“I have contacts. Producers, directors, performers — I know quite a few people in the field.”
“Good. I was counting on that.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. The silence stretched out.
“So what’s the problem?” Finally I prompted him.
“The problem is the survival of the planet Earth.”
“I’m relieved. I thought it might be something really serious.”
The irony passed Putnam by. “So that you will understand the seriousness, Mr. Victor, a decision has been reached to make you privy to the most carefully guarded secret in the world today. It involves the four major powers. Red China, Russia, the United States, and the Mafia.”
“The Mafia? What have racketeers got to do with . . . ?”
“The word is ‘power,’ Mr. Victor. In its way, the Mafia exerts as much power as the three nations mentioned. Mafia operations can make or break the economies of small nations. They control some national governments outright, just as they have on occasion controlled large municipal governments in the United States—such as Newark, for instance. Indeed, the Mafia has even been stockpiling its own atomic arsenal.”
“Happy St. Valentine’s Day!”
“Sometime back,” Putnam continued, “top-level contact was made by the four superpowers. The leadership of each had become aware independently of five factors, brought to a head by modern technology, which made imminent the threat to the continued existence of mankind.”
Putnam ticked them off. First, of course, was the stockpiling of nuclear weapons. Second was the rapidly deteriorating ecology of the planet. Third was the population explosion. Fourth was the accelerating pace of man’s innate aggression. Fifth was the instinct of people with power-—whether over nations or crime syndicates-—to extend their control to additional groups and territories. This last, the “growth factor,” created the climate for conflicts whereby lesser men’s aggressions were loosed.
“The top people of the superpowers,” Putnam told me, “recognized that only they had the power to save the world from self-destruction. Granting that each of their group self-interests might well be the greatest stumbling block, not deluding themselves that any one of them would willingly relinquish power, or that man would conquer his natural hostility, they sought a means to ensure survival that would transcend human limitations. The means decided upon was a computer.”
“They asked a computer for the answer to survival?”
“Not exactly. They knew there was no one answer. But they hoped that by obtaining answers to specific subquestions, so to speak, the trend toward global suicide might be reversed. For instance, if mankind’s aggressive instincts could be phrased as a mathematical equation by the computer, and the equation then fed back into it, it might be determined just how much violence is psychologically necessary, and to what extent outlets for that violence might be provided short of annihilating the human race. Conceivably, the computer might spell out the distinction between a third world war and an acceptable body-count.”
“What,” I wondered, my thinking Vietnamized, “is an acceptable body-count?”
“The computer would know. It would take many factors into account. Population growth. Ethnic hostilities. Power needs. Et cetera.” Putnam took a deep breath and then continued. “Anyway, it was decided to design, build, and program a computer especially oriented to survival. An obscure locale in an uninhabited region of the Andes Mountains in South America was agreed upon as the site. The construction was the best-kept secret in history. Teams of engineers, representing all four powers, utilized imported uneducated native laborers to do the physical work. Even most of the technicians involved had no idea what the computer’s purpose was. Indeed, the technical teams manning it today are kept in ignorance by a system of codes super-imposed on codes. It was—and still is—disguised as a mining operation.”
“Has it worked?” I wondered. “Will the world survive?”
“It’s too early to tell. In any case, that needn’t concern you.”
The hell he said!
“What is necessary is that you understand some aspects of how the computer operates,” Putnam stressed.
He went on to explain that the computer had five memory banks. Four of them were completely separate from each other, but not from the fifth. All input information was fed into one of the four, which relayed it to the fifth, but not to any of the other three. Each of the superpowers had access to all of the data stored in its own individual memory bank, but not to the info in any of the other three memory banks, nor to the combined facts stashed in the fifth memory bank. Only the computer itself had access to the fifth memory bank! It could use the information stored there to arrive at solutions to problems, but it could not reveal the information to any one of the four superpowers posing the problems. Also, the answers provided always took into account the priority of world survival.
The example Putnam used was of China contemplating border aggression against Russia. China would feed all its relevant data into the computer. These facts would be stored in the Chinese memory bank, and in the fifth memory bank as well. The computer would search its fifth memory bank, compile all the pertinent information stored there by all four superpowers, add these data to the Chinese facts, weigh all the info, and answer the Chinese question as to the advisability of the attack-—all in a matter of seconds, since computer time is to ordinary time as a lightning flash to a sunrise. And, of course, the answer would not reveal the secret data on which it was based.
“But wouldn’t the Chinese be able to make inferences from the answer?” I wondered.
“No,” Putnam told me. “Too many factors would be involved. The way the computer was programmed, the Chinese couldn’t get an answer as to whether an attack would be successful or not. All the computer could tell them was whether or not it was an acceptable action in terms of world survival. Any number of reasons—-military, political, economic, ecological—might figure in the answer. And no matter what the answer, the data relating to the Chinese question would be stored in the fifth memory bank, available for consideration by the computer when the other powers raised other questions.”
“Still, the computer actually makes policy decisions.” It was fantastic!
“No.” Putnam disagreed. “It only decides what’s acceptable in carrying out policy. For instance, if the Chinese followed up by asking how they might best acquire the border territory, the computer might advise a plebiscite among the natives of the area. It’s programmed to devise workable alternatives.”
“If it’s everything you say, then what’s the threat?” I asked.
Putnam looked at me keenly. “Do you know what an M.F.-er is, Mr. Victor?”
“Motherfu—”
“Please!” He cut me short with a raised hand and a pained expression. “In technical terms. Not gutter jargon!”
I spit the soap out of my mouth. “ ‘M.F.’ stands for ‘multifrequency,’ ” I remembered. “There’s a multifrequency gizmo that’s sometimes called an ‘M.F.-er.’ It’s used by phone phreaks.”
“That’s right. How knowledgeable are you about phone phreaks, Mr. Victor?”
“Not too. I know it’s spelled cutey-cute, with a ‘p-h.’ I know phone phreaks use M.F.-ers to make long-distance calls without paying for them. Somehow they cut into the phone-company lines, but I don’t really understand how they do it.”
“You’ll have to familiarize yourself with the technology involved. It’s highly sophisticated. Phone phreaks are more than mere pranksters. Some of them are electronic geniuses. Dangerous geniuses! One of them is the most dangerous threat to survival in the world today!”