It explained a great deal, but I would not until then have accused
Mayflower of pigsty taste.
‘She and I can’t decipher it, although she painted the thing, and
asking experts to do it would only spread knowledge that is better kept
close. Can your Mob decipher it?’
I had my doubts but I said, ‘They can design and build the computer to do the job. It will require unusual programming.’
‘T hat is my thought. So, a deal.’
‘W hat do you offer?’
He spread his hands. ‘Intangibles. Protection and the path-easing
of wealth, industrial power and contacts in useful areas. Alternatively,
I can have your mind torn open and their identities revealed, after
which I will take over direction of the operation,’
I pretended to think it over. I was about six metres from him and his
hand only inches from a button. I decided that I could get closer
without alarming him, and did so between exchanges, as naturally as
I could manage.
‘W hat puzzles me,’ I said, ‘is what you expect to gain. Do you want
to establish a factory for the production of super-intelligences?’
He snorted a contempt which seemed to me the most natural thing
about him; he became for a moment the larrikin politician ‘Who the
hell wants C Group brains? What are they good for? We can’t understand them and they can’t be bothered with us. They’re useless. What’s the good of a nuclear power plant to people who have just discovered
fire? T hat’s about the right comparison.’
Quite so. Super-intelligence has no place in our world. We need intellects only slightly advanced over our best, brains that can still exchange ideas with us rather than reduce both sides to ill-tempered bafflement. Groups A and B are about the best we can accommodate,
and about the best that can tolerate us as a hum an ambience
‘So what do you w^ant M r Armstrong?’
Since a deal has Finally to be founded on at least partial truth, he
was willing to allow me a small curiosity. ‘The same as your Mob
wants. Power. I may live another hundred years, longer if the techniques continue to improve. I want to make use of life. Given the knowledge that can produce exactly calculated intelligence of a
specific type — not brains past comprehension but mathematicians,
psychologists, pure logicians, even some kinds of artists — given that,
On the nursery floor
191
what is impossible to the man who controls them?’
Controls. There it is, naked and unashamed and stupid. He aspires
to control a gaggle of assorted geniuses! The great problem of power
has always been that the wielders of it learn to think themselves infallible. Hitler, Napoleon, the M ah’dis and Ayatollahs . . . make your own list. This intelligent idiot thought to control genius. He could only
misuse and destroy it.
‘Your Mob wants power,’ he said, ‘and I want power. There will be
enough to share.’ Until the shootout, I thought; there’s always a
shootout to really finalise the deal. ‘The country?’ he asked, musing.
‘Why not the world, in good time?’
Good time was now; I let the little electrodes slide forward through
my fingertips. I was only three metres from him now, but he was alert
and watchful.
‘The Mob,’ I said, ‘doesn’t want power. It wants knowledge. T hat’s
all it wants.’ His expression asked: W hat’s this, some new angle?
He said, laying down the philosophy, ‘Nobody wants knowledge for
its own sake. He wants the rewards of knowledge.’
‘Not the dedicated genius. Not the created brains you still think you
understand. The Mob is A Group.’
He sat quite silent and still, revolving the information, deciding if
and how it altered the situation. I offered a distracting crumb: ‘Like
Mayflower, the A Group boys have done some sexual slumming. One
of them is my father and you can believe that he has never forgiven
you for a childhood on the Project site.’
Armstrong said, like a man keeping his tongue busy while he
thinks, ‘He passed no genius on to you.’
‘Indeed, no. He bred for relief, not for brains.’
Before the last word I was moving and his action showed that his experience did not include physical attack. Instead of pressing the button he obeyed the protective insinct, raising his hands to ward me off.
With my fingertips on his wrist I discharged the power pack in a single
bolt. He died with the faintest of grunts.
From the door of the protected room I gave a servile, ‘Thank you
for your kindness, M r Armstrong,’ for the benefit of any who lurked
or listened, and closed it behind me — and walked out of the house.
I had to take the lifts out of my shoes, deflate the artificial waistline,
remove the coloured contact lenses, wash the colour out of hair and
skin and correct the little hop-skip limp of six months misdirection,
192
George lurner
or Dad would not have known me. More importantly, the door flunkey would not know me either.
Dad’s questions were searching rather than sympathetic; his
urgency was only to get back to the other three to study the huge 3D
blowup of Mayflower’s painting which — monitored and reproduced
while I examined it — already occupied the end walls of the store
room.
Now they needed a physicist-mathematician better than themselves
to solve the problems that held them up, but not so much better as to
be unwilling to communicate . .
