“Thank you, Judge.”
Conn drank some more brandy, hoping he could get his courage up without getting drunk. After all, they had a right to a full report; all of them had contributed something toward sending him to Terra.
“The main purpose in my going to the University was to learn computer theory and practice. It wouldn’t do any good for us to find the Brain if none of us are able to use it. Well, I learned enough to be able to operate, program and service any computer in existence, and train assistants. During my last year at the University, I had a part-time paid job programming the big positron-neutrino-photon computer in the astrophysics department. When I graduated, I was offered a position as instructor in positronic computer theory.”
“You never mentioned that in your letters, son,” his father said.
“It was too late for any letter except one that would come on the same ship I did. Beside, it wasn’t very important.”
“I think it was.” There was a catch in old Professor Kellton’s voice. “One of my boys, from the Academy, offered a place on the faculty of the University of Montevideo, on Terra!” He poured himself a second drink, something he almost never did.
“Conn means it wasn’t important because it didn’t have anything to do with the Brain,” Fawzi explained and then looked at Conn expectantly.
All right; now he’d tell them. “I went over all the records of the Third Fleet-Army Force’s occupation of Poictesme that are open to the public. On one pretext or another, I got permission to examine the non-classified files that aren’t open to public examination. I even got a few peeps at some of the stuff that’s still classified secret. I have maps and plans of all the installations that were built on this planet—literally thousands of them, many still undiscovered. Why, we haven’t more than scratched the surface of what the Federation left behind here. For instance, all the important installations exist in duplicate, some even in triplicate, as a precaution against Alliance space attack.”
“Space attack!” Colonel Zareff was indignant. “There never was a time when the Alliance could have taken the offensive against Poictesme, even if an offensive outside our own space-area had been part of our policy. We just didn’t have the ships. It took over a year to move a million and a half troops from Ashmodai to Marduk, and the fleet that was based on Amaterasu was blasted out of existence in the spaceports and in orbit. Hell, at the time of the surrender, we didn’t have—”
“They weren’t taking chances on that, Colonel. But the point I want to make is that with everything I did find, I never found, in any official record, a single word about the giant computer we call the Third Fleet-Army Force Brain.”
For a time, the only sound in the room was the tiny insectile humming of the electric clock on the wall. Then Professor Kellton set his glass on the table, and it sounded like a hammer-blow.
“Nothing, Conn?” Kurt Fawzi was incredulous and, for the first time, frightened. The others were exchanging uneasy glances. “But you must have! A thing like that—”
“Of course it would be one of the closest secrets during the war,” somebody else said. “But in forty years, you’d expect something to leak out.”
“Why, during the war, it was all through the Third Force. Even the Alliance knew about it; that’s how Klem heard of it.”
“Well, Conn couldn’t just walk into the secret files and read whatever he wanted to. Just because he couldn’t find anything—”
“Don’t tell me about security!” Klem Zareff snorted. “Certainly they still have it classified; staff-brass’d rather lose an eye than declassify anything. If you’d seen the lengths our staff went to—hell, we lost battles because the staff wouldn’t release information the troops in the field needed. I remember once—”
“But there was a Brain,” Judge Ledue was saying, to reassure himself and draw agreement from the others. “It was capable of combining data, and scanning and evaluating all its positronic memories, and forming association patterns, and reasoning with absolute perfection. It was more than a positronic brain—it was a positronic super-mind.”
“We’d have won the war, except for the Brain. We had ninety systems, a hundred and thirty inhabited planets, a hundred billion people—and we were on the defensive in our own space-area! Every move we made was known and anticipated by the Federation. How could they have done that without something like the Brain?”
“Conn, from what you learned of computers, how large a volume of space would you say the Brain would have to occupy?” Professor Kellton asked.
Professor Kellton was the most unworldly of the lot, yet he was asking the most practical question.
“Well, the astrophysics computer I worked with at the University occupies a total of about one million cubic feet,” Conn began. This was his chance; they’d take anything he told them about computers as gospel. “It was only designed to handle problems in astrophysics. The Brain, being built for space war, would have to handle any such problem. And if half the stories about the Brain are anywhere near true, it handled any other problem—mathematical, scientific, political, economic, strategic, psychological, even philosophical and ethical. Well, I’d say that a hundred million cubic feet would be the smallest even conceivable.”
They all nodded seriously. They were willing to accept that—or anything else, except one thing.
“Lot of places on this planet where a thing that size could be hidden,” Tom Brangwyn said, undismayed. “A planet’s a mighty big place.”
“It could be under water, in one of the seas,” Piet Dawes, the banker, suggested. “An underwater dome city wouldn’t be any harder to build than a dome city on a poison-atmosphere planet like Tubal-Cain.”
“It might even be on Tubal-Cain,” a melon-planter said. “Or Hiawatha, or even one of the Beta or Gamma planets. The Third Force was occupying the whole Trisystem, you know.” He thought for a moment.
