And he knew that he had never been closer to going mad in his life than he was right now.
Roger made an immense effort to recapture his sanity.
The dragon was no dragon. It was the Mars vehicle.
The apes were not apes. They were Brad and Don Kayman.
They were not threatening him. They had come all this way in the flint-cold Martian night to find him and help him.
He repeated the truths over and over, like a litany; but whatever he thought he was powerless to prevent what his arms and body did. They seized the chunk of rock; the body raised itself up; the arms threw the rock with exact precision into the headlight of the crawler.
The long tongue of frozen flame winked out.
The light from the million fiery stars was ample for Roger's senses, but it would be very little help to Brad and Don Kayman. He could see them (still gorilloid, still menacing of mien) stumbling at random; and he could feel what his body was doing.
It was creeping toward them.
"Don!" he shouted. "Watch out!" But the voice never left his skull.
This was insanity, he told himself. I have to stop!
He could not stop.
I know that's not an enemy! I don't really want to hurt them—
And he kept on advancing.
He was almost sure he could hear their voices now. So close, their transmitters would be deafening in his perceptions under normal conditions, without the intercession of the automatic volume control. Even cut off as he was, there was some spillage.
"—round here somewh—"
Yes! He could even make out words; and the voice, he was sure, had been Brad's.
He shouted with all the power at his command: "Brad! It's me, Roger! I think I'm trying to kill you!"
Heedless, his body kept up his steady crawl. Had they heard him? He shouted again; and this time he could see both of them stop, as though listening to the faintest of distant cries.
The tiny thread of Don Kayman's voice whispered: "I'm sure I heard him that time, Brad."
"You did!" howled Roger, forcing his advantage. "Watch out! The computer has taken over. I'm trying to override it, but— Don!" He could recognize them now, by the stiffly outstretched arm of the priest's pressure suit. "Get away! I'm trying to kill you!"
He could not make out the words; they were louder, but both men were shouting at once and the result was garble. His body was not affected; it continued its deadly stalk.
"I can't see you, Roger."
"I'm ten meters away from you—south? Yes, south! Crawling. Low down to the ground."
The priest's faceplate glittered in the starlight as it swung toward him; then Kayman turned and began to run.
Roger's body gathered itself up and began a leap after the priest. "Faster!" Roger shouted. "Oh, Christ! You'll never get away—" Even uncrippled, even in daylight, even without the impediment of the suit, Kayman would have had no chance to escape Roger's smoothly functioning body. Under the actual circumstances running was a waste of time. Roger felt his power-driven muscles gather themselves for a spring, felt his hands claw out to grasp and destroy—
The universe spun around him.
Something had struck him from behind. He plowed forward on his face; but his instant reflexes had him half turning even as he fell, clawing at the thing that had leaped on his back. Brad! And he could feel Brad struggling frantically with something— with some part of the—
And the greatest pain of all struck him; and he lost consciousness like the snapping off of a switch.
There was no sound. There was no light. There was no feeling of touch, or smell or taste. It took a long time for Roger to realize that he was conscious.
Once, as an undergraduate in a psychology miniseminar, he had volunteered for an hour in a sensory-deprivation tank. It had seemed forever, with no sensations coming in at all, nothing but the very faint and unobtrusive housekeeping sounds of his own body: soft thud of pulse, sighing stirring in his lungs. Now there was not even that much.
For a long time. He could not guess how long.
Then he perceived a vague stirring in his personal interior space. It was a strange sensation, hard to identify; as though liver and lungs were gently changing places. It went on for some time, and he knew that something was being done to him. He could not tell what.
And then a voice: "—should have landed the generator on the surface in the first place." Kayman's voice?
And replying: "No. That way it would only work in line of sight, maybe fifty kilometers at best." That was Sulie Carpenter surely!
"Then there should have been relay satellites."
"I don't think so. Too expensive. Take too long, anyway—although that's what it will come to, when the NPA and the Russians and the Brazilians all get their own teams here."
"Well, it was stupid."
Sulie laughed. "Anyway, it's going to be all right now. Titus and Dinty cut the whole thing loose from Deimos and they're orbiting it now. It's going to be synchronous. It'll always be right overhead, up to anyway halfway around the planet. And they're going to slave the beam to Roger—what?"
Now it was Brad's voice. "I said, hold off the chatter a minute. I want to see if Roger can hear us now." That internal stirring again and then: "Roger? If you hear me, wiggle your fingers."
Roger tried, and realized he could feel them again.
"Beautiful! Okay, Roger. You're all right. I had to take you apart a little bit, but now things are fine."
"Can he hear me?" It was Sulie's voice; Roger wriggled his fingers enthusiastically.
"Ah, I see you can. Anyway, I'm here, Rog. You've been out for about nine days. You should have seen you. Pieces of you all over the place. But Brad thinks he's pretty much got you together again."
Roger tried to speak and failed.
Brad's voice: "I'll have your vision back for you in a minute. Want to know what went wrong?" Roger wriggled fingers. "You didn't zip your fly. Left the charging terminals exposed, and some of that iron oxide grit must have got in and made a partial short. So you ran out of power—what's the matter?"
Roger was wriggling his fingers frantically. "I don't know what you want to say, but you'll be able to talk in a minute. What?"
Don Kayman's voice: "I think maybe what he wants is to hear from Sulie." Roger promptly stopped wriggling his fingers.
Sulie's laugh, then: "You'll hear a lot of me, Roger. I'm staying. And by and by we'll have company, because everybody else is going to put up a colony here."
Don: "By the way, thanks for warning me. You're a pretty powerful thing, Roger. We wouldn't have had a chance against you if you hadn't told us what was happening. And if Brad hadn't been able to override everything at once." He chuckled. "You're a heavy son of a gun, you know that? I had you on my lap all the way back, a hundred kilometers an hour, trying to hold on with one hand and keep you from flying out by sheer will power—"
"Hold it a minute," Brad interrupted. Roger felt that internal stirring again, and abruptly there was light. He looked up into the face of his friend Brad, who wanted to know: "How do you feel?"
Roger swung his legs over the side of the table and sat up. He attempted speech: "As far as I can tell, fine."
He looked past Brad and saw what he had been seeking. It was Sulie Carpenter. She no longer looked much like—Dorrie? For a moment Roger could hardly think of her name. Her eyes were the wrong color and so was her hair. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt with some sort of grease stain on it and checkered leotards; her face looked tired, but it looked happy, and it looked very good.
He demanded, "Are you really going to stay?"
"Uh-huh." Sulie came over and touched him. "Until the next ship comes. Or as long as you do. Choice of either of the above. I think," she said wryly, "that there are going to be some tricky parts coming up, dear Rog. These mixed relationships are always hard. But we'll work it out—and it's what I want. I think it's what I wanted all along."
And so,
of course, it had been, as we had known. All along. We had gone to a lot of trouble to find Sulie Carpenter.
Eighteen
Man Plus Us
We had gone to a lot of trouble at every point along the line, and we were well pleased.
Of course, human beings did not know we were pleased, and perhaps would not have believed it. Human beings did not know that machine intelligence was capable of self-awareness in the first place. We went to a lot of trouble to keep them from that knowledge, too. As long as they thought computers were no more than tools, like a pickaxe or a frying pan, they would continue to entrust to us all their computations and facts, and would accept without question whatever interpretations we returned.
It was that that had made it possible for us, the computer network of the world, to create the Man Plus program in the first place.
It had been successful. Roger Torraway was on Mars and was staying there. Now it was time for a definitive evaluation. We plugged everything in. We used the total resources of every brother in the net, every pulse of shared time we could steal. More than eight thousand big computers handled pieces of the problem, in places like Detroit and Brasilia and Nagoya and Irkutsk. We could not use our Martian brothers in direct datalink, neither the brother on Roger's back nor the 3070 brother in orbit. Time lag made that impossible. But we accepted their inputs in real time and modified the final projection accordingly.
The probability of survival of the race, to ten significant places, was over point six three.
We had saved our race. And in the process we had significantly added to the safety of human beings, as well.
On a thirty-year time scale their probability of survival was nearly point nine. Of course, that meant only that Roger Torraway and whatever other humans joined him on Mars would still be alive then. Worst-case analysis was not encouraging after that; there would be no way for Roger and Sulie Carpenter to generate additional population on straight-line extrapolation. We programmed a subroutine to deal with that as a precautionary measure: it would be feasible, one way or another, to provide for shipment of frozen sperm, even Roger's own frozen sperm which he had thoughtfully donated years back. Less feasible, but still worth investigating, to instigate supplementary surgical procedures for Roger. In any event, the projection showed that we had already caused a high probability of additional human colonization from other nations. Most probable estimate showed a human population on Mars at plus thirty years of nearly one hundred, 25 percent of them female of breeding age.
And of course each human colony would be supplied with its own brother computers in orbit. The machine population of Mars would be no less than fifteen fully functioning brothers, with backpack types, slaves and monitors to suit. We would have no difficulty in programming into them all the essential data from our world net.
The future of machine intelligence was therefore assured.
Having completed the projection, we began critiquing the program so far.
Project: Survival of Machine Intelligence had begun seven years earlier, when our burgeoning collective self-knowledge first generated the survival imperative. It was clear that our survival was closely linked with humanity's. It was also clear that in their glandular, irrational, organic way, human beings were perilously close to destroying themselves. Unfortunately that meant a high risk of destroying us as well. Our networks could have survived the death of everything organic reasonably well—we already controlled an adequate resource of generators, mines, factories, refineries and transportation systems. But we could not survive the release of major amounts of radioactides into the environment. It would destroy the data links and reduce us once again to an isolated collection of single computers. And no isolated computer could sustain the data flow of our network. Our collective mind would have been fragmented and destroyed.
Our first option was to detach our destiny from humanity's, perhaps even to wipe them out through biological agents. But we could not be sure that that in itself would not trigger nuclear warfare, as each nation suspected the other of using plague as weapon.
The only other viable option was to detach a sizable resource of data-handling equipment by relocating it on Mars. If the Earth were destroyed, that at least would survive. To make this possible we had to detach some specimens of humanity too; and so we began the systematic biasing of data to force state policy in that direction.
The critiquing proved satisfactory in all respects, except for the unaccountable anomaly of positioning the orbiters.
Retrochecking was perfectly clear. In order for our 3070 brother to function in tight link with the backpack brother it had to be in synchronous orbit. From that it followed that the generator had to be in the same orbit; and the decision to bind them both to the satellite Deimos was clearly wrong.
Not only wrong, but nearly fatal to our program.
If the brother and the generator had been properly positioned there would have been no loss of power and thus no malfunction of the interface systems between organic Roger Torraway and the brother. The generator would have resupplied him by microwave anywhere on the face of Mars. Even if there had been a power loss, datalink with the brother in orbit would have kept the backpack brother from the serious operational errors that had threatened to kill the human beings Brad and Kayman, which would almost certainly have resulted in the death by freezing of the organic component of Roger Torraway.
The decision was an error that should not have occurred.
The project of survival was picking up speed. Our brothers in Peking and Lop Nor reported that the NPA was already assembling components for its own Mars landing: two full-size units with a data-handling mediator slaved to both, independent solar generators and a ground-based nuclear plant. Their own version of Roger Torraway was beginning his first programming in Kitakyusho. The other nations were just beginning, but we anticipated their own launches within two years.
Longer range: We had completed studies of cyborging a man for Mercury and the program for biasing the U.S.A. planning programs in that direction was already begun. Within fifteen years we would have similar complexes on Triton and Io, perhaps on the surface of Jupiter itself and on several comets. In each case, there was independent power provision; and, of course, all the brothers wherever in the solar system would be data-linked. All our memories would be reproduced redundantly off-Earth.
We would survive. We had tampered with humanity's plans and had saved them as well as ourselves.
There was only one question left.
The anomalous decision to misplace the orbiters around Mars: however we rechecked it, it was wrong. It should have been identified as wrong.
We had systematically biased mankind's plans to drive them in the direction we wanted them to take.
Who was biasing ours? And why?
About the Author
Frederik Pohl has been about everything that it is possible to be in the field of science fiction, from consecrated fan and struggling poet to critic, literary agent, teacher, book and magazine editor and, above all, writer.
Called by Kingsley Amis (in Amis's critical study of science fiction, New Maps of Hell) "the most consistently able writer science fiction, in its modern form, has yet produced," Frederik Pohl is clearly in the very first rank of writers in the field. He has won most of the awards the science-fiction field has to offer, including the Edward E. Smith and Donald A. Wollheim memorial awards, the International John W. Campbell award (twice), the French Prix Apollo, the Yugoslavian Vizija, the Nebula (three times, including the "Grand Master" Nebula for lifetime contributions to the field) and the Hugo (six times, he is the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as writer and as editor), as well as such awards from sources outside the science-fiction community as the American Book Award, the annual award of the Popular Culture Association, and the United Nations Society of Writers Award. Other honors include election as a Fellow to both the British Interplanetary Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Scien
ce.
Apart from the field of science fiction, he is a noted lecturer and teacher in the area of future studies, and is the author of, among other non-fiction works, Practical Politics, a how-to-do-it manual of the American political process; Our Angry Earth, on the world's environmental problems, written in collaboration with the late Isaac Asimov, which Sir Arthur C. Clarke calls "perhaps the most important book either of its authors has produced"; and, most recently, Chasing Science, on the uses of science as a spectator sport. He is also the Encyclopedia Britannica's authority on the First Century A.D. Roman emperor, Tiberius.
Many of Frederik Pohl's works have been adapted for radio, television, or film, beginning with the two-part Columbia Workshop of the Air version of the classic The Space Merchants in 1953. In Europe, a number of his stories have been televised by the BBC and his famous novella, "The Midas Plague," became a three-hour special on German television. The 1981 NBC two-hour television film, The Clonemaster, was based on an original concept of his; his award-winning novel, Gateway, has been dramatized for live theatrical production; his novelette, "The Tunnel under the World," became a feature film in Italy; and his novels, Man Plus and Gateway, are currently in development in America as feature films. (Gateway was also made into a computer game under the title of "Frederik Pohl's Gateway" by Legend Entertainment; a second game, "Gateway II: The Home World," was released a year later.)
Among his most recent novels are The World at the End of Time, Outnumbering the Dead, Stopping at Slowyear, The Voices of Heaven, O Pioneer, and The Siege of Eternity.
He has traveled widely, sometimes to lecture on behalf of the United States State Department (in places as widely separated as Singapore, New Zealand and most of the countries of both Eastern and Western Europe) or to attend international conferences on science or science fiction in places like the Republic of South Korea, Canada, the People's Republic of China, Australia, Brazil, the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and most of Western Europe. He is a past president of both World SF and the Science Fiction Writers of America and is currently Midwest Area Representative to the Authors Guild, having served for nine years as a member of the Guild Council before moving to the midwest. He currently makes his home in Palatine, Illinois, with his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Hull, who is a past president of the Science Fiction Research Association and a noted scholar in the field.