even shovels — it merely combined chemicals, heated and cooled them, lit them, boiled them… and that's how every living thing on earth came about.
That was the point, that everything the computer did was consecutive and logical! Even its desires for me to put on Monomakh's Crown — and that was the most frequent request — were transparent.
Rather than process raw information from photo, sound, smell, and other sensors, it was much easier to use information already processed by me. In science, many do that.
But, my God, what reagents the computer demanded: from distilled water to sodium trimethyldyphtorparaamintetrachlorphenylsulfate and from DNA and RNA to a specific brand of gasoline! And the convoluted technological circuits I had to get!
The lab was changing into a medieval alchemist's den before my very eyes; it was filled with bottles, two — necked flasks, autoclaves, and stills. I connected them with hoses, glass tubing, and wires. My supply of reagents and glass was depleted in a week and I had to requisition more and more.
The noble, soothing electrical smells, rosin and heated insulation, were replaced with the swampy miasmas of acids, ammonia, vinegar, and God knows what else. I wandered lost in these chemical jungles. The stills and hoses bubbled, gurgled, and sighed. The mixtures in the flasks and bottles fermented and changed color; they precipitated, dissolved, and regenerated metallic pulsating clumps and pieces of shimmering gray threads. I poured and sprinkled according to the computer's directions and understood nothing.
Then, the computer suddenly asked for four more automatic printers. I was happy: so the computer was interested in something other than chemistry! I worked at it, got the stuff, connected it… and off it went!
(Probably, this was the point at which I created Ashby's “power information retrieval” or something like it. Who knows! That was when I became hopelessly confused.)
Now the lab sounded like a typing pool. The machines were printing out numbers. Paper ribbon with columns of numbers poured out of the machines like manna from heaven. I rolled up the tapes, picked out the words separated by spaces, translated them, and made sentences.
The “true” phrases were very strange and enigmatic. For example: “…. twenty — six kopeks, like from Berdichev.” That was one of the first. Was that a fact, a thought? Or a hint? How about this: “An onion like a steel wound….” It resembles Mayakovsky's “A street like an open wound.” But what does it mean? Is it a pathetic imitation? Or maybe a poetic discovery that contemporary poets haven't reached yet?
I deciphered another tape: “The tenderness of souls, taken in Taylor's series expansion, in the limits of zero to infinity comes down to a biharmonic function.” Well put, no?
And all of it was like that: either nonsensical excerpts or something “schizophrenic.” I was going to take some of the tapes to the mathlinguists — maybe they could figure it out — but I changed my mind, fearing a scandal. Meaningful information came only from the first printer: “Add such and such reagent to flasks 1,3, and 7. Lower the voltage by five volts in electrodes 34 — 123.” And so on. The computer remembered “to feed itself,” and therefore it hadn't “gone mad.” What was going on?
The most painful part was knowing that there was nothing I could do. I had had inexplicable things happen in other experiments, but in those, at least, I could always backtrack and repeat the experiment. If the bad effect disappeared, all the better; if not, we could analyze it. But here, there was nothing that could be replayed, nothing that could be turned back. I even dreamed of wavy, snakelike tapes in scaly numeral skins, and tried to figure out what the computer was trying to say.
I didn't even know where to hide the rolls of tape. In our institute we use the tape two ways: the ones with answers to new questions are turned in to the archives, and the rest are taken home to be used as toilet paper — very practical. I had enough rolls for every bathroom in Academic Town.
And when one fine day in April (after a sleepless night in the lab fulfilling every caprice of the computer: pouring, sprinkling, regulating) printer Number 3 gave me the following sentence: “A streptocidal striptease with trembling streptoccoci….” I knew that there was no point in continuing.
I took all the rolls out onto the lawn, ruffled them up (I might have been muttering: “Streptocide, huh? Berdichev? Tenderness of the soul? Onions?… I don't remember) and set fire to them. I sat by the bonfire, keeping warm, had a cigarette and understood that the experiment was a failure. And not because nothing had happened, but because I had gotten a mess. Once for a lark Valery Ivanov and I welded from all the materials we had on hand a “metallosemiconducting potpourri” in a vacuum oven. We got a breathtakingly colored ingot; we broke it down for analysis. Each crumb of the ingot showed all the effects of solid body — from tunnel to transistor — and they were all unsteady, unstable, and unreproducible. We threw the potpourri in the garbage.
And this was the same thing. The point of scientific solutions is to find what is necessary in the mass of qualities and of effects in an element, in matter, or in a system, and to throw out the chaff. And it hadn't worked here. The computer had not learned to understand my information. I headed to the lab to turn off the current.
And in the hallway my eye fell on a tank — a beautiful vessel made of transparent teflon, 2 x 1.5 x 1.2 meters; I had acquired it back in December with the idea of using the teflon for other things, but I hadn't needed it. And the tank gave me a final and completely mad idea. I put all the printers in the hall and put the tank in their place. I brought all the wires from the computer, the ends of the piping, tubing, and hoses, poured out the remains of the reagents, covered the smelly mess with water and turned to the computer with the following speech:
“Enough numbers! You can not express the world in binary numbers, understand? And even if it were possible, what point is there to it? Try it another way: in images, in something tangible, damn you!”
I locked the lab and left with a firm determination to get some rest. I hadn't been able to sleep for the entire past week.
Those were a pleasant ten days — calm and soothing. I slept late, charged my batteries, took showers. Lena and I took the motorcycle outside town, went to the movies, took long walks, kissed. “Well, how are our solid — state circuits doing?” she would ask. “They haven't gone soft yet?” I would answer in kind and change the subject. “I have nothing to do with any circuits, or computers, or experiments!” I would remind myself. “I don't want to be hauled away from the lab one day in a very cheery mood wearing a jacket with inordinately long sleeves.”
But something was bothering me. I had run off, abandoned the project. What was going on in there? And what had happened? (I was already thinking of the experiment in the past tense.) It looked as though, through random information, I had started some kind of synthesis in the complex. But what kind of crummy synthesis was it? Synthesis of what?
Chapter 8
The waiter wrapped the bottle in a towel and opened it. The room was filled with a roar and smoke, and unshaven cheeks and a green turban rose to the ceiling.
“What's this?”
“It's a genie!”
“But 1 ordered champagne! Let me have the complaint book.”
A man was walking toward me on the paved path. I could see the green trees and white columns of the old institute building behind him. I was headed for the accounting office. Everything was normal in the grounds. The man had a slightly rolling gait, swinging his arms, and he didn't quite limp, but stepped more carefully with his right foot than with his left. I noticed that particularly. The wind made his raincoat flap and ruffled his red hair.
My first thought: “Where have I seen this guy?”
The closer we got to each other, the more I saw of him: his sloping forehead with a widow's peak and steep ridges over the eyes, flat cheeks with a reddish, week — old stubble, haughtily pursed lips, and bored, squinting eyes. No, we had definitely met before. It was impossible to forget an obnoxious face like that. And that jaw — my
