Terminal Man (16 page)

Six a.m., he thought. There wasn’t much time.

“W
HAT IS IT, SOME KIND OF EMERGENCY?”
Farley asked, unlocking the door to Autotronics.

“You could say so,” Morris said, standing outside, shivering. It was a cold night, and he had been waiting half an hour. Waiting for Farley to show up.

Farley was a tall, slender man with a slow manner. Or perhaps he was just sleepy. He seemed to take forever to unlock the offices and let Morris inside. He turned on the lights in a rather plain lobby-reception area. Then he went back toward the rear of the building.

The rear of Autotronics was a single cavernous room. Desks were scattered here and there around several pieces of enormous, glittering machinery. Morris frowned slightly.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Farley said. “You’re thinking it’s a mess.”

“No, I—”

“Well, it is. But we get the job done, I can tell you
that.” He pointed across the room. “That’s Harry’s desk, next to Hap.”

“Hap?”

Farley gestured to a large, spidery metal construction across the room. “Hap,” he said, “is short for Hopelessly Automatic Ping-pong Player.” He grinned. “Not really,” he said. “But we have our little jokes here.”

Morris walked over to the machine, circled around it, staring. “It plays ping-pong?”

“Not well,” Farley admitted. “But we’re working on that. It’s a DOD—Department of Defense—grant, and the terms of the grant were to devise a ping-pong-playing robot. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it isn’t an important project.”

Morris shrugged. He didn’t like being told what he was thinking all the time.

Farley smiled. “God knows what they want it for,” he said. “Of course, the capability would be striking. Imagine—a computer that could recognize a sphere moving rapidly through three-dimensional space, with the ability to contact the sphere and knock it back according to certain rules. Must land between the white lines, not off the table, and so on. I doubt,” he said, “that they’ll use it for ping-pong tournaments.”

He went to the back of the room and opened a refrigerator which had a big orange
RADIATION
sign on it, and beneath,
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
. He removed two jars. “Want some coffee?”

Morris was staring at the signs.

“That’s just to discourage the secretaries,” Farley said, and laughed again. His jovial mood bothered Morris. He watched as Farley made instant coffee.

Morris went over to Benson’s desk and began checking the drawers.

“What is it about Harry, anyway?”

“How do you mean?” Morris asked. The top drawer contained supplies—paper, pencils, slide rule, scribbled notes and calculations. The second drawer was a file drawer; it seemed to hold mostly letters.

“Well, he was in the hospital, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He had an operation, and left. We’re trying to find him now.”

“He’s certainly gotten strange,” Farley said.

“Uh-huh,” Morris said. He was thumbing through the files. Business letters, business letters, requisition forms …

“I remember when it began,” Farley said. “It was during Watershed Week.”

Morris looked up from the letters. “During what?”

“Watershed Week,” Farley said. “How do you take your coffee?”

“Black.”

Farley gave him a cup, stirred artificial cream into his own. “Watershed Week,” he said, “was a week in July of 1969. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

Morris shook his head.

“That wasn’t an official title,” Farley said, “but that was what we called it. Everybody in our business knew it was coming, you see.”

“What was coming?”

“The Watershed. Computer scientists all over the world knew it was coming, and they watched for it. It happened in July of 1969. The information-handling capacity of all the computers in the world exceeded the information-handling capacity of all the human brains
in the world. Computers could receive and store more information than the 3.5 billion human brains in the world.”

“That’s the Watershed?”

“You bet it is,” Farley said.

Morris sipped the coffee. It burned his tongue, but he woke up a little. “Is that a joke?”

“Hell, no,” Farley said. “It’s true. The Watershed was passed in 1969, and computers have been steadily pulling ahead since then. By 1975, they’ll lead human beings by fifty to one in terms of capacity.” He paused.

“Harry was awfully upset about that.”

“I can imagine,” Morris said.

“And that was when it began for him. He got very strange, very secretive.”

Morris looked around the room, at the large pieces of computer equipment standing in different areas. It was an odd sensation: the first time he could recall being in a room littered with computers. He realized that he had made some mistakes about Benson. He had assumed that Benson was pretty much like everyone else—but no one who worked in a place such as this was like everyone else. The experience must change you. He remembered that Ross had once said that it was a liberal myth that everybody was fundamentally the same. Lots of people weren’t. They weren’t like everybody else.

Farley was different, too, he thought. In another situation, he would have dismissed Farley as a jovial clown. But he was obviously bright as hell. Where did that grinning, comic manner come from?

“You know how fast this is moving?” Farley said. “Damned fast. We’ve gone from milliseconds to nanoseconds
in just a few years. When the computer
ILLIAC I
was built in 1952, it could do eleven thousand arithmetical operations a second. Pretty fast, right? Well, they’re almost finished with
ILLIAC IV
now. It will do two hundred
million
operations a second. It’s the fourth generation. Of course, it couldn’t have been built without the help of other computers. They used two other computers full time for two years, designing the new
ILLIAC.
”

Morris drank his coffee. Perhaps it was his fatigue, perhaps the spookiness of the room, but he was beginning to feel some kinship with Benson. Computers to design computers—maybe they were taking over, after all. What would Ross say about that? A shared delusion?

“Find anything interesting in his desk?”

“No,” Morris said. He sat down in the chair behind the desk and looked around the room. He was trying to act like Benson, to think like Benson, to
be
Benson.

“How did he spend his time?”

“I don’t know,” Farley said, sitting on another desk across the room. “He got pretty distant and withdrawn the last few months. I know he had some trouble with the law. And I knew he was going into the hospital. I knew that. He didn’t like your hospital much.”

“How is that?” Morris asked, not very interested. It wasn’t surprising that Benson was hostile to the hospital.

Farley didn’t answer. Instead, he went over to a bulletin board, where clippings and photos had been tacked up. He removed one yellowing newspaper item and gave it to Morris.

It was from the Los Angeles
Times,
dated July 17,
1969. The headline read:
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL GETS NEW COMPUTER
. The story outlined the acquisition of the IBM System 360 computer which was being installed in the hospital basement, and would be used for research, assistance in operations, and a variety of other functions.

“You notice the date?” Farley said. “Watershed Week.”

Morris stared at it and frowned.

“I
AM TRYING TO BE LOGICAL
, D
R
. R
OSS.”

“I understand, Harry.”

“I think it’s important to be logical and rational when we discuss these things, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do.”

She sat in the room and watched the reels of the tape recorder spin. Across from her, Ellis sat back in a chair, eyes closed, cigarette burning in his fingers. Morris drank another cup of coffee as he listened. She was making a list of what they knew, trying to decide what their next step should be.

The tape spun on.

“I classify things according to what I call trends to
be opposed,” Benson said. “There are four important trends to be opposed. Do you want to hear them?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Well, trend number one is the generality of the computer. The computer is a machine but it’s not like any machine in human history. Other machines have a specific function—like cars, or refrigerators, or dishwashers. We expect machines to have specific functions. But computers don’t. They can do all sorts of things.”

“Surely computers are—”

“Please let me finish. Trend number two is the autonomy of the computer. In the old days, computers weren’t autonomous. They were like adding machines; you had to be there all the time, punching buttons, to make them work. Like cars: cars won’t drive without drivers. But now things are different. Computers are becoming autonomous. You can build in all sorts of instructions about what to do next—and you can walk away and let the computer handle things.”

“Harry, I—”

“Please don’t interrupt me. This is very serious. Trend number three is miniaturization. You know all about that. A computer that took up a whole room in 1950 is now about the size of a carton of cigarettes. Pretty soon it’ll be smaller than that.”

There was a pause on the tape.

“Trend number four—” Benson began, and she clicked the tape off. She looked at Ellis and Morris. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said.

They didn’t reply, just stared with a kind of blank fatigue. She looked at her list of information.

“Suggest anything to you?” Ellis asked.

“No,” Ross said. “But I think one of us should talk to McPherson.” She looked at Ellis, who nodded without energy. Morris shrugged slightly. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

It was 4:30 a.m.

“The fact is,” Ross said, “we’ve exhausted all our options. Time is running out.”

McPherson stared at her across his desk. His eyes were dark and tired. “What do you expect me to do?” he said.

“Notify the police.”

“The police are already notified. They’ve been notified from the beginning by one of their own people. I understand the seventh floor is swarming with cops now.”

“The police don’t know about the operation.”

“For Christ’s sake, the police brought him here for the operation. Of course they know about it.”

“But they don’t really know what it involves.”

“They haven’t asked.”

“And they don’t know about the computer projection for 6 a.m.”

“What about it?” he said.

She was becoming angry with him. He was so damned stubborn. He knew perfectly well what she was saying.

“I think their attitude might be different if they knew that Benson was going to have a seizure at six a.m.”

“I think you’re right,” McPherson said. He shifted his weight heavily in his chair. “I think they might stop thinking about him as an escaped man wanted on a charge of assault. And they would begin thinking of him as a crazy murderer with wires in his brain.” He sighed. “Right now, their objective is to apprehend him. If we tell them more, they’ll kill him.”

“But innocent lives may be involved. If the projection—”

“The projection,” McPherson said, “is just that. A computer projection. It is only as good as its input and that input consists of three timed stimulations. You can draw a lot of curves through three graph points. You can extrapolate it a lot of ways. We have no positive reason to believe he’ll tip over at six a.m. In actual fact, he may not tip over at all.”

She glanced around the room, at the charts on his walls. McPherson plotted the future of the NPS in this room, and he kept a record of it on his walls, in the form of elaborate, multicolored charts. She knew what those charts meant to him; she knew what the NPS meant to him; she knew what Benson meant to him. But even so, his position was unreasonable and irresponsible.

Now how was she going to say that?

“Look, Jan,” McPherson said, “you began by saying that we’ve exhausted all our options. I disagree. I think we have the option of waiting. I think there is a
possibility he will return to the hospital, return to our care. And as long as that is possible, I prefer to wait.”

“You’re not going to tell the police?”

“No.”

“If he doesn’t come back,” she said, “and if he attacks someone during a seizure, do you really want that on your head?”

“It’s already on my head,” McPherson said, and smiled sadly.

It was 5 a.m.

T
HEY WERE ALL TIRED, BUT NONE OF THEM
could sleep. They stayed in Telecomp, watching the computer projections as they inched up the plotted line toward a seizure state. The time was 5:30, and then 5:45.

Ellis smoked an entire pack of cigarettes, and then left to get another. Morris stared at a journal in his lap but never turned the page; from time to time, he glanced up at the wall clock.

Ross paced, and looked at the sunrise, the sky turning pink over the thin brown haze of smog to the east.

Ellis came back with more cigarettes.

Gerhard stopped working with the computers to make
fresh coffee. Morris got up and stood watching Gerhard make it; not speaking, not helping, just watching.

Ross became aware of the ticking of the wall clock. It was strange that she had never noticed it before, because in fact it ticked quite loudly. And once a minute there was a mechanical click as the minute hand moved another notch. The sound disturbed her. She began to fix on it, waiting for that single click on top of the quieter ticking. Mildly obsessive, she thought. And then she thought of all the other psychological derangements she had experienced in the past.
Déjà vu,
the feeling that she had been somewhere before; depersonalization, the feeling that she was watching herself from across the room at some social gathering; clang associations, delusions, phobias. There was no sharp line between health and disease, sanity and insanity. It was a spectrum, and everybody fitted somewhere on the spectrum. Wherever you were on that spectrum, other people looked strange to you. Benson was strange to them; without question, they were strange to Benson.