Men And Machines Part 1

Silverberg, Robert.

Men and Machines.

Introduction.

The first man to use a machine was the first of our primitive ancestors who picked up a rock to hurl at some pa.s.sing animal or to crack open some edible nut. In the million-plus years since then, our machines have grown much more complex, but even in our modern era of computers, rockets, and color television, their basic purpose remains the same: to serve man.

Whether our machines truly serve us is a question much debated by science-fiction writers and other professional speculative philosophers. Does some essential quality go out of human life when it becomes too easy? Have our automobiles, telephones, typewriters, and elevators sapped our vigor? Are we speeding into flabby decay because we have made things too easy for ourselves?

And as our machines grow more able, when do they cross the boundary that separates the living from the unliving? Is it possible that we are building machines that will make humanity obsolete? Perhaps the day is coming when we ourselves will be rendered unnecessary, and our sleek successors, creatures of metal and plastic, will inherit the earth.

The relations.h.i.+p between man and his machines is a complex and many-sided one, compounded by love and hate. Many a bitter attack on the encroachments of the machine age has been produced by a writer using an electric typewriter in an air-conditioned room, innocently unaware of the inner contradictions involved. We need our machines, but we fear them; and out of this tension come ideas best dealt with in the guise of science fiction.

Ten science-fictional explorations of the man-machine relations.h.i.+p are offered here. Some are lighthearted excursions into fantasy, others bleak and forlorn visions of a hopeless future. They show man as the master and as the slave of his machines, as the victim and the tyrant, as conqueror and as conquered. No sermons are intended: the purpose of these tales is to entertain, to stimulate, to suggest possibilities. But implicit in them is the awareness that we have only begun to cope with the problems that our age of fabulous machines is creating.

R.S.

COUNTER FOIL.

by George O. Smith.

We sometimes used to be reminded how dependent we have become on our machines. A substantial part of the northeast United States received such a reminder one November evening in 1965, when a trifling technical difficulty blotted out lights and power for 30,000,000 people over a vast area. George O. Smith's story, written before the great power failure, shows the even more devastating possibilities in a transportation breakdown. Of course, the transportation system he describes is one that doesn't yet happen to be in use-but allow him that one bit of fantasy and everything else follows with devilishly consistent logic.

George O. Smith has long been well known as a devilishly logical character anyway. An engineer by trade who has been involved in military electronics research, he has been writing s-f since 1942 and has published over one hundred stories. A good many of them deal with the technical problems engineers of the future are likely to encounter, and are impressive both for their insight into technological processes and for the sly, lively wit that makes them favorites even of nontechnical readers.

It was near the close of a normal day in late July, if a day in late July can properly be called normal. The temperature and the humidity were tied in the mid-nineties; a reporter from the News fired the usual egg on the pavement while his photographer snapped the picture that would adorn tomorrow's front page. There had been three flying saucer sightings reported, and the Loch Ness monster had made his appearance right on schedule. The cases of heat prostration were running at par, and nerves in the un-airconditioned areas were fraying short. Still, the clock displayed hope as it crawled on toward the end of the work day and promised freedom from bondage and the right to pursue both internal and external liquid happiness.

Gertrude, the videophone receptionist, still looked crisp in her office. Her voice as she responded with the singysongy, "Tele-por-TRAN-sit," had not lost its lilt. But it was obvious to the caller that Trudy sat in air-conditioned splendor. And either she loathed the idea of leaving her comfort and going home, or she despised him who called. For after the lilting greeting, her voice dropped to a flat, "Oh, it's you again."

Johnny Peters smiled. "Show?"

"No."

"Swim?"

"No."

"Dinner?"

"No."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing!"

"Trudy, I'm not poison, you know."

"Johnny, I know you're not poison. But you're not very ambitious, either."

"Now listen," he said sharply, "I'm only asking for a date. I'm not offering to have you share my frugal life, bed, and board as a lowly technician. A date I can afford; a wife I can't."

"You could try to get ahead."

"I've made my bid. I asked my ill.u.s.trious leader for advanced training and an accelerated course so I could move along faster, and he said that moving too fast was bad for a young man. Shall I quit now and go elsewhere?"

"Where would you go?"

"That's the trouble, Trudy. I majored in teleportonics, and it's either teleportonics or I go back to school and start something new. Think the boss-man will move me faster in Greater Chicago? I doubt it. So I might as well stay right here in Megapolis."

"I suppose you're right."

"All right, let's start over again. Show?"

"Johnny, not tonight. I'm busy."

"Tomorrow?"

"If we're not all cooked by then. Call me, Johnny." "Will do," he said with a growing smile.

Johnny Peters broke the connection and checked his instrument panel. The primary powerline from Con Edison was running a tenth of a volt low; with bored, routine gesture he twitched a k.n.o.b, watched the voltage rise, and then he settled back with little more to do until the end of his s.h.i.+ft of duty.

In the distant reaches of the city, the uneasy slumber of a napping woman was broken by a wave of pain. A gush of body-warm wetness brought a flash of things to mind that came and went as fast as thought, far too rapidly to reproduce in any electromechanical medium of expression. She thought, in turn: It was her firstborn. The doctor said there was little point in predicting the arrival of a firstborn because they had no record upon which to base an estimate. The women in her family were p.r.o.ne to deliver in taxicabs and ambulances on the way to the hospital.

A second wave of pain a.s.sailed her, interrupting the rapid flow of thought. Then as the pain subsided, she went on: That was fast!

She struggled to her feet and duckwalked heavily on her heels to the videophone. She pressed the b.u.t.ton for one of the stored-program numbers and immediately a crisp, cool voice responded, "Tele-port-TRAN-sit," in the lilt with all four clear tones sounding in order.

"Trudy, this is Irma Fellowes. Can you connect me with Joe?"

"Sure thing. Half a mo' and you're on. How's things?"

"Baby's on the way." The simple statement was emphasized by a smothered groan and the grimace of pain on Irma Fellowes' face.

Trudy gulped and lost her cool, crisp, composure. "Whoops! I'll give Joe the double-whammy ring."

The muted wail of a siren came, and almost instantly the scene on the videophone switched to a man, seated at his desk. His face was still changing to a look of puzzled concern. He barked, "Where's the emergency and wha .. . oh! Irma. Wh . . . er . . . ?"

"Baby's on the way, Joe."

"Fine," he said. "Have you called Maternity?"

"Not yet."

"Irma, I can't do you any good at all. I appreciate the information, but it could have waited until you got to the hospital."

"Joe! It's your child!"

"Sure. And you're my wife. Now buzz off here and call the hospital. Get going."

He hung up; reluctantly because he hated the harshness of the act, but deliberately because it was the only way he could get her to move in the right direction.

Irma Fellowes stared at the videophone as though it should resume operation after a brief interruption. It didn't. Whatever she started to think at that moment was stopped by another wave of agony. When it subsided, she pressed another b.u.t.ton, one that had been set up for a temporary emergency. It connected her with the maternity ward of City Hospital; the plate showed an elderly woman in nurse's uniform, who said, "Maternity, Nurse Wilkins speaking."

"This is Mrs. Fellowes. Baby's on the way."

"Just how frequent are your pains, Mrs. Fellowes?" "Rapid. And coming faster all the time."

Irma was interrupted by another pain, through which, faintly, she heard the muted siren. Nurse Wilkins read off some detailed instructions from a card, speaking unhurriedly to someone that could not be seen on the videophone. When she finished, Nurse Wilkins said to Irma Fellowes, "Take it easy now, there's a resident doctor, an interne, and a nurse on their way."

Irma closed the circuit, waddled to the kitchen and drank a gla.s.s of water, returned to the living room and paced a bit. Perhaps two minutes pa.s.sed, then came a rap on the door. She opened it to admit doctor and nurse, followed by the interne pus.h.i.+ng a wheeled stretcher. "Hop on," said the intern.

"I can't," groaned Irma.

The doctor scooped her up and deposited her on the stretcher. He applied stethoscope, then palpated her abdomen gently. "O.K.," he said after a moment. "Let's go. No problem."

Irma said, "But I was born in an ambulance, and-"

The doctor laughed. "Mrs. Fellowes, from what little I know of the process, teleportation flips you from entry to exit at the speed of light. Now, even if it were from here to Alpha Centauri, your baby couldn't be born en route simply because at the speed of light all timing processes come to a quiet standstill. And by 'timing processes' I mean things like clocks, and biochemical reactions, births, aging, and death. O.K.?"

"That's what Joe always says, but-"

"Well, let's find out if he's right."

The corridor was partly cooled from leakage from the air-conditioned apartments, but by contrast it was stifling enough to make Irma gasp. The interne had used foresight; the elevator door was blocked open so that no one could call it away and tie it up. He held the "No Stops" b.u.t.ton as the elevator dropped them smoothly to the stage below the first floor. Here the full heat of the city hit them as they made their way along a short corridor to the teleportransit booth.

The signal light turned green as soon as the interne inserted the credit key in the lock-register. He pressed the b.u.t.tons with a practiced hand, then paused to check the number in the address readout carefully.

"Pays to be careful," be said.

"Ever goof?" asked the nurse.

"Not really bad," he replied turning the credit key. The green light changed to orange, which started the circuit-computer on its faster-than-lightning task of selecting the route from this entry station to the address in the read-out panel. The orange turned to red. "Um-m-m. Maternity seems to have another customer," he said. "We'll be on our way as soon as they get her out of the booth and close the door." He looked at the number again.

"Worried?" asked the nurse.

"Not really worried," he replied. "But I've been thoughtful ever since I watched a hapless, well-dressed citizen trying to walk on air back to the diving exit they have over the ocean at Jones Beach. He was still protesting and waving his brief case as he disappeared beneath the billowy wave."

"I hear you can watch about one per hour on a busy day," chuckled the doctor.

"Yeah," said the interne. He looked at the red light. "All right, all ready. Let's get cutting, huh?"

Two men whose names are legion paused and stood in momentary indecision halfway between Father's Bar and Grill on Eighth Avenue and the kiosk that led down to the 14th Street Teleportransit Station. Habit clashed with common sense; there was also the reluctance to part company.

"Fast one?"

"In this heat?"

"Father's is air-conditioned."

"So's my apartment. And there I can have the Little Woman construct me a cool, tall one whilst I get out of these clothes and into something comfortable. Then I can sit on the terrace in shorts and have my drink in comfort."

"You've got a point. No sense in leaving the office early if we don't take advantage of it."

They turned and headed for the kiosk. Down below, where the subway once rumbled, 14th Street Station was lined with booths, and before each booth was the start of a line-up of people. The big rush hour hadn't started yet, but there were enough citizens in this area who had the kind of job they could leave early to avoid the big jam. There were quite a number who didn't have that kind of job, but they left anyway, hoping their dereliction would either be overlooked or forgotten by Monday morning.

The legion of citizens who left their jobs early to avoid the rush were not being watched by Big Brother, but by an impersonal peg-count that drove a dial that indicated the number of completed transits per minute. Beside the dial was a series of animated graphs that compared the day's traffic against yesterday's traffic, the same day a year ago, the maximum and minimum for this day any year, and the grand maximum and minimum for any day any year. All of the statistical graphs showed a sudden upsurge at the line denoting five o'clock, and the animated graph-line that displayed today's traffic was approaching a record.

Today's traffic had surpa.s.sed yesterday's for the past half hour, but this was not surprising because the rush-hour and just-before-rush traffic was heavier on Friday afternoons. It would undoubtedly repeat itself on Monday morning.

But as the moving finger wrote on toward the critical hour, it approached an all-time record. This would ring no bells nor toot any whistles. It would be duly noted, and a memorandum would be issued authorizing a survey to determine the possible future expansion of facilities; the probable cost of such an expansion; and above all, how much more income would pour into the coffers of Teleportransit, Incorporated.

Walter Long said, "I appreciate your interest, Harry, but I simply can't go out of line for your Johnny Peters." "Is it out of line?" asked Harry Warren.

"Yes, and it is also obvious to us in this section. Or, rather, it would be obvious if I did it."

"I should think you'd jump at a chance to reward someone who asked for advancement."

"I would. And I could justify jumping Peters over a number of his seniors if he were outstanding in just one department. But he isn't outstanding in anything but his ability to lolly-gag with Trudy."

"You make him sound like a washout."

"Oh, Peters is no washout," said Walter Long. "He's just not sufficiently outstanding to warrant special attention."

"Well, you must admit that maintaining a monitor over a function-panel for a system that's adjusted and operated by a computer is not a job that provides an opportunity to be outstanding. There's just so much verve and vigor with which an ambitious man can turn a small k.n.o.b to twitch the incoming line voltage by a couple of tenths. This operation gets pretty dull, especially when the computer will twist the k.n.o.b itself if the line gets more than about a quarter of a volt off."