Part 5 (1/2)
”What?”
”Our side got a draw in that game.”
”Then the beam can't be on him. Are you sure . . .”
”It is! Look, here, the same indication we got last time. It's been on him the better part of an hour now, and getting stronger.”
The Commander stared in disbelief; but he knew and trusted his Second's ability. And the panel indications were convincing. He said: ”Then someone-or something-with no functioning mind is learning how to play a game, over there. Ha, ha,” he added, as if trying to remember how to laugh.
The berserker won another game. Another draw. Another win for the enemy. Then three drawn games in a row.
Once the Second Officer heard Del's voice ask coolly: ”Do you want to give up now?” On the next move he lost another game. But the following game ended in another draw. Del was plainly taking more time than his opponent to move, but not enough to make the enemy impatient.
”It's trying different modulations on the mind beam,” said the Second. ”And it's got the power turned way up.”
”Yeah,” said the Commander. Several times he had almost tried to radio Del, to say something that might seep the man's spirits up-and also to relieve his own feverish inactivity, and to try to find out what could possibly be going on. But he could not take the chance. Any interference might upset the miracle.
He could not believe the inexplicable success could last, even when the checker match turned gradually into an endless succession of drawn games between two perfect players. Hours ago the Commander had said good-bye to life and hope, and he still waited for the fatal moment.
And he waited.
”-not perish from the earth!” said Del Murray, and Newton's eager hands flew to loose his right arm from its shackle.
A game, unfinished on the little board before him, had been abandoned seconds earlier. The mind beam had been turned off at the same time, when Gizmo had burst into normal s.p.a.ce right in position and only five minutes late; and the berserker had been forced to turn all its energies to meet the immediate all-out attack of Gizmo and Foxglove.
Del saw his computers, recovering from the effect of the beam, lock his aiming screen onto the berserker's scarred and bulging midsection, as he shot his right arm forward, scattering pieces from the game board.
”Checkmate!” he roared out hoa.r.s.ely, and brought his fist down on the big red b.u.t.ton.
”I'm glad it didn't want to play chess,” Del said later, talking to the Commander in Foxglove's cabin. ”I could never have rigged that up.”
The ports were cleared now, and the men could look out at the cloud of expanding gas, still faintly luminous, that had been a berserker; metal fire-purged of the legacy of ancient evil.
But the Commander was watching Del. ”You got Newt to play by following diagrams, I see that. But how could he learn the game?”
Del grinned. ”He couldn't, but his toys could. Now wait before you slug me.” He called the aiyan to him and took a small box from the animal's hand. The box rattled faintly as he held it up. On the cover was pasted a diagram of one possible position in the simplified checker game, with a different-colored arrow indicating each possible move of Del's pieces.
”It took a couple of hundred of these boxes,” said Del. ”This one was in the group that Newt examined for the fourth move. When he found a box with a diagram matching the position on the board, he picked the box up, pulled out one of these beads from inside, without looking-that was the hardest part to teach him in a hurry, by the way,” said Del, demonstrating. ”Ah, this one's blue. That means, make the move indicated on the cover by a blue arrow. Now the orange arrow leads to a poor position, see?” Del shook all the beads out of the box into his hand. ”No orange beads left; there were six of each color when we started. But every time Newton drew a bead, he had orders to leave it out of the box until the game was over. Then, if the scoreboard indicated a loss for our side, he went back and threw away all the beads he had used. All the bad moves were gradually eliminated. In a few hours, Newt and his boxes learned to play the game perfectly.”
”Well,” said the Commander. He thought for a moment, then reached down to scratch Newton behind the ears. ”I never would have come up with that idea.”
”I should have thought of it sooner. The basic idea's a couple of centuries old. And computers are supposed to be my business.”
”This could be a big thing,” said the Commander. ”I mean your basic idea might be useful to any task force that has to face a berserker's mind beam.”
”Yeah.” Del grew reflective. ”Also . . .”
”What?”
”I was thinking of a guy I met once. Named Blankens.h.i.+p. I wonder if I could rig something up. . . .”
SOLAR PLEXUS.
by James Blish.
James Blish is a slender, quietly vehement man who qualifies as an authority on the poems of Ezra Pound, the operas of Richard Strauss, a number of sciences, and both the art and the science of writing science fiction. Formerly science editor for a large pharmaceutical company, he is now employed as an account executive for a public relations firm, in charge of promoting an a.s.sortment of controversial causes, and manages in his spare time to write first-rate science fiction and take part in amateur theatricals. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife, artist Judith Ann Lawrence, and an a.s.sortment of cats.
The story here is one of his earliest, first published in 1941, but substantially revised when it was reprinted eleven years later. It concerns an aspect of the man-machine relations.h.i.+p now frequently discussed: the cyborg, or ”cybernetic organism”-that is, the man as ma-chine, human brain joined to nonhuman equipment.
Brant Kittinger did not hear the alarm begin to ring. Indeed, it was only after a soft blow had jarred his free-floating observatory that he looked up in sudden awareness from the interferometer. Then the sound of the warning bell reached his consciousness.
Brant was an astronomer, not a s.p.a.ceman, but he knew that the h.e.l.l could mean nothing but the arrival of another s.h.i.+p in the vicinity. There would be no point in ringing a bell for a meteor-the thing could be through and past you during the first cycle of the clapper. Only an approaching s.h.i.+p would be likely to trip the detector, and it would have to be close.
A second dull jolt told him how close it was. The rasp of metal which followed, as the other s.h.i.+p slid along the side of his own, drove the fog of tensors completely from his brain. He dropped his pencil and straightened up.
His first thought was that his year in the orbit around the new trans-Plutonian planet was up, and that the Inst.i.tute's tug had arrived to tow him home, telescope and all. A glance at the clock rea.s.sured him at first, then puzzled him still further. He still had the better part of four months.
No commercial vessel, of course, could have wandered this far from the inner planets; and the UN's police cruisers didn't travel far outside the commercial lanes. Besides, it would have been impossible for anyone to find Brant's...o...b..tal observatory by accident.
He settled his gla.s.ses more firmly on his nose, clambered awkwardly backwards out of the prime focus chamber and down the wall net to the control desk on the observation floor. A quick glance over the boards revealed that there was a magnetic field of some strength nearby, one that didn't belong to the invisible gas giant revolving half a million miles away.
The strange s.h.i.+p was locked to him magnetically; it was an old s.h.i.+p, then, for that method of grappling had been discarded years ago as too hard on delicate instruments. And the strength of the field meant a big s.h.i.+p.
Too big. The only s.h.i.+p of that period that could mount generators that size, as far as Brant could remember, was the Cybernetics Foundation's Astrid. Brant could remember well the Foundation's regretful announcement that Murray Bennett had destroyed both himself and the Astrid rather than turn the s.h.i.+p in to some UN inspection team. It had happened only eight years ago. Some scandal or other ...
Well, who then?
He turned the radio on. Nothing came out of it. It was a simple transistor set tuned to the Inst.i.tute's frequency, and since the s.h.i.+p outside plainly did not belong to the Inst.i.tute, he had expected nothing else. Of course he had a photophone also, but it had been designed for communications over a reasonable distance, not for cheek-to-cheek whispers.
As an afterthought, he turned off the persistent alarm bell. At once another sound came through: a delicate, rhythmic tapping on the hull of the observatory. Someone wanted to get in.
He could think of no reason to refuse entrance, except for a vague and utterly unreasonable wonder as to whether or not the stranger was a friend. He had no enemies, and the notion that some outlaw might have happened upon him out here was ridiculous. Nevertheless, there was something about the anonymous, voiceless s.h.i.+p just outside which made him uneasy.
The gentle tapping stopped, and then began again, with an even, mechanical insistence. For a moment Brant wondered whether or not he should try to tear free with the observatory's few maneuvering rockets-but even should he win so uneven a struggle, he would throw the observatory out of the orbit where the Inst.i.tute expected to find it, and he was not astronaut enough to get it back there again.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
”All right,” he said irritably. He pushed the b.u.t.ton which set the airlock to cycling. The tapping stopped. He left the outer door open more than long enough for anyone to enter and push the b.u.t.ton in the lock which reversed the process; but nothing happened.
After what seemed to be a long wait, he pushed his b.u.t.ton again. The outer door closed, the pumps filled the chamber with air, the inner door swung open. No ghost drifted out of it; there was n.o.body in the lock at all.
Tap, tap. Tap, tap.
Absently he polished his gla.s.ses on his sleeve. If they didn't want to come into the observatory, they must want him to come out of it. That was possible: although the telescope had a Coude focus which allowed him to work in the s.h.i.+p's air most of the time, it was occasionally necessary for him to exhaust the dome, and for that purpose he had a s.p.a.ce suit. But be had never been outside the hull in it, and the thought alarmed him. Brant was n.o.body's s.p.a.ceman.