When he shut his eyes, the world blackened and slipped back out of sight like blown ash, Myra and Kalish and workshop and all. He felt the centuries wavering past him until he hung disembodied in tomorrow’s twilight—
A cool dim place. Tip. Mind your hats goan in. A silence that trembled in the walls.
This was Dulcie. As he hung there, loving her, her knowledge flowed through him.
He remembered how it all began:
“Of course it isn’t a substitute for the General Staff or anything like that. Human minds still have to make the decisions. But modern warfare involves so many factors that it really has become a mathematical problem. And to solve a mathematical problem faster, more efficiently, we use an electronic calculator—DLC. We know, incidentally, that the other side has been doing the same for the last three years.”
After that, at first, Dulcie munched the little problems they gave her and ticked out the answers. But it happened that a human evaluation lost a battle and they set up the channels to feed information directly into Dulcie. And a human decision lost another battle and, not without fierce argument among themselves, they gave her the channels of command. They had no real choice, except to wait until the other side did it to their computer first.
So Dulcie became a chess player. Her board was the planet, her pieces men and machines.
P to QB4: and down rained a hell of missiles that pretended the rooftops were not there, nor the people under them, nor the ships in the harbor, nor the boys playing ball outside the town.
DULCIE was a living thing. It was in her to grow and increase her ability, to do her job with greater thoroughness, efficiency, simplicity, elegance. Like an old gray philosopher, or boxer, or politician, she learned to do much with little; economy became her passion. She reduced the elements of warfare to a basic few, and reduced them again.
Across the ocean, deep in another continent, so did her enemy.
Now war to a computer is not the same as war to a human being. Nobody had ever thought it was, or so much as tried to make Dulcie feel that human revulsion from the things they so enthusiastically did. Dulcie did two things that no one had expected.
Probing into the mysteries of the human brain, so convenient and puzzling a model of her own, she found the pattern that could fix a mind forever in one unreasoning conviction. She chose the simplest and best for her purpose: I love Dulcie. She insinuated that pattern into the mind of every man, woman and child within her reach—within her hemisphere—and canceled out all the problems of discipline, training, tradition, politics, civil government, military organization, law enforcement—seven-tenths, let’s say, of the human picture —at one stroke.
The second thing was even simpler. She deduced the existence of her opponent, searched for him on wavelengths which should be as perceptible to him as to her, and worked out a system of communication.
It was not necessary for men or machines to go to war. DLC could say to DCRM, “I move such a force here.” DCRM could reply, “Then I move here.”
Not every game had to be played out. When Dulcie lost, she paid. Machines could be destroyed more efficiently by their owner than by the enemy; human beings, asked to die, did it tidily and conveniently. There was no cruelty or humor in it for Dulcie; it simply made her books balance.’
And when, in spite of her best fumbling efforts, her human beings—her counters—diminished until none were left, what was she to do but search in the vastness of time for more? She began tentatively, feeling back along the ancestral lines of the last to die, touching here an ancestor more susceptible than the rest, here another—
JONES mumbled something.
“What was that?” Myra asked Kalish. “Did you get it?”
Kalish was carrying some typed papers; the inked notes at the bottom of them, in his own handwriting, were not quite dry. His face had a peculiar expression, a little like that of a man who thinks he has just been wounded, but hasn’t felt the pain.
“Latin this time,” he said. “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.’ ”
The link strained tight. Jones felt his love gathering inside him like a fist: suffocating love, bursting love. He knew it all now. He knew what Dulcie wanted him for and the joy of being chosen was more than he could bear.
His heart burst with it.
“Click,” said Dulcie.
“Click,” answered Decorum.
And Jones did.