And that's why you rousted me from bed, Stafford realized with a thrill of icy dismal grief. You didn't bring me here to implement your jerry-built jamming of the computer. Genux-B could be neutralized by one shell from one rocket launcher towed up and parked outside the building. In fact, he realized, in all probability it's effectively neutralized now. You can keep that Phillips screwdriver wedged in there forever. And you helped design and build the thing. No, he realized, that's not it. I'm not here to repair or destroy; I'm here to decide. Because I've been physically close to Genux-B for fifteen years – it's supposed to confer some mystic intuitive ability on me to sense whether the thing is functioning or malfunctioning. I'm supposed to hear the difference, like a good garage mechanic who can tell merely by listening to a turbine engine whether it has bearing knock or not, and if so how bad.
A diagnosis, he realized. That's all you want. This is a consultation of computer doctors – and one repairman.
The decision evidently lay with the repairman, because the others had given up.
He wondered how much time he had. Probably very little. Because if the computer were correct -
Sidewalk gum machines, he pondered. Penny-operated. For kids. And for that it's willing to pacify all Northern California. What could it possibly have extrapolated? What, looking ahead, did Genux-B see?
It amazed him: the power of one small tool to halt the workings of a mammoth constellation of autonomic processes. But the Phillips screwdriver had been inserted expertly.
"What we must try," Stafford said, "is introduction of calculated, experimental – and false – data." He seated himself at one of the typewriters wired directly to the computer. "Let's start off with this," he said, and began to type.
HERB SOUSA, OF SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, THE GUM MACHINE MAGNATE, DIED SUDDENLY IN HIS SLEEP. A LOCAL DYNASTY HAS COME TO AN UNANTICIPATED END.
Amused, one of the FBI men said, "You think it'll believe that?"
"It always believes its data," Stafford said. "It has no other source to rely on."
"But if the data conflict," the engineer pointed out, "it'll analyze everything out and accept the most probable chain."
"In this case," Stafford said, "nothing will conflict with this datum because this is all Genux-B is going to receive." He fed the punched card to Genux-B then, and stood waiting. "Tap the outgoing signal," he instructed the engineer. "Watch to see if it cuts off."
One of the FBI men said, "We already have a line splice, so that ought to be easy to do." He glanced at the engineer, who nodded.
Ten minutes later the engineer, now wearing headphones, said, "No change. The Red Alert is still being emitted; that didn't affect it."
"Then it has nothing to do with Herb Sousa as such," Stafford said, pondering. "Or else he's done it – whatever it is – already. Anyhow, his death means nothing to Genux-B. We'll have to look somewhere else." Again seating himself at the typewriter, he began on his second spurious fact.
IT HAS BEEN LEARNED, ON THE ADVICE OF RELIABLE SOURCES IN BANKING AND FINANCIAL CIRCLES IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, THAT THE CHEWING GUM EMPIRE OF THE LATE HERB SOUSA WILL BE BROKEN UP TO PAY OUTSTANDING DEBTS. ASKED WHAT WOULD BE DONE WITH THE GUM AND TRINKETS CONSTITUTING THE GOODIES WITHIN EACH MACHINE, LAW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS HAZARDED THE GUESS THAT THEY WOULD BE DESTROYED AS SOON AS A COURT ORDER, NOW BEING SOUGHT BY THE ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY OF SACRAMENTO, CAN BE PUT INTO EFFECT.
Ceasing typing, he sat back, waiting. No more Herb Sousa, he said to himself, and no more merchandise. What does that leave? Nothing. The man and his commodities, at least as far as Genux-B was concerned, no longer existed.
Time passed; the engineer continued to monitor the output signal of the computer. At last, resignedly, he shook his head. "No change."
"I have one more spurious datum I want to feed it," Stafford said. Again he put a card in the typewriter and began to punch.
IT APPEARS NOW THAT THERE NEVER WAS AN INDIVIDUAL NAMED HERBERT SOUSA; NOR DID THIS MYTHOLOGICAL PERSON EVER GO INTO THE PENNY GUM MACHINE BUSINESS.
As he rose to his feet, Stafford said, "That should cancel out everything Genux-B knows or ever did know about Sousa and his penny-ante operation." As far as the computer was concerned, the man had been retroactively expunged.
In which case, how could the computer initiate war against a man who had never existed, who operated a marginal concession which also never existed?
A few moments later the engineer, tensely monitoring the output signal of Genux-B, said, "Now there's been a change." He studied his oscilloscope, then accepted the reel of tape being voided by the computer and began a close inspection of that, too.
For a time he remained silent, intent on the job of reading the tape; then all at once he glanced up and grinned humorously at the rest of them.
He said, "It says that the datum is a lie."
IV
"A lie!" Stafford said unbelievingly.
The engineer said, "It's discarded the last datum on the grounds that it can't be true. It contradicts what it knows to be valid. In other words, it still knows that Herb Sousa exists. Don't ask me how it knows this; probably it's an evaluation from wide-spectrum data over an extensive period of time." He hesitated, then said, "Obviously, it knows more about Herb Sousa then we do."
"It knows, anyhow, that there is such a person," Stafford conceded. He felt nettled. Often in the past Genux-B had spotted contradictory or inaccurate data and had expelled them. But it had never mattered this much before.
He wondered, then, what prior, unassailable body of data existed within the memory-cells of Genux-B against which it had compared his spurious assertion of Sousa's nonexistence.
"What it must be doing," he said to the engineer, "is to go on the assumption if if X is true, that Sousa never existed, then Y must be true – whatever 'Y' is. But Y remains untrue. I wish we knew which of all its millions of data units Y is."
They were back to their original problem: Who was Herb Sousa and what had he done to alert Genux-B into such violent sine qua non activity?
"Ask it," the engineer said to him.
"Ask what?" He was puzzled.
"Instruct it to produce its stored data inventory on Herb Sousa. All of it." The engineer kept his voice deliberately patient. "God knows what it's sitting on. And once we get it, let's look it over and see if we can spot what it spotted."
Typing the proper requisition, Stafford fed the card to Genux-B.
"It reminds me," one of the FBI men said reflectively, "of a philosophy course I took at U.C.L.A. There used to be an ontological argument to prove the existence of God. You imagine what He would be like, if He existed: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, immortal, plus being capable of infinite justice and mercy."
"So?" the engineer said irritably.
"Then, when you've imagined Him possessing all those ultimate qualities, you notice that He lacks one quality. A minor one – a quality which every germ and stone and piece of trash by the freeway possesses. Existence. So you say: If He has all those others, He must possess the attribute of being real. If a stone can do it, obviously He can." He added, "It's a discarded theory; they knocked it down back in the Middle Ages. But" – he shrugged – "it's interesting."
"What made you think of that at this particular time?" the engineer demanded.
"Maybe," the FBI man said, "there's no one fact or even cluster of facts about Sousa that prove to Genux-B he exists. Maybe it's all the facts. There may be just plain too many. The computer had found, on the basis of past experience, that when so much data exists on a given person, that person must be genuine. After all, a computer of the magnitude of Genux-B is capable of learning; that's why we make use of it."
"I have another fact I'd like to feed to it," the engineer said. "I'll type it out and you can read it." Reseating himself at the programming typewriter, he ground out one short sentence, then yanked the card from the bales and showed it to the rest of them. It read:
THE COMPUTER GENUX
-B DOES NOT EXIST.
After a stunned moment, one of the FBI men said, "If it had no trouble in comparing the datum about Herbert Sousa with what it already knew, it certainly isn't going to have any trouble with this – and what's your point anyhow? I don't see what this accomplishes."
"If Genux-B doesn't exist," Stafford said, with comprehension, "then it can't send out a Red Alert; that's logically a contradiction."
"But it has sent out a Red Alert," the shortest of the FBI men pointed out. "And it knows it has. So it won't have any difficulty establishing the fact of its existence."
The engineer said, "Let's give it a try. I'm curious. As far as I can see ahead, no harm can be done. We can always cancel out the phony fact if it seems advisable."
"You think," Stafford asked him, "that if we feed it this datum it'll reason that if it doesn't exist it couldn't have received the datum to that effect – which would cancel the datum right there."
"I don't know," the engineer admitted. "I've never heard even a theoretical discussion as to the effect on a B-magnitude computer of programming a denial of its own existence." Going to the feed bracket of Genux-B, he dropped the card in, stepped back. They waited.
After a prolonged interval, the answer came over the output cable, which the engineer had tapped. As he listened through his headphones, he transcribed the computer's response for the rest of them to study:
ANALYSIS OF CONSTITUENT RE THE NONEXISTENCE OF GENUX-B MULTIFACTOR CALCULATING INSTRUMENTS. IF CONSTIT UNIT 340s70 IS TRUE, THEN:
I DO NOT EXIST.
IF I DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NO WAY I CAN BE INFORMED THAT MY GENERIC CLASS DOES NOT EXIST.
IF I CANNOT BE INFORMED IN THAT REGARD, THEN YOU HAVE FAILED TO INFORM ME, AND CONSTIT UNIT 340s70 DOES NOT EXIST FROM MY STANDPOINT.
THEREFORE: I EXIST.
Whistling with admiration, the shortest of the FBI men said, "It did it. What a neat logical analysis! He's proved – it's proved – that your datum is spurious; so now it can totally disregard it. And go on as before."
"Which," Stafford said somberly, "is exactly what it did with the datum filed with it denying that Herb Sousa ever existed."
Everyone glanced at him.
"It appears to be the same process," Stafford said. And it implies, he reasoned, some uniformity, some common factor, between the entity Genux-B and the entity Herb Sousa. "Do you have any of the charms, prizes, or just plain geegaws, whatever they are, that Sousa's gum machines dole out?" he asked the FBI men. "If so, I'd like to see them…"
Obligingly, the most impressive of the FBI men unzipped his briefcase, brought out a sanitary-looking plastic sack. On the surface of a nearby table he spread out a clutter of small glittering objects.
"Why are you interested in those?" the engineer asked. "These things have been given lab scrutiny. We told you that."
Seating himself, not answering, Stafford picked up one of the assorted trinkets, examined it, put it down, and selected another.
"Consider this." He tossed one of the tiny geegaws toward them; it bounced off the table and an obliging FBI agent bent to retrieve it. "You recognize it?"
"Some of the charms," the engineer said irritably, "are in the shape of satellites. Some are missiles. Some interplan rockets. Some big new mobile land cannons. Some figurines of soldiers." He gestured. "That happens to be a charm made to resemble a computer."
"A Genux-B computer," Stafford said, holding out his hand to get it back. The FBI man amiably returned it to him. "It's a Genux-B, all right," he said. "Well, I think this is it. We've found it."
"This?" the engineer demanded loudly. "How? Why?" Stafford said, "Was every charm analyzed? I don't mean a representative sample, such as one of each variety or all found in one given gum machine. I mean every damn one of them."
"Of course not," an FBI man said. "There's tens of thousands of them. But at the factory of origin we -"
"I'd like to see that particular one given a total microscopic analysis," Stafford said. "I have an intuition it isn't a solid, uniform piece of thermoplastic." I have an intuition, he said to himself, that it's a working replica. A minute but authentic Genux-B.
The engineer said, "You're off your trolley."
"Let's wait," Stafford said, "until we get it analyzed."
"And meanwhile," the shortest of the FBI men said, "we keep Genux-B inoperative?"
"Absolutely," Stafford said. A weird weak fear had begun at the base of his spine and was working its way up.
Half an hour later the lab, by special bonded messenger, returned an analysis of the gum-machine charm.
"Solid nylon," the engineer said, glancing over the report. He tossed it to Stafford. "Nothing inside, only ordinary cheap plastic. No moving parts, no interior differentiation at all. If that's what you were expecting?"
"A bad guess," one of the FBI men observed. "Which cost us time." All of them regarded Stafford sourly.
"You're right," Stafford said. He wondered what came next; what hadn't they tried?
The answer, he decided, did not lie in the merchandise with which Herb Sousa stuffed his machines; that now seemed clear. The answer lay in Herb Sousa himself – whoever and whatever he was.
"Can we have Sousa brought here?" he asked the FBI men.
"Sure," one of them said presently. "He can be picked up. Buy why? What's he done?" He indicated Genux-B. "There's the trouble right there, not way out on the Coast with some small-potatoes-type businessman working half the side of one city street."
"I want to see him," Stafford said. "He might know something." He has to, he said to himself.
One of the FBI men said thoughtfully, "I wonder what Genux-B's reaction would be if it knew we're bringing Sousa here." To the engineer, he said, "Try that. Feed it that nonfact, now, before we go to the trouble of actually picking him up."
Shrugging, the engineer again seated himself at the typewriter. He typed:
SACRAMENTO BUSINESSMAN HERB SOUSA WAS BROUGHT TODAY BY FBI AGENTS BEFORE COMPUTER COMPLEX GENUX-B FOR A DIRECT CONFRONTATION.
"Okay?" he asked Stafford. "This what you want? Okay?" He fed it to the data receptors of the computer, without waiting for an answer.
"There's no use asking me," Stafford said irritably. "It wasn't my idea." But, nevertheless, he walked over to the man monitoring the output line, curious to learn the computer's response.
The answer came instantly. He stared down at the typed-out response, not believing what he saw.
HERBERT SOUSA CANNOT BE HERE. HE MUST BE IN SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA; ANYTHING ELSE IS IMPOSSIBLE. YOU HAVE PRESENTED ME WITH FALSE DATA.
"It can't know," the engineer said huskily. "My God, Sousa could go anywhere, even to Luna. In fact, he's already been all over Earth. How would it know?"
Stafford said, "It knows more about Herb Sousa than it should. Than is reasonably possible." He consulted with himself, then abruptly said, "Ask it who Herb Sousa is."
" 'Who'?" The engineer blinked. "Hell, he's -"
"Ask it!"
The engineer typed out the question. The card was presented to Genux-B and they stood waiting for its response.
"We already asked it for all the material it has on Sousa," the engineer said. "The bulk of that ought to be emerging anytime now."
"This is not the same," Stafford said shortly. "I'm not asking it to hand back data given in. I'm asking it for an evaluation."
Monitoring the output line of the computer, the engineer stood silently, now answering. Then, almost offhandedly, he said, "It's called off the Red Alert."
Incredulous, Stafford said, "Because of that query?"
"Maybe. It didn't say and I don't know. You asked the question and now it's shut down on its SAC scramble and everything else; it claims that the situation in Northern California is normal." His voice was toneless. "Make your own guess; it's probably as good as any."
Stafford said, "I still want an answer. Genux-B knows who Herb Sousa is and I want to know, too. And you ought to know." His l
ook took in both the engineer with his headphones and the assorted FBI men. Again he thought of the tiny solid-plastic replica of Genux-B which he had found among the charms and trinkets. Coincidence? It seemed to him that it meant something… but what, he could not tell. Not yet, anyhow.
"Anyhow," the engineer said, "it really has called off the Red Alert, and that's what matters. Who cares a goddam bit about Herb Sousa? As far as I'm concerned, we can relax, give up, go home now."
"Relax," one of the FBI men said, "until all of a sudden it decides to start the alert going again. Which it could do anytime. I think the repairman is right; we have to find out who this Sousa is." He nodded to Stafford. "Go ahead. Anything you want is okay. Just keep after it. And we'll get going on it, too – as soon as we check in at our office."
The engineer, paying attention to his headphones, interrupted all at once. "An answer's coming." He began rapidly to scribble; the others collected around him to see.
HERBERT SOUSA OF SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA, IS THE DEVIL. SINCE HE IS THE INCARNATION OF SATAN ON EARTH, PROVIDENCE DEMANDS HIS DESTRUCTION. I AM ONLY AN AGENCY, A SO TO SPEAK CREATURE, OF THE DIVINE MAJESTY, AS ARE ALL OF YOU.
There was a pause as the engineer waited, clenching the ballpoint metal government-issue pen, and then he spasmodically added:
UNLESS YOU ARE ALREADY IN HIS PAY AND THEREFORE WORKING FOR HIM.
Convulsively, the engineer tossed the pen against the far wall. It bounced, rolled off, disappeared. No one spoke.
V
The engineer said finally, "We have here a sick, deranged piece of electronic junk. We were right. Thank God we caught it in time. It's psychotic. Cosmic, schizophrenic delusions of the reality of archetypes. Good grief, the machine regards itself as an instrument of God! It has one more of those 'God talked to me, yes, He truly did' complexes."
"Medieval," one of the FBI men said, with a twitch of enormous nervousness. He and his group had become rigid with tension. "We've uncovered a rat's nest with that last question. How'll we clear this up? We can't let this leak out to the newspapers; no one'll ever trust a GB-class system again. I don't. I wouldn't." He eyed the computer with nauseated aversion.