aren’t hoodlums, are you?”
“Don’t believe so,” Jerry said, eyes trained on the road. “Where you from?”
“Back in town. My house is gone, and the neighborhood’s all wrapped up like a Christmas package. I thought I was the only one in the world left alive.”
“Haven’t been listening to the radio, then,” John said.
“No. Don’t like electronic things. But I know what’s going on anyway.”
“Yeah?” Jerry asked, moving the truck back onto the road.
“Yes indeed. My son. He’s responsible for this. I had no idea what form it would take, but there’s no doubt in my mind. And I warned him, too.”
The twins glanced at each other again. The woman tossed her hair and deftly slipped a flexible band around it
“Yes, I know,” she said, chuckling. “Crazy as a bedbug. Crazier than all that back in town. But I can tell you where we should be going.”
“Where?” Jerry asked.
“South,” she said firmly. “To where my son was working.” She smoothed her gown down over her knees. “My name, by the way, is Ulam, April Ulam.”
“John,” John said, awkwardly extending his right hand and gripping hers. “This is my brother, Jerry.”
“Ah, yes,” April said. “Twins. Makes sense, I suppose.”
Jerry started laughing. Tears came into his eyes and he wiped them with a muck-stained hand. “South, lady?” he said.
“Definitely.”
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
Electronic Journal of Michael Bernard
January 15: Today, they began speaking with me, halting at first, then with greater confidence as the day progressed.
How do I describe the experience of their “voices”? Having finally crossed the blood-brain barrier, and explored the (to them) enormous frontier of my brain, and having discovered a pattern in the activities of this new world—the pattern being me—and realizing that the information from their distant past, months ago, was accurate, that a macroscopic world does exist—
Having learned this much, they have now had to learn what it is to be human. For only then could they communicate with this God in the Machine. Appointing tens of millions of “scholars” to work on this project, in perhaps only the last three days, they have indeed cracked the case, and now chatter with me no more strangely than if they were (far example) aboriginal Australians.
I sit in my desk chair, and when the appointed time comes, we converse. Some of it is in English (I think— the conversation may occur in pre-literate portions of the brain, and be translated by my own mind into English afterward), some of it visual, some of it in other senses—mostly taste, a sense which seems particularly attractive to them.
I cannot really comprehend the size of the population within me. They come in many classes: the original noocytes and their derivatives, those converted immediately after the invasion; the categories of mobile cells, many of them apparently new to the body, newly designed, with new functions; the fixed cells, perhaps not individuals in a mental sense having no mobility and being assigned fixed, if complex, functions; the as-yet unaltered cells (nearly all the cells in my brain and nervous system fall into this category); and others I am not yet clear on.
Together, they number in the tens of trillions.
At a crude guess, perhaps two trillion fully developed, intelligent individuals exist within me.
If I multiply this crude number times the number of people in North America—half a billion, another rough guess—then I end up with a billion trillion, or on the order of 1020. That is the number of intelligent beings on the face of the Earth at this moment—neglecting, of course, the entirely negligible human population.
Bernard pushed his chair back from the desk after saving the entry in memory. There was too much to record, too much detail; he despaired of ever being able to explain the sensations to the researchers outside. After weeks of frustration, of cabin fever, and then trying to break the chemical language within his blood, there was suddenly a feast of information so huge he couldn’t begin to absorb it All he had to do was ask, and a thousand or a million intelligent beings would organize to analyze his question and return detailed, rapid answers.
“What am I to you?” would bring in reply:
Father/Mother/Universe
World-Challenge Source of all
Ancient, slow
Mountain-galaxy.
And he could spend hours replaying the sensual complexes which accompanied the words: the taste of his own blood serum, the fixed tissues of his body, the joy at nutrition being diffused, the necessity of cleansing, protecting.
In the quiet of night, lying on his cot with only infra-red scanners trained on him and the ubiquitous sensors taped to his body, he swam in and out of his own dreams and the cautious, almost reverent inquiries and replies of the noocytes. Now and then, he would awaken as if alerted by some mental guard dog that a new territory was being probed.
Even in the day, his sense of time became distorted. The minutes spent conversing with the cells felt like hours, and he would return to the world of the containment chamber with a disconcerting lack of conviction about its reality.
The visits by Paulsen-Fuchs and others seemed to come at longer intervals, though in fact the visits were made at the same established times each day.
At three P.M., Paulsen-Fuchs arrived with his elaborations of the news reports Bernard had read or seen earlier that morning. The news was invariably bad and getting worse. The Soviet Union, like an untamed horse set loose, had now left Europe panicked and bristling with helpless rage. It had then retreated into sullen silence, which reassured no one. Bernard thought briefly of these problems, then asked Paulsen-Fuchs what progress there was on controlling the intelligent cells.
“None. They are obviously in control of all the immune system; other than having an increased metabolic rate, they are very thoroughly camouflaged. We believe they can now neutralize any anti-metabolite before it begins to work; they are already alert to inhibitors like actinomycin. In short, we cannot damage them without damaging you.”
Bernard nodded. Oddly, that didn’t concern him now.
“And you are, now, communicating with them,” Paulsen-Fuchs said.
“Yes.”
Paulsen-Fuchs sighed and turned away from the triple glass. “Are you still a human, Michael?”
“Of course I am,” he said. But then it occurred to him that he was not, that he had not been
“Why have we had to snoop to find this fact?”
“I wouldn’t call it snooping. I assumed my entries were being intercepted and read.”
“Michael, why haven’t you told
Bernard shook his head and chuckled. “You are indeed, Paul. You’re my host. And as soon as I figured out precisely what to say, in speech, you would have been told. Will be told. The dialogue between the noocytes and myself is just beginning. I can’t be sure we don’t still have fundamental misunderstandings.”
Paulsen-Fuchs stepped toward the viewing chamber hatchway. “Tell me when you are ready. It could be
