ancient Greece, Multivac gives oracular and obscure answers. Only we have translators, you see.'
They had arrived. Meyerhof was waiting.
Whistler said briskly, 'What circuits did you use, Grand Master?' Meyerhof told him and Whistler went to work.
Trask tried to follow what was happening, but none of it made sense. The government official watched a spool unreel with a pattern of dots in endless incomprehensibility. Grand Master Meyerhof stood indifferently to one side while Whistler surveyed the pattern as it emerged. The analyst had put on headphones and a mouthpiece and at intervals murmured a series of instructions which, at some far-off place, guided assistants through electronic contortions in other computers.
Occasionally, Whistler listened, then punched combinations on a complex keyboard marked with symbols that looked vaguely mathematical but weren't.
A good deal more than an hour's time elapsed.
The frown on Whistler's face grew deeper. Once, he looked up at the two others and began, 'This is unbel-' and turned back to his work.
Finally, he said hoarsely, 'I can give you an unofficial answer.' His eyes were red-rimmed. 'The official answer awaits complete analysis. Do you want it unofficial?'
'Go ahead,' said Meyerhof.
Trask nodded.
Whistler darted a hangdog glance at the Grand Master. 'Ask a foolish question-' he said. Then, gruffly, 'Multivac says, extraterrestrial origin.'
'What are you saying?' demanded Trask.
'Don't you hear me? The jokes we laugh at were not made up by any man. Multivac has analyzed all data given it and the one answer that best fits that data is that some extraterrestrial intelligence has composed the jokes, all of them, and placed them in selected human minds at selected times and places in such a way that no man is conscious of having made one up. All subsequent jokes are minor variations and adaptations of these grand originals.'
Meyerhof broke in, face flushed with the kind of triumph only a Grand Master can know who once again has asked the right question. 'All comedy writers,' he said, 'work by twisting old jokes to new purposes. That's well known. The answer fits.'
'But why?' asked Trask. 'Why make up the jokes?'
'Multivac says,' said Whistler, 'that the only purpose that fits all the data is that the jokes are intended to study human psychology. We study rat psychology by making the rats solve mazes. The rats don't know why and wouldn't even if they were aware of what was going on, which they're not. These outer intelligences study man's psychology by noting individual reactions to carefully selected anecdotes. Each man reacts differently. . . . Presumably, these outer intelligences are to us as we are to rats.' He shuddered.
Trask, eyes staring, said, 'The Grand Master said man is the only animal
with a sense of humor. It would seem then that the sense of humor is foisted upon us from without.'
Meyerhof added excitedly, 'And for possible humor created from within, we have no laughter. Puns, I mean.'
Whistler said, 'Presumably, the extraterrestrials cancel out reactions to spontaneous jokes to avoid confusion.'
Trask said in sudden agony of spirit, 'Come on, now, Good Lord, do either of you believe this?'
The senior analyst looked at him coldly. 'Multivac says so. It's all that can be said so far. It has pointed out the real jokesters of the universe, and if we want to know more, the matter will have to be followed up.' He added in a whisper, 'If anyone dares follow it up.'
Grand Master Meyerhof said suddenly, 'I asked two questions, you know. So far only the first has been answered. I think Multivac has enough data to answer the second.'
Whistler shrugged. He seemed a half-broken man. 'When a Grand Master thinks there is enough data,' he said, 'I'll make book on it. What is your second question?'
'I asked this. What will be the effect on the human race of discovering the answer to my first question?'
'Why did you ask that?' demanded Trask.
'Just a feeling that it had to be asked,' said Meyerhof.
Trask said, 'Insane. It's all insane,' and turned away. Even he himself felt how strangely he and Whistler had changed sides. Now it was Trask crying insanity.
Trask closed his eyes. He might cry insanity all he wished, but no man in fifty years had doubted the combination of a Grand Master and Multivac and found his doubts verified.
Whistler worked silently, teeth clenched. He put Multivac and its subsidiary machines through their paces again. Another hour passed and he laughed harshly. 'A raving nightmare!'
'What's the answer?' asked Meyerhof. 'I want Multivac's remarks, not yours.'
'All right. Take it. Multivac states that, once even a single human discovers the truth of this method of psychological analysis of the human mind, it will become useless as an objective technique to those extraterrestrial powers now using it.'
'You mean there won't be any more jokes handed out to humanity?' asked Trask faintly. 'Or what do you mean?'
'No more jokes,' said Whistler, 'now! Multivac says now! The experiment is ended now! A new technique will have to be introduced.'
They stared at each other. The minutes passed.
Meyerhof said slowly, 'Multivac is right.'
Whistler said haggardly, 'I know.'
Even Trask said in a whisper, 'Yes. It must be.'
It was Meyerhof who put his finger on the proof of it, Meyerhof the accomplished jokester. He said, 'It's over, you know, all over. I've been trying for five minutes now and I can't think of one single joke, not one! And if I read one in a book, I wouldn't laugh. I know.'
'The gift of humor is gone,' said Trask drearily. 'No man will ever laugh again.'
And they remained there, staring, feeling the world shrink down to the dimensions of an experimental rat cage-with the maze removed and something, something about to be put in its place.
The Immortal Bard
'Oh, yes,' said Dr. Phineas Welch, 'I can bring back the spirits of the illustrious dead.'
He was a little drunk, or maybe he wouldn't have said it. Of course, it was perfectly all right to get a little drunk at the annual Christmas party.
Scott Robertson, the school's young English instructor, adjusted his glasses and looked to right and left to see if they were overheard. 'Really, Dr. Welch.'
'I mean it. And not just the spirits. I bring back the bodies, too.'
'I wouldn't have said it were possible,' said Robertson primly.
'Why not? A simple matter of temporal transference.'
'You mean time travel? But that's quite-uh-unusual.'
'Not if you know how.'
'Well, how, Dr. Welch?'
'Think I'm going to tell you?' asked the physicist gravely. He looked vaguely about for another drink and didn't find any. He said, 'I brought quite a few back. Archimedes, Newton, Galileo. Poor fellows.'
'Didn't they like it here? I should think they'd have been fascinated by our modern science,' said Robertson. He was beginning to enjoy the conversation.
'Oh, they were. They were. Especially Archimedes. I thought he'd go mad with joy at first after I explained a little of it in some Greek I'd boned up on, but no- no-'
'What was wrong?'
Copyright (c) 195? by Palmer Publications, Inc.
'Just a different culture. They couldn't get used to our way ѓ@i life. They got terribly lonely and frightened. I had to send them back.' ja
'That's too bad.'
'Yes. Great minds, but not flexible minds. Not universal. So I tried Shakespeare.'
'What?' yelled Robertson. This was getting closer to home.
'Don't yell, my boy,' said Welch. 'It's bad manners.'
'Did you say you brought back Shakespeare?'
'I did. I needed someone with a universal mind; someone who knew people well enough to be able to live with them centuries way from his own time. Shakespeare was the man. I've got his signature. As a memento, you know.'
'On you?' asked Robertson, eyes bugging.
'Right here.' Welch fumbled in one vest pocket after another. 'Ah, here it is.'
A little piece of pasteboard was passed to the instructor. On one side it said: 'L. Klein & Sons, Wholesale Hardware.' On the other side, in straggly script, was written, 'Will1' Shakesper.'
A wild surmise filled Robertson. 'What did he look like?'
'Not like his pictures. Bald and an ugly mustache. He spoke in a thick brogue. Of course, I did my best to please him with our times. I told him we thought highly of his plays and still put them on the boards. In fact, I said we thought they were the greatest pieces of literature in the English language, maybe in any language.'
'Good. Good,' said Robertson breathlessly.
'I said people had written volumes of commentaries on his plays. Naturally he wanted to see one and I got one for him from the library.'
'And?'
'Oh, he was fascinated. Of course, he had trouble with the current idioms and references to events since 1600, but I helped out. Poor fellow. I don't think he ever expected such treatment. He kept saying, 'God ha' mercy! What cannot be racked from words in five centuries? One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!'
