Yet what the hell was this but a command ship? Rostock had hinted as much. The activity aboard was characteristic: the repeated sound of courier boats coming and going, intercom calls, technicians hurrying along the corridors, but no shooting.
Nevertheless…
Voices jabbered beyond the cell door. Their note was triumphant. Probably they related a hit on an American vessel. Diaz recalled brushing aside chunks of space-frozen meat that had been his Corps brothers. Sammy Yoshida was in the Utah Beach, which was with the Alaska—Sammy who’d covered for him back at the Academy when he crawled in dead drunk hours after taps, and some years later had dragged him from a shell-struck foxhole on Mars and shared oxygen till a rescue squad happened by. Had the Utah Beach been hit? Was that what they were giggling about out there?
Prisoner exchange, in a year or two or three, will get me back for the next round of the war, Diaz thought in darkness. But I’m only one man. And I’ve goofed somehow, spilled a scheme which might’ve cost the Unies several ships before they tumbled. It’s hardly conceivable I could smuggle out whatever information Rostock wants to give me. But there’d be some tiny probability that I could, somehow, sometime. Wouldn’t there?
I don’t want to. Dios mio, how I don’t want to! Let me rest a while, and then be swapped, and go back for a long furlough on Earth, where anything I ask for is mine and mainly I ask for sunlight and ocean and flowering trees. But Carl liked those things too, didn’t he?
A lull came in the battle. The fleets had passed each other, decelerating as they fired. They would take many hours to turn around and get back within combat range. A great quietness descended on the Ho. Walking down the passageways, which thrummed with rocket blast, Diaz saw how the technicians slumped at their posts. The demands on them were as hard as those on a pilot or gunner or missile chief. Evolution designed men to fight with their hands, not with computations and pushbuttons. Maybe ground combat wasn’t the worst kind at that.
The sentries admitted Diaz through the door of the warning. Rostock sat at the table again. His coifed features looked equally drained, and his smile was automatic. A samovar and two teacups stood before him.
«Be seated, Captain,» he said tonelessly. «Pardon me if I do not rise. This has been an exhausting time.»
Diaz accepted a chair and a cup. Rostock drank noisily, eyes closed and forehead puckered. There might have been an extra stimulant in his tea, for before long he appeared more human. He refilled the cups, passed out cigarettes, and leaned back on his couch with a sigh.
«You may be pleased to know,» he said, «that the third pass will be the final one. We shall refuse further combat and proceed instead to join forces with another flotilla near Pallas.»
«Because that suits your purposes better,» Diaz said.
«Well, naturally. I compute a higher likelihood of ultimate success if we followed a strategy of… no matter now.»
Diaz leaned forward. His heart slammed. «So this is a command ship,» he exclaimed «I thought so.»
The blue eyes weighed him with care. «If I give any further information,» Rostock said—softly, but the muscles tightened along his jaw—«you must accept the conditions I set forth.»
«I do,» Diaz got out.
«I realize that you do so in the hope of passing on the secret to your countrymen,» Rostock said. «You may as well forget about that. You won’t get the chance.»
«Then why do you want to tell me? You won’t make a Unie out of me, General.» The words sounded too stuck up, Diaz decided. «That is, I respect your people and so forth, but… uh… my loyalties lie elsewhere»
«Agreed. I don’t hope or plan to change them. At least, not in an easterly direction.» Rostock drew hard on his cigarette, let smoke stream from his nostrils, and squinted through it. «The microphone is turned down,» he remarked. «We cannot be overheard unless we shout. I must warn you, if you make any attempt to reveal what I am about to say to you to any of my own people, I shall not merely deny it but order you sent out the airlock. It is that important.»
Diaz rubbed his hands on his trousers. The palms were wet. «Okay,» he said.
«Not that I mean to browbeat you, Captain,» said Rostock hastily. «What I offer is friendship. In the end, maybe, peace.» He sat a while longer, looking at the wall, before his glance shifted back to Diaz. «Suppose you begin the discussion. Ask me what you like.»
«Uh…» Diaz floundered about, as if he’d been leaning on a door that was thrown open. «Uh… well, was I right? Is this a command ship?»
«Yes. It performs every function of a flag dreadnaught, except that it seldom engages in direct combat. The tactical advantages are obvious. A smaller, lighter vessel can get about much more readily, hence be a correspondingly more effective directrix. Furthermore, if due caution is exercised, we are not likely to be detected and fired at. The massive armament of a dreadnaught is chiefly to stave off the missiles that can annihilate the command post within. Ships of this class avoid that whole problem by avoiding attack in the first place.»
«But your computer! You, you must have developed a combat computer as… small and rugged as an autopilot… I thought miniaturization was our specialty.»
Rostock laughed.
«And you’d still need a large human staff,» Diaz protested. «Bigger than the whole crew of this ship!
«Wouldn’t you?» he finished weakly.
Rostock shook his head. «No.» His smile faded. «Not under this new system. I am the computer.»
«What?»
«Look.» Rostock pulled off his hood.
The head beneath was hairless, not shaved but depilated. A dozen silvery plates were set into it, flush with the scalp; in them were plug outlets. Rostock pointed toward the office. «The rest of me is in there,» he said. «I need only set the jacks into the appropriate points of myself, and I become… no, not part of the computer. It becomes part of me.»
He fell silent again, gazing now at the floor. Diaz hardly dared move, until his cigarette burned his fingers and he had to stub it out. The ship pulsed around them. Monet’s picture of sunlight caught in young leaves was like something seen at the far end of a tunnel.
«Consider the problem,» Rostock said at last, low. «In spite of much loose talk about giant brains, computers do not think, except perhaps on an idiot level. They simply perform logical operations, symbol-shuffling, according to instructions given them. It was shown long ago that there are infinite classes of problems that no computer can solve: the classes dealt with in Gödel’s theorem, that can only be solved by the nonlogical process of creating a metalanguage. Creativity is not logical and computers do not create.
«In addition, as you know, the larger a computer becomes, the more staff it requires, to perform such operations as data coding, programming, retranslation of the solutions into practical terms, and adjustment of the artificial answer to the actual problems. Yet your own brain does this sort of thing constantly… because it is creative. Moreover, the advanced computers are heavy, bulky, fragile things. They use cryogenics and all the other tricks, but that involves elaborate ancillary apparatus. Your brain weighs a kilogram or so, is quite adequately protected in the skull, and needs less than a hundred kilos of outside equipment—your body.
«I am not being mystical. There is no reason why creativity cannot someday be duplicated in an artificial structure. But I think that structure will look very much like a living organism; will, indeed, be one. Life has had a billion years to develop these techniques.
«Now if the brain has so many advantages, why use a computer at all? Obviously, to do the uncreative work, for which the brain is not specifically designed. The brain visualizes a problem of, say, orbits, masses, and tactics, and formulates it as a set of matrix equations; then the computer goes swiftly through the millions of idiot counting operations needed to produce a numerical solution. What we have developed here, we Unasians, is nothing but a direct approach. We eliminate the middle man, as you Americans would say.