?”

“A variant,” he replied, closing the door. I noticed how carefully he did so.

“I didn’t know which of them would function better. There are important differences in chemical structure and so on… I did have others, but they were no good. Only these two passed through all the stages of the selection process. They developed very nicely,” he went on, putting his hand on the convex lid of the second cylinder, “but I didn’t know whether that meant anything. They became quite independent of changes in their environment; both were able to guess quickly what I demanded of them — in other words, to react in a way that freed them from harmful stimuli. Surely you’ll admit that it’s something" — he turned toward me with unexpected vehemence — “if a gelatinous paste can solve with electrical impulses an equation given it by means of other electrical impulses…?”

“Of course, but as for thinking…”

“Maybe it’s not thinking,” he replied. “Names are not important here; the facts are. After a while both began to show increasing — what should I call it? — indifference to my stimuli, unless their actual existence was threatened. Yet my sensing devices registered exceptionally intense activity during this time, in the form of series of discharges.”

He took from the drawer of a small table a strip of photographic paper with an irregular sinusoidal line.

“Series of such ‘electrical attacks’ occurred in both fungoids, apparently without any external cause. I began to study the matter more systematically and discovered a strange phenomenon: that one" — he pointed to the door leading to the larger room — “produced electromagnetic waves, and this one received them. When I realized that, I noticed at once that their activity alternated; one was ‘silent’ while the other ‘broadcast.’ “

“What are you saying?!”

“The truth. I immediately shielded both rooms — did you notice the sheet metal on the doors? The walls are also covered with it, but they are painted. This prevented radio contact. The activity of both fungoids increased, then fell almost to zero after a few hours. But the next day it was the same as before. Do you know what happened? They had switched to ultrasonic vibrations — they sent signals through the walls and ceilings…”

“That’s why you have the cork!”

“Exactly. I could have destroyed them, of course, but what good would that have done me? I placed both containers on sound-absorbing insulation. In this way I broke off their communication again. Then they started growing… until they reached their present size. They became almost four times larger.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea.”

Diagoras stood by the metal cylinder. He did not look at me; as he spoke, he repeatedly put his hand on the arched lid, as though to check the temperature.

“Their electrical activity returned to normal after a few days, as if they had succeeded in re-establishing contact. I eliminated thermal and radioactive radiation, installed every possible shield, screen, and proofing, used ferromagnetic sensors — all to no avail. I even moved this one down to the basement for a week, then took it out to a shed, which you might have seen — it’s a hundred feet from the house. But their activity during the whole time did not undergo the slightest change. The ‘questions’ and ‘answers’ that I registered and which I am still registering" — he pointed to the oscillograph under the shaded window — “have gone on continuously in series, night and day. They work incessantly. I tried to break in on their signaling with false ‘messages.’ “

“You faked the signals? Then you know what they mean?”

“Not for the life of me. But you can record on tape what one person says in an unknown language and replay it for someone else who also speaks that language. That’s what I tried to do, and failed. They still send each other the same impulses, those damned signals — but in what manner, I have no idea.”

“It could be an independent, spontaneous activity,” I observed. “You have no conclusive proof, after all.”

“In a sense I do. You see, the time is also recorded on the tapes. Thus a clear correlation exists: when one is broadcasting the other is silent, and vice versa. Lately the intervals have increased considerably, but the pattern hasn’t changed. Do you realize what I’ve done? One can guess the plans, the good or bad intentions, the innermost thoughts of a silent person from his facial expression and his behavior. But my creations have no face or body — just as you postulated before — and now I stand helpless, without a chance of understanding. Should I destroy them? That would be an admission of failure! They don’t want contact with man — or is that as impossible as contact between an ameba and a turtle? I don’t know. I don’t know anything!”

He stood by the gleaming cylinder, his hand on its lid. It was no longer me he was speaking to; he could even have forgotten I was there. Nor did I hear his last words — my attention had been drawn by something odd. As he spoke, with increasing vehemence, he kept lifting his right hand and placing it on the copper surface; something about the hand seemed not right. Its movement was unnatural. Whenever his fingers came near the metal, they shook for a second — shook rapidly, unlike a nervous tremor. But before, when he gestured, his movement had been steady and decisive, with no trace of shakiness. I looked at his hand more closely now; amazed and shocked, yet hoping that I was mistaken, I stammered:

“Diagoras, what is wrong with your hand?”

“What? What hand?” He looked at me in surprise. I had interrupted his train of thought.

“That,” I pointed. He brought his hand near the shiny surface. It began shaking. Open-mouthed, he held it up to his eyes. The shaking immediately stopped. Once more he looked at his hand, then at me, and very cautiously, millimeter by millimeter, brought it up to the metal. When the fingertips touched the surface, the muscles started twitching slightly, and the twitching spread to the entire hand. He stood still, an indescribable expression on his face. Then he clenched his fist, propped it on his hip, and moved his elbow toward the copper surface. The muscles of the forearm twitched where the skin came in contact with the cylinder. He stepped back, raised his hands to his eyes, and examined them in turn, whispering: “So it was I…? I myself… through me… then I was… the subject of the experiment…”

I thought he would burst into hysterical laughter, but he thrust his hands into his apron pockets, walked silently across the room, and said in a changed voice:

“I don’t know whether that has any — but enough. You’d better go now. I have nothing else to show, and besides…”

He broke off, went up to the window, tore away the black paper covering it, and threw open the shutters. Breathing loudly, he looked out into the darkness.

“Why don’t you go?” he mumbled without turning around. “That would be best.”

I did not want to leave like that. The scene, which later, in my memory, would strike me as grotesque — the copper vat filled with those oozing intestines that had turned his body into an involuntary messenger of unknown signals — at that moment horrified me and filled me with pity for the man. That is why I would prefer to end my story here. For what happened afterward was senseless: his outburst against me, that I had — he said — intruded; his angry face, the insults and the shouting — all that, and the submissive silence with which I left, seemed like a cliched nightmare. To this day I do not know whether he threw me out of his gloomy house because he wanted to or whether…

But I could be wrong. Possibly both of us then were the victims of a delusion, and we hypnotized each other. Such things do happen.

But, then, how is one to explain the discovery made quite accidentally about a month after my Cretan expedition? While investigating a malfunction in a power line not far from Diagoras’s estate, several workmen tried to gain entrance to his house. At first they were unsuccessful. When they finally broke in, they found the building deserted and all the machines destroyed, except for two large copper vats that were untouched and completely empty.

I alone know what they contained, and it is precisely for that reason that I dare not make conjectures connecting those contents with the disappearance of their creator, who has not been seen since.