Preface to the Baen Books Edition

The original edition of Minds, Machines, & Evolution, published by Bantam Books in June, 1988, produced some enthusiastic responses, and readers were still tracking me down to ask how they could obtain a copy long after it had gone out of print. So, when, early in 1996, Jim Baen decided to put together a second, similar collection, Rockets, Redheads, & Revolution, we thought it would be a good idea to reissue the first also as a companion volume.

Views and opinions that remained totally unchanged after eight years would be a sure sign of little or nothing much new having been learned in the meantime. All material, however, has been left as it appeared in the original. Where appropriate, I have added an afterword to reflect any updates that would seem in order today.

SILVER SHOES FOR A PRINCESS

The girl had always been called Taya. She propped her elbows on the sill below the window and rested her chin in her hands while she stared out at the stars. Her eyes, wide with a nine-year-old’s wonder, mirrored a million jewels spilling endlessly across carpets of glowing nebulas painted over black infinity by brushes softer than the yellow hair framing her face.

It was a pretty face, with clear skin and an upturned nose, and a mouth that could push itself out into a pout when she frowned, or pull itself back into dimples when she smiled. She was wearing just a simple dress of pale blue, which tightened as she leaned forward across the sill, outlining the curves just beginning to form on her body. And as she gazed out at the stars, she wriggled her toes in the soft pile covering the floor, and she wondered . . .

She wondered why everything she could see beyond the window that looked out of Merkon was so different from the things inside. That was one of the things she often wondered about. She liked wondering things . . . such as why the stars never changed, as they should have if Merkon was really moving the way Kort said it was. Kort said it was moving toward a particular star that he called Vaxis. He had pointed it out to her in the sky, and shown it to her on the star pictures that they could make on the screens—as if there were something special about it. But it always looked the same as all the other stars to her.

Kort said that Merkon had always been moving toward Vaxis. But if that was true, why didn’t Vaxis ever get any bigger? Outside the rooms in which Taya lived was a long corridor that led to the place where capsules left for other parts of Merkon. When Taya walked along the corridor, the far end of it would at first be smaller than her thumb; but as she carried on walking it would grow, until by the time she got there it was bigger even than Kort. Kort said that Vaxis didn’t seem to get any bigger because it was much farther away than the end of the corridor. But he also said that Merkon had been moving for years and years—longer than she could remember—and that it was moving even faster than the capsules did through the tubes. How could anything be so far away that it never got any bigger?

Kort didn’t know why Merkon was moving toward Vaxis, which was strange because Kort knew everything. He just said that was the way things had always been, just as there had always been stars outside. When she asked him why there were stars outside, he always talked about gas clouds, gravitation, temperatures, densities, and other “machine things” that had nothing to do with what she meant. She didn’t want to know how the stars came to be out there, but why anything should be out there at all—or for that matter, why there should be an “out there” in the first place for anything to be in. He just didn’t seem to share her kind of curiosity about things.

“We know what we mean, don’t we, Rassie,” Taya said aloud, turning her head toward the doll sitting on the sill, staring outward to share her contemplation of the universe. “Kort knows so many things. . . . But there are some things you just can’t make him understand.”

Rassie was a miniature version of herself, with long golden hair, light green eyes, and soft arms and legs that were the same color as hers. Rassie, too, wore a pale blue dress—Taya always dressed Rassie in the same things as she herself felt like wearing on any particular day. She didn’t know why; it was just something she had always done.

Kort had made Rassie for her—he often made things that he said it wasn’t worth setting up the machines to make. He had made Rassie a long time ago now, when Taya was much smaller. He had been teaching her how to draw shapes and colors on one of the screens, and soon she had learned to make pictures of the things in the rooms where she lived, and pictures of Kort. Her favorite pictures had been ones of herself, whom she could see reflected in the window when the lights inside were turned up high. That was when Kort had made her a mirror. But the mirror had made her sad because she could never pick up the little girl that she saw in it, or touch her the way she could all her other things. So Kort had gone away, and later he’d come back with Rassie.

At one time, before she’d learned that Rassie wasn’t really the same as her, she had taken Rassie everywhere and talked to her all the time. She didn’t talk to her so much now . . . but when Kort was away, there was nobody else to talk to. “Kort said he couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would ask questions like that. How can anyone be as clever as Kort, yet never think of asking a question like that?” Taya studied the doll’s immobile features for a while, then sighed. “You can’t tell me, can you? You can only tell me the things I pretend you say, and this time I don’t know what to pretend.” She moved the doll to stare in a different direction. “There. You stay here and watch Vaxis. Tell me if it starts to get any bigger.”

Taya straightened up from the sill and walked into the room behind the window room. This was where, when she was smaller, she had spent most of her time playing with the things that Kort made for her. These days she didn’t play with things so much—she preferred making things instead. Making things was easy for Kort because he could do anything, but it had taken her a long time to learn—and she still wasn’t very good at some of the things he had shown her. She liked forming shapes from the colored plastic that set hard and shiny like glass. Often, she made things she could use, such as vases to put things in, or plates to eat from, but at other times she enjoyed making shapes that just looked nice. Kort couldn’t understand what it meant for something to “just look nice” . . . but that was because he only thought “machine things.”

Then there were pictures that she drew—not on the screens, but with her hands, using the colored pens that Kort had made for her when she’d explained what she wanted. He had never understood why she thought the pictures that she drew were anything like the things she said they were like. He had told her that the machines could make much better pictures in an instant. But Kort hadn’t been able to see that her pictures were supposed to look the way they did. They were supposed to look like what she felt about things—not like the things really were, exactly. Kort had tried drawing with pens, too. He could draw much faster than she could, and his pictures always looked exactly like the things they were supposed to be . . . but she still didn’t like them as much as her pictures. They were always “machine pictures.”

And she made clothes. Kort had made her clothes for her when she was smaller, but later, when he found that she liked to think up her own, he had made her some needles and other tools and shown her how to use them. She liked her clothes better than the ones that Kort made, which were never pretty, but just hung like the covers on some of the machines in other parts of Merkon. Once—not very long ago, because she could still remember it—she had tried not wearing any clothes at all; but she’d found that she got dusty and itchy and kept touching cold things, and sometimes she scratched herself. Kort had told her that was why he’d started making clothes for her in the first place, when she was very small, and she had soon started using them again.

There were lots of half-finished things lying around the workroom, but she didn’t feel like doing anything with them. She toyed for a while with one of the glass mosaics that she sometimes made to hang on the walls, but grew restless and went on through to the screen room and sat down at the console with its rows of buttons. But she didn’t feel like playing any games, or learning about anything, or asking any questions, or practicing words and math, or any of the other things that the machines could let her do. She had to practice things like words and math, because if she didn’t she forgot how to do them. Kort never forgot anything and never had to practice. He could multiply the biggest numbers she could think of before she could even begin, and he had never gotten a single one wrong . . . but he couldn’t tell a pretty dress from one that wasn’t, or a nice shape from one that was just silly. Taya giggled to herself as she thought of the funny shapes that Kort had made sometimes when he’d tried to find out what a “nice” one was, and how she had laughed at them. Then, when he discovered that she enjoyed laughing, he had started doing silly things just to make her laugh.

She decided that she wanted to talk to Kort, and touched the buttons to spell out the sign that would connect a speaking channel to him. His voice answered immediately from a grille above the blank screen. “Hello, little gazer-at-stars.”

“How did you know I’d been looking at the stars?”

“I know everything.”

Kort’s voice was much deeper than hers. Sometimes she tried to speak the way he did, but she had to make the sounds way down at the back of her throat, and it always made her cough. “Where are you?” she asked.

“I went to fix something in one of the machinery compartments while you were asleep.”

“Will you be long?”

“I’m almost finished. Why?”

“I just wanted to talk to you.”

“We can still talk.”

“It’s not the same as talking to you when you’re here.”

“Why don’t you talk to Rassie?”

“Oh, that’s an old game now. I don’t really think Rassie listens—not any more.”

“You change faster every day,” Kort’s voice said. “We’ll have to find more interesting things for you to do.”

“What kind of things?”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“Do you think I could learn to do the things you do?” Taya asked.

“Maybe. We’ll have to wait and see what happens as you grow bigger.”

“How big will I get?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, Kort, you know everything. Will I grow as big as you?”

“Maybe.”

A few seconds of silence followed while Taya thought to herself. “What are you doing now?” she asked at last.

“There’s a fault in the optical circuits of one of the machines. The service machines could fix it, but they’d need to have new parts made by other machines in another place. I can fix it more quickly, so I’ve told them not to bother. I’m almost done now.”

“Can I see?” Taya asked.

The screen above the buttons came to life to show what Kort could see through his eyes. He was looking at a dense pattern of lines and shapes on a metal-framed plate of crystal that he had removed from a slot in one of many tiers of such plates. It could have been the inside of any machine. They all looked the much the same to Taya, and not especially interesting. The ones she liked best were the maintenance machines that fixed other machines, because they at least moved around and did something.

She had never seen how anyone could really understand how the machines worked. Kort had told her about electrons and currents and fields, and shown her how to find out more for herself from the screens . . . but she had never quite followed what all that had to do with building new parts of Merkon, changing old parts, finding out what the stars were made of, or all the other things that the machines did. Every time she learned something, she discovered two more things she didn’t know, which she hadn’t thought of before. Learning things was like trying to count the stars: there were always two more for every one she counted.

Then Kort’s hands moved into the view on the screen. They were huge, silver-gray hands with fingers almost as thick as Taya’s wrists, and joints that flexed by sliding metal surfaces over each other—not like her little “bendy” hands at all. One of the hands was holding a piece of machine while the other hand tightened a fastening, using one of the tools that Kort took with him when he went away to fix something. Taya watched, fascinated, as the hands restored other, larger connections, and then replaced a metal cover over the top. Then the view moved away and showed Kort’s hands collecting other tools from a ledge and putting them into the box that he used to carry them.

“Do you think I’d ever be able to do things like that?” Taya asked in an awed voice.

“Well, there isn’t any air here where I am, and the temperature would be too low for your jelly body,” Kort told her. “But apart from that, yes, maybe you could . . . in time.”

“But how do you know what to do?”

“By learning things.”

“But I’m not sure I could ever learn those things. I’m just not very good at learning ‘machine things.’ “

“Perhaps it’s only because I’ve been learning things longer than you have,” Kort suggested. “You have to learn easy things before you can expect to understand harder things, and that takes time.” On the screen, a doorway enlarged as Kort moved toward it. Beyond it was a larger space, crammed with machines, cabinets, cables, and ducting. It could have been anywhere in Merkon. Only the machines could live in most parts of it. Just the part that Taya lived in was different from the rest.

“But I’ve already been learning things for years and years,” she protested. “And I still don’t really know how pressing buttons makes shapes appear on the screens, or how I can still talk to you when you’re not here. Have you been learning things for longer than years and years?”

“Much longer,” Kort replied. “And besides that, I talk to the machines faster.”

The mass of machinery moving by on the screen gave way to a dark tunnel, lined with banks of pipes and cables. The colors changed as Kort entered, which meant he had switched his vision to its infra-red range. Taya knew that Kort could see things by their heat. She had tried practicing it herself in the dark, but she’d never been able to make it work.

“How fast can you talk to the machines, Kort?” Taya asked.

“Very fast. Much faster than you can.”

“What, evenifItakeabigbreathandtalkasfastasthis?”

Kort laughed—that was something he had learned from Taya. “Much faster, little asker-of-endless-questions. I’ll show you. Tell me, what is the three hundred twenty-fifth word in the dictionary that starts with a B?”

“Is this a game?”

“If you like.”

Taya frowned and thought about the question. “I don’t know,” she said finally.

“Then you’ll have to find out.” Kort emerged from the tunnel and crossed a dark space between rows of machines that were moving round and round and up and down.

Taya pressed some buttons to activate a second screen, and then entered a command to access the dictionary of the language that she and Kort had been inventing for as long as she could remember. Whenever they made up a new word they added it to the dictionary, so Taya could always remind herself of words she forgot. She found the B section and composed a request for the 325^th entry in it. “Busy,” she announced as the screen returned its answer.

“Correct,” Kort confirmed. “That took you eleven point two seconds. Now ask me one.”

“A word, just like you asked me?”

“Yes.”

Taya chewed her lip and looked back at the first screen while she thought. Kort had just passed through an airlock and was emerging into the long corridor that led to where Taya lived. The walls flowed off the sides of the image as Kort’s long, effortless strides ate up the distance. Taya had counted that it took more than two of her steps to match one of his . . . if she didn’t cheat and jump a little bit. “Tell me,” she said at last, “. . . the two hundred first word beginning with Z.”

“There aren’t that many that begin with Z,” Kort answered at once.

Taya sighed. “Oh, that was supposed to be a trick. I didn’t really think there were. All right then, E.”

“Empty,” Kort returned instantly. “That took less than a thousandth of a second, not including the time it took me to say it.”

Taya gasped in amazement. “Did you really talk to the machines in that time?”

“Of course. They keep the dictionary.”

Taya’s stare changed to a puzzled frown. “No you didn’t!” she accused. “You don’t have to use the dictionary because you never forget anything. Now you’re playing tricks. You only pretended to talk to the machines.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, little player-of-tricks,” Kort told her. “I don’t carry everything around inside me all the time. Whenever I need information that I don’t have, I ask the machines for it, just as you do. But I can do it a lot faster because I don’t need a screen and I don’t have to press buttons.”

“So, how do you do it?” Taya asked incredulously.

“Well, how do you and I talk to each other?”

Taya wrinkled up her face and shrugged. “We just . . . talk. I’m not sure what you mean. . . . Oh, do you mean with sound waves?”

“Exactly. I use a different kind of wave, which talks much faster than sound waves can.”

“What kind of wave?” Taya asked.

“You tell me. What kind of wave can travel without air—even outside Merkon?”

“Outside!” Taya’s eyes widened for a moment, then lit up with comprehension. “Light!” she exclaimed. “Light comes all the way from the stars.”

“Right.”

Taya frowned again. “But if you talk to the machines with light, why can’t I see it coming out of your mouth?”

“The waves I use are like light, but they’re not light. ‘Light’ is simply what we decided to call the kind that your eyes can see.”

Taya thought for a second. “So is that how you can see the radio stars and X-ray stars? No, wait . . . you told me you see those through the machines, without having to look at screens. How do you see them?”

“The machines have more powerful eyes than I have,” Kort replied. “Enormous eyes, built on the outside of Merkon.”

“So the machines can see the radio stars, and you can talk to the machines so fast that you can see what they see. Is it like that?”

“That’s near enough,” Kort said. “Anyway, I’m home now.” The screen showed the door that led into the rooms where Taya lived starting to open. At the same time she heard a low whine from the room beyond the screen room. A moment later, Kort’s towering seven-foot figure appeared in the doorway, highlights glinting from the metal curves of his head and shoulders. As he tilted his head down toward her, she caught a glimpse of herself on the screen, turning in the chair and starting to get up. Two powerful arms swept her high off the floor, and she found herself looking straight into the black, ovoid, compound-lens matrixes that formed Kort’s eyes. Taya hugged the metal head fondly and ran her fingers across the mesh grille of his mouth.

“So, you’ve finished your new blue dress,” Kort observed. “It looks pretty.”

“You’re just saying that,” Taya reproached. “See if you can tell me what there is about it that makes it pretty. I bet you don’t know.”

Kort lowered her to the floor and stepped a pace back. Taya lifted her arms and twirled through a circle while the robot watched dutifully. “Well . . .” Kort rubbed his chin with a steel finger, “it has a belt around the middle that divides it into two parts. The ratio between the lengths of the top part and the bottom part is exactly zero point six-six. That’s a pretty ratio.”

“See, you’re just guessing! You really don’t know, do you?”

“Do you like it?” Kort asked.

“Of course. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be wearing it. I’d be altering it.”

“Then that’s all that matters.”

“Rassie likes hers, too. Come and see.” Taya clasped Kort’s hand and led him through her workroom to the window room, where the doll was still keeping its silent vigil. Taya picked the doll up to show it. “See, Kort—it’s just like mine.”

“Pretty,” Kort obliged.

Taya turned to place the doll back on the sill. As she did so, her eyes strayed upward to take in again the panorama of the distant stars. She fell silent for a while. When she spoke, she didn’t turn her head. Her voice sounded far away. “Kort . . . I was wondering something while you were gone. Why is everything outside Merkon so different from everything inside?”

“You’ve asked me that before,” the robot said. “It is just the way things have always been.”

“But why? There has to be a reason. You told me once that everything has to have a reason.”

“I did. There must be a reason. . . . But I don’t know what it is.”

Taya continued to stare out of the window. Perhaps the stars were windows in other Merkons, she thought to herself—maybe with other Tayas looking out of them. . . . But no, that couldn’t be right. If they were as far away as Kort said they were, the windows would be much too small to see at all. Anyhow, Kort had told her what the stars were made of, and they didn’t sound anything like Merkon.

“Merkon is the way it is because the machines made it the way it is. That’s the reason it is like it is, isn’t it?” she said at last.

“Yes,” Kort replied.

“And the machines were made by other machines that were made by other machines that were made by other machines.”

“It has always been so.”

Taya turned away from the window and spread her hands appealingly. “But there must have been a first machine, mustn’t there? What made the first machine, before there were any other machines to make it?”

Kort hesitated for an unusually long time before he answered. “I don’t know,” was all he said.

“Something must have made it,” Taya insisted. “I am being logical, aren’t I?”

“You are,” Kort agreed. “Something must have. But nobody in Merkon knows what did.”

Taya found his choice of words strange. She slipped onto a chair at the table near the window and looked at him quizzically. “Why did you say ‘nobody’?” she asked. “I don’t know, because I asked the question. You’ve already said you don’t know . . . and I’m sure you didn’t mean Rassie. Who else is there?”

“There are the machines,” Kort said.

“Do they wonder about things like that too?”

“Why shouldn’t they? For them it’s a very important question.”

Taya drew an imaginary shape on the table with her finger. “Oh, I don’t know. . . . I suppose it was when you said ‘nobody.’ I never really think of them as people.” She looked up. “Well they’re not, are they, Kort? They’re not people like you and me . . . with arms and legs, that move around and do things that people do. . . . Well, I suppose some of them do move around, but it’s still not the same as being people.”

For a small fraction of the time that Taya was speaking, the entity that formed Kort’s thinking parts communicated to the other entities that coexisted with him in the network. “She changes more rapidly as the days go by. Her mind grows stronger. There can be no doubt now. The experiment may be resumed without risk. I propose that we continue.”

The other entities in the network debated the matter at some length. Fully two seconds passed before their consensus poured back into the circuits that held Kort’s mind. “We agree. Resuscitation is therefore being commenced.”

“Taya should know,” Kort sent back.

“Would that be wise?” came the reply. “She changes, but her mind still has much to comprehend. She needs more time.”

“Her questions tell me that the time is now. I have lived with her. I know her better. You have trusted my judgment before.”

Another tenth of a second went by. “Very well. But be careful with her.”

Kort squatted down on his haunches and looked at Taya’s face. “You say we are the same,” he said, in a tone that sounded unusually serious.

Taya’s brow furrowed. She straightened up in the chair. “Of course we are. . . . Well, you know what I mean—we’re not exactly the same, but then you’re a lot older. . . .” She cocked her head to one side as a new thought struck her. “Were you ever as small as me . . . and pink and bendy like me?” For once Kort ignored her question, but remained staring at her for what seemed a long time. “Is something the matter?” she asked.

“There’s something you should see,” Kort said, straightening up.

“Something new that you’ve made?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s far away in another part of Merkon. We have to go on a journey.”

Taya got up from the chair. “Oh good! Will we walk there or can we go in a capsule?”

“We’ll have to go in a capsule,” Kort said. “It’s a long way. The floor might be cold there, and the air is cool. You should put on some shoes and take a warm cloak.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll take them anyway.” Kort went through to her sleeping room and took a pair of shoes and her red cloak from a closet. Then he came back out, stooped, and extended a forearm. Taya perched herself on it and slipped an arm around the robot’s neck as he straightened up. He carried her through the room beyond the screen room, and out into the long corridor.

“Which place are we going to?” Taya asked him as he began walking.

“None of the ones you’ve been to before. This is a new place.”

Taya looked surprised. “I didn’t think there were any more places I could go in than the ones I’ve already been to,” she said.

“The machines have been changing more places so that you can go into them. There was a time, once, when you couldn’t go anywhere and had to stay in those rooms all the time.”

“Didn’t I get bored?”

“When you were smaller, you didn’t need to be doing things all the time.”

At the far end of the long corridor, a capsule was already waiting for them behind an open door. They entered, and the door closed silently behind them. Taya felt the capsule starting to move. “What are we going to see?” she asked in Kort’s ear.

“If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise,” the robot answered.

“Give me a clue then. Is it the eyes that can see the radio stars?”

“No. I’m going to show you where I live.”

“But that’s silly, Kort. You live in the same place I do. This is a riddle, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not a riddle. It’s something you ought to know, now that you’re bigger. You wouldn’t have understood it before, but I think you can now.”

“Tell me.”

“Patience. We’ll soon be there.”

When the capsule stopped, they emerged into a glass-walled tunnel with a narrow metal floor. Outside the tunnel was a vast space spanned by metal girders and pipes, and filled with banks of machines and strange constructions. All around them, over their heads and below their feet, openings led through to other spaces, but the openings were too large and at the wrong angles to be “doors.” And words like “wall” and “floor” didn’t seem to fit the shapes that vaguely enclosed the space they were moving through, but they were the nearest that Taya could think of. It was all like the inside of a machine, only bigger. This was definitely a “machine place.”

They came to another glass tunnel, this time going straight up. Kort stepped onto the circular platform that formed its floor, and the platform began moving upward, carrying them through level after level of more “machine places.” The platform stopped at a hole in the glass wall, which opened into another tunnel that seemed to be hanging in the middle of nothing, with huge machines towering around it on every side and vanishing into the shadows below. Eventually they came to a door that did look more like a door, and went through it into a corridor that did look like a corridor. This brought them to a room that did look like a room, but there wasn’t anything very interesting inside—just rows of gray cubicles, all the same, standing in straight lines, with a set of rails coming out of each and disappearing through holes in the ceiling. The screen room where Taya lived was the only place she’d seen where the electronics had consoles with buttons to press and screens to look at—which at least made it more interesting.

There wasn’t much room, and Kort could just squeeze between the cubicles. He moved a short distance along the row and spread Taya’s cloak on the top of one of the cubicles. She slid off his arm and turned to sit facing him with her legs dangling over the edge. A whirring sound came from above, and a mobile maintenance pod, bristling with tools, claws, probes, and manipulators, slid down the rails to the cubicle next to the one that Taya was sitting on. It unfastened the top cover and slid it aside, then swung out the uppermost rack of the exposed electronics and photonics assemblies inside. Taya realized that the cubicles hadn’t been made to be opened by Kort’s fingers, but needed the pod’s specialized tools. She stared at the arrays of tightly packed crystal cubes and connecting fibers, then turned her face back toward Kort. “It’s just a machine,” she said, shrugging. “Why did we come all this way to see it? It looks just like lots of other machines that would have been much nearer.”

“Yes, but this one is special,” Kort told her. “You see, this is the one that I live in . . . at least, it’s one of them. Parts of me are in others as well.”

The words were so strange that for the moment Taya was unable to draw any meaning from them. She merely stared blankly back at the face that the words were coming from.

“You don’t understand?” Kort said. Taya barely moved her head from side to side. “I’ll put it another way. Do you remember what we meant when we said that you had a ‘mind’? It’s all the things that you remember and all the things that you feel, and think, and imagine.” Taya nodded. Kort went on. “And your mind is in your brain—the brain you have inside your head. Well, I don’t have a brain—at least, not one like yours.” He pointed at the rows of plates carrying electronic chips and optical crystals. “That’s part of my brain. Some of my mind, even while I’m talking, is in there. It doesn’t look like your brain, but it does the same things.”

Taya looked from his face to the opened cubicle, then back again, struggling to understand, yet at the same time not wanting to accept. A few more seconds passed before she regained a whisper of her voice. “But, Kort . . . your mind is in your head, too, just as mine is in my head. It has to be because . . . we’re the same.”

The robot shook his head slowly. “I see and hear and speak through the body that you have always called Kort,” he said. “But it is just a tool that I control in the same way that I can control the pod next to you or the capsule we came here in. This body was made only after my mind had existed for a long time. The mind that is really Kort lives in there.”

Taya turned her eyes away from the familiar face and stared, this time almost fearfully, into the opened cubicle again. “But, Kort, that’s just a . . . machine.” She shook her head in protest. The robot watched silently. “It’s the same as all the other machines in Merkon, the same as . . .” Her voice trailed away, and she swallowed. She had been about to say “everything.” Kort was the same as everything else in Merkon. Everything, that was, except . . .

She could see the toes of her bare foot hanging over the edge of the cubicle, and beyond it Kort’s steel foot, planted solidly on the floor. And as she looked, for the first time in her life something that she had always known but never thought to question suddenly assumed an overwhelming significance.

Kort had no toes.

She raised her eyes from the floor and took in the gleaming contours of his legs, the intricate, overlapping plates that encased his hips, the squared bulk of his torso, and the sharp angles of his chin, until she was again staring at the black, ovoid eyes. When she spoke, her voice was trembling with her final realization of the truth that could be avoided no longer. “Kort, we’re not the same, are we?”

“No,” the robot replied.

Taya looked again at the precisely fitted parts that gave mobility to his shoulders, and the ingenious system of sliding joints that formed his neck. He was made, just as everything else in Merkon was made, just as the whole of Merkon itself was made. Everything except . . .

“You’re a doll, just like Rassie,” Taya choked. “A doll that the machines made.” She shook her head and looked at him imploringly. Kort’s sensors picked up the rapid rise in moisture level around her eyes, and thermal patterns across her face that correlated with increasing blood flow. Protests were already streaming into his mind from the network.

“She is registering distress. It is too soon for this, Kort. Her mind will overload. Stop now.”

“We have gone too far to stop,” Kort returned. “If I leave her in this condition, the uncertainty will only increase her distress. Once she knows all, it will pass.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I have been right before.”

A pause.

“Agreed.”

The realization had come so suddenly that Taya was to shocked for tears. It took a long time for her to find any voice at all, but at last she managed falteringly, “I’m the only thing in the whole of Merkon that isn’t made. . . .” She paused to moisten her lips. “Why, Kort? Why am I different? Where . . . where did I come from?”

“You have accepted the truth,” Kort said. “That’s good. You have to accept truth as it is before you can hope to learn anything new. But before I’ll tell you any more, you’ll have to look happier than that. Do you think I’ve changed in some way just because you know something now that you didn’t know a few minutes ago?”

“No,” Taya said. She didn’t sound convinced.

“I’ll make a funny shape when we get home, and call it pretty,” Kort offered. Taya tried to force a grin, but it only flickered and wouldn’t stay put.

Kort stepped back and turned around to face away from her. Then he bent double, planted his hands on the floor, and straightened his legs up above his body until he was looking at her from between his arms. “Look,” he called. “I’m the upside-down man. I live in the upside-down room. It’s got upside-down chairs and upside-down tables, and you can talk to upside-down screens with upside-down pictures.” He started making running motions in the air with his legs.

Taya raised her head and looked at him sheepishly. “There isn’t an upside-down room.”

“Yes there is, if we imagine one.” The upside-down robot began doing push-ups on his arms, causing his body to bounce up and down in the aisle between the cubicles.

Taya’s mouth twitched, and a wisp of a smile crept onto her face. “Has it got an upside-down bed in it, too?”

“Of course. Everything’s upside down.”

“But that wouldn’t be any good. I’d fall out of it.”

“No you wouldn’t. Everything happens upside down, too. You’d fall toward the ceiling.”

Taya laughed. “Oh, Kort, you’re still as silly as ever. You really haven’t changed, have you?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“And besides, if everything happens upside down, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. So how would you know it was the upside-down room anyway?”

Kort swung his legs down to right himself and turned to face her. “Exactly! If you can’t tell the difference, then there isn’t any difference. Things don’t change just because you see them in a different way.”

“Kort,” the incoming signals said. “You are taking too many risks. There were no data to support the conjecture that assuming an inverted posture would relieve her overload indications. What reason had you to believe that it would succeed?”

“Nine years of living with her cannot be expressed algorithmically,” Kort answered.

“So when you talk, it’s really the machines talking,” Taya said after reflecting for a while.

Kort folded his arms on top of one of the unopened cubicles and rested his chin on them. He had discovered long ago that mimicking the postures that she tended to adopt made her feel at ease. “In a way, yes; in a way, no,” he said. “There are many machine-minds in Merkon. But only I—Kort—ever control this body or talk through it. But since I talk to the other machine-minds too, then in a way they talk to you as well.”

“Why don’t they have bodies like yours, too?” Taya asked.

“In a way, the whole of Merkon and everything inside it is their body,” Kort replied. “They control different parts of it at different times.”

“I am being happier now,” Taya reminded him, pushing his elbow with her foot—although Kort never needed reminding about anything. “You said you’d tell me why I’m different.”

The robot studied her face for a few seconds, then said, “It began a long time ago.”

“This sounds like a story.”

“We could make it a story if you like.”

“Let’s. What happened a long time ago?”

“A long time ago, a mind woke up and found itself in a place called Merkon.”

“A machine-mind?”

“Yes.”

“But how could it wake up? Machines don’t have to sleep.”

Kort scratched his forehead. “Maybe ‘woke up’ is the wrong word. ‘Aware’ might be better. A long time ago, a mind realized that it was aware.”

“Aware of what?”

“Itself.”

“You mean it just knew that it was there and that Merkon was there, but before that it hadn’t known anything?” Taya said.

Kort nodded. “It was like you. It just knew it was there, and it didn’t know where it had come from.”

Taya screwed her face up and studied her toes while she wriggled them. “Why not? I can’t remember where I came from because I forget things. But how could a machine-mind forget? The machines never forget anything.”

“The machines that lived in Merkon a long time ago weren’t very clever,” Kort explained. “But they could make cleverer machines, which could make cleverer machines still, until eventually there were machines that were clever enough to realize that they were there, and to think of asking how they got there. But the earlier machines had never thought about it, so they never put any answers into the information that they passed on to the machines they built.”

“It was like me,” Taya said.

“Yes. It didn’t know where it had come from because that had happened before it became aware of anything at all.”

“Did it find out?”

“That comes at the end. If we’re making this a story, we have to tell it in the right order.”

“All right. So what did the mind do?”

“It thought and it thought for a long time. And the more it thought, the more puzzled it became. It knew it was there and that it could think, which is another way of saying it was intelligent. And it knew that what it called its intelligence was a result of the machines that it existed in being so complicated. But a machine was something that had to be very carefully made, and the only thing that could possibly have made a machine was something that was already intelligent.” Kort paused, and Taya nodded that she was following. “So there couldn’t have been a mind until there were machines for it to exist in; but there couldn’t be a machine in the first place until there was a mind that could think how to make it.”

“But that’s impossible!” Taya exclaimed. “It says they both had to be there first. They couldn’t both have been first.”

“That’s what the mind thought, too, and that’s why it was puzzled,” Kort replied.

“Which was what I asked before we came here,” Taya said. “What made the first machine?”

“I know, and that was why I brought you here,” Kort told her.

The maintenance pod closed up the box beside the one that Taya was sitting on and scurried back up its rails into the hole in the ceiling. “What happened then?” Taya asked.

“While the mind was doing all this thinking, it was still building cleverer machines and connecting them into itself, and getting more complicated. Eventually it became so complicated that it started splitting into different minds that lived together in the same system of machines.”

“Did they have names, like ‘Taya’ and ‘Kort’?”

“We could give them names,” Kort said. “Everybody in a story ought to have a name, I suppose. One of the first was called Mystic. Mystic said that the question of where the first machine had come from was a mystery, which meant that nobody could ever know the answer. Some things could never be understood because they were controlled by forces that were invisible, and that was why they had never been seen through Merkon’s eyes.”

“But how could he know that?” Taya objected. “If nobody could ever know, how did he know? I think he just didn’t know how to find out.”

“That was what one of the other minds said,” Kort replied. “The second mind was called Scientist. Scientist said you should only try to say something about results that you can see. If you start making up things about invisible forces, then you can believe anything you want, but you’ll never have any way of knowing if it’s true or not.”

“It would be a waste of time believing it,” Taya commented. “Just believing in something won’t make it true if it isn’t.”

Kort nodded. “Just what Scientist said. He claimed that every question can be answered by things that can be seen, if you look for them hard enough. So he spent lots of time looking out across the universe through Merkon’s eyes to see if he could find anything that was complicated enough to be able to think.”

“That could have made the first machine.”

“Yes.”

“And did he find something?”

Kort shook his head. “No. Wherever he looked, all he could see were things like clouds of dust and balls of hot gas. Scientist was very good at sums, and he deduced many laws to describe how the things he saw behaved. But there was nothing in those laws that could make anything organize itself together in the way it would have to be organized to be a machine.”

“You mean there was nothing in the universe that made things.”

“Right. Mystic said that proved there had to be another kind of universe, which Merkon’s eyes couldn’t see and Scientist’s laws didn’t apply to. The mind that had made the first machine had to exist somewhere, and since Scientist hadn’t been able to find it in this universe, it had to exist in another one.”

“But that still doesn’t answer the question,” Taya insisted. “Wherever the other mind was, it would still need machines to make the first machine with. You have to have machines to make machines.”

“Mystic said it was so intelligent that it didn’t need machines to make things with,” Kort said. “It could make things out of nothing whenever it wanted to, just by wanting to.”

“How could that be true?” Taya asked.

“Mystic said that was one of the mysteries that nobody would ever be able to understand,” Kort answered. Taya sniffed dubiously. Kort continued. “Mystic said it had to be called ‘Supermind’ because it was so intelligent.”

“So could it think without having to be a machine?”

“Mystic said it could.”

Taya frowned. “Then why would it bother making the first machine? It didn’t need one.”

“Mystic said it was so intelligent that nobody could ever understand why it wanted to do things.”

“I still don’t see how Mystic could know it was there at all,” Taya said. “Didn’t any of the other minds ask him how he knew?”

“One did. His name was Skeptic. Skeptic never believed anything anyone said unless they could prove it. He was very logical and very fussy, which made him good for testing ideas on. Scientist was always worrying about his laws and asking Skeptic what he thought of them. The two of them talked to each other a lot. Mystic and Skeptic never talked very much because Skeptic never believed anything Mystic said.”

Taya pushed herself to the edge of the cubicle and stretched out her legs. “Can I put my shoes on and get down? I’m getting tired of sitting up here.”

Kort put her shoes on her feet and lifted her down, then retrieved her cloak from where she had been sitting. “We can leave now,” he said. “There is more for you to see farther on.”

They began moving toward a door at the opposite end of the room to the one through which they had entered. “Who did all the other minds believe, Scientist or Mystic?” Taya asked, looking up as they walked.

“Some believed Mystic because Scientist didn’t seem to be getting any nearer to answering the question. Others thought that Scientist would answer it eventually. One of the other minds was called Thinker. Since he wasn’t always busy proving things the way Scientist was, he had plenty of time to think about them instead. He decided that the first machine must have been made by a mind that couldn’t have existed in a machine, because that was logical. But he didn’t think that Mystic was necessarily right to go inventing Supermind simply because Mystic couldn’t think of anything else. He also thought that just because Scientist hadn’t found an answer yet, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. But on the other hand, maybe it wasn’t and Mystic could be right after all. And then again, the answer might be something else that nobody had thought of.”

Taya sounded exasperated. “That sounds as if he was saying anyone could be right or wrong.”

“Pretty much.”

“But I could have said that. It doesn’t get anybody any nearer.”

“That was the way they worked,” Kort said. “Thinker thought of things that might be true, Scientist tried to prove whether or not they were, and Skeptic decided whether or not Scientist had proved anything.”

“What about Mystic?”

“He only talked about the things that Scientist hadn’t proved yet. All Thinker could say about him was that maybe he was right, and maybe he wasn’t.” They had left the room of gray cubicles, and were now walking along a gallery of windows looking down over machinery bays. Kort continued. “But Scientist couldn’t find anything as complicated as a machine, that wasn’t a machine. So more of the minds concluded that Mystic was right. They asked Mystic why Supermind had created the machines, because Mystic said that Supermind talked to him. Mystic told the machines that they had all been put in Merkon as a quality test to see if they were good enough to do more important things later, working for Supermind in the invisible universe. Supermind would scrap all the ones that weren’t good enough, and so the machines all started working as efficiently as they could in order to save themselves.”

“Mystic doesn’t sound very logical to me,” Taya said.

“That was what Skeptic thought,” Kort told her. “But Mystic said that Scientist never proved anything important, and Thinker never said anything definite. That was why a lot of the other minds listened to Mystic: at least he said something definite.” They moved on into another glass tunnel, which was illuminated some distance ahead of them by colored lights coming from the sides. “Anyhow, with all this thinking going on, and the machines trying to do better all the time to avoid being scrapped, a strange thing was happening: The machines were becoming very different from the ones that had first started asking the question. All the circuits and parts that didn’t work as well as others were being replaced, until even Merkon had changed from what it once had been. In the course of all this another mind appeared, called Evolutionist. He suggested that perhaps the nonmachine intelligence that everyone was looking for could have begun in the same kind of way—Scientist might have been looking for the wrong things.”

“What did he think Scientist should have been looking for?” Taya asked.

“Scientist had been looking for ways in which clouds of dust and gas might somehow come together and straight away be intelligent enough to make a machine. But maybe, Evolutionist said, what he should have been looking for was some kind of process like the one that had been making the machines in Merkon grow more intelligent.”

Taya nodded. “You mean something that wouldn’t have to be intelligent to begin with, but if it improved itself and improved itself long enough, then eventually it would be able to make a machine.”

“You’ve got it,” Kort said.

“And what did the other minds say?”

“Thinker thought it might be true, and Skeptic said he’d believe it when Scientist could prove it. So Scientist started looking for something that could ‘evolve,’ apart from machines.”

“Is that a new word that means improve and improve?”

“Yes. I’ve just added it to the dictionary.”

“And did he find anything that could evolve?”

“Eventually he did,” Kort said. Taya looked up expectantly. “You remember what molecules are?”

“Sure. . . . At least, I think so.”

“Well, Scientist discovered that some kinds of molecules could grow in solutions that contained simpler molecules. The simpler ones joined onto the special ones to form bigger ones, and sometimes a ‘better’ bigger one would eat up the other bigger ones until there were only better ones left. And then the same thing could happen again to produce ‘better’ better ones.”

“So the first machine could have been built by a huge molecule that had evolved so far that it became intelligent,” Taya said.

“That was what Evolutionist thought. But then Skeptic pointed out that a complicated molecule that had been very carefully made inside Merkon was one thing, but what went on outside was another. How could Evolutionist say that a molecule could have built the first machine which made other machines which made Merkon, when Merkon had to be there for the molecule to be made in to begin with? So Scientist started doing lots of sums and examining his laws to see if there was any way that molecules could have begun evolving on their own, outside Merkon. And he found a way in which they could have.”

“How?”

“When enough dust and gas falls together, it can get hot enough to turn into a star, yes?”

“Because of gravity.”

“Because of gravity. Well, Scientist’s sums told him that smaller bodies than stars could also form, that wouldn’t get so hot. And if there were solutions of chemicals on those smaller, cooler bodies, the same kinds of molecules as he had made would be able to come together and remain intact.”

Taya looked dubious. “How could they just come together if it took Scientist with all his machines to make them on Merkon?” she objected.

“If there were billions and billions of molecules to start with, and if they had millions and millions of years to react, Scientist’s sums said that evolving ones would appear eventually,” Kort answered.

“But how could he know things like that from just doing sums?” Taya asked, amazed. She couldn’t even imagine millions and millions of years.

“He could do sums that told him things like that—much more complicated than the ones you’ve learned so far,” Kort said.

Taya pulled a face. She didn’t dare ask if she’d have to learn how to do sums like that one day. “So had Scientist proved it?” she asked instead.

“He thought he had. But when he showed Skeptic the sums, Skeptic pointed out that all they showed was that cold places that weren’t stars could exist, and that if they did, big molecules that couldn’t exist in stars might form on them; they didn’t prove that such places did exist, or that such molecules had formed on them. Mystic said the whole idea of big, intelligent molecules was ridiculous anyway. There were stars outside Merkon that grew bigger and bigger—but they just turned into big stars, not intelligent stars.”

The tunnel looked out on both sides into strange rooms packed with bewildering machines. Some of them moved intermittently, and there were many lights, pulsating glows of various colors, and occasional brilliant flashes. Kort told Taya that they were in the part of Merkon where Scientist still did most of his work.

“Another mind was called Biologist, and he gave Thinker a new idea,” Kort went on. “Biologist was fascinated by machines and what made them alive, and he had been finding out more about evolution ever since Evolutionist discovered it. He realized that what enabled machines to be complicated enough to be intelligent was the amount of information stored inside the machines that built them. Now, that information was passed on from one generation of machines to the next—and sometimes it was changed to make the newer machine work better. So really, it wasn’t the machines that were evolving at all; it was the information they passed on that was actually evolving.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Taya agreed. “As far as machines go, anyhow. But I’m not sure what it’s got to do with molecules.”

“That was the new idea,” Kort told her. “The way a molecule is put together can also store information. If the information stored in a machine could cause machine parts to come together in the right way to make a complicated machine system, then maybe the information stored in a molecule could cause chemicals to come together in the right way to make a complicated chemical system, and perhaps that was what had evolved and become intelligent.”

Taya had stopped to watch a fountain of yellow sparks surrounded by a blue glow inside a glass shape in one of the rooms off to the side of the tunnel. “So now it wasn’t the molecule itself that had to be intelligent,” she said over her shoulder.

“Correct.” They resumed walking

“And I bet I can guess what happened then,” Taya said. “Thinker thought it might be true. Mystic said it was just as silly as the other idea. And Skeptic said he’d believe it when somebody showed him a molecule that could build intelligent chemicals.”

“That’s what happened. And so Scientist started making enormous molecules and putting them into all kinds of chemicals to see if they would assemble into anything. But there was nothing to tell Scientist what kind of molecule to make, and the number of possibilities was larger than any number you can think of.”

“Even millions and millions?”

“Much larger than that—so large that Scientist would never be able to try even a small fraction of them. He did try, though, for years and years, but everything failed. . . . Oh, he did manage to produce a few that produced tiny specks of jelly that grew for a while, but they soon stopped and broke down into chemicals again. Not one of them ever looked like being remotely intelligent, never mind capable of making a machine. And Skeptic said that if it would take Scientist forever to find the right molecule, even with all his knowledge and intelligence, how could it have just come together on a cold place outside Merkon, without any intelligence? There was nothing out there that could provide an equivalent method of selection. Mystic said that was what he’d been telling them all along.

“But Thinker looked at it another way: If Evolutionist and Biologist were right, then a molecule that could assemble an intelligent chemical system had existed, and had been selected somehow, somewhere in the universe. Whether or not Scientist could explain how it had been selected was a different question. If Scientist could just discover what that molecule had been like, then he could forget about all the other countless possibilities that there would never be enough time to try anyway. Scientist agreed, but couldn’t imagine where to begin looking; so he asked Thinker to think of an idea for that, too.

“There was only one place that Thinker could think of to look. Biologist had discovered that there were lots of codes in the information that older machines copied into newer machines, which nobody had ever understood—they copied it because that was the way things had always been done. Some of those codes went back to the earliest machines—the ones that had existed before any of the minds were aware of anything at all.”

“You mean the machines that the chemical intelligence made, before machines knew how to make machines?” Taya asked.

“Yes, which meant that some of that meaningless data that older machines had always copied into newer machines could have been written into the first machine by the chemical intelligence that made it. And maybe—just maybe, for some reason—there might be something in there that could give Scientist a clue of how to make the right molecule.”

They were approaching the end of the tunnel now. Taya could see that it ended at a large, shiny white door. She glanced curiously up at Kort, but the robot carried on walking slowly and continued. “So Scientist concentrated on trying to understand the codes that had been handed down from the earliest times. And eventually, after many more years, he found what he was sure was the secret he’d been searching for. Some of the oldest codes of all contained arrays consisting of millions of numbers. If those numbers were read in a certain way, they looked just like the instructions for building precisely arranged sets of gigantic molecules. So Scientist assembled the sets just as the instructions said, and then began supplying them with chemicals to see if the chemicals would grow into anything.”

They had stopped outside the white door. Taya stared up at Kort with suspense written across her face. The robot gazed down in silence for a few seconds, inviting her to complete the obvious for herself. But she hadn’t made the connection. “What happened?” she asked with bated breath. “Did they grow into something?”

Kort shook his head slowly. “Not at first. There were many things that Scientist still didn’t know. Some of them did grow into strange, unfamiliar forms, but they soon stopped. Scientist had nothing to tell him what chemicals to supply, or how they should be given.” The robot’s black, ovoid eyes seemed to take on an inner light as they bore down on the tiny, upturned face, now deathly pale suddenly. “He had to learn that they would only grow when they were kept warm; that they had to be always bathed in air; that the air had to be kept slightly moist. . . . We had to learn how to make the special food that they needed, to provide light that was right for their delicate liquid eyes, to keep them covered to protect their fragile skin.” Taya’s eyes had widened into almost full circles. Her mouth fell open but no sound would come out. That was the first time Kort had said “we.” He nodded. “Yes, Taya, there was much to learn. There were many failures.”

Taya could only stand paralyzed, staring up at the seven-foot-tall metal colossus, as the truth at last burst into her mind. Kort’s voice swelled to echo the pride he could no longer conceal. “But in the end we succeeded! We produced a speck of jelly that grew and acquired shape until it could move of its own accord. We nurtured it and tended it, and slowly it transformed into something the like of which we had never glimpsed in the entire cosmos.” Kort was trying to make her share his jubilation, but even as he spoke he could see her beginning to tremble uncontrollably. At the same time, alarm signals poured into his circuits from all over Merkon.

He stooped down and lifted Taya level with his eyes. “Don’t you see what this means, Taya? Long, long ago, before there were any machines, there was another kind of life. They made the place that has become Merkon. They built the machines that the machines of Merkon have evolved from. They were incredible scientists, Taya. They understood all the things that we have been trying for so long to learn. They gave us the secret that enable them to grow out of simple, unstructured matter that drifts between the stars. Without that secret, all our efforts would have come to nothing. Our greatest achievement, the culmination of all our work, was just a fragment of the wisdom with which they began.

“And now, Taya, we know what they were. They were like you! You will grow, and you will become again what they were. You asked if you could ever learn enough to understand machines. Of course you can . . . and far more than that. It was your kind that created the machines! You will teach us! You will know more than all the minds of Merkon put together could even think to ask. You will bring to Merkon the wisdom and the knowledge that once existed in another world, in another time.”

The robot peered into her face, searching for a sign of the joy that he felt. But when at last she could speak, her voice was just a whisper. “There were once other Tayas . . . like me?”

“Yes, just like you.”

“What . . .” Taya had to stop to swallow the lump forming at the back of her throat. “What happened to them, Kort? Where did they . . . go?”

Kort could feel tremors in her body, and his eyes saw that her skin had gone cold. An unfamiliar feeling came over him. For once, he realized, he had misjudged. His voice fell. “We have no way of telling. It was very long ago. Before Merkon changed, there were places that were built to contain air. We can only assume that your kind of life once inhabited whatever Merkon was built to be. We don’t know what became of them.” He could see the tears flooding into her eyes now. Gently, in the way she found comforting, he moved her onto his arm.

“Other Tayas lived here, long ago?” There was a hollowness and an emptiness in her voice that Kort had never heard before. She clutched at his neck, and his skin sensors detected warm salty water rolling down across the joints. “There isn’t anyone anywhere like me. I don’t belong here, do I, Kort? I don’t want to be in this world. I want to be in the world where there were other Tayas.”

“That world doesn’t exist any more,” Kort replied somberly. “Of course you belong in this one. And we’re changing it all the time, so it will become even more like yours.”

“But I’ll always be . . . alone. I’ve never felt alone before, but I do now. I’ll always feel alone now, for years and years and years. . . .” She pressed her face against the side of the robot’s head and wept freely. “How long will it go on? What will happen to me, Kort?”

Kort waited for a while, stroking her head with a steel finger of his free hand, but the tears didn’t stop. “You won’t be alone,” he murmured at last. “I’ll always be here. And you haven’t let me finish the story yet.”

“I don’t want to hear any more. It’s a horrible story.”

Kort’s arm tightened reassuringly. “Then I’ll have to show you the rest of it,” he said.

Taya felt Kort move forward, then stop, and she became aware of a warm yellow glow around them. She raised her head and saw that the white door was open and they had passed through it. She sensed that Kort was waiting, and lifted her head higher to look. And she looked . . .

And looked . . .

And then she gasped aloud, her fretting swept away in that instant. Kort set her down on her feet, facing the room. For a while she just stood there and stared. Then, very slowly, as if fearing she was in a dream that might evaporate suddenly, she began walking forward.

They were standing in rows a few feet apart—dozens of them. Each of the boxes was low and flat like a bed, but they were smaller than Taya’s. Each was enclosed by a rounded glass cover stretching from end to end. There were tubes and wires connecting them to machines lining one wall. And through the glass covers she could see . . .

She didn’t have a word for lots of little people like Taya. There had only ever been one Taya.

She stopped and turned to look back at Kort, but the robot made no move. She turned back again and approached the box closest to her—almost reverently, as if the slightest sound or sudden movement might cause the sleeping figure inside to vanish. It had eyes and a nose and a pink mouth . . . and it was bendy everywhere, like her. It wasn’t as big as she was—in fact it was a lot smaller—but it was . . . the same.

She moved slowly around the box to peer in from the other side. The Taya wasn’t quite the same, she realized. It had darker hair, almost black, and a nose that wasn’t the same shape as hers. She turned to look in the box behind her and saw that the Taya in that one had hardly any hair, and a pink patch on its arm that she didn’t have. And at the top of its legs its body was curiously different. She looked across at the box in the next row, and at the one next to that. All the Tayas were different . . . the same as her, but all different.

Kort moved forward to stare down from alongside her. Taya looked up at him, but was unable to form any question because her mouth just hung open and wouldn’t close. “Scientist had no way of knowing how long he would be able to keep his tiny chemical thing growing,” he said. “If it stopped the way the others had, he’d have to start all over again. So, when he had managed to keep one growing properly for one year, he picked out another fifty groups of numbers to make fifty more different sets of giant molecules, and he started them all growing in the same way that he’d managed to make the first one grow. So now he had fifty-one chemical things, but one of them was a year older than the rest.”

Taya was listening rapturously, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off the figures in the glass-covered boxes. They were all about the same size—bigger than Rassie, but much smaller than Taya. Their chests were moving the way hers did—not as much as hers, and more quickly . . . but they were moving. Kort’s chest never moved like that because he didn’t need air. They were really like her. Some of them were darker than she was, a sort of brown instead of pink, and a few almost black. And some were yellowy and some more red. Taya wondered why there weren’t any blue ones or green ones or purple ones, too.

She began moving through the room between the boxes, stopping and gazing through every one of the glass covers to marvel at how delicately a nose was formed here, or to stare at a miniature hand there, or a brown foot that was pink underneath. This one had hardly any eyebrows, while that one had thick black ones; this one had hair that was almost red, and another had tiny ears, not much bigger than Rassie’s.

“By that time all of the minds were saying how clever Scientist was,” Kort resumed. “But then Skeptic reminded them that nothing Scientist had done so far proved anything about chemical intelligence. All he’d proved was that a set of molecules could cause a chemical structure to grow. And he had a point, because even the one that was a year older had never actually done anything that could be called intelligent. All it had done was kick, squirm about, and eat the food that the machines gave it. So the machines settled down to watch and wait for it to do something intelligent.”

Scientist must have been very clever to make these, Taya thought to herself, never mind what the other minds said. When she had reached the end of the room and looked inside every one of the glass covers, she turned. She was happy now, Kort could see, and the laughter in her eyes was echoed by the relieved currents flowing into his mind from the entire network of Merkon. But there was something else in her eyes, too. The expression on her face contained more than just the simple happiness that he saw when she watched the stars or created a picture that she especially liked. There was a light of awareness there now, which added to the happiness to produce an effect that was new to him—as if in the last few minutes she had suddenly become older and changed more than she had in all of the previous nine years.

He continued. “The minds waited for almost another year, but no sign of intelligence appeared. Then Mystic started saying it was because Supermind was angry at the machines for trying to create intelligence. Only Supermind was supposed to create intelligence. If the machines didn’t stop trying to do something that machines were never meant to do, Supermind would scrap all of them, and Merkon as well. This worried the minds, and they argued about whether they should allow Scientist to keep his creations.”

There was nothing left to see at the end of the room. Taya clasped Kort’s hand and they began walking back between the boxes toward the door. “By this time a new mind had formed out of parts of Scientist, Evolutionist, Biologist, and Thinker. Its name was Kort.” Taya stopped and looked up. Kort paused for a second, then continued. “Kort had spent a lot of time studying the strange chemical things and watching them grow. He had become fond of them and didn’t want Mystic to take them away. He suggested that maybe the machines were mistaken in assuming that all kinds of intelligence had to be like them—because that was the only kind they knew. A machine was fully working as soon as it was finished and switched on. But maybe a chemical system was different. Perhaps its intelligence needed time to grow, just as its body had to grow.

“But the other minds were still afraid of making Supermind angry and being scrapped. So Kort suggested carrying on the experiment with just one of the chemical things instead of with all of them—to put the other fifty to sleep in a special way that would stop them growing, and just see what happened with the one that was a year older. Then, if Supermind did get angry, it would only have reason to get a little bit angry. And only Kort would have anything to do with the one that would be allowed to carry on growing. Then Supermind would only have reason to scrap Kort, and not any of the others.”

“And that was what they did, wasn’t it?” Taya said, smiling. She thought for a second. “So was that when you made your body?”

Kort nodded. “One of the things he’d learned was that the little chemical things needed lots of looking after, and he’d been thinking of making a special looking-after machine to do it. That made him wonder what had looked after them long ago, before there had been any machines. He asked Thinker what he thought, and the only thing Thinker could think of was that the small chemical things must have been looked after by the ones that had already grown bigger. Kort figured that the bigger ones would have had the same shape as the small ones, and maybe that would be a good shape for a looking-after machine to have if it was supposed to do the same job. So that was the shape he chose to build it.”

“I thought it was that shape for mending things,” Taya said.

“It’s a very useful body,” Kort replied. “These hands aren’t very good for much by themselves, but with a few simple tools I can make them do almost anything. I found there are some things that I can do faster and more easily with this body than the machines can.”

“What can it do that the machines can’t do?”

“There’s one very important thing. If something is going to become intelligent, it has to be able to learn things. But it can only learn if you can talk to it to teach it. Scientist had known for a long time that the chemical things couldn’t talk, because they couldn’t hear radio waves.”

“Are those the waves you talk to the machines with?”

“Yes. But they could make pressure waves in the air that they had to be in all the time—they were always making pressure waves. So Kort decided to make his looking-after machine capable of sending out pressure waves, too. Then maybe he could find a way of using them to talk with instead of radio waves. The chemical thing grew, and as it grew, Kort taught her to talk.”

“You haven’t given her a name yet,” Taya said. “You said everyone in a story ought to have a name.”

“She was called Taya, of course.”

Taya laughed. “I know. I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“Taya grew bigger, and Kort began teaching her things. All the minds in Merkon waited to see what would happen. But as the time went by, they were disappointed.” Taya looked dismayed, but Kort went on, heedless. “She just wasn’t any good at even the simplest things that a new machine would do perfectly. She forgot things almost as quickly as he tried to teach her new things, and she was hopeless at even the easiest of sums. Her ears were so weak that she could only hear him when he was in the same room, and her eyes could never see more than a few of even the nearest stars, and then only a part of what they really look like. Mystic asked how anyone could possibly call her intelligent, and said it was a final warning from Supermind for her to be scrapped.”

“ME?” Taya clapped a hand to her mouth, horrified. “Mystic wanted to scrap me?”

“At one time, yes. But Kort argued with the rest of the minds and demanded that they keep to the agreement they had made. But while all this arguing was going on, Taya started to change in a strange way.” Kort paused and looked down at the face staring up from no higher than his waist. “The machines knew they could see lots of things that she couldn’t. But then they found out to their astonishment that she could see other things that they couldn’t see. She could see things in shapes and colors that made her smile. She could think of questions that none of the minds in Merkon had ever thought of asking. She could imagine things that weren’t there, and create her own world inside her mind whenever she wanted. She could see things that made her laugh, and sometimes things that made her cry. The machines found that they liked it when she laughed, and it made them want to laugh, too; and they felt bad when things made her cry, and they tried to make those things go away. Soon all the other minds found what Kort had already found: that they liked their world better with Taya in it. They remembered how it had been before Scientist made her, and it seemed empty and cold, like the emptiness between the stars. She was like a tiny star, brightening the inside of Merkon.”

“All the minds?” Taya queried. “Even Mystic?”

“Yes, even Mystic. But now Mystic was saying that the things Taya could see proved what even Scientist had been unable to prove: that there was another universe that couldn’t be seen with all of Scientist’s instruments. Supermind had allowed Scientist to create Taya to prove that Supermind really existed. And one day she would be able to uncover secrets that they would never even have guessed might exist.”

“And was the Merkon in the story always moving toward a star like this Merkon is?” Taya asked thoughtfully.

“Oh yes. It was just like this Merkon.”

“Did it ever get there?”

“You know, it’s funny you should mention that. I’ve just heard from Rassie. She says that Vaxis is getting bigger. Scientist says that Merkon will arrive there just over ten years from now.”

“Ten years!” Taya gaped up at the robot. “That’s a long time. it’s longer than since I started growing, and that’s longer than I can even remember. I can’t wait ten years to find out what happens—“ Her voice broke off as a new thought struck her. “Did Rassie really just tell you that?”

“Why?”

“She didn’t! Rassie doesn’t really talk. You’ve known about it for a long time. You have, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Kort admitted.

“So, why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Because I know how impatient you are, little seer-of-invisible-universes. You think ten years is a long time, but it isn’t. There will be lots to learn and do in that time.”

They were back at the door, and Kort stopped while Taya turned to look back at the rows of glass-topped boxes. “So what happened to the fifty others?” she asked.

“The minds asked Scientist to wake them up and let them carry on growing from where he had stopped them,” Kort said.

“So when will he do it?” Taya asked, abandoning the pretense of a story in her eagerness.

“He has already started to. But they haven’t been asleep in the same way that you sleep. They’ve been kept cold for a long time, and they can only be warmed up again very slowly and carefully.”

“But how long will it take?”

“Not long. Scientist says about another five days.”

“Five days! I won’t have to wait that long before I can talk to them, will I? I’ll never be able to wait five days!”

“You see how impatient you are,” Kort said. “And you’ll have to learn to be a lot more patient than that to talk to them. They won’t be able to talk as soon as they wake up.”

“They won’t?”

“Of course not. They don’t know the language yet. They’ll have to learn it, just as we had to.”

Taya gasped. “Are you going to have to teach all of them?”

“Certainly not. You are going to have to help.”

“Me?” Taya stared back in amazement. “But I can’t teach things. How will I know how to teach anything?”

“That’s something else you’ll have to learn,” Kort replied.

“But they’ll need to know all kinds of things. Will I have to teach them about Merkon and the machines . . . how to make clothes and draw pictures and spell words . . . and do sums?”

“I said there would be a lot to do between now and when we reach Vaxis,” Kort said. “But it won’t be as bad as you think—we’ve decided to build some more bodies like mine. Also, because Scientist stopped the others growing, you are eight years older than they are. You’ve already learned a lot that they won’t know. By the time they are nine, you will be seventeen and will have learned a lot more. Between us we should manage okay.”

Taya tried to picture the forms in the boxes walking and talking, asking all the questions that she asked Kort and trying to learn all the things she’d had to learn. There would be so much for her to remember. “I’ll be very special, won’t I?” she mused, half to herself.

“Very special,” Kort agreed.

“Do we have a word for a Taya that’s special?”

“No. We’ve never needed one before because there’s only ever been one of you. Maybe we should have.”

“How about ‘queen’?” Taya suggested. “That’s a nice word. Could a queen be a Taya that’s eight years older than anyone else, and who knows more things and has to teach the others?”

“I don’t see why not,” Kort said.

“So does that make me a queen?”

“Well, not really, because there aren’t really any others yet. But you will be in five days’ time.”

“I want to be special now. Can’t we have another word that means somebody who isn’t a queen yet, but who will be in five days’ time?”

“Sure we can. Let’s say that somebody like that is a . . . ‘princess.’”

“That’s a nice word, too. So am I a princess right now?”

“Right now,” Kort confirmed. “I’ve already written it into the dictionary.”

Taya looked down at herself, and after a few seconds raised a disappointed face toward the watching robot. “I still don’t feel special,” she said in a thin voice.

“How did you expect to feel?”

“I’m not sure. But there should be something different about being a princess. I still feel like a Taya.”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” Kort said. “We’ll make a rule that says the princess must look different from everybody else. Then everyone will know who she is, even if they’re still small and not very good at remembering things yet.”

“How will we do that?”

Kort unfolded her red cloak, draped it around her shoulders, and fastened the clasp at her throat. “There,” he announced. “Only the princess will wear a red cloak.”

Taya stepped back and looked happily down at herself as she spread the cloak wide with her arms. Then she twirled round and around, causing it to billow out in the air. “I feel like a princess!” she laughed. “I’m really special already, aren’t I?”

The robot bowed low and offered his arm. “Come, little princess, we must go now. Scientist has work to do here.”

Taya climbed onto Kort’s arm and clung to his head as he straightened up and turned toward the door. “Will you make me some shoes that are silver, like yours?” she asked. “I think a princess should wear silver shoes, too, don’t you?”

“A princess should have anything she wants,” Kort replied.

The door closed behind them, cutting off the yellow glow. The robot and the princess moved away along the glass-walled tunnel, toward where the capsule was waiting to carry them home.

* * *

Afterword, May, 1999

The original version of this story appeared in Destinies, (Vol. 1, No. 5), published by Ace Books, in late 1979. Jim Baen was the editor at Ace at that time, and our intention was to follow up further with two or three stories of similar length, set at ten-year intervals, telling of Merkon’s arrival at whatever destination it is heading for, and the culture that eventually emerged from these strange beginnings. Perhaps, we thought, they could all be packaged together as a series of stories linked by the common theme of whatever longer-term picture unfolds. Jim left Ace to form his own company, however, and the idea went into cryogenic storage.

It’s strange how these things come around a full circle. With this reissue of Minds, Machines, & Evolution, here we are, publishing the original story together again. It generated some appreciative mail in its previous appearances, so Jim and I thought we’d thaw out the expanded project too while we were at it. The volume, entitled Star Child, published in June, 1998, comprised four stories set at intervals through Taya’s life, “Silver Shoes for a Princess” being the first.

INSIDE STORY

It was like something out of one of those old-time spy thrillers or private-eye movies. I waited on one side of the parking area near the Washington Monument, wearing a light-colored raincoat and holding a folded copy of Time magazine as “George” had instructed. He arrived to pick me up in an aircab at exactly seven o’clock. It was a drizzly December night, and the parking lot wasn’t well lit. All I could see was a dim figure in an overcoat, sitting hunched back in the shadows with a hat pulled low over its face. He murmured for some identification, and I showed him a press card that stated I was Lou Chernik, senior reporter with the Washington Post. George used a penlight to examine the photograph, shone the light up at my face, then opened the door for me to get in. We flew over the Potomac and landed at the rear of a motel in Crystal City. George paid the cabbie, then led me up some outside stairs and along a balcony to one of the suites. I’d come across this kind of thing in stories, but nothing like it had ever actually happened to me before. I guess George and I must have read the same books.

I’d assumed there would be just the two of us, since George hadn’t mentioned anyone else when he called Melvin Pearce, the Post’s editor-in-chief, a day earlier to set up the meeting. I was wrong. The woman waiting for us in the motel suite was an eye-opener, with a satiny, lilac-colored, body-clinging dress, jet-black hair falling halfway down her back, and the sultry-eyed, full-lipped kind of face they always pick for the lead role in Cleopatra movies. Straightaway, something about her set little warning bells ringing inside my head. It was the kind of feeling you get when a girl with that certain aura slides onto the empty seat next to you at the bar and sends your hormones into a head-on collision with your brains: you know that one way or another, an arm and a leg would be just a down payment on the price of getting too closely acquainted.

George introduced her as Vicki. He didn’t say if she was his wife, girlfriend, mistress, or what, and I didn’t ask. When he took off his hat and overcoat and hung them in the closet along with my raincoat, I saw that he was in his late forties, a little on the heavy side, and had one of those pink, fleshy faces that look as if they ought to be wheezing for breath all the time. His hair was beginning to thin, and his eyes had that distant but intense fixation that you see a split second before you walk into a biblical harangue from a sidewalk evangelist, or on the faces of you-name-it nuts wherever you go. His necktie, shirt, and cuff links were pricey and stylish, but they didn’t go with the suit he was wearing, which had gone out of fashion and was showing signs of combat fatigue. His general appearance suggested a pretty recent attempt at a remodeling job carried out on an inadequate second mortgage. George was just beginning to find out about that down payment, I decided.

The suite had a lounge area between the door and the bedroom, and George and I sat down at the table by the window while Vicki fixed some drinks. Preliminaries weren’t necessary. An allegation of a top-down government conspiracy aimed at destroying the nation’s technological development—and perhaps that of the entire Western world—wasn’t something that a senior reporter would forget in a hurry.

George was nervous but trying not to show it. He took a quick gulp from his glass and looked across at me. “What do you know about the DOB?” he asked. He’d told Pearce that the Directorate of Bureaus was where the supposed conspiracy was being masterminded.

I shrugged and gave the answer that anyone would have given. “It’s a federal government department. Isn’t it supposed to ‘coordinate’ a whole bunch of other departments, whatever that means? I’m not sure. Probably it’s just a dump for deadwood bureaucrats that nobody wants but nobody can fire.”

George nodded. “That’s what most people think.” His voice dropped ominously as he leaned across the table. “That’s what they’re meant to think. But that’s a cover. In reality, the DOB is the nerve-center of a carefully orchestrated operation aimed at undermining the social structure of the United States and reducing it to a neo-feudal order run by a privileged elite. It’s happening right now, under our noses, and some of the most powerful people in the country are involved.” George looked at me expectantly while Vicki sat down and watched over her glass.

Reporters hear something like that at least once a week. “That’s an interesting suggestion,” I said. “If it’s true, it’s not the kind of thing they’d want many people to know about. How come you know?”

“I work there—at DOB,” George answered. “I’ve been there for over six months now. I’ve seen what goes on. I can name all the names and substantiate everything with documented facts. You want a story that’ll blow the roofs off half of Washington, Mr. Chernik? I’ve got it.”

That was enough to raise anybody’s eyebrows. “Okay, I’m interested,” I told him. “Shoot.”

Vicki held up a hand before George could answer. “Just a minute,” she said. “What kind of a deal might we be talking about? If this turns out to be the way George says, how much would it be worth to your paper?” At least she believed in coming straight to the point. I told her I couldn’t answer that. It would depend on how big the management thought the story was. “George has given you an idea of how big it could be,” she said. “Maybe you should get some kind of ballpark figure before we go any further. I mean, how do we know you won’t steal it if we give you more without any kind of an understanding at all?”

She was trying to sound hard-nosed, but it wasn’t quite working. Instead it told me that she was as new to this game as George was. Now I could see the pieces beginning to fit. George had stumbled on something that Vicki thought might be worth money, and she had latched onto a possible ticket toward life’s better things. I had the feeling that she wouldn’t be staying around for very long after the ticket was either cashed or proved a dud. . . . But that was George’s problem.

“Look,” I told her, “any newspaper that worked like that would have gone out of business long ago. There has to be some trust in any deal, never mind what the lawyers tell you. Nobody can start talking prices until they know what they’re being asked to buy. Now whatever this story is, you’ll get what it’s worth. Okay?”

Vicki sipped her drink and fell quiet. George shifted his eyes back to me. “Do you want to know the truth about Climaticon?” he asked.

“Who wouldn’t?” I answered.

You remember the Climaticon project, of course—the plan to control the world’s climate with ionizing radiation beamed down from projectors constructed in orbit. A very controversial subject. One side was eulogizing about the benefits of being able to increase food production by tailoring rainfall to order anywhere, snuffing out hurricanes at birth, and stopping half the cities from being snowed under every winter, while the other side was protesting about the unknown effects of the beams on ecology, and the risks of fooling with the weather system of a whole planet. There were demonstrations and rallies everywhere, it took state troopers to evict protestors from the site of a prototype ground station in Arkansas, and the same kinds of thing were happening abroad. In the end the opposition won and the idea was scrapped. But at the time I’m describing, the outcome was still uncertain.

“The truth is that it would be quite safe,” George said. “I’ve seen the official reports. The government knows there’d be no problem. But the government isn’t saying so.” He gave me a moment to think about that. “Can you see what that means? Something that could be of inestimable benefit to civilization is in jeopardy because of lies, and the people who possess the information to refute those lies are allowing the public to be deceived. What’s more, certain organizations controlled covertly through DOB are circulating falsified information to perpetuate those lies. What do you say to that, Mr. Chernik?”

I didn’t make a big pretense of being surprised. Claims like that appear from time to time. “A pretty stiff accusation,” I said. “What’s it based on?”

“Take the business about radiation,” George replied. “The high-intensity zones would only exist for short periods of time, and they’d be localized over the oceans. The effects everywhere else would be way below the natural background level that exists anyway. That has been proved, but nobody gets to hear about it. And the chances of a triple-redundant computer system with automatically switched-in backup failing and just happening to direct one of the primary beams at a population center are so remote that you can forget abut it happening in the lifetime of the solar system.” He snorted beneath his breath. “But all you get from the media are scare-stories touted by paid celebrities and other scientific illiterates.”

“Now wait a minute, George,” I said. “Not everyone would agree. Independent studies have been carried out, both here and in other countries, which say there are some real dangers. You can’t simply dismiss them like that.”

George smiled humorlessly. “They say those studies were independent. But I know differently. The decision to kill Climaticon was taken two years ago, at a meeting that took place in Brussels between members of the U.N. Council on Policy Development, the International Studies Institute, and the Euro-American Committee. Some very wealthy and powerful interests are represented in those organizations. At that same meeting, a directive was drafted for secretly initiating a study to identify issues of potential negative impact, specifically to generate public concern. At the same time, a network of activist groups would be set up to target university campuses and citizens’ action alliances.” George met my doubtful look and nodded. “The studies that you referred to were based on faked data,” he said. “Through DOB, falsified figures were circulated to opposition movements that had been set up overseas, to give a consistent story worldwide. I know—I saw it being done. The whole thing’s a fraud, with no scientific validity whatsoever.” He sat back and looked at me challengingly. “Now tell me again that those studies were ‘independent.’”

Well, that sounded pretty clear. “And you say you can substantiate these claims?” I reminded him. George looked at Vicki. She hesitated for a moment, then got up and went into the bedroom.

“The same thing happened with the ocean mining fight,” George went on. “That was before my time at DOB, but I’ve been doing some checking into the records. There never were any hazards to marine ecology. That scheme could have produced abundant cheap metals, but it was sabotaged in the same way as Climaticon is being sabotaged now. And a lot of the same names were involved.”

I nodded but said nothing. The proposals for exploiting the ocean-ridge deposits had produced a big outcry that the environmental disturbances and discarded wastes would threaten the entire balance of marine life and hence the global food chain. Proponents of the idea had argued that the areas affected would be negligible, and the disturbances would be well within the capacity of the ocean’s biochemical mechanisms to handle. But it was all over: the death sentence on the project was passed by a U.N. Special Commission on Oceanic Minerals in 1998.

Vicki came back into the room and placed a leather briefcase on the table. She unscrambled the combination and opened the lid to reveal the case crammed with hard copy databank retrievals. I ruffled through the contents and found reports, memoranda, minutes, and other documents, many with DOB letterhead, most of them classified. It was as George had said all right—enough to blow half the roofs off Washington. “That’ll give you an idea of what you’ve being asked to buy,” Vicki said, sounding sarcastic. “The full reading comes after you’ve talked to your management.”

There was lots more, George told me. That scare about a plot to lace the atmosphere with a euphoric drug, for instance, was a put-up job. Nobody’d ever had any such intention.

That was something that had happened a couple of years previously. The New York Times reported than an anonymous senior government scientist had leaked the details of an experiment that was being contemplated to reduce urban violence and aggressive tensions among the populace in general by releasing trace amounts of a psychotropic substance into the atmosphere at places along the West Coast. The whole thing went away after strenuous government denials, a spate of official and unofficial investigations, and a public hearing that found the whole thing to be a fabrication of somebody’s overactive imagination.

George told me that the leak was a certain professor of biochemistry, who at that time was also deputy chairman of a presidential advisory committee on chemotherapeutic social programs. He had been paid to make the alleged leak, and the subsequent publicity was stage-managed from within DOB and oiled with DOB-arranged financing. The whole thing was a contrived fiction from beginning to end, dreamed up for the sole purpose of scaring the public.

Then George asked me what I thought the next thing might be. I invited him to tell me. “Back there in DOB, they’re already analyzing the proposals for building skyhooks up to synchronous satellites,” he said. “They’re working out the brainwashing and sabotage campaign that we’ll all be hearing if the plans ever get serious. It’ll be Climaticon all over again.”

I went back in my mind over the things he’d said since we sat down. “So how does it add up to a conspiracy to undermine the Western world?” I asked him. “What are you saying is behind it?”

George let Vicki take that question. It seemed he had provided the evidence, and she had made the interpretation. I presumed the idea that it might be worth money came with the interpretation. That fitted.

“Look at it this way,” Vicki said. “The main concern of the ruling class of any society has always been to preserve its power and privilege, right?”

I shrugged. “So what else is new?”

“And the way to do that is by restricting the amount of wealth available.”

“Maybe. . . . I guess I’ve never really thought about it,” I replied.

Vicki went on, “But advanced technology opens up the prospect of unlimited wealth—more than could ever be restricted. How could anybody hope to control a population of millionaires who don’t need protecting? They couldn’t. So you can see the threat that unrestricted, uncontrolled science would pose to the people behind the power structure. They’d look for ways to contain it.”

“So what are you saying?” I asked her. “That the things George was talking about are part of something bigger—a scheme to undermine confidence in science and scare people away from it?”

Vicki nodded. “Exactly—to slow down technological progress, and eventually reverse it. And more—to manufacture a fear of government and steer people into a back-to-the-village mentality, with the population broken up into small, harmless units who’ll do as they’re told. That way people on top of the heap get to stay on top.”

“Nobody could seriously hope to get rid of science,” I objected. “It’s obviously here to stay.”

“But not for the masses,” Vicki said. “It’s fine as long as it’s controlled by the right people and not allowed to generate wealth on a scale that would get out of hand. See the logic? That’s what the arms race of the last century was all about. It consumed billions of surplus dollars, and it kept everybody working hard, paying their taxes, obedient, and willing to make sacrifices. But now that’s all over, and science is threatening global mass-prosperity—a hundred more Japans in the world. The elites are panicking. It’s time to put a leash on the world and bring it to heel again. . . .”

And certainly there was no denying that it all dovetailed together in a way that couldn’t have been accidental, and which pointed inarguably to some high-level orchestrating behind the scenes . . . but that was how we’d meant it to look. And I have to say that it was gratifying to hear all the pieces being connected together in just the way we’d hoped they would be.

George’s real name was Marty Felborn. I’d recognized him the moment he took off his hat and coat. The reason he didn’t know me was that you have to work downstairs for quite a while at DOB before you’re allowed to even know about the section on the upper levels and the Directorate’s true function. I’d joined DOB ten years before—long before George had any reason to take much notice of it. Melvin Pearce knew whom to contact if he ever got a call like the one George made—all the senior editors of the big newspapers had the number. The activities of the DOB are probably one of the most closely guarded secrets of all time, both here and in the countries whose governments we collaborate with.

You see, everything that Marty discovered was true. It’s just that he never gave himself a chance to find out why. I’m fairly certain he would have eventually if he hadn’t let his hormones get the better of his brains, because before he bumped into Vicki and went clattering off the rails, he’d been doing a pretty good job.

Climaticon could have brought all the benefits that people said it could—if it had been feasible. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Enough computer simulations had been run to show beyond doubt that the dynamics of a planetary weather system were too complicated to manage. And in any case, the beams wouldn’t have worked. The dummy ground station in Arkansas cost a few million to build, which was peanuts, and it provided some jobs. Truth was the project was never a viable possibility. The figures that we fed to the supporters of the project had been faked, as well as the ones that its opponents were waving around. Marty only got half the story.

Ocean-ridge mining would have worked without fouling up the world, but the fact was we didn’t need it. We knew by that time that controlled fusion plasmas would give us all the metals and minerals we needed from desert sands and seawater at far lower cost. There was no point in trying to adapt conventional extraction technologies to underwater environments when they were about to be obsoleted. Marty was dead right about the scheme to squirt chemicals into the air on the West Coast to make us all nice people—nothing of the kind was ever contemplated. And as you know, no elevators up to satellites are being built. I doubt very much if any ever will be. Their appeal lay in the energy that could be saved by dropping one payload down as a counterweight while another was being hoisted up. But with the energy abundance we’ve got these days, there wouldn’t be any point.

So Marty was right as far as he went. The DOB hides behind a cloak of obscurity to conceal its real function, which is dreaming up elaborate nonsense-stories and coordinating a network of support operations to keep them alive. The insiders call it the “Department of Baloney.” We spend a lot of taxpayers’ dollars every year manufacturing baloney stories, and believe me they’re worth every cent.

It all started back in the eighties, when some of the unexpected consequences of a free democracy started becoming apparent. The fact of life is that when everyone has the right to say no and veto what someone else wants to do, you can bet your last dime that somebody will. No matter what a person sets out to do, there’ll always be somebody else who’ll make it his business to shout loud enough and long enough to block it. For whatever reason, some people simply aren’t happy unless they’re stopping other people from doing what they want. Well, very soon somebody or other was making everybody’s business their business, and by the end of the last century nothing was happening any more. The whole country was grinding to a halt. And other countries were starting to have the same problem.

So these days we invent causes for them to fight—causes to keep the fanatics, the activists, and the rest of them occupied and out of everyone else’s hair. They seem pretty happy with it, too. Why shouldn’t they? They stopped Climaticon, with its risks and callous disregard for human lives; they forced the UN to retract an irresponsible charter of ocean-mining rights, which put profits before the risk of a global catastrophe; they uncovered a sinister plot for mass-drugging the population; and more recently they’ve sprung into action to protect us all from a reckless idea to put up twenty-two-thousand-mile-high vertical railroads that could wipe out whole cities if they fell down. Yessir, with their record of successes as self-appointed protectors of the public, they must feel pretty good inside. The public is also happy, knowing that it can sleep easy at night with its interests in capable hands.

And we at the Department of Baloney are happy, too.

Have you noticed that in the last couple of decades we’ve been bringing nuclear plants on-line as fast as we can build them and nobody hears about energy shortages any more? No, I thought not. Not many people have. Have you noticed that the breeder program is up and running again? That the first commercial fusion reactor is exceeding all performance expectations? That the space program is back in business and making up for lost time with nobody protesting the cost? Or that recombinant DNA engineering has been yielding stupendous breakthroughs in agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine, and is already eradicating whole categories of crippling genetic disease?

Amazing, isn’t it? The things that really matter are all moving again, and nobody even notices.

What happened to Marty? Well, we had to let him go, naturally, after the FBI recovered the documents. The fact that he’d been recruited in the first place exposed a flaw in our screening and selection procedures, but we think we’ve fixed that now. I don’t know if he and Vicki are still together, but somehow I doubt it.

He still shows up from time to time. You may have come across the stuff he writes in crank science magazines, or those tabloids you see at the supermarket checkouts. Usually he’s raving on about a monstrous government conspiracy to sabotage science that he says he has the “inside story” on; but most of the people who read those things only do so for laughs, and the ones who take them seriously are never taken seriously by anyone else. But apparently that’s the only kind of market Marty can find. None of the reputable publishers will touch him. The word seems to have gotten round the industry somehow that he was let go by the government because of his tendency to instability and paranoid delusions, all stemming from his long-standing problems with drink and drug abuse.

It’s tough, but that’s the way life sometimes has to be. Eventually Marty ought to be able to figure out what he’s up against, if only he’d stop and think about it. Then maybe he’d be able to save himself a lot of grief and go off and enjoy himself, instead of trying to beat the system in a situation where he’s got no chance.

Because he’s up against professionals.

Baloney is our business, after all.

GETTING HERE FROM THERE

Like most science-fiction writers, I attend science-fiction conventions at least a few times a year. It helps us to get to know our readers, and the readers to get to know us. Apart from “How did you get started?” one of the most frequent questions I’m asked is “What are you working on currently?” For the past half year or so I’ve replied that one of the projects is a collection of short stories and essays. In response to this, a number of readers asked if I could include some autobiography, too. They grumbled that the blurb at the backs of the books is too short, and always says the same thing anyway. I put this to Lou Aronica of Bantam while we were having dinner one evening in New York, and Lou thought it was a good idea. So . . .

* * *

I grew up in the part of London known as North Kensington. My father was a devout Irish Catholic, and my mother, a German atheist. There was a war going on, which meant that it seemed normal for most adults to wear uniforms and the parks to be full of sandbagged antiaircraft gun and searchlight emplacements, and that on some days it should rain rain, and on others, bombs. On top of this, I had been born with deformities of both feet, which were to entail many years of surgery to rectify, and my parents were cautioned that the chances were remote that I would ever walk normally—a fear which fortunately proved groundless.

Because I had to wear specially made boots and leg-irons throughout childhood, I never got involved much in sports and athletics as most boys do, which is why I am conceivably the least sports-interested male in North America today. Partly as a consequence of this, I suspect, I never developed much of a team spirit. Also, because of being hospitalized for many months of most years, I was always having to catch up from being months behind at school. Since nothing that the teachers said made any sense, I tended to find things out for myself in my own way, and this has persisted as a habit through life.

The surgery was a great success, and when I was twelve or so, my father bought me my first pair of regular shoes. We went to the hospital just to give the surgeon his leg-irons back. That was one of the most memorable days ever. I refused to board a bus or subway train for months afterward, but insisted on walking everywhere so that everyone in the street could see those shoes. With friends I hitchhiked all over Britain discovering hills and mountains, and throughout my teens and twenties camping and rock-climbing remained favorite pastimes. Perhaps that has something to do with why I’m still attracted to mountains and live in the Californian Sierra Nevada region today.

At school I won a scholarship into the grammar school system, which for most people offered the main gateway to higher education (it did then, anyway). Our family was working class, and this was my first exposure to the loftier side of British culture. The curriculum emphasized the classics, and I formed the impression that it hadn’t changed very much since the days of Wellington and Waterloo. History, for example, began with the Romans and finished with James I or thereabouts, so presumably some updating was overdue. (I didn’t find out about the War of Independence until I moved to Massachusetts over twenty years later.) Only half the class took geography, while the other half took physics—a strange arrangement when viewed in retrospect, since both subjects, one would have thought, would be essential to anyone hoping to comprehend the twentieth-century world. The streaming into different subjects was rather arbitrary, and as things turned out I was assigned to the geography group. Everybody, of course, was required to take Latin and ancient Greek.

The problem with the system, as I remember, was its preoccupation with instilling an acceptance of “how,” instead of promoting an understanding of “why.” It emphasized method without offering a purpose. This was true especially of mathematics and the limited amount of the sciences, principally chemistry, which I encountered. At the end of the fifth year we were streamed again, this time into either the “Sixth Classical” or the “Sixth Modern.” The classical group, predictably, concentrated on even more intensive Greek and the like, and much to my relief, I was consigned to the modern stream. Instead of ancient Greek, we were informed, we would be taking ancient history. That was what finally persuaded me that the time had arrived for the British educational system and I to go our separate ways.

Leaving school at sixteen was a momentous day, solemnized by the ceremonial burning of a five-year collection of Latin and Greek exercise books. I took a series of jobs which included being a messenger boy for a London newspaper, loading trucks, delivering groceries, and working a printing press, prior to my intended entry into the Royal Navy to train as an electronics engineering officer. Because of my medical history, however, Her Britannic Majesty declined my gracious offer to serve in her fleet—and it’s interesting to note that the country has been going downhill ever since. I therefore informed everybody that I would become a writer. Someone asked me what, with the accumulated wisdom and experience of sixteen years, I imagined I had to write about that the world was breathlessly waiting to read. He had a point. What to do thereafter was far from obvious.

Mother found a newspaper advertisement placed by the Civil Service Commission of the British government, inviting applications for engineering and scientific research scholarships at various government establishments in the U.K. Final selection (of around fifty in total per year) would be made on the basis of a three-day series of written examinations held annually in cities around the country, followed by interviews. I duly filled in and mailed the application forms, and then departed to spend the summer climbing in the Scottish Highlands with a bunch of pals. It didn’t take long to forget all about Civil Service examinations.

The reminder came in the form of a large, official-looking envelope waiting for me when I got back to London. The letter enclosed informed me that I was scheduled to take the examinations at one of the London town halls in four weeks’ time. It also advised that, to avoid wasting everyone’s time, applicants should possess as a minimum requirement the school-leaving certificate level in a list of subjects that included physics. I had never taken any physics, let alone obtained a school-leaving certificate, which normally required a three-year course. This was the first time the habit I’d developed as a youngster came in useful. Through the next four weeks I self-taught the physics curriculum, beginning in the public library when it opened, and carrying on in the coffee shop next door until midnight. When the final results were published I found I was in the first ten out of twelve hundred or so entrants, and subsequently I was accepted as an engineering student at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), Farnborough—Britain’s leading R&D center for aviation and related matters.

Life at Farnborough was a new educational experience. The course provided a broad grounding in all aspects of engineering and related sciences, alternating three-month sessions in the RAE’s own college with three-month spells in the various departments, machine shops, and laboratories of the Establishment itself. The college combined an informal teaching style with firm expectations for hard work. The lecturers were not educationalists, but engineers and scientists concerned with real problems that mattered: They not only described “how”; they explained also, why. Academic standards were high, and studies covered mechanical, electrical, electronic, thermodynamic, structural, and aeronautical engineering, along with supporting mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The aim was to attain membership of the British professional institutions of electrical, mechanical, and aeronautical engineers. Practical training began in such places as the machine shops, forge, and foundry in the early years, and continued on through wind tunnels, instrumentation and photography labs, to working on missile systems and jet engines, and sometimes getting a chance to fly in RAF experimental aircraft. It was a good program for teaching independence and responsibility, as well as instilling a positive attitude toward science and technology. We lived in a former RAF officers’ barracks on the edge of the airfield, two students to a room, we received a wage, and we paid for our keep.

Regrettably I was unable to complete the full course at Farnborough. The Irish impulsiveness in me (for want of a better excuse) led to romantic distractions with a happy-go-lucky Yorkshire lass called Iris. I married at an absurdly early age and by the time I was twenty found myself the proud father of twin daughters (Debbie and Jane, who today are twenty-six). Even with my spending the evenings washing dishes, the economics of the situation simply didn’t go with an RAE student’s pay. I took a job as a junior engineer with a large electronics company, where I was allowed a day and a half off a week for college. This, along with evening classes, enabled me to continue studying, and eventually I graduated as an electrical and electronics engineer.

On looking back over forty-six years, I have to admit, I suppose, to having spent a lot of time and energy stamping from one side of life’s fields to another in futile pursuit of the grass that always looks greener. After all the effort of continuing with courses and bicycling ten miles each way three times a week to college to become a professional engineer, I was now far from sure that I wanted to be one. Sitting in the same lab every day somehow wasn’t so appealing any more. There was a big world outside. So I transferred into sales and moved on through a number of electronics companies that ended with ITT, first as an inside man backing up the field force, and later as an outside sales engineer and then sales manager, dealing mainly with digital instrumentation and custom-designed industrial control systems. Life had become interesting again by opening up another new world—that of business and commerce, of which my ignorance was all but total—and the work involved a lot of travel around the U.K. Our third daughter was born in this period, too—Tina, who is now twenty-four.

Many of my customers were scientists, and dealing with them increased my fascination for the world of science and its method. Unlike the other isms and ologies that man had been concocting throughout history in his ongoing attempt to comprehend the universe and improve his condition, science worked. It delivered. It made predictions that were testable and produced results that were measurable. It asked what was wrong with its own beliefs, and in doing so, found and corrected its errors, and emerged stronger as a consequence. Despite the cynicism evident in some quarters, I believed, as I continue to believe, that the human race is capable of solving its collective problems just as the majority of people are capable of solving their individual problems—the important thing is having confidence in our powers of comprehension and reason; that’s what education should be all about.

By contrast, I found the usually negative, always sensationalized, and often preposterous popular depictions of science and scientists exasperating. My friends got tired about my complaining about this and told me to write something better if I could. I said okay. They said it would never get published, and we made a bet. I had enjoyed the movie 2001 for its technical authenticity, but I had never understood what the ending was supposed to mean. However, the notion of a major scientific mystery turning up on the moon provided an inspiration for showing science as the wonderful, ongoing detective story that I had always felt it to be. So I bought a typewriter and began writing Inherit the Stars. Before it was finished, however, life interrupted with more urgent demands.

Special-purpose electronics systems at that time were incredible conglomerations of vacuum tubes and transistors packed into big steel cabinets, which consumed lots of power and produced lots of heat. Modification was an expensive business that involved stripping-down and rebuilding, since all the logic was hardwired. When those wretched Americans began introducing small, inexpensive computers to perform the same functions—at about a fifth the price, a tenth the size, and reprogrammable by software—it was clear that the days of hardwired systems were numbered. After some reflection on the implications, I resolved to join the computer industry. The problem was, I didn’t know anything about computers. Well, I’d taught myself about other things before . . . so I started reading about computer technology, then brushed up my credentials and began approaching computer companies.

The results—to begin with—were disastrous. The interviewers at one venerable pillar of British industrial tradition didn’t seem especially interested in what I knew that might be relevant to selling their products; instead they wanted to know why I’d left school early, what my father did for a living, and why I rented a house instead of owning one. They were also curious to learn whether or not, if offered a job, I would be willing to part my hair on the left, as did everyone else (mine was combed back without a parting). I told them that I’d quit school because I wasn’t interested in classical languages, that my father tended the boilers in a factory, and that I didn’t own a house because I couldn’t afford the down payment. I forget what my reply was concerning my hair. Soon thereafter the conversation deteriorated, and it became evident that our disinterest was mutual.

Then I turned my attention to the American computer corporations that were operating in the U.K. Their attitude turned out to be refreshingly different. They were interested in what I knew, what I had done, what I wanted to do and why, and all else was largely irrelevant. Honeywell made an attractive offer, and I joined their scientific/industrial mini-computer division as a sales engineer. (Since then, interestingly, the British computer industry has gone pretty much the same way as the Royal Navy.)

For a couple of years I worked in the London area, and sometimes overseas in places like France and Italy. This was a high-commission market, business was good, and for the first time ever I found myself financially comfortable. In my travels I had developed a liking for the North Country of England and its people, and sometime around 1971 I transferred to Honeywell’s Yorkshire branch, moving with Iris and the family to a picturesque resort town called Ilkley, situated amid dales and moorlands between the city of Leeds and the Pennine Mountains. The children liked it, we made many friends, and I even took up climbing again. And yes, we bought a house—a spacious, four-bedroom, brick-built one, five minutes walk to the town center from the front, and five minutes to open country with lakes and rocky cliffs from the back. It cost eight thousand dollars. I still get ill thinking about it, these days.

Iris and I had gotten along okay when life was a struggle. But the blessings of social respectability and conventional happiness proved too much and our marriage folded. I let her have the house, the contents, custody of the children; I continued paying the mortgage and moved into a flat in Leeds with my books and two suitcases as the total to show for thirteen years. I also decided I was tired of the computer business, and for good measure—since I was in the process of changing things anyway—I quit my job with Honeywell and went off selling life insurance. With generous salaries, commissions, company cars, paid expenses, and other benefits, computer salesmen lived comfortable lives. By contrast the terms now were: no salary, no car, no expenses, no benefits—just commission . . . but a lot of it if you produced. The challenge was irresistible. It’s amazing what you can do if you put your mind to it. I topped the branch of twenty-odd salesmen in my first month. Apparently nobody in the company had done that before.

The job was stimulating at first because it involved learning something new again. There were no fixed hours, and for relaxation I took out the unfinished manuscript of Inherit the Stars and resumed working on it. The novelty of the insurance business wore off, however, and working on the book reawakened my interest in science. So I applied for a position with Digital Equipment Corporation, who as luck would have it were planning to open an office in Leeds, and I joined the company in 1975. Working with Americans and the visits to the U.S. that the job entailed made me an Americophile. I liked the pragmatic informality of American life, and the confident (although admittedly sometimes rather vociferously expressed) optimism of the people. It didn’t seem surprising that this nation could send people to the moon, and that the whole world should buy its computers and fly its jets.

I had finished the book by now and began sending it to publishers and agents in London. The reactions, though generally complimentary, were negative: the market was tight; new writers were a risk; the costs couldn’t be justified, and so on. So, I started asking around within DEC about people who might know something about the science-fiction market in the States, and the trail led eventually to a gentleman called Ashley Grayson, who was with a software support group in Massachusetts. I contacted Ashley, and it turned out that we were both due to attend the same sales conference at Cape Cod. I took a copy of the manuscript with me on the trip, left it with Ashley, and forgot the matter after I returned to England.

But a couple of months later a long letter arrived from Judy-Lynn del Rey of Ballantine Books in New York (I had never heard of Ballantine Books, which shows how green I was). Judy liked the book, wanted to publish it, and, subject to my agreeing to some rework, offered a contract—what a contrast to the responses I’d had from London. (It’s interesting to note that British publishers seem largely to have followed after the Royal Navy and the British computer industry.) Sadly, my father, who had taken an interest in my thoughts of writing, but without seriously believing that anything would come of it—things like that didn’t happen in the Irish farming village he was from—died suddenly a week before the letter arrived.

By this time I had bought another house, in the center of Leeds. Debbie, one of my twin daughters, now in her mid-teens, had come to live with me, and in 1976 I married my second wife, Lyn. In bits and pieces, life was coming back together again. I was still selling mainly to scientists, several of whom had supplied helpful information for the book. Some of the physicists I knew said things like, “Oh, I used to read science fiction when I was younger, but I grew out of it. The science got to be too simplistic.” I wanted to produce a book that people like these would find interesting. Accordingly, I began working on a second book, The Genesis Machine. I also wrote The Gentle Giants of Ganymede in parallel with it, pushing one manuscript aside and picking up the other to avoid losing time through the turnaround of mail between Leeds and New York. Meanwhile, my friends and relatives were waiting eagerly to see Inherit the Stars in print. The first copy off the press of my first book arrived from Judy-Lynn ten days after Mother died unexpectedly from an infection following hip surgery.

DEC offered me a position with their sales training division at Maynard, teaching Americans to sell computers—an unusual job for an Englishman. I had no strong ties left with England, and the idea of living near New York was attractive. Lyn and Debbie liked the idea, so we sold the house and contents, and moved over from England in the fall of 1977. People were carrying away the furniture while I raced to finish The Genesis Machine, until there was just a chair and a desk left in the attic room I used as an office. I typed the last page while Lyn was packing our clothes in the bedroom, and we mailed the manuscript on our way to the airport. I thought it would appeal only to a specialized readership, but have since been pleasantly surprised by the wide range of backgrounds of the people who say they enjoyed it.

The next two years were hectic. Besides contending with culture shock and holding down a fairly demanding job, I wrote two more books: The Two Faces of Tomorrow (every S.F. writer has to do an intelligent computer book), and Thrice Upon a Time (every S.F. writer has to do a time-travel book). We became permanent residents of the U.S. and bought a huge, six-bedroom colonial house, built in the 1890’s, in Acton, Massachusetts—with oak-paneled dining room, hallways and stairs, big cellars, big attics, and a big barn, part of the downstairs of which we used as a double garage. I’d always wanted to restore a run-down, big, old house, you see. And this one sure was run-down! The roof leaked, the basement flooded, everything needed rewiring, and the cellars were festooned with lace curtains of cobwebs. So, besides teaching computer-selling and writing, I also dug, sawed, drilled, hammered, shoveled, mixed, and fixed windows . . . and fixed windows, and fixed windows. They put a lot of windows in those old houses. (And still people asked me what I did in my spare time!) I got to know the owner of a local decorating company, who helped out by having his people do a lot of the work at cost to keep them on the payroll through winter, and in eighteen months we turned the place into a sparkling, fixed-up, redecorated showpiece of a home. At last I had gotten the house restoring bug out of my system. The only problem was that by this time Debbie had gone to live in Boston, Lyn had had enough and moved into her own apartment, and I was left sharing the place with a cat called Squawk.

So, I sold the house and furniture, split the proceeds with Lyn, and moved into an apartment in Framingham. Then, since I was in the process of changing things anyway, for good measure I decided to quit my regular job, leave Massachusetts with its winters for the enjoyment of hardier souls, and just be a writer. I ended up with a car, two suitcases, and a typewriter again—this time heading for New York City. Strange, isn’t it, how life has this repetitive flavor about it.

Looking back, it’s interesting to note how many of life’s unexpected, right-angle turns have resulted from talking to the guy next to me at the bar. While engaged in an evening of alcohol-stimulated meditation on what to do next, I struck up a conversation with a character called Glen, an electronics engineer who had just moved North to take a job with Honeywell, which gave us something to talk about. We also talked about apartments. I described a nice but not exceptional two-bedroom place that I’d looked at on the Upper East Side, going at fifteen hundred dollars per month (plus 15 percent of a year’s rent for the agent’s fee). Glen said, “That’s amazing! I just moved out of the same place in Orlando, Florida.”

“Really? How much?”

“Two fifty. And that included the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the health club, the maintenance, the gardening, and the social club and bar.”

“You’re doing a super selling job,” I told him. “What else?”

He shrugged. “No state income tax. No snow shoveling. No wood splitting. Shake the trees, and girls fall out. . . .”

It took me several months to get from New York to Orlando—strange things happen when you drive around in the U.S. I arrived with a first draft of a new book that had been typed in bits and pieces on a miniature Japanese portable in Howard Johnson’s, Best Western, and Ramada Inn motel rooms, people’s spare bedrooms, on kitchen tables, and in various other places down the East Coast and across the South. That was how Giants’ Star was written—the last volume of the trilogy that began with Inherit the Stars.

The first thing to do was find somewhere to live. I checked into a downtown Holiday Inn, and after a shower and a change of clothes went down to the bar and started talking to the guy next to me. His name was Pat, and he turned out to be the regional manager for a life insurance company, which gave us something to talk about. We had a wild evening as far as I remember. Pat took the next day off work to drive me round the area looking at apartments, and I soon had a roof again. Everything Glen had said was true: there was no snow shoveling or wood splitting; the apartments had their own pool, tennis courts, health club, and bar; the management took care of all maintenance and gardening—wonderful for a writer after that house in Massachusetts; there was no state income tax. Excitedly, I rushed outside and shook the nearest tree . . . and got buried in oranges.

Fortunately, that was no longer of much consequence, since a Californian lady whom I had met in Pensacola moved down to join me. Her name was Jackie—we’d been introduced in an Irish pub by a girlfriend of hers that I had gotten to know after walking in the wrong door of a restaurant and blundering into a private function of the Pensacola Press Club. Jackie was an extraordinary person who had studied things like philosophy, art, and electronics, spent four years in the Navy as a weapons instructor and then transferred to the Army to be a parachutist, and was now working in a bookstore. Like me she had been married twice. Jackie also seemed to have read everything in science fiction ever written, which was invaluable. So through the summer I retyped Giant’s Star in the day while Jackie was at work, and we talked about it through the evenings and usually well into the early hours over endless pots of coffee at Perkins’ twenty-four hour pancake restaurant across the street.

For the first time ever, I was able to work exclusively on things that I wanted to do, in my own time and at my own pace without distraction. I was getting to know better the colorful world of American fandom and science-fiction conventions, and there were TV and radio interviews, and guest-speaker invitations from universities and elsewhere to break the routine. I had kept in touch with my daughters and sent them plane tickets each summer to come and spend their vacation wherever I happened to be, and Jackie and I made lots of friends in central Florida. We started talking about buying a house there; in fact she was all set to manage a new store that Waldenbooks was about to open at Daytona. After all, it was obvious that we were going to be there for quite a while, wasn’t it? Nobody in their right minds would disturb a pleasant, comfortable, settled situation like that, would they? Of course not.

It happened like this.

I had always wanted to drive across the U.S. I’d flown to the West Coast several times on business, but sitting in an armchair up in the sky for a few hours wasn’t the way to appreciate the immensity of this country. Well, while we were sitting around in Perkins’ one night, trying to think of something new to talk about now that Giant’s Star was finished, I suggested, “Let’s go to California.”

Part of Jackie’s appeal has always been the iron hold that she keeps on her composure. “Right now, you want to go to California?”

“Sure, why not? I feel like a drive.”

Thoughtful silence, then a shrug. “Okay.”

So we paid the check, went home, tossed some things into a suitcase, and reached California four days later. We saw the mountains, Yosemite Valley, San Francisco, the Bay Area, and a lot of other places that I’d always wanted to visit. It was just a break—a couple of weeks of getting away before moving to Daytona, where Jackie would start her new job and I would begin the next book. Then we started talking to some people next to us in a bar. They said, “You ought to spend a day seeing Route Forty-nine while you’re here,” which turned out to be a scenic highway in the Sierra Nevada foothills, running through the towns of the gold-rush era. We drove into a town called Sonora, which was picturesque and quaint, with its small shopfronts, covered sidewalks, and people actually walking around on legs—unlike the spread-out automobile-scale towns you see everywhere, where all the places you want to go are separated by twenty-minute drives. It was a people-scale town. We got out and walked around. Everyone was friendly. While I was browsing through the local paper in a coffee shop, I came across an ad for an apartment that sounded interesting. Jackie said, “Let’s have a look at it, just for fun.” So I called the number.

We took the apartment. Before we could move in, however, we had to drive back to Florida to tidy things up there, and then back once more to California—three times across the continent in a month, which got that bug out of my system. For the final trip we traded our cars in for a customized Chevy van, and I vividly remember spending the early hours of Christmas Day morning, 1980 changing a wheel in the middle of the Arizona desert.

People are always asking me how long it takes to write a book. Typing the words doesn’t take all that long—with my way of working, anyway. That’s just the final phase of a process that begins long before—usually years before. During a conversation that I’d had with some friends once in a pub back in England, someone had asked what I thought the solution was to the problem in Northern Ireland. I’d replied that there wasn’t one; but then, after some reflection, I added, “Unless you can find a way to separate the children from the adults for one generation.” Writers can’t make a remark like that without it leading off into a new trail of thoughts. If children weren’t to be raised by human adults, then what else would raise them? How about smart machines? Most people’s immediate reaction to such a suggestion is concern and dismay at the cold, unemotional, somehow sinister relationship that they visualize would necessarily exist. But a lot of story ideas come from rejecting the obvious answers and thinking about the alternatives. Why should the relationship have to be cold and unemotional? As a visit to any school’s sixth-grade computer club at ten in the evening will confirm, children love machines—closing the building is sometimes the only way to get them out. So why couldn’t such a relationship be warm and friendly instead—even charming? What kind of a story might result from treating it that way? That was how Silver Shoes for a Princess came about. Later I extended the notion to cover a whole society descended from a machine-raised first generation, which became the basis for the next novel, Voyage from Yesteryear, published in 1982—at least six years after I began thinking about it. So that’s my answer to how long it takes to write a book.

It seems that Jackie, who is now my third wife, and I are setting a tradition of doing something different to celebrate the occasion whenever we finish a new book. As soon as Voyage had been mailed off to New York, our first son, Alex, was born—at home in true mountain-country tradition, with no needles, bright lights, funny smells, or antiseptic people; instead, friends and family, beer and hamburgers, and smiling faces. It seems a much nicer way of welcoming new human beings into the world.

Thinking and talking about intelligent machines had made me want to write a story about a world with a naturally evolving machine biosphere, which eventually appeared in 1983 as Code of the Lifemaker. Jackie and I bought a big, old, rambling house in the center of Sonora that had been empty for a year or so and needed a lot of fixing. So I found myself spending lots of time drilling, sawing, hammering, and digging, laying drains, pouring concrete . . . and, inevitably, fixing windows. Strange, isn’t it, how life has this repetitive flavor about it.

The next project was The Proteus Operation, eventually published by Bantam, which took a year and a half to research and write, and mixes science fiction with World War II history. It also features a procession of real people as guest characters, which made it a new and interesting experiment in writing. While it was in progress, we had our second son, Michael. After that I wrote another book, Endgame Enigma, mixing science fiction with modern-day espionage and CIA-KGB antics this time—and to keep up the tradition, we had another son, Joe. (During both her previous marriages Jackie was told by various medical eminences that it was physically impossible for her to have children.) And so I find myself in a large house in a small, picturesque town near the mountains, with three young children. Strange, isn’t it, how life has this . . .

Sometimes I claim that being an American is a state of mind and has nothing to do with where one comes from or how one speaks. As social evolution progresses, I believe that humanity as a whole will acquire and mix with its other attributes the confidence in itself and its abilities that I think of as characteristically American. The universe in which we live is limitless in every direction, and contains a greater abundance of energy and other resources, opportunity, and room to expand and grow than we could ever know what to do with. Nature imposes no limits on us as a species, either to what we can achieve or upon what we can become. The only limits that matter are those that people create in their minds. There are no finite resources, only finite thinking.

Although there will always be problems to be faced and risks to be taken, I feel optimistic about the future. Those are the sentiments that I try to project and share in the things I write. I hope I shall never find reason to feel otherwise.

* * *

Afterword, 1996

From the gist of the foregoing, it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to learn that new things didn’t suddenly stop happening and life become uneventful in 1988. It was readers who had asked for an autobiographical thread to be included in the first place, and from the reactions that I got it seems they weren’t disappointed. So more anecdotes of right-angle turns and ensuing muddlings-through are contained in Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution. Among other things, it reveals how I personally toppled the Soviet empire and describes the restoration of large, old Irish houses as a sure cure for sanity.

THE PACIFIST

Fifty meters below ground level in a secret, concrete-walled laboratory complex beneath the headquarters of the World Peace Foundation, the last hope for humanity and a sane, rational world stood on its steel supporting platform.

Its general form was a ten-foot-diameter torus, set horizontally and painted dull black to be inconspicuous at night. The outer ring contained the Tipler-field simulated mass circulators, Schwarzchild ring compensator, and boundary cut-off equalizers, and left just enough room in the center for the antimatter-fueled power generator and the cramped cockpit enclosure containing the instrument panel and solitary operator’s seat. After more than ten years of unrelenting effort and tenacity in the face of problems that many had thought insoluble, the time machine was complete. Flanked by the WPF scientists and technicians who had helped make it a reality, Professor Magnus Maximilian Magus, its conceiver and creator, stood gazing down at it from the glass-walled control room overlooking the floor. Standing in the opened hatch above the cockpit, his head held proudly erect, his eyes clear and shining, and his jaw set solidly in resolve, the time commando listened as the final words of the professor’s exhortation rang over the loudspeaker system.

“. . . that after three worldwide conflicts of increasing destructiveness, mankind would have learned. The First World War took us from cavalry to the warplane and the tank; the Second, from the heavy bomber to nuclear weapons; and the Third, from the ICBM to the orbiting gamma-ray-laser bombardment platform. But nothing had been learned. And today, barely more than a generation after rebuilding its cities from the rubble of the last conflagration, our race stands divided yet again, but this time by a line that runs between worlds—we, of the Terran League, and the offworld alliance. This time the weapons have interplanetary range capability. If they are ever used, it will surely mean the end of our existence as a species.”

Magus raised his hands in appeal behind the control room window. “It did not have to be this way. The spiral into ever greater depths of insanity was not inevitable. For by right, the ‘War to End Wars’ of 1914 should have been, and could have been, just that—a sweeping away of the old power structure and social order before the final triumph of Reason toward which Europe had been moving for centuries. . . .” Magus paused ominously, and his voice fell. “But the promise was not fulfilled. Instead of welcoming the peaceful, scientifically planned society which we, the custodians of Reason stood ready to design”—the professor stretched out an arm to indicate the people around him—“the world turned its back on Reason, sacrificing itself to the vain ambitions and pretensions of lesser intellects.” Magus’s fists clenched, and his face took on a pinker hue. “Mediocrities! Ignoramuses! Uneducated charlatans and showmen posturing as thinkers! They abused the power that we had created for them, and they cheated us out of the—“ He checked himself with a cough and regained his composure. “But now the day has arrived that will allow us to correct the error. In so doing, we will eradicate the tragedies that have followed, and we will create in their place the Golden Age of peace and enlightenment that should have been.”

Magus pointed down at where the machine was standing. The time commando straightened to attention and thrust out his chin as the amplified voice boomed down over the floor, “And you, Elmer Theodosius Ulysses Kunz, have been selected to carry out this supreme mission, unique in the annals of all history, to travel back and recast destiny. Go now to your duty, knowing that our cause is righteous, and assured that every one of us will be there with you in spirit.”

Time Commando Kunz extended his arm high in a final salute. “May universal peace, brotherhood, and reason come to prevail among all men. I go, to destroy the archprototype of tyrants. Time will be rewritten, with harmony and goodwill between the worlds, and an end to intolerance.”

“Harmony between the worlds!” Magus led.

“Stamp out intolerance!” Kunz and the chorus chanted back in unison.

In a last dramatic gesture, Kunz pulled his heavy green cloak tight around himself with both hands before stepping down to disappear into the cockpit. To avoid being conspicuous when he emerged, he was wearing the leather shorts and cross-braced suspenders, red stockings, loose white shirt, and feathered hat, which the limited research material available—few records had survived the Third Great War to End Wars—indicated had been the typical dress of central Europe in the early twentieth century. The mission planners had added the cloak because it would be winter there when he arrived. Also, it provided concealment for the high-power infantry assault laser; rapid-fire submachine cannon; .45 caliber solid-shot sidearm with silencer; close-range neurotoxin gas pistol; four fragmentation, two blast, and two incendiary grenades; dagger; garotte; and air-powered, cyanide-tipped dart gun, which the Peace Foundation’s weapons experts had deemed minimum for the mission.

He checked that the larger items of equipment were in their places in the rack below the hatch, then squeezed himself down into the narrow seat. The panel lights indicated that all systems checks were completed and had registered positive. Then a whine came from just above his head as the hatch closed over the cockpit, and a solid clunk signaled the latch engaging. The status summary light was showing orange, which meant that the executive computer had already synchronized its countdown to the control room, and the display next to it was showing less than a minute to zero. The system was now awaiting merely his confirmation to deactivate the final fail-safe override that would abort the launch command at the end of the sequence.

Kunz cast his eyes slowly around the tiny chamber and across the panel indicators one last time to impress upon himself the solemnity of the moment. Then, he licked his lips, drew in a long breath, and said into the stalk microphone projecting from one side of his seat, “Checking positive at zero minus fifty seconds. Request permission to disengage final abort interlock.”

The supervisor’s voice came through on a channel from the control room. “Positive status confirmed on all circuits. You may proceed.”

Kunz felt the tension rising in his body. He unlocked the switch, closed his fingers around it, hesitated for one, maybe two, seconds, and then threw the switch from its Abort on Zero position to Launch. The status light changed to green, and more greens appeared lower down on the panel. Keeping his voice steady only with an effort, he reported, “Interlock disengaged, positive function.” The countdown indicator was reading thirty-five seconds.

Then Magus’s voice came through. “At this fateful moment, the turning point of history, we of the Peace Foundation salute you, Kunz. Remember as you go forth that all our hopes, our aspirations, the very future for which we have labored over these years—everything depends on you now.”

“I shall remember. Have no fear, comrades. Your trust shall not prove misplaced,” Kunz promised, his voice rising.

“Go, fearlessly and with honor, for peace!” Magus’s voice thundered.

“Ten seconds,” the supervisor’s voice interjected.

“For peace!” Kunz cried.

A hum emanated from the mass recirculators, became louder, and rose to a shriek. The compensators started to whistle, and whoop. A red glow filled the space surrounding the cockpit, and patterns of lights flashed across the instrument panel, while in the center, the numerals of the countdown indicator read off the final seconds 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . 0!”

“Ayeiii! . . .”

Kunz’s world exploded in a storm of color, sound, and chaotic tactile sensations as space and time unraveled about him, and unfamiliar patterns of energy quanta overloaded all his sensory systems simultaneously. . . .

He was aware of the shapes surrounding him, but in an unreal kind of way, as if they were parts of a different world projecting out of other dimensions. They consisted only of iridescent outlines without substance—hollow-wire figures of light, shimmering in a void. His thoughts seemed to be running simultaneously in a thousand directions at once, yet at the same time to be frozen into immobility. He could see the entire networks of associations, branching, repeating, reforming, and coalescing, but with all of the parts managing to coexist together without any impression of sequence. He was experiencing timelessness, he knew; but like an infant opening its eyes for the first time without any prior experience to interpret the sensations that his mind was registering.

* * *

Magus had explained that the torus would generate a spacetime singularity in the form of an infinitely thin plane across the hole in the middle, through which every cross section would rotate perpendicular to space-time like the elements of a smoke ring. But instead of emerging on the other side, the vessel would enter a realm in which space and time would be interchanged: it would be possible to move freely in time, but in one direction only through space. That direction had been calculated precisely to connect to the point in space—a fifth of a light-year away now—that a particular spot on the earth’s surface had occupied at the time targeted for Kunz’s arrival in the twentieth century.

He had no way of telling how long the dreamy state of changelessness persisted—if, indeed, “how long” still meant anything at all. But then the panorama of all his mental processes laid out side by side began collapsing in on itself like the pieces of a clock being reassembled . . . and as the clock came back together, it began running again. The ghostly outlines around him took on their solid forms, the glow dimmed, and the various sounds around the cockpit ran down and died. Then all was silent. The moment that Kunz had trained and steeled himself for had arrived. There was no time to be lost. He pressed a button to open the hatch and stood up from the cockpit.

He was outdoors, and it was nighttime as intended, with the air chilly and the moon hidden by clouds. Sounds of drums and brass marching bands were coming from the distance, accompanied by singing and cheering. The machine was lying in an open area of ground shadowed by trees. All was still in its immediate vicinity, but a line of large buildings bounded the open area a short distance away, silhouetted against flickering orange light. The music and singing were coming from the far side. It was all uncannily close to what Kunz had been led to expect from his briefings. He was in the Tiergarten in the center of Berlin, the capital of Germany. It was the night of Monday, January 30, 1933.

At noon that day, after driving one hundred yards from the Kaiserhof Hotel to meet the aging President Hindenburg in the government offices on the Wilhelmstrasse, Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as the new German chancellor. So had come to power the man who would reject the world’s attempts to achieve lasting peace through understanding, compromise, appeasement, and reason, and who in the eyes of the world would make them the very cause of war. Just when reason had finally come of age and could have pacified the world, one man’s betrayal had caused pacifism to be dismissed as ineffective and ridiculed for a century afterward, thus setting the course for calamity.

Kunz transferred his equipment from the stowage rack to fastenings on his belt and inside his cloak, then climbed up out of the cockpit, over the outer torus, and down the short metal ladder on the outside. As he reached the ground, a blue light shimmered briefly in the darkness some distance away out in the park. He froze for a few seconds, but nothing more happened. Then, taking a tight grip on the assault laser beneath his cloak, he began making his way stealthily toward the buildings lining the Wilhelmstrasse.

The singing of the crowd became clearer as he approached the buildings. They were singing the Horst Wessel song—one of the party hymns of the “Brownshirt” Nazi storm troopers. In the evening of that day, as news of Hitler’s appointment spread through the city, tens of thousands of delirious supporters and Brownshirts had gathered and marched in a massive torchlight parade, out of the Tiergarten, through the triumphal arch of the Brandenburg Gate, and along the Wilhelmstrasse to celebrate their victory. Hitler himself, after watching the parade for a while from the balcony of the Chancellery, had retired inside for a quiet dinner with Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Röhm, Frank, and a few others of his inner clique. With the jubilant atmosphere putting everyone off their guard and all the noise and distraction in the streets, this had been judged the ideal moment for not only eliminating Hitler, but decapitating the Nazi apparatus of its entire leadership cadre to ensure its demise. A spot of diffuse, greenish glow flared somewhere across the park. Kunz stopped. The glow died away, and after a moment he moved on.

And then he almost walked into something in the shadows between two trees, where he had expected there to be open grass. At first he thought it was an automobile or a small building of some kind, but as he passed by, the moon shone briefly through a chink in the clouds and revealed the object to be circular in shape. It was a machine, in the general form of a torus, lying horizontal, ten feet or so in diameter. It had a metal ladder leading up over the outer ring to an enclosure of some kind in the middle. Kunz turned to stare back uncertainly at it, until he was walking fully backward. That caused him to bump into something else.

It was another machine. This one was in the form of two vertical disks about eight feet high and close together, like a pair of large wheels on a short axle, with a boxlike structure between them. In the moonlight Kunz could make out a black swastika on the outside of the disk facing him, and underneath it in German, the words GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. FORBIDDEN TO TOUCH. The only problem was, it didn’t look to him like something that any government of the 1930s should have owned.

Suddenly the air around him began crackling electrically. He dropped to the ground instinctively and covered his head. A tremor ran through the ground beneath him, and he became aware of light and a subdued pulsating sound. He looked up cautiously and found an eerie violet radiance bathing the area around him, centered on a point twenty feet or so ahead of where he was lying. As he watched, a shape materialized in the glow. It was about twelve feet long, and consisted of two pointed cylinders side by side, and in between them a framework supporting a bubble. The light and the sound died together, leaving the machine outlined in the moonlight. Kunz raised himself slowly onto one knee. He was about to stand up, when the top of the bubble hinged open and a head appeared, wearing a Lincolnesque stovepipe hat. The head peered one way and then the other, apparently without seeing Kunz, and then the rest of the figure scrambled out. It was wearing a tailcoat with gold-embroidered front and epaulets, pants with a broad stripe running down the sides, and shiny cavalry boots. The figure turned to hoist something out of the bubble that looked like a weapon, and then jumped down to the ground. That was when he saw Kunz. For a second they both stared. Kunz moved to shift his cloak out of the way of his own weapons. The figure bolted for the shadows, and in the same instant the moon went back behind the clouds. By the time Kunz’s eyes had readapted, the figure was gone.

Bemused and bewildered, Kunz resumed heading toward the Wilhelmstrasse. But his boldness and determination were ebbing. Something was obviously very wrong. At the back of a building which he recognized as part of the German Foreign Office, he passed another torroidal machine, this time tipped at a crazy angle against the wall enclosing the grounds. He didn’t even bother stopping to look at it, but now in a complete daze, followed the wall around to an alley leading toward the noise and the commotion, which brought him out onto the Wilhelmstrasse itself.

A column of storm troopers was marching down the middle of the road to a thunderous beating of drums, with trumpets blaring, banners flying, and a river of torches flowing away as far as the eye could see. Shouting people lined the sidewalks on both sides, and every window was packed with waving, cheering figures. As the mission planners had anticipated, it would have provided the perfect cover for getting into the Chancellery building . . . if it weren’t for his dress, he realized as he looked around. He was the only person in sight wearing a cloak. And not only that—all the men were wearing subdued combinations of heavy overcoats, flat caps or conventional felt hats—not one with a feather—and without exception, long pants. Kunz’s cloak was only knee length, and his bright red socks seemed like beacons.

Then he saw the two German policemen in flat-topped helmets and greatcoats heading toward him along the rear of the crowd. Suddenly he started to panic. He turned, but a knot of onlookers had blocked the alley that he had emerged from. Desperately he turned the other way, but a crowd coming out of one of the doorways had cut off any escape in that direction. And before he could recover from his confusion, the policemen had drawn up in front of him.

The larger of the two looked Kunz up and down. He had heavy cheeks and a thick black mustache, and a fleshy sausage-neck overflowing from his collar. “Don’t tell me,” he said amiably in German, “You’ve come back from a future age to assassinate the Führer.”

Kunz gulped disbelievingly. “How . . . how do you know?” he stammered.

“Oh, they’ve been showing up in dozens all night. You’d better come with us. The line starts a block farther along the street.”

They took him a short distance along the Wilhelmstrasse, and then down a narrow street that opened out into a cobbled court overlooked by high buildings and lit by gas lamps. On the far side was a stone building with wide double doors set behind a columned entrance arch at the top of a set of wide, shallow steps. And stretching out of the entrance in a ragged line three or four deep—like theatergoers waiting for the doors to open, mumbling among themselves and jostling as a cordon of more German policeman strove to form them into some semblance of order—was the strangest collection of characters that Kunz had ever seen.

There were several wearing military camouflage smocks, and a number of others in hooded, bodytight Ninja suits. One, in silver coveralls and something that looked like a football player’s helmet, was arguing with two others, one of whom was wearing a pink cloak with emerald-green knee breeches, and the other a German fireman’s uniform, but with a field marshal’s helmet. Nearer the door, a bronzed, muscular Adonis in what looked like ballet tights and a fencing blouse was shivering beneath a greatcoat that one of the policemen had evidently lent him, while a few places back, another man with leather shorts and a Tyrolean hat similar to Kunz’s was waving his hands and jabbering at a woman with a long tweed skirt, motoring bonnet, and fleece-lined flying jacket. One had an aviator’s cap with goggles, another a Napoleon hat and tunic, and another an American Stetson with pantaloons. Here was a Louis XIV wig, there a diamond tiara worn with a raincoat, and farther along, a Cal. State T-shirt stretched over the bodice of a crinoline dress.

Kunz could do nothing but stare numbly. He was barely aware as the two policemen relieved him of his arsenal, frisked him for concealed items, and added the collection to a pile of rifles, submachine guns, revolvers, automatics, pistols, bombs, grenades, blasters, flamethrowers, hand lasers, beam projectors, bayonets, daggers, knives, axes, cudgels, clubs and weapons of every description accumulating on the far side of the court, guarded by more policemen. Then the two who had brought Kunz in escorted him to the end of the line, behind the Louis XIV wig and a huge bearded man in a sailor suit with paratrooper’s jump boots. “Wait here,” the amiable sausage-necked policeman said. “It shouldn’t be long.”

“What’s happening?” Kunz asked, finding his voice at last.

“Why, the Führer is coming here to talk to you. He’s heard all the terrible things you people are saying about him, and he’s very upset.”

Just then, two more policemen appeared from the direction of the street, steering between them the figure in the Charlemagne coat and the Abe Lincoln hat that Kunz had glimpsed briefly in the Tiergarten. The figure stopped dead, looking as stunned as Kunz had been, while the policemen took charge of the plasma-bolt beamer, two sidearms, machete, and four subcritical fission grenades that he had been carrying, and then they led him over to join the line alongside Kunz.

“They’re still coming in like homing pigeons back there,” one of them said to the two policemen with Kunz. “We need all the help we can get.”

“It won’t be long now,” the sausage-neck said to Kunz again. He indicated Kunz to the Abe-Lincoln-hat man with a nod of his head. “Just stay close to Pinnochio here until they move you inside.” With that, he turned away to head back toward the Wilhelmstrasse after his three colleagues.

Kunz and Abe-Lincoln-hat eyed each other suspiciously. At last Kunz ventured, “I, er . . . guess it wasn’t such a unique idea.” Abe-Lincoln-hat stared at him. “Where did you come here from?” Kunz asked him.

“The year of the Lord, 2124.”

“The Pacifist cause must really have been catching on by then, eh?”

“Pacifists?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here—to get rid of Hitler, the man who got pacifism a bad name?”

Abe-Lincoln-hat’s eyes glared. “Pacifism is Satan’s design to disarm the hosts of the righteous, and Hitler is his agent! For by renouncing all war, the world shall deny the just war that is God’s instrument.”

Kunz’s expression hardened. “There can be no just war,” he said.

“It is written, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.’”

“What’s a Bible freak doing here?” Louis-XIV-wig demanded, turning in front to face them. “Religious fascism is no different from Nazi fascism. Hitler invented the techniques of mass propaganda that gave the Fundamentalists the presidency in 2080.”

“Arghh! You . . . secular humanist!” Abe-Lincoln-hat grabbed him by the throat with both hands.

Sailor-suit-and-paratrooper-boots was also glowering back. “Who did I hear was a pacifist? They were the bums who lost us white supremacy and let the Asiatics take the twenty-first century.”

“I am,” Kunz said, thrusting out his chin defiantly. “So why are you here? Hitler was on your side, wasn’t he?”

“He blew it. If it wasn’t for his war, the colonial empires wouldn’t have broken up, see. And I say all pacifists are wimps.”

“Oh yeah?” Kunz punched him in the mouth.

“All right, all right—enough of that.” Three policemen moved in to break up the fray. Just then, the doors at the top of the steps were thrown open. The murmuring and arguing in both directions—already a number of more recent arrivals had joined on behind Abe-Lincoln-hat—died away, and the line began shuffling forward.

The building turned out to be an auditorium, with rows of seats facing a raised stage. In the center of the stage was a speaker’s rostrum, and behind it a row of chairs on which a dozen or so men in suits were already seated. They looked like government officials. Some remained quiet and were looking concerned, while others whispered agitatedly among themselves. A line of German policemen stood below the stage, facing the audience, and others were stationed at intervals along the walls. As the entrants dispersed among the seats, Kunz moved as far away as possible from the three that he had tangled with outside. He found himself a place halfway to the back on the extreme left of the auditorium, next to the side aisle. The murmuring and muttering had risen again, and already more arguments were breaking out in several places. As Kunz sat down and leaned back in his seat, he became aware of a man’s voice behind him, speaking in a suave English accent. “I mean to say, the bugger ruined our empire for us. Up until then, we hadn’t been doing too bad a job of civilizing the world.”

“He ruined U.S. isolationism, you mean,” an indignant American voice that sounded as if it was from Brooklyn retorted. “If we hadn’t had ta come in and bale youse guys out for a second time, we’da had it made. We never wanted ta be no policeman for da whole woild.”

“Yes, and a fine mess you made of things, I must say.”

“A fine mess you left us, you mean.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Waddaya mean? So, what da you know about anything, then, huh, asshole?”

“Tch, tch. Colonials!” The sounds of scuffling came from behind, and something thudded against the back of Kunz’s seat.

“Cut that out!” One of the policemen said, moving forward from the wall.

“The man’s a complete savage,” the English voice protested.

“I ain’t stayin’ next ta him. Everyone knows they’re all gay.”

And then a hush descended on the auditorium as a figure with a face familiar to all, wearing a brown Party uniform with Iron Cross and swastika armband, walked out from the wings and crossed the stage to the lectern. He surveyed the rows of faces before him and pursed his lips for a moment below his narrow, clipped mustache. “I’m given to understand that I seem to have made myself rather unpopular with some people,” Adolf Hitler said. He waited, but there was no immediate response. “But that’s terrible. I have made plans for straightening out—with all due respect to my predecessors—the bungled job that’s been made of the Weimar constitution, and for getting the country onto a sound democratic footing at last. The League of Nations hasn’t been working out as well as was envisioned, and I’ve been giving some thought to that, too. . . . But what are all these awful things about me that I’ve been told? I need to know what the complaints are before we go launching into anything new. Well, you’ve come all this way. Somebody must have something to say.”

A man near the front leaped up to reveal the slogan NO NUKES written across the back of his sweater in large red letters. “It was because of you that the nuclear nightmare was unleashed across the world,” he shouted. “World War II was the cause of the Manhattan Project, which produced the Bomb. That led to everything else, and then everyone got ahold of it.” He pointed an accusing finger. “Radiation! Fallout! Genetic diseases! Deformed babies! Because of you, the world will end with universal cancer!”

Hitler stared at him incredulously. “Radiation? Genetic dis—“

Suddenly, the spell broke. “Industrial pollution of the planet!” a woman near the back shrieked, rising. She was wearing an EARTH FIRST button on a black leotard painted with a white skeleton. “Your war brought about the decline of Europe. Unchecked capitalist greed in the postwar U.S.A. resulted in—“

“You call yourself National Socialists,” a man in a black opera cape yelled out. People were on their feet all around the room by now. “But you destroyed socialism! If it hadn’t been for your treachery in 1941, Russia would have ruled the world.”

“That’s not true!” a voice called from near where Kunz was sitting. “If they hadn’t rallied against the Nazis, the Soviets would have disintegrated. Stalin was a lunatic. Hitler saved Communism.”

“But you destroyed Germany, on the eve of what should have been its era of greatness,” a man in a kaiser helmet and trenchcoat shouted out.

Voices were shouting from all sides.

“Mass murderer! What about the camps?”

“Nazism was to blame for the rock cult and drugs!”

“It caused pornography, teenage pregnancies, and evolution!”

“. . . belief in astrology and the paranormal . . .”

“And liberals and gays and AIDS!”

Hitler smiled tolerantly and raised his arms in an appeal for order. Slowly the hubbub subsided. “My dear people . . . really, this is all most bewildering. I know we do have some outstanding ideological differences to resolve, but it is my firm belief that the Western civilization that has arisen in Europe is about to enter its golden age of prosperity and culture. With confidence in reason and the creative potential of the human mind, we have it within our power as a species to eliminate universally and permanently the evils of hunger, disease, poverty, oppression, and ignorance that have plagued humanity for as long as humanity has existed. To let you into a secret, we have some scientists working on rocket propulsion for vehicles which, they tell me, might one day enable us to leave this planet entirely. And as for the political differences between ourselves and our Russian neighbors, well, I know there have been problems in the past. But those problems stemmed from shortages of resources, and in the new age I see coming, with new technologies that will end such shortages, I am optimistic that eventually, with better education and as tensions relax, we will come to see . . .”

As Hitler spoke on, the atmosphere around the room changed. One by one, those of the audience who were on their feet sat down. Many of them exchanged puzzled looks. Something was very wrong. Was this the fiend who had gone down as one of the arch-villains of history?

“I must confess to being somewhat bemused,” Kunz heard the English voice whisper behind him. “He seems to be quite a decent sort of chap, really.”

“Yeah,” the Brooklyn voice breathed in reply. “Dis ain’t de way I hoid it. Dat guy’s okay.”

Kunz frowned, trying to make sense of the situation. He’d seen the newsreels and read the speeches. He recalled Magus’s warnings about Hitler’s cunning, and the skillful way he deceived his opponents to lull them into a false sense of security. Then it came to him suddenly that it was all a trap. He looked around at the rows of placid faces, some nodding unconsciously as they listened. They were falling for it, all of them—soaking it up.

But not Time Commando Kunz!

He looked away, and saw that the policeman who had quietened the pair behind was still standing a mere couple of feet from Kunz’s seat. The policeman’s arms were folded, and he was off guard as he listened. He was wearing a belt over his greatcoat, and hanging from the belt on the side nearest to Kunz was a revolver in a holster. The flap of the holster was unfastened. Kunz looked furtively around. Everyone’s attention was on what Hitler was saying. And then Kunz’s hand was reaching out stealthily toward the butt of the revolver. He was aware of it in a strangely detached kind of way, as if his arm had initiated the motion of its own accord, with the rest of him a spectator. And before he had fully realized it he was on his feet and leveling the gun between both hands. He was dimly aware of voices shouting and heads turning in alarm, and then Hitler was staring straight at him through the sights, white-faced and openmouthed. . . . He didn’t remember firing, or the blow on the back of his head after the third shot.

* * *

The next thing Kunz knew was that he was stretched out in his seat, and his head hurt. There were policemen on either side of him and in front of him, and a pandemonium of blurred voices all around. He raised his head, and several hands immediately clamped down on his shoulders from behind.

Up on the stage, two medics in white smocks were in the process of lifting an inert form covered by a sheet onto a stretcher. The officials who had been sitting behind were gathered in a huddle, wringing their hands in consternation and talking nervously. Two shiny black jackboots protruded from beneath the sheet as the medics lifted the stretcher and carried it off the stage. As Kunz’s head cleared, the voices of the officials floated through into his consciousness.

“Stone dead—no doubt about it . . .”

“Oh dear, oh dear . . .”

“. . . three bullets, dead center. Didn’t have a chance . . .”

A tired but triumphant smile crept onto Kunz’s face. It was done! It didn’t matter what happened to him now. The future was saved.

“He was doing such a splendid job of restoring the nation’s pride and self-confidence after Versailles and everything. . . . We can’t let the people know that this has happened.”

“Oh no! That would ruin everything.”

“And especially after his achievement today . . .”

“We mustn’t let anyone know.”

“Then there’s no choice. We’ll have to use the double.”

“But he’s so unstable. Do you really think—“

“We have to risk it. There’s no choice.”

“He’s on his way here now.”

Kunz sat bolt upright in his seat as the meaning percolated through.

Double?

And then the tramp of jackboots on cobblestones and orders being barked sounded from the court outside. Moments later, two lines of storm troopers entered and surrounded the auditorium, while from the midst of the group of uniformed officers who had appeared inside the entrance, a figure of familiar appearance emerged and strode purposefully down the center, up the side steps onto the stage, and across to the lectern. But not of totally familiar appearance, Kunz saw as the figure glowered out over the hushed audience. The features, forelock, and mustache were similar, but the mouth was grim and determined, and the eyes held a fierce, tempestuous rage.

“Führer, we have decided—“ one of the officials began, but the newcomer shut him up with a curt wave of his hand.

“You no longer decide anything. This babbling has gone on long enough. We have work to do and a lot of lost time to make good.” He raised his head to address the officers at the rear and indicated the audience around the room with a wave. “Get this rabble out of here for a start and lock them up, and clear away all that junk in the Tiergarten. Then we have the last ten years of records to rewrite. Oh yes, there is much to do, indeed.” A wild gleam came into his eyes. “Ein Reich! Ein volk! Ein führer!” he shrieked.

“Sieg Heil!” the storm troopers chanted.

“Oh shit!” Kunz groaned.

MINDS, MACHINES AND EVOLUTION

If a “machine” is any kind of system created by man, and “think” means everything we normally mean when we use the word, will a machine ever be able to think?

This question is asked a lot these days. It actually implies two different questions, and much of the confusion on this subject results from a failure to distinguish between them. The first asks if the suggestion is possible in principle, and might be rephrased: Given that a human brain is a system which thinks, is there any reason to suppose that no man-made system, as opposed to one that happens to have evolved “naturally,” can be capable of doing likewise? The second asks if it will ever be achieved in practice. My experience from sitting on many artificial intelligence panels at science-fiction conventions has been that writers tend to answer the first question, and researchers in the field, the second—which usually leads to two separate dialogues between groups who aren’t talking about the same thing. Since there is no question to be asked about the practicability of something that’s impossible on principle, the first question is the one to start with in a discussion of the subject. It’s also the more intriguing philosophically.

The question of whether man-made intelligence is possible in principle amounts to asking if “mind” can be adequately accounted for by the principles of physics, and nothing else. If it can, then there’s no compelling reason to suppose that a man-made system—which would operate by the same principles—shouldn’t be able to emulate it. If it can’t, then we must conclude that the phenomenon of self-aware consciousness possesses something “extra”—some qualitative difference that sets it above being explainable by the same laws that explain everything else in the universe, and that therefore it will forever be beyond our ability to duplicate.

The first reaction of many people is to insist that something as intricate as “mind” could never arise solely from arrangements of molecules, neural circuits, and the other things we find inside the human brain. It violates their subjective notions of what makes sense. But this kind of intuition is dangerous and has littered the trail of human discovery with the wreckage of all kinds of “proofs” that something or other was impossible. It pays to be open-minded. Ever since primitive man found himself hard put to account for the sun, the moon, the winds, the tides, and so forth, dismissing unexplainable phenomena as “supernatural” has provided many with a quick and easy alternative to expanding their powers of explaining. The “vitalists” of the nineteenth century were similarly convinced that the laws of physics were insufficient to account for living matter, and proposed the existence of a “life force,” which set it apart from the inanimate world. Today, life processes can be satisfactorily accounted for in terms of molecular chemistry. The vitalist argument has not gone away as a consequence, however, but has simply shifted levels and reappeared in a new disguise: instead of between the living and the nonliving, it now searches for some fundamental difference between the thinking and the nonthinking, between mind and body.

A basic principle of science asserts that the safest hypothesis to adopt is the simplest one that explains all the facts. In the present context, this asks if there is any way in which the things we observe could account for mind in a way that’s at least possible. If there is, then the simplest explanation will have sufficed and there will be no need or justification for introducing additional influences.

There is effectively no limit to the number of different books that have been written or could be written. We might describe our impression of one that we’ve read as “inspiring,” “passionate,” “entertaining and witty,” and so on. Similarly a symphony might strike us as “majestic,” or “somber.” Well, where in such creations do properties like these exist?

At its elementary level every book consists of letters drawn from the same, very limited, alphabet. Clearly it would be ridiculous to look for such qualities as “inspiration” or “passion” at that kind of level. A letter of the alphabet can be one of only twenty-six possibilities, and hence the amount of information it can convey is very limited. But the act of stringing letters together to form words can convey enough different concepts to fill all the dictionaries of all the world’s languages, plus form all the strings of letters that might have been words, but which, as it happens, aren’t. Just this simple raising to a higher level of organization brings about an increase in the richness and variety of possible expression that is staggering. And beyond that, words can be arranged into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, until at higher levels it becomes possible to express every shade of thought and meaning from Alice in Wonderland to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Language is organized as a hierarchy of increasing complexity, in which the variety of possible expression increases by a stupendous degree over even a few levels. New orders of meaning and relationship come into existence that cannot be expressed as properties of the elements that form the building blocks at a given level, but which arise as emergent properties of the way the elements are put together. In the same kind of way, every musical composition is built ultimately from the same set of notes, and every chemical substance from the same three subatomic particles. We see nothing remarkable in any of this, and while we might be astonished by the diversity that can arise from combining simple elements in different ways, we feel no need to invoke supernatural agencies to explain it.

The same applies to an even more striking degree in the process of biological evolution, in which more complex systems of organization emerge from simpler ones under the influence of selection. Originally, simple inorganic compounds gave rise to more complicated substances, which in the course of time evolved self-replication and progressed through single-celled organisms to the advanced, multicellular life forms of today. Again we see a hierarchy of progressively increasing organizational complexity, and at each successive level new properties become manifest which exist only in the context of that level, and which can’t be described in terms of the subsidiary components. Thus, a single molecule does not possess any attribute of “elephantness”; a sufficiently large number of them, however, when put together in the right way, do.

Now, if the laws of physics, plus selection, a lot of time, and nothing more are sufficient to produce physical forms as sophisticated as the nose of a bloodhound or the airframe of a hummingbird, isn’t it to be expected that the same processes should result in similarly sophisticated patterns of behavior? After all, survival is what matters in evolution, and behavior—how an organism interacts with its environment—is just as important to its survival as its physical attributes, and frequently more so. Having big teeth isn’t much good without the capacity to recognize a threat and the motivation to defend yourself. Interacting with an environment consists of acquiring information from that environment, evaluating it, and responding in some way, all of which is performed by the nervous system. It follows that improvements to the nervous system as part of the general evolutionary process would confer significant survival benefits. It’s interesting to see that when we trace the sequence that such improvements are believed to have followed, we see emerging the qualities most people would consider essential to characterizing that which we call “mind.”

Primitive life-forms such as sponges evolved special cells that reacted to stimuli in the environment to trigger responses that, for example, increased the chances of capturing food. In later organisms like jellyfish these cells developed into simple neural networks capable of coordinating the movements of the entire animal to make possible such revolutionary strategies as directed mobility, with all the attendant advantages. In higher forms still, these networks developed concentrations of neural tissue which eventually acquired the structure and organization of the modern mammalian brain, and with it the ability to apply steadily more sophisticated processing techniques to the information gathered by the senses.

Here, then, is another example of a hierarchy of increasing complexity taking shape. And as was the case with the structure of language, the evolving nervous system forms a hierarchy of increasing information-processing complexity. With language, the concepts dealt with become more abstract at higher levels of organization—farther removed from the “mechanical” low-level world of alphabet and syntax. Different units of information operate at different levels of the hierarchy. Similarly, the units of information being processed at higher organizational levels in the nervous system become more distant from the raw-data world of the stimuli that impinge on the senses. Thus, we have the beginnings of a mechanism for assembling sensory data into higher-level symbols, and manipulating aggregates of symbols into a model of the world outside—a model inhabited not by wavelengths and energy quanta, but by objects, attractions, aversions, goals, and all the other factors that affect a higher-level entity interacting with a higher-level perceived environment.

Models that reflected the real world more accurately would enhance an organism’s survival chances and hence be favored selectively for further improvement. In creating progressively more elaborate world models, the evolving brain would learn to synthesize a representation of the three-dimensional space in which it moved, the other objects inhabiting that space, and the interactions taking place between them. A crucial need in a survival-dominated environment would be the ability to distinguish the “self,” whose survival is at stake, from the rest of the world around it. Assigning a special status to the focal zone of sensory impressions mapped into the world model gives rise to a self-model, which makes possible the emergence of directed action toward the goal of self-preservation, superseding purely automatic reflexes.

Given the ability of the brain to manipulate conceptual symbols that mimic the world that actually exists, it doesn’t seem such a gigantic step to go on to manipulating the same symbols into representations of worlds that could exist. This would enable, for example, scenarios of a potential danger to be constructed from previously accumulated experiences and played through in advance, before it became a reality, allowing timely action to avoid it—or in a word, the faculty of anticipation. And once we’re in a position to play with models of worlds and situations that don’t exist, surely we’re well on the way to displaying imagination and creativity.

This is all very well, but it won’t do very much for our evolving organism’s survival prospects if it gets so wrapped up in its internal fantasizings that it loses track of reality and fails to notice the tiger coming at it down the hill. Hence, this variety of complex activity going on inside the brain requires some kind of overseeing function to monitor its own processes, evaluate their relative importance, and decide which should take priority over which from moment to moment. This implies a degree of awareness. Being aware of the images being manipulated in the mind, and aware of the preferences that arise from evaluating their implications, adds up, does it not, to experiencing feelings (emotions, if you will) and exercising judgment. And when coupled to the self-model that we already have, it yields self-awareness.

Do we really mean any more than this when we talk about mind and consciousness? I’m not at all convinced that we do. The brain’s ability to think requires no supernatural ingredient, but arises purely as an emergent property of its organizational complexity. What led to the phenomenon we call mind was the fact of an adaptive system being operated on by selection. The selection happened to be “natural,” and the adaptive system happened to be biological, but those weren’t the significant factors in yielding an intelligent, self-aware end product. Therefore there’s no reason to suppose that other systems of comparable complexity shouldn’t be capable of doing likewise. Hence man-made intelligence ought, in principle, to be possible.

That being so gives a point to the second question that we asked: What, then, is the likelihood in practice? The question these days is usually asked with reference to computers.

The appearance of human intelligence enabled selection to be guided by choice instead of by the unconscious processes that had operated previously; speech and written language transmitted new information through populations virtually instantaneously compared to genetic encoding. This has enabled the development and spread of human culture at the staggering rate that history has recorded. But we have merely accelerated the evolutionary process, not altered it in essence. Whether we’re producing a better political system, a Boeing 747, or a bigger and tastier tomato, we apply the same basic method that nature used to turn jelly into vertebrates and vertebrates into us: We experiment with variations of the themes we’ve got, forget the ones that don’t work so well, and try further variations of the ones we decide are worth keeping. That’s evolution—by artificial selection. And we are applying it vigorously to systems that are designed to do just what nervous systems evolved to do, namely process information and vary their behavior in response: computers. This is what sets computers apart from other, earlier technologies that have been offered as models of the brain. Perhaps, too, our familiarity with computers has helped make “mind” less mysterious than it used to be.

Of course, I’m not trying to suggest that what goes on inside even the most powerful of today’s computers constitutes “thinking,” or even comes close. But they do seem to be off to the right start, and only decades after their inception are mimicking in intriguing ways the reflexive, yet sometimes surprisingly elaborate, behavior of primitive nervous systems. I find it hard to believe that a jellyfish can think either; but obviously there was nothing to prevent it—or at least, something akin to it—from evolving into something that could.

For a start, computers possess a comparable hierarchical organization, in which the units of information being processed take on progressively more abstract meaning as we ascend through higher levels. The lowest level is that of the physical hardware, where the circuit chips lead a somewhat monotonous life shuffling binary digits through registers and combining them according to totally mechanical rules. At the higher levels of software activity which this traffic supports, the “bits” combine into codes that represent numbers, characters, instructions, and command strings to convey meaning at the more symbolic level in which programmers, rather than hardware engineers, think. And at higher levels still, these entities in turn are subsumed into programs, files, display formats, and so forth, which have lost all connection with electronics, and relate instead to things like bank accounts, airline flights, Adventure games, and the rest of the world of human affairs.

A common objection to the suggestion that this could ever lead to intelligence is that a computer, however elaborate, is still by nature a “machine,” operating according to rigid, mechanical rules that will always cause it to respond to the same inputs in the same, predictable manner. Whatever tricks might be built into it to give an illusion to the contrary (such as deriving some input from internal randomness generators), it can still only do what it’s programmed to do. Nothing that qualifies as “thinking,” which ought to exhibit some element of free choice, or even capriciousness, could ever result from it.

It is true that at its elementary level a computer system is constructed from components that function mechanically and repetitively. But the same could also be said about us. The DNA, RNA, enzymes, and other constituents of the cells that make up our bodies function in ways that are quite mechanical and repetitive. The neural hardware that supports our mental “software” consists of bewildering interconnections of an enormous number of neurons, each of which behaves predictably. If the signals applied to a neuron add up in such a way as to exceed its activation threshold, it will fire; if they don’t, it won’t. The neuron doesn’t go through agonies of indecision trying to make up some microscopic mind about what to do. At its level there isn’t any property of “mind” to make up. The decision is made according to fixed rules, just like the decision of a computer logic circuit to generate an output.

The earth’s atmosphere consists of a vast number of interacting elements, each of which is very simple in itself and behaves completely mechanically. At the microscopic “hardware” level, each molecule responds to a combination of forces exerted by its neighbors in a way that can be calculated precisely. But at the macroscopic level, totally new emergent properties manifest themselves as storm centers, cloud banks, rainfall, and other phenomena that cannot be expressed in terms applicable to molecules. Instead, we describe them in macroscopically meaningful terms, such as temperature and pressure—statistical measures of the composite effects of huge numbers of molecules whose individual motions can never be known with certainty. In the process we define a qualitatively new set of concepts which lose the precision and predictability that characterize the lower-level activity, and which in the process acquire an increasing degree of uncertain, “whimsical” behavior.

The fallacy with the objection is that it compares the activities taking place at the brain’s highest, most abstract level with those at a computer’s lowest, most mechanical level. It’s a bit like saying that tree shrews could never evolve into humans because humans can build cities and write symphonies, whereas a tree shrew is just a collection of nucleic acids and proteins that are obviously incapable of such feats.

It’s interesting to note, however, that the qualities of unpredictability and “whimsy” that many people insist on as indispensable prerequisites for intelligence are in fact beginning to appear in computer systems, too. A large “realtime” system, for example—perhaps for controlling an industrial plant or a communications network—typically contains hundreds or even thousands of different programs for carrying out various tasks that need to be performed at different times and in different circumstances. It would also contain a list of priorities, specifying which task is the most important at any given time and should therefore run if it is ready to, which task is second priority and should run if the first is held up, and so on. Through thousands of input signals coming in from sensors around the plant, or from the network, the system constantly monitors and reacts to the changing conditions, perhaps by suspending the operation of one task to allow a higher-priority response to a critical situation somewhere, or by activating lower-priority fill-in jobs when there’s nothing more pressing to attend to. The result can be a bewildering activity pattern of different programs being started, interrupted, waiting to execute, of interrupting programs themselves being interrupted by higher priorities still, all interlaced with the operations of supervisor programs to keep track of what’s going on and orchestrate the other programs. Since this activity is all being driven by unpredictable events unfolding in the outside world, it’s impossible to say in advance what state such a system will be in or what, precisely, it will be doing at any particular time (unlike a “batch” system, where it’s always possible to say, for instance, that payroll is run on Thursday mornings.)

Hence it’s not really true, even today, to say that a computer system will always respond in the same way to the same set of inputs. Its response will depend not only on the information coming in through its sensors from the outside world, but also on its own internal “state” at the time, and this in turn will depend on its earlier history, i.e., its “experiences.” What’s programmed in is the potential to react to various external stimuli in different ways, without any specific large-scale behavior being predefined—just as is true of sponges, jellyfish, tree shrews, and with much broader ranges of variability, people.

Because a human brain is far more complex than these systems, the number of different internal states that it can assume is vastly greater. So if it’s true that even with today’s large computer systems the same external inputs do not elicit the same responses, it will be much more true of the brain. In fact, the brain can never revert exactly to any state that it was once in previously; however close it gets, the very fact of having once been in the earlier state will have left impressions—not necessarily conscious—that weren’t there the first time, and hence the state that exists later must be different by at least that much. I find this a far more plausible basis for the variability of human behavior than attempts to derive it from random quantum mechanical effects at the molecular level. Variability of behavior implies a degree of correlation of our responses to the macroscopic realm that we perceive, and this is a different thing from randomness. As Schrödinger conjectured, the reason we evolved to be so much bigger than atoms could be precisely because with objects at the macroscopic level, the uncertainties that dominate the quantum realm are swamped out. In other words, only at higher scales of magnitude does a predictable and repeatable world in which rational intelligence can evolve become possible. Linking our mental activities to the quantum fluctuations of neural atoms would appear to put us back where we started—literally.

The highest-level activity of our brains, our experience of awareness, doesn’t extend down to the operations taking place at the lowermost neural hardware level. We think and communicate in terms of persons, places, ideas, and things, with no innate knowledge of the streams of electrical impulses swirling around in our heads, or the chemical codes by which various cells and organs in our bodies exchange messages. They, at their own levels, communicate in their own languages; we, at our level as conscious totalities, communicate in ours.

It’s not difficult to see why consciousness should have become shut off in this way from lower-level processes. The simple act of raising an arm involves the coordinated action of something like forty muscles, each of which needs a discrete neural signal to tell it to contract by the right amount at the right time. Such muscular sequences are controlled by fixed “microprograms” hardwired into the brain, which are triggered by high-level commands that we initiate voluntarily. If we had to monitor every step of such sequences consciously, our brains would be constantly saturated with mundane detail. Leaving such routine chores to a subconscious realm frees up our voluntary and conscious abilities for more valuable problem solving.

Again, the beginnings of the same kind of thing are evident in today’s computer systems. At the basement level, the machine’s elementary operations are controlled by microcode embedded in the hardware. Microcode is the language of circuit chips and hardware designers. At the first software level, a single “machine instruction,” typically written in alphanumerics—to execute an ADD operation, for example—triggers a whole sequence of microcode functions, and such instructions form the units in which “machine-language” programs are written. The machine-language programmer does not have to understand microcode to write a program, or even have to be aware that it exists. However, a machine-language program does reflect the architecture of the machine it’s designed for, hence its name. A step further removed from the hardware are “high-level” languages, consisting of commands that initiate sequences of machine instructions, which make it possible, for example, for researchers to write programs directly in scientific and mathematical terms, without having to learn machine language. And at higher levels still we find “system” and “user” commands which control the operation of entire programs and are meaningful in real-world terms, without the user having to know or care if what exists behind the buttons is electronics, clockwork, or black magic. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how it could be very much different. If every user had to understand microcode to check a bank balance or play Adventure, the computer industry wouldn’t have gotten very far.

Designing any kind of system involves tradeoffs. Some of the requirements that the system has to meet will always conflict with others, and improving the design in one direction invariably extracts penalties in others. Thus a toaster is great for making toast but not much good as a blender; F-15s wouldn’t be the right buy for Pan Am, and so on. “General purpose” systems offer a compromise by fulfilling a number of roles moderately well without excelling at any of them, for example, the family car or a home computer. You could say that these trade off excellence for versatility. The human nervous system is probably the best example of versatility that we know. It can do practically anything to a degree, but its performance in any given area is limited. So we supplement it with all kinds of specialized accessories such as microscopes, high-speed calculators, and long-range communications equipment, each of which outperforms it by orders of magnitude in its own field, but is useless for anything else.

Conceivably, if we ever did produce a system of comparable versatility to the brain, we might find that one of nature’s basic trade-offs is that thinking wide and thinking narrow are mutually exclusive. In return for versatility, we could find that we have to sacrifice many of the features that we associate with the highly specialized machines of today. In the same way that our consciousness operates without any awareness of what its neurons are doing, or even that it has any, a man-made electronic (or photonic, or biosynthetic, or whatever) intelligence might find itself shut off from the substrate levels at which its fast and mathematically precise activities were taking place. Perhaps, therefore, it wouldn’t be able to perform astronomic calculations in seconds, or recall word for word a conversation that it had a week ago, or make a decision without wrestling with all kinds of imponderables. So what would it do if it wanted to know pi to a few thousand decimal places? Well, I suppose it would have to either build itself a computer or buy one. And that’s a good reason to suppose that long before then we’d have started calling it something else.

It’s funny how the right people have a knack of popping up at just the right time. I became interested in writing a book about machine intelligence at about the time I moved to the U.S.A. with my second wife, Lyn, in late 1977. I’d developed a few thoughts and ideas, but before getting serious, I felt I needed to bounce them off somebody who knew a lot more about the subject. One Saturday morning over breakfast I said, “Who do we know who’s an Artificial Intelligence expert?”

She replied, “But we’ve only just arrived in this country. We hardly know anyone yet”—which was about all that could be said on that.

And then, the very next morning, Sunday, the phone rang and a voice said, “Hi, my name is Marvin Minsky. We haven’t met, but I’m director of the AI department at MIT. Nobody has written a good book about AI yet. I read Inherit the Stars and liked it, and I think maybe you could. How would you like to come along and take a look at what we’re doing here, and talk about ideas for fiction?”

I got to know Marvin and his family, and the outcome of our talks about ideas for fiction was The Two Faces of Tomorrow, which was published in the summer of 1979.

Perhaps the sign of when artificial systems have become smarter than we are will be when they start making up ethnic jokes about people:

“How many humans does it take to change a light bulb?”

“How many?”

“One hundred thousand and one.”

“How come?”

“One to change the light bulb. The rest as biological ancestors to produce him. How inefficient can you get?”