“There was no betrayal. Hines tried to damage Multivac; a foolish, impossible thing for him to try.”
“You accused him.”
“I had to. Multivac knew the facts without my accusation, and without my accusation, I would have been an accessory. Hines would not have gained, but I would have lost.”
“Without a human witness, Multivac would have suspended sentence.”
“Not in the case of an anti-Multivac act. This wasn’t a case of illegal parenthood or life-work without permission. I couldn’t take the chance.”
“So you let Simon be deprived of all work permits for two years.”
“He deserved it.”
“A consoling thought. You may have lost the confidence of the Congress, but you have gained the confidence of Multivac.”
“The confidence of Multivac is important in the world as it is,” said Bakst seriously. He was suddenly conscious of not being as tall as Noreen.
She looked angry enough to strike him; her lips pressed whitely together. But then she had passed her eightieth birthday—no longer young—the habit of non-violence was too ingrained. . . . Except for fools like Hines.
“Is that all you have to say, then?” she said.
“There could be a great deal to say. Have you forgotten? Have you all forgotten? Do you remember how it once was? Do you remember the Twentieth Century? We live long now; we live securely now; we live happily now.”
“We live worthlessly now.”
“Do you want to go back to what the world was like once?”
Noreen shook her head violently. “Demon tales to frighten us. We have learned our lesson. With the help of Multivac we have come through—but we don’t need that help any longer. Further help will soften us to death. Without Multivac, we will run the robots, we will direct the farms and mines and factories.”
“How well?”
“Well enough. Better, with practice. We need the stimulation of it in any case or we will all die.”
Bakst said, “We have our work, Noreen; whatever work we choose.”
“Whatever we choose, as long as it’s unimportant, and even that can be taken away at will—as with Hines. And what’s your work, Ron? Mathematical games? Drawing lines on paper? Choosing number combinations?”
Bakst’s hand reached out to her, almost pleadingly. “That can be important. It is not nonsense. Don’t underestimate—” He paused, yearning to explain but not quite knowing how he could, safely. He said, “I’m working on some deep problems in combinatorial analysis based on gene patterns that can be used to—”
“To amuse you and a few others. Yes, I’ve heard you talk about your games. You will decide how to move from A to B in a minimum number of steps and that will teach you how to go from womb to grave in a minimum number of risks and we will all thank Multivac as we do so.”
She stood up. “Ron, you will be tried. I’m sure of it. Our trial. And you will be dropped. Multivac will protect you against physical harm, but you know it will not force us to see you, speak to you, or have anything to do with you. You will find that without the stimulation of human interaction, you will not be able to think—or to play your games. Goodbye.”
“Noreen! Wait!”
She turned at the door. “Of course, you will have Multivac. You can talk to Multivac, Ron.”
He watched her dwindle as she walked down the road through the parklands kept green, and ecologically healthy, by the unobtrusive labors of quiet, single-minded robots one scarcely ever saw.
He thought: Yes, I will have to talk to Multivac.
Multivac had no particular home any longer. It was a global presence knit together by wire, optical fiber, and microwave. It had a brain divided into a hundred subsidiaries but acting as one. It had its outlets everywhere and no human being of the five million was far from one.
There was time for all of them, since Multivac could speak to all individually at the same time and not lift its mind from the greater problems that concerned it.
Bakst had no illusions as to its strength. What was its incredible intricacy but a mathematical game that Bakst had come to understand over a decade ago? He knew the manner in which the connecting links ran from continent to continent in a huge network whose analysis could form the basis of a fascinating game. How do you arrange the network so that the flow of information never jams? How do you arrange the switching points? Prove that no matter what the arrangement, there is always at least one point which, on disconnection—
Once Bakst had learned the game, he had dropped out of the Congress. What could they do but talk and of what use was that? Multivac indifferently permitted talk of any kind and in any depth precisely because it was unimportant. It was only acts that Multivac prevented, diverted, or punished.
And it was Hines’s act that was bringing on the crisis; and before Bakst was ready for it, too.
Bakst had to hasten now, and he applied for an interview with Multivac without any degree of confidence in the outcome.
Questions could be asked of Multivac at any time. There were nearly a million outlets of the type that had withstood Hines’s sudden attack into which, or near which, one could speak. Multivac would answer.
An interview was another matter. It required time; it required privacy; most of all it required Multivac’s judgment that it was necessary. Although Multivac had capacities that not all the world’s problems consumed, it had grown chary, somehow, of its time. Perhaps that was the result of its ever-continuing self-improvement. It was becoming constantly more aware of its own worth and less likely to bear trivialities with patience.
Bakst had to depend on Multivac’s good will. His leaving of the Congress, all his actions since, even the bearing of evidence against Mines, had been to gain that good will. Surely it was the key to success in this world.
He would have to assume the good will. Having made the application, he at once traveled to the nearest substation by air. Nor did he merely send his image. He wanted to be there in person; somehow he felt his contact with Multivac would be closer in that way.
The room was almost as it might be if there were to be a human conference planned over closed multivision. For one flash—by moment, Bakst thought Multivac might assume an imaged human form and join him—the brain made flesh.
It did not, of course. There was the soft, whispering chuckle of Multivac’s unceasing operations; something always and forever present in Multivac’s presence; and over it, now, Multivac’s voice.
It was not the usual voice of Multivac. It was a still, small voice, beautiful and insinuating, almost in his ear.
“Good day, Bakst. You are welcome. Your fellow human beings disapprove of you.”
Multivac always comes to the point, thought Bakst. He said, “It does not matter, Multivac. What counts is that I accept your decisions as for the good of the human species. You were designed to do so in the primitive versions of yourself and—”
“And my self-designs have continued this basic approach. If you understand this, why do so many human beings fail to understand it? I have not yet completed the analysis of that phenomenon.”
“I have come to you with a problem,” said Bakst.
Multivac said, “What is it?”
Bakst said, “I have spent a great deal of time on mathematical problems inspired by the study of genes and their combinations. I cannot find the necessary answers and home computerization is of no help.”
There was an odd clicking and Bakst could not repress a slight shiver at the sudden thought that Multivac might be avoiding a laugh. It was a touch of the human beyond what even he was ready to accept. The voice was in his other ear and Multivac said:
“There are thousands of different genes in the human cell. Each gene has an average of perhaps fifty variations in existence and uncounted numbers that have never been in existence. If we were to attempt to calculate all possible combinations, the mere listing of them at my fastest speed, if steadily continued, would, in the longest possible lifetime of the Universe, achieve but an infinitesimal fraction of the total.”
Bakst said, “A complete listing is not needed. That is the point of my game. Some combinations are more probable than others and by building probability upon probability, we can cut the task enormously. It is the manner
