Other Times, Other Worlds

The Mechanical Answer

Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1948.

A suggestion on the problem of a true thinking — not simply calculating — machine. And a suggestion, too, that not even the ultimate thinking machine can answer the most fundamental of human questions!

Jane Kayden, the traces of dried tears on her pretty face, said, in a hopeless tone for the hundredth time, “But why does it have to be you, Joe?”

Joseph Kayden, Director of Automatic 81, paced back and forth through the room of their apartment that they called the Main Lounge. After they were married, when permission was given for Jane to live on the premises at Automatic 81, she had designed the apartment. Automatic 81 was in the Mesilla Valley, eighteen miles from Albuquerque.

The two opposite walls of the Main Lounge were of clear glass. One wall looked out across the valley. The other looked out across the vast production floor of Automatic 81, where the humming machine tools fabricated the portable tele sets. Automatic 81 was a nearly average government facility, with all unloading and sorting of incoming raw materials, all intraplant transportation of semi-fabricated and completed parts, all assembly and all inspection, all packing and labeling accomplished by the prehensile steel fingers of automatic equipment. Joe Kayden, lean and moody, was the director and only employee.

On the end wall was the warning panel. With any break down, a buzzer and flashing lights indicated the department and the specific piece of equipment. That portion of operations dependent on the breakdown stopped automatically until the production break was repaired. Kayden was responsible for the complete operation and maintenance. Each month his production quota figures were radioed from Washington and he adjusted his production to fit the quota.

He stopped by her chair and looked down at her, his bleak look softening. “Honey, I can’t say no. The government spent eight years and a lot of money filling my thick head with electronics, quantum mechanics and what all. I’m their boy and when they say jump, Joe jumps.”

“I know all that, Joe. I know that you can’t quit. But why do they have to pick you? They’ve got what they call their high-level people, the theorists and all. People all wound up in the philosophy of mathematics. You’re one of the workers. Why does it have to be you?”

He held his hands out in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. But I can make a guess. They’ve been appropriated two hundred million a year for the past four years on the project and they aren’t getting anywhere. So I guess that some congressman has told them to bring in one of the practical boys from the Department of Civilian Production. They picked me.”

“Out of over two hundred men they picked you? Why, Joe? Why?”

“Because I’ve never missed a quota. Because I’ve cut the warning board down to less lights than any other outfit. Because I rigged up a new standby system and because I shifted more maintenance over to automatic equipment than anybody else. They just stuck the two hundred and something cards in the sorter and sorted for the guy with the most practical imagination and the best ratio of accomplishment. My card dropped out. So they called me up and said, ‘Come on down here to Poughkeepsie, Joseph, and take over the Thinking Machine.’ ”

Out of the midst of her distress, she looked at him proudly and said, “You have done a good job, Joe.”

He kicked a small stool closer to her chair, sat on it and took her hand. “Here is the big trouble, Jane. They don’t know it and I don’t think you do either. But by myself I couldn’t have done these things. You’re the guy who has... what do they say?... given me pause to think. You don’t know a thing about production or about electronics, honey, but you’ve got a terrific quotient of horse sense. You’ve made me see things about this place I’d never have seen by myself. The board is small now because you did so much griping about how much of my time answering the board took. Remember all the times you’ve started a sentence with, ‘Why don’t you—?’ ”

“Yes, but—”

“You’ve brought the simple outlook of a child to this problem and all I’ve ever done is take your direct ideas and put them into shape. They don’t want me, they want us.”

She brightened visibly. “Then why can’t—”

“No. They won’t do it. They’ve surrounded the whole project with a batch of phony secrecy. Back in the days when it was called a Project to Develop a Selective Mechanical, Numerical, Semantic and Psychic Integrator and Calculator, we could have both gone on the job. But then, after the press got hold of it and labeled it the Thinking Machine and stated that in the field of warfare it would give better, quicker answers than any General Staff, the War Department made it Top Secret and that’s the way it stands. For you it would be no soap.”

The quick tears came again. “Joe, I’ll be so lonesome!”

“So will I,” he said quietly.

“And I’ll be afraid, Joe, darling. Remember when you met Toby Wanderer in El Paso? Remember what he said?”

Kayden nodded. He remembered. Toby had just been fired from the Thinking Machine Project. Not fired, really, but retired with a pension for life. Poor Toby. Toby had got a bit tight and talked more than he should have. He talked about the tremendous strain of the Project, of the strange mental breakdown of the men who worked on it. Something about a machine to duplicate the processes of the human mind. When Toby had cracked the first time, they had given him shock treatments and put him back to work. Finally the interval between the necessary shock treatments grew too small and Toby was given his pension. Toby had cursed the Project with cold fury and said that it was impossible — that the most they’d ever accomplish was a machine which could duplicate the mental processes of a four-year-old child, emotionally unstable, with a limited I.Q. for its years.

Unfortunately Joseph Kayden had told Jane the entire story, never believing for a moment that he would be selected to join the Project, that political expediency would result in his being placed in charge. It was obvious to him that his appointment had been made out of desperation.

“Will you be able to write me?” Jane asked.

“Probably. With censorship. And out of the goodness of their heart they give me two days chaperoned leave every two months.”

It was time to leave. The shuttle aircraft was due. Joe packed moodily while Jane wept some more. The shuttle would bring the new man for Automatic 81. He’d live outside until Jane could find a place to move their possessions to.

At last he was packed and they stood, his arms tight around her, her fair hair brushing his cheek. He whispered, “I’ll probably make a blob of it, honey, and they’ll boot me out quickly. To keep yourself busy, why don’t you brush up on your neurology and psychiatry?”

When he kissed her, her lips tasted of salt. His last look at her was from fifteen hundred feet. She was a forlorn figure, standing out on the patio, waving listlessly.

He was a pale man, almost luminous in his pallor, and he announced himself as Roger Wald, Kayden’s Executive Assistant. Wald flapped his pale hands and Kayden thought that he looked as though his face was of moonstone dust, held together with luminous putty.

“How long have you been on the job here, Wald?”

“Oh, over two years. I’ve been the assistant to some very great men and—”

Kayden grinned. “Yeah. And now you’re the assistant to a guy with grease under his fingernails. Buck up, Roger. I brush my teeth and everything.”

Wald flapped his gray hands some more. “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that—”

“Skip it, Roger. You just keep telling me the score and we’ll get along fine. Is this my room?” Wald had led him into a small plaster cubicle containing one single bed, a chair, a bureau and a glass ash tray.

“Yes, it is. I admit it’s a bit bleak, Mr. Kayden—”

“Call me Joe, please.”

“Yes sir. The room is bleak. They all are. Dr. Mundreath who was in charge three years ago felt that there should be no distractions, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. Let me check this. I’m in charge?”

“Oh, yes sir.”

“Then your first job, Roger, is to get me a suite of rooms. I want luxury on a Sybarite scale. I want rooms with music, tele sets, wine lists and everything but beautiful hostesses. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now show me the production setup, the labs and all.”

The Project was housed in a series of long, one-story buildings surrounded by a high electrified wall. Interception rocket stations were set up in profusion in the surrounding countryside, the scanners revolving perpetually.

One building housed the best approach to a Thinking Machine that had been devised. The guard let them through the door and Kayden stopped dead. The main room was five hundred feet long and about eighty feet wide. All along the walls stood independent units of the machine. Each unit was plastered with switchboard panels, plug sockets and lamp indicators. Between the interstices of the panels showed an array of electronic tubes, circuit elements, relays.

Kayden looked at a small vehicle rolling smoothly across the floor. A uniformed girl sat in it and guided it. He recognized it as a massive variation of a master programming unit. The girl wheeled it up to one of the independent units against the wall, consulted a chart and plugged in the programming unit. The indicator lamps glowed and the girl took the tape that was ejected from the wall unit. She glanced at it, unplugged and wheeled away toward a far part of the room. He could see at least a dozen other master programming units. “What are they after?” he asked Wald.

“Test problem. With each improvement in the basic equipment, we run the same test problems through.”

“What’s the problem they’re working on now?”

Roger Wald beckoned to one of the girls on the vehicles. She stopped beside them, smiled prettily.

“Mr. Kayden, Miss Finch. Miss Finch, what is the test problem?”

“Chemical exchange separation method, Mr. Wald.”

The girl drove away on the silent wheels. Wald said: “We just feed the machine all the factors of a problem — i.e., to devise a simple way of preparing carbon-13 compounds. We know the answer, of course. Other test questions concern other fields — rules of harmonics, heat radiation and so forth.”

They walked into the room and, as Kayden looked more closely at the independent units, he began to see the point of approach to the problem. He said, “Give me a short statement of the reasons for failure.”

Roger Wald bit his lip. “My training... I’d better get Dr. Zander for you. He’s in charge of testing and analysis of results. We’ll go to his office.”

Zander was a man constructed of overlapping pink spheres. His face was covered with a constant dew of perspiration. He had the build, the complexion and the blue eyes to go with what should have been an amiable disposition. But his small mouth was an upside down U of sourness, his eyes were smothered bits of blue glass and his voice was a nasal whine. He looked at Kayden with what could have been contempt. Kayden sat and Wald stood on the opposite side of Zander’s paper-littered desk.

“So! You’re the new director,” Zander said.

“Right. Glad to know you, Dr. Zander. I’ve heard about you. Suppose you give me a brief on the present difficulties.”

“You want it in layman’s language?”

Kayden smiled with his lips alone. “I think I can struggle through the big words with you, Doc.”

Zander frowned and put his fat fingertips together, stared at Kayden through the puffy arch. “History first. By 1953 the Electronic Mechanical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator was carried to a point of development where it could solve any problem given to it in the mathematical field, provided the automatic sequencing was fed to it on a paper tape or punch cards. Iconoscopes were set up to act as accumulators to expand the memory factor, and calculations were put on the binary obviating the use of digits two through nine.

“With the first appropriation to develop a Thinking Machine, as it is called by the layman, our problem was to switch from mathematics to semantics. In other words, instead of absolute figures, we had to change over to the fuzzy values of words and phrases. Instead of asking for the cube root to ten thousand places of minus two, we had to ask it what happens when a cat is shot through the head and have it answer that the cat dies. As simple as that.

“To make the changeover, we had to select a language for it. We selected English and took out all variations which add little or nothing to connotation. We gave each sound a numerical value, and combined the numerical values into words. Then, into the expanded memory factor, we fed thousands of truisms. Naturally, with number-sound valuation, each truism became a formula... an equation. Assume that we had fed into the memory factor the phrase, ‘Roses are red.’ The machine tucks it away as a numerical formula. Then we ask the machine, ‘What color are roses?’ It translates the question into an open-ended formula, digs into the memory chamber and says back to us, ‘Roses are red.’

“Now we can ask a question based on any truism or proven statement that we have fed the machine, and we get the answer. We get it either written or spoken, though I personally consider the vocal attachments to be more toys than anything practical. The voice makes an impression on distinguished visitors, particularly when we permit the visitor to ask his own question. It is embarrassing when the question concerns a statement not previously fed to the memory factor. One congressman asked when his mother would die. The machine gave him a detailed definition of the word mother and a physiological explanation of the meaning of death — what happens when death occurs.

“The next step was to teach the machine basic differentiations. We selected a quality — such as calorie content. Then we stored in the memory factor a complete list of caloric ratings of food. Now, if you ask it the calorie rating of a given food, it will answer, or if you ask it which of two foods has the highest rating, it will select the proper answer. We have fed the machine eighty thousand differentiation lists covering eighty thousand different methods of grading myriad items.

“In addition,” he continued, “we have read to it philosophical concepts, records of phenomena, all types of data and information. At the present time we have a superabundance of response. Should you feed it just one word, such as ‘steel’ or ‘indigestion’ the machine will give you several volumes of data.”

Kayden nodded. “All you’ve done, in other words, is build yourself an automatic library.”

Zander’s eyes widened and narrowed quickly. “You are perceptive, Mr. Kayden. In effect, that is what we have. As yet we have no indication of the least creative impulse in the equipment, or how to initiate it. We have had hopes. At one time, in answering an astronomy question the machine faltered and then wrote, ‘The moon is ardium.’ We were excited and we speculated about new elements, until we discovered that it was merely a partial short in the wiring that had escaped the specialized equipment we have built for the sole purpose of diagnostics and repair.”

“And what is the current program?”

“We are feeding the machine more data each day. Each day we expand the memory factor. Our present theory is that eventually, under the pure mass of data given it, the machine itself will break down. Psychoneurosis on a mechanical plane if you will. The place and manner of the breakdown may in itself stimulate us to provide it with some form of intellectual selectivity.” He smiled woodenly. “We would all be very happy if the last words of the machine were, ‘The hell with it!’ ”

“But you keep giving it these problems.”

“Quite right. The problems are our control. So long as the machine merely repeats back to man what man has fed into it, it will be a failure. So far, that is all that it does. The problems are our continual check to see if by any chance the machine has struck on any creative method.”

“If the creative method isn’t built into it, how do you expect it to acquire it?”

Zander’s smile was broader. “That, my young friend, was the problem which stopped your predecessor. And now it is your problem. If you want to come with me, I’ll show you the mechanics of the machine.”

Kayden rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “No thanks. I’ll look at the woods from a distance and climb the individual trees later. I want some time to think about it.” Zander stood up, smirked. “What are your orders, sir?”

Joseph Kayden looked at him in irritation. “Follow existing orders until they’re countermanded.”

Zander sighed, smiled in a superior fashion and picking up some papers from his desk began to work.

Outside Roger Wald said, “He... he’s a bit peculiar, Mr... I mean... Joe.”

“O.K. I’m going to wander around. You get me fixed up with something to live in besides that shoebox with running water.” Wald hurried off.

Kayden wandered around. He talked to watchmen, electricians, lab assistants, cooks, janitors. At six he was back in his room with his mind full of figures. Nearly nine hundred people lived and worked within the Project Area. Since its inception, the Project had used up over nine hundred millions. There was little chance of a complete cancellation of the Project, as no politician would be willing to take the chance of saying to the people that all that had gone before was a dead loss.

He sat on his bed and stared out the window at the low, pale buildings. Someone had told him that he had an office, but he was too discouraged to even find it. Probably a secretary or two went with the office. “What are your orders, Mr. Kayden? What are you going to do next, Mr. Kayden?”

Roger Wald came at six, eager and breathless. “Your place is ready, Mr. Kayden. I ordered a complete prefab, entirely equipped. The crew has offloaded it at the north end of the area.” Wald had one of the little cars used within the Project area waiting and he helped Joseph Kayden with his luggage.

The pre-fab was small, but luxurious. Kayden felt better as soon as he walked in. He said, “All I need now is Jane.”

“Jane?” Wald asked politely.

“My wife.”

“Oh, of course. Too bad she isn’t permitted.”

“I’d like to take a run down to New York and get stinking,” Kayden said wistfully.

Wald flapped his pale hands. “That isn’t allowed either.”

Wald had dinner brought to the prefab and they ate together. After dinner he sat in front of the synthetic fire, after shooing Wald away, and began smoking jittery cigarettes.

“Jail,” he muttered. “Prison! What am I accused of, judge? Joe Kayden, head of the Automatic Mechanical Library of Nonessential Information. I’d like to kick Zander’s fat head. What do they expect me to do? Hide inside the machine and give the right answers?”

He walked nervously back and forth through the rooms, kicking petulantly at the furniture, scowling at the rugs. Jane might have a plan. Any plan. The whole thing seems wrong. The wrong slant. The wrong angle. A machine that thinks. What is thinking? Got to get basic about it. Very basic. They’re too loaded up with tubes and connections. Need Jane around.

Slowly he felt the pressure of responsibility settling over him. Kayden, the fall guy. The stooge. When would he see Jane? Two months. And then it wouldn’t be like being with her. Chaperoned!

He left the prefab and started to walk. The area was brilliantly floodlighted. After sixty steps a guard stopped him and sent him home. He told the guard that he was in charge of the place, but the guard rested a hand lightly on the deadly air gun and said that no exceptions were made and that the guard detail answered to the War Department, not to the Head of Project.

Two weeks later and twelve pounds lighter, Joe Kayden sat at his big desk in the executive offices and wrote his fifth letter to Jane. It was the third time he had written the same letter. The first two versions had been returned because of matters touched on which concerned the Project. Jane’s letters to him carried so little real news that he suspected that she was having the same trouble, but, of course, would not be permitted to say so in a letter.

She was living in El Paso, where she had found an apartment, and she missed him and she was looking forward to seeing him in New York when he got his first leave.

He puzzled over his letter, trying to find some acceptable way of telling her that he was getting no place on the Project. He watched the shaking of his own hands as he lit another cigarette. He wondered how long he would last — whether it would be better to fake a mental upset as soon as possible. But the thought of the shock treatments scared him. There might be a subsequent personality change which would alienate Jane.

At last he wrote, “I’m very, very happy here, and things are going very, very well. I’m as happy as I told you I’d be when we parted.”

The next morning he had her answer. “Darling, I’m so glad that you’re happy,” she wrote. And then she ignored the entire matter. She babbled away about how she felt that her letters were probably “engramatical,” about how she had played tennis and that the girl she met kept putting “lobes” over her head, about how she was enjoying the “frontal” apartment, about a new three-di movie she had seen about a “Woman of Syn,” about how she had been looking over some of her old school “thesis.”

He felt a quick wave of pity. Jane was trying so hard to be gay in her letters, but he could see that she was going to pieces. Her spelling was usually perfect. He shoved her letter into the top drawer of the desk, and sat, brooding, cursing the fate that had stuck him into the Project.

After lunch he reread her letter. Its absurdity struck him again. Surely Jane knew how to spell “sin.” Jane had a fine neurological education and had had two years of advanced psychiatric nursing.

As he read the letter he took a pencil and circled the obvious errors in spelling. Wald came in and said, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, the wife wrote me and I think she’s going to pieces. Look at the mistakes.”

Wald picked the letter up and glanced at the circled words. He frowned. “Joe, does she know any neurology?”

“Why, yes! Why?”

“Look at this. Engram. Know what this is? A lasting trace left in an organism by psychic experience. And look at this! Frontal. And over here is lobe. Add syn to thesis and you have synthesis. Hey, this is a code, Mr. Kayden!”

Joe snatched the letter. “What?”

“I’ll have to report this to security, Joe.”

Kayden glanced up at him. There was no trace of expression on Roger Wald’s gray face. “You will?”

“Certainly. I’m going to write a detailed report. I certainly hope I won’t forget to send it over to them. Would you like me to get you a good text on neurology?”

Kayden saw the flicker in the gray eyes. He grinned. “You’re O.K., Roger. Yes. Get me a text.”

At three in the morning, Kayden finished the book and tossed it aside, turned out his light. But he couldn’t sleep. Jane had been the first one to make sense. She had guided him to the heart of the problem. A mechanical approach to thinking. When he did fall asleep, it was to dream of her.

Dr. Zander stood up behind his desk and said firmly: “It is unthinkable, Mr. Kayden! An absurdity!”

“You just work here, Doc. I know what I want.”

“You want to run a kindergarten, yes?”

“Possibly. I said to turn off the juice to all your gimmicks. Now listen to what I have to say. What are the two processes in the human mind that we’re trying to duplicate? We’re trying to build engrams, habitual pathways through the mind. Also, we’re trying to create a process of synthesis. Do you agree?”

Zander sat down and said, sullenly: “If you say so, Mr. Kayden.”

Kayden suddenly leaned across the desk and fluttered a paper out of the line of Zander’s vision. Zander turned his head quickly.

“You see what you did? When you saw motion out of the corner of your eye, your nerves told the muscles of your neck to turn your head. You didn’t think about it. That’s an engram, an habitual pattern a mile wide. It would take conscious and hard thought to keep you from turning your head. Does an infant? No. The engram is developed. Listen to me — and stop acting so sullen and superior.

“Take synthesis. In cases of anxiety neurosis, the patient can make no decisions. He thinks of all possible eventualities and they frighten him. Some psychopaths think of no related fact except the one they have in their mind at the moment. In the first place, there is too much synthesis. In the second place there is too little.

“Combine those two factors. Suppose you had a machine into which you built, through varying strengths of electrical current across a field, varying factors of resistance, the faculty of being able to find a path of least resistance depending on the circuit where the electrical impulse started. If your chemists could devise some sort of molecular memory factor, you would have a continually decreasing resistance across this hypothetical field for certain standard questions. In other words, engrams! Don’t you see? Habitual thought patterns! Any new item would have to find its own way across, but the old ones would have an established channel.”

Zander looked faintly interested. He said: “I think I see what you mean, but—”

“Now add the quality of synthesis. I can think of one way to do it. Use a shifting ratio. Each fact stored in the machine’s memory is given a ratio number. Through a sliding value scale, you can alter the ratio numbers in the same way that they affect the problem at hand. For example, the machine may know something about rabbits. If the question you ask the machine, the task you set for it, concerns the orbit of Uranus, then rabbits would get a ratio number of zero. If you’re talking about waltzing mice, rabbits might have a distant bearing and get a very small ratio number. If you’re talking about lettuce, rabbits might have a high ratio number. You people should be able to figure out some method of making the ratio numbers plus and minus. Then, in effect, the machine could add up the pro side, the con side, and arrive at a decision. The decision arrived at would set up the beginning of an habitual pattern across this field I was talking about, thus eliminating some of the processes when a related question is asked. Tell me this, Zander: Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Zander examined his pink, dimpled knuckles. “In a way, I do. It is... is very new, yes? Hard to adjust oneself.”

“Natürlich, my friend. But if your technicians can work it out, it would be beautiful. Just imagine. With any question asked of it, the machine would be able to call on all the vast stored knowledge of the ages, go through the weighing motions, and come up with an unemotional answer. That would be creative thought, because the new is always born from the old. We even had the wrong slant on creativeness. There isn’t any such thing. It’s all a question of engrams and synthesis.”

Zander said, “So for this... for this dream of yours, you want everything we are doing scrapped? You want us to start from scratch with nothing but our developments in memory storage facility?”

“I want you to do just that.”

“You have my verbal resignation. I’ll confirm it.”

Kayden leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling. He said softly, “Citizens of North America. Today Dr. Artur Zander resigned from the Thinking Machine Project. Joseph Kayden, in charge of the Project, has announced that, with success in sight, Dr. Zander resigned because of petty jealousy, because he didn’t wish to take orders from a man with fewer degrees than he has. Dr. Zander attempted to refute this statement, but in view of the record of failure of the Project during the time that Dr. Zander—”

“Wait, Mr. Kayden. I have been thinking, and possibly there is more in what you suggest than I at first realized and I would—”

Kayden grinned at him, “Doc, I don’t want to force you. I want you to work for me because you want to work for me. How about it? I’ll let you resign and I won’t say one little word. Of course, it’ll be tough for me trying to bumble along with men who don’t have your background.”

For the first time, Zander gave him an almost human smile. “I stay.”

Eleven weeks later Wald stood in Kayden’s office saying, “Joe, why don’t you go down on the floor. They should be running the first test. They were hooking up when I went by.”

“Why should I?” Kayden snarled. “If it works, a grateful government raises my pay and keeps me on the stinking job of managing the monster. If it doesn’t work, I’m stuck here until it does. Heads you win; tails I lose. Why don’t you go down?”

Kayden sat alone as dusk gradually misted the office, hazing the sharp edges of the furniture, obscuring the picture of Jane on his desk.

The door opened and Dr. Zander walked in. He didn’t say a word. He stood in front of the desk. Kayden switched on the light and saw to his surprise that tears were running down Zander’s cheeks.

“So it didn’t work,” he said dully.

In a monotone, Zander said: “The first question asked was: ‘What hath God wrought?’ The answer was vocal. After a few seconds it said: ‘There is no adequate definition of God except that He must exist in the spirits of men, in their hearts and minds. Man, this day, has completed a machine, a device, which, in its mechanical wisdom, well help Man to clarify and explain his environment. But the machine will never supplant the mind of Man. The machine exists because of Man. It is an extension of the inquisitive spirit of Man. Thus, in one sense, it can be said that God, as the spirit of Man, has builded for His use a device to probe the infinite.’ ”

Kayden couldn’t speak. He licked his dry lips.

“Some of them screamed and ran from the room. Some of them thought that it was a trick of some sort. To the rest of us the Machine is already a personality. And yet nothing that it said was emotional. It was factual. The question was asked. It dipped into its store of knowledge and came up with the simplest and most direct answer. The thing knew that it had been built. It knew that it existed. Its existence is a fact. Its own recognition of that fact is something that I hadn’t anticipated.”

Kayden suddenly saw how shaken Zander was. He came around the desk and took the older man’s arm, said gently: “Sit down, Artur. Let me get you a drink.”

Zander drained the glass in three quick gulps, set it on the corner of the desk and grinned up at Kayden. All of the man’s pretense was gone. He was humble. “You did it,” he said simply.

It brought back the sense of loss. “I didn’t do it,” Joseph said bitterly, “my wife did it. My wife that isn’t considered acceptable to come into this place.”

“You miss her, don’t you?” Zander said, his voice soft.

Kayden jumped up. “Now we’ve got to demonstrate this thing. I’ll get hold of our bevy of angels and we’ll give it a coming-out party. Make it for tomorrow afternoon, or the day after. You fix up a list of questions, Dr. Zander, and I’ll have Roger fix up the surroundings. Can we move the mike and the amplifier around? Good! We’ll wire it for the main assembly hall. Building K. And by the way, get the voice of the monster as deep as you can and slow it down a little. I want it to sound like one of the major prophets.”

At five o’clock the assembly hall was filled. The President of the United States of North America was present, as were two score of congressmen, a hundred scientists, dozens of minor officials. After Security had cleared the questions to be asked, the President was given permission to invite Ming, Dictator of the Federated States of Asia, as well as Follette, Ruler of Europe, and Captain Anderson, King of the States of Africa. South America was not represented.

Kayden sat with Roger Wald in the front row. At the appointed time, Dr. Zander walked out from the wings, turned and faced the men who sat in the audience — the men who ruled the world. A switch was turned on and a very faint hum permeated the air. All eyes were turned toward the immense amplifier that filled half the stage.

Zander faced the amplifier and said, into a small microphone: “What hath God wrought?”

In a slow voice of thunder the amplifier gave the answer that Kayden had heard in his office. He turned in his seat and looked at the faces of the men, saw there both fear and uncertainty — and a strange pride, as though each of them had had a hand in the making of the voice that spoke slowly to them.

“When will Man reach the stars?” Zander asked.

After a short silence, the Voice said: “It is possible now. All the necessary problems have been or can be solved with present methods. When sufficient money is given to research and development, space travel will become immediately possible.”

The next few questions concerned problems that the physicists had not yet solved. The machine answered two clearly and, on the third, said: “The synthesis of all available data does not provide sufficient basis for an answer as yet. But there is validity in the assumption that the solution will be found by experimentation with the fluorine atom.”

Kayden glanced at the list in his hand and saw that Zander had asked the last question. To his surprise he heard Zander say, “The development of the Thinking Machine has been a process surrounded with secrecy because of its possible use in warfare. Will the machine help in the event of a war between nations?”

During the long pause before the question was answered, a man jumped up and yelled, “Turn it off!” He was ignored. The representatives of the nations sat, tense and expectant.

The deep voice said: “The Thinking Machine will help in warfare only in so far as it is possible to utilize some of the scientific advances made possible by the Thinking Machine. However, this is not a valid assumption. Warfare should now become avoidable. All of the factors in any dispute can be given to the Machine and an unemotional fair answer can be rendered. The Machine should not be a secret. It should be duplicated a score of times and made available to all nations. Thus can disputes be avoided. The effort to enforce secrecy is barren effort. Secrecy in the case of the Machine accomplishes nothing.”

Zander turned and walked from the stage. The humming stopped suddenly. The assembly hall was silent. The rulers of nations looked at each other and in their eyes was a new promise of trust, of acceptance.

Roger Wald was whistling as he came into Kayden’s office. “The bans are lifted today,” he said happily. “Come and go as you please. O fine and happy day! When does Jane arrive?”

“At four.”

“Good. You’ll get cocktails at your place at four-thirty. I’ll have them sent over.”

Wald turned to go. “Wait a minute, Roger,” Kayden said. “I know I owe Zander for the fact that the security measures are done with, but what on earth ever got into him to ask that question?”

“Didn’t he ever tell you? He must be shy. He and I were working late on the setup, and just for the hell of it, he asked that question. You see, he and I had been talking about you and your busted home life. We liked the answer so well that he decided to use the question in front of all the folks.”

Wald left the office. Joseph Kayden glanced at his watch. Two-fifteen. Just one hundred and five more minutes. He walked into the silent, empty assembly hall and turned on the amplifier. He grinned and said into the mike: “Does she still love me?”

There were a few seconds of silence. Then the Machine boomed, with what was almost irritability: “Does who still love whom? The question must be specific.”