of achieving this building of probability upon probability that I ask you to help me with.”
“It would still take a great deal of my time. How could I justify this to myself?”
Bakst hesitated. No use in trying a complicated selling job. With Multivac, a straight line was the shortest distance between two points.
He said, “An appropriate gene combination might produce a human being more content to leave decisions to you, more willing to believe in your resolve to make men happy, more anxious to be happy. I cannot find the proper combination, but you might, and with guided genetic engineering—”
“I see what you mean. It is—good. I will devote some time to it.”
Bakst found it difficult to hitch into Noreen’s private wave length. Three times the connection broke away. He was not surprised. In the last two months, there had been an increasing tendency for technology to slip in minor ways—never for long, never seriously—and he greeted each occasion with a somber pleasure.
This time it held. Noreen’s face showed, holographically three-dimensional. It flickered a moment, but it held.
“I’m returning your call,” said Bakst, dully impersonal.
“For a while it seemed impossible to get you,” said Noreen. “Where have you been?”
“Not hiding. I’m here, in Denver.”
“Why in Denver?”
“The world is my oyster, Noreen. I may go where I please.”
Her face twitched a little. “And perhaps find it empty everywhere. We are going to try you, Ron.”
“Now?”
“Now!”
“And here?”
“And here!”
Volumes of space flickered into different glitters on either side of Noreen, and further away, and behind. Bakst looked from side to side, counting. There were fourteen, six men, eight women. He knew every one of them. They had been good friends once, not so long ago.
To either side and beyond the simulacra was the wild background of Colorado on a pleasant summer day that was heading toward its end. There had been a city here once named Denver. The site still bore the name though it had been cleared, as most of the city sites had been . . . He could count ten robots in sight, doing whatever it was robots did.
They were maintaining the ecology, he supposed. He knew no details, but Multivac did, and it kepi fifty million robots allover the Earth in efficient order.
Behind Bakst was one of the converging grids of Multivac, almost like a small fortress of self-defense.
“Why now?” he asked. “And why here?”
Automatically he turned to Eldred. She was the oldest of them and the one with authority—if a human being could be said to have authority.
Eldred’s dark-brown face looked a little weary. The years showed, all six score of them, but her voice was firm and incisive. “Because we have the final fact now. Let Noreen tell you. She knows you best.”
Bakst’s eyes shifted to Noreen. “Of what crime am I accused?”
“Let us play no games, Ron. There are no crimes under Multivac except to strike for freedom and it is your human crime that you have committed no crime under Multivac. For that we will judge whether any human being alive wants your company any longer, wants to hear your voice, be aware of your presence, or respond to you in any way.”
“Why am I threatened with isolation then?”
“You have betrayed all human beings.”
“How?”
“Do you deny that you seek to breed mankind into subservience to Multivac?”
“Ah!” Bakst folded his arms across his chest. “You found out quickly, but then you had only to ask Multivac.”
Noreen said, “Do you deny that you asked for help in the genetic engineering of a strain of humanity designed to accept slavery under Multivac without question?”
“I suggested the breeding of a more contented humanity. Is this a betrayal?”
Eldred intervened. She said, “We don’t want your sophistry, Ron. We know it by heart. Don’t tell us once again that Multivac cannot be withstood, that there is no use in struggling, that we have gained security. What you call security, the rest of us call slavery.”
Bakst said, “Do you proceed now to judgment, or am I allowed a defense?”
“You heard Eldred,” said Noreen. “We know your defense.”
“We all heard Eldred,” said Bakst, “but no one has heard me. What she says is my defense is not my defense.”
There was a silence as the images glanced right and left at each other. Eldred said, “Speak!”
Bakst said, “I asked Multivac to help me solve a problem in the field of mathematical games. To gain his interest, I pointed out that it was modeled on gene combinations and that a solution might help in designing a gene combination that would leave man no worse off than he is now in any respect and yet breed into him a cheerful acceptance of Multivac’s direction, and acquiescence in his decisions.”
“So we have said,” said Eldred.
“It was only on those terms that Multivac would have accepted the task. Such a new breed is clearly desirable for mankind by Multivac’s standards, and by Multivac’s standards he must labor toward it: And the desirability of the end will lure him on to examine greater and greater complications of a problem whose endlessness is beyond what even he can handle. You all witness that.”
Noreen said, “Witness what?”
“Haven’t you had trouble reaching me? In the last two months, hasn’t each of you noticed small troubles in what has always gone smoothly? . . . You are silent. May I accept that as an affirmative?”
“If so what then?”
Bakst said, “Multivac has been placing all his spare circuits on the problem. He has been slowly pushing the running of the world toward rather a skimpy minimum of his efforts, since nothing, by his own sense of ethics, must stand in the way of human happiness and there can be no greater increase in that happiness than to accept Multivac.”
Noreen said, “What does all this mean? There is still enough in Multivac to run the world—and us—and if this is done at less than full efficiency, that would only add temporary discomfort to our slavery. Only temporary, because it won’t last long. Sooner or later, Multivac will decide the problem is insoluble, or will solve it, and in either case, his distraction will end. In the latter case, slavery will become permanent and irrevocable.”
“But for now he is distracted,” said Bakst, “and we can even talk like this—most dangerously—without his noticing. Yet I dare not risk doing so for long, so please understand me quickly.
“I have another mathematical game—the setting up of networks on the model of Multivac. I have been able to demonstrate that no matter how complicated and redundant the network is, there must be at least one place into which all the currents can funnel under particular circumstances. There will always be the fatal apoplectic stroke if that one place is interefered with, since it will induce overloading elsewhere which will break down and induce overloading elsewhere—and so on indefinitely till all breaks down.”
“Well?”
“And this is the point. Why else have I come to Denver? And Multivac knows it, too, and this point is guarded electronically and robotically to the extent that it cannot be penetrated.”
“Well?”
“But Multivac is distracted, and Multivac trusts me. I have labored hard to gain that trust, at the cost of losing all of you, since only with trust is there the possibility of betrayal. If any of you tried to approach this point, Multivac might rouse himself even out of his present distraction. If Multivac were not distracted, he would not allow even me to approach. But he is distracted, and it is I!”
Bakst was moving toward the converging grid in a calm saunter, and the fourteen images, keyed to him, moved along as well. The soft susurrations of a busy Multivac center were all about them.
Bakst said, “Why attack an invulnerable opponent? Make him vulnerable first, and then—”
