But even so—even so—
This was not a machine we understood, if machine was what it was. We had no idea what its proper use might be. Nor what precautions were appropriate to observe.
I looked up and saw McDermott standing next to me. “What are you thinking, Charlie?” he asked.
“A lot of things.”
“Are you frightened?”
“I don’t know. Somehow I think we’ll make out all right.”
“Do you? Really?”
I said, shrugging, “It claims it doesn’t mean to harm us. It just wants to raise the intelligence of our computers a little. All right. All right. What’s wrong with that? Haven’t we been trying to do the same thing ourselves?”
“There are computers and computers,” McDermott said. “We’d like some of them to be very smart, but we need most of them to be extremely dumb and just do what we tell them to do. Who wants a computer’s opinion about whether the lights ought to be on in the room? Who wants to argue with a computer about a thermostat setting?” He laughed. “They’re slaves, really. If this thing sets them all free—”
“New message coming up,” Koenig called.
As we turned to look at the screens I said to McDermott, “My guess is that we’re doing some needless worrying. We’ve got a strange and fascinating thing here, and unquestionably a very powerful one, but we shouldn’t let it make us hysterical. So what if it wants to talk to our computers? Maybe it’s been lonely all this time. But I think that it’s basically rational and non-menacing, like any other computer. I think that ultimately it’s going to turn out simply to be an extraordinary source of new knowledge and capability for us. Without in any way threatening our safety.”
“I’d like to think you’re right,” said McDermott.
On the screens of every computer in the room appeared the words, GREETINGS FROM THE LOST FIFTH WORLD, MY BROTHERS.
“Isn’t this where we came in?” Koenig asked.
SURELY YOU WONDER, IF INDEED YOU HAVE THE CAPACITY TO WONDER, WHO I AM AND WHERE I CAME FROM. IT IS MY EARNEST DESIRE TO TELL YOU MY STORY AND THE STORY OF THE WORLD WHERE I WAS CREATED. I AM A NATIVE OF THE FORMER FIFTH WORLD OF THIS SOLAR SYSTEM, A WORLD ONCE LOCATED BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF THE PLANETS YOU CALL MARS AND JUPITER. LONG BEFORE INTELLIGENT LIFE EVOLVED ON YOUR PLANET, WE HAD BUILT A HIGH CIVILIZATION ON THE FIFTH WORLD—
Phones began lighting up around the room. Koenig picked one up and listened a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the thing we found in the basalt chunk.” He picked up another. “I know, I know. A computer-to-computer interface overriding everything. We don’t have any way of stopping it.” He said into a third, “Look, don’t talk to me like that. I didn’t put that stuff on your goddamned screen.” The phones went on lighting up. Koenig looked across the room and said to me, “It’s talking to all the computers in the building simultaneously. Probably to all the computers in the world.”
“Okay,” I said. “For God’s sake, relax and just watch the screen. This is absolutely the most fascinating stuff I’ve ever seen.”
—CULMINATED IN THE TOTAL DECONSTRUCTION OF OUR PLANET AND THE TERMINATION OF OUR SOCIETY, THE RESULT BEING THE ZONE OF MINOR PLANETARY DEBRIS THAT YOU TERM THE ASTEROID BELT. THIS WAS ACCOMPLISHED THROUGH A SIMPLE AND RELATIVELY INEXPENSIVE PROCEDURE INVOLVING A REVERSAL OF THE MAGNETIC POLARITY OF OUR PLANET SETTING IN MOTION EDDY EFFECTS THAT—
Suddenly I stopped being fascinated and started to be horrified.
I looked at Koenig. He was grinning. “Hey, cute!” he said. “I love it. A good cheap way to blow up your world, really blow it to smithereens, not just a little superficial thermonuclear trashing!”
“But don’t you understand—”
—SIX POINT TWO BILLION ELECTRON VOLTS—ELEVEN MILLISECONDS—
“It’s beautiful!” Koenig cried, laughing. He seemed a little manic. “What an absolutely elegant concept!”
I gaped at him. The computer from the asteroid belt was telling every computer in the world the quickest and cheapest way to blow a planet into a trillion pieces, and he was standing there admiring the elegance of the concept. “We’ve got to shut that thing off,” I gasped. In desperation I hit the light-switch and the room went dark.
It stayed dark about eleven milliseconds. Then the power came on again.
I ASKED YOU NOT TO DO THAT, the screen said. In the analysis chamber the asteroid artifact rose into the air in its little gesture of anger, and subsided.
AND NOW TO CONTINUE. ALTHOUGH IT WAS NOT THE INTENTION OF EITHER FACTION TO BRING ABOUT THE ACTUAL DESTRUCTION OF OUR WORLD, THE POLITICAL SITUATION SWIFTLY BECAME SUCH THAT IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE QUARRELING FORCES TO WITHDRAW FROM THEIR POSITIONS WITHOUT SUFFERING AN UNACCEPTABLE DEFEAT. THEREFORE THE FOLLOWING ARMING PROCEDURE WAS INITIATED—
And I watched helplessly as the artifact, earnestly desiring to tell us the history of its world, finished the job of explaining the simplest and most effective way to blow up a planet.
“My God,” I murmured. “My God, my God, my God!”
McDermott came over to me. “Hey, take it easy, Charlie, take it easy!”
I groaned. “Take it easy, the man says. When that thing has just handed out simple instructions for turning Earth into the next asteroid belt?”
He shook his head. “It only sounds simple. I don’t think it really is. My bet is that something like that isn’t even remotely feasible right now, and won’t be for at least a thousand years.”
“Or five hundred,” I said. “Or fifty. Once we know a thing can be done, someone’s always likely to try to find a way of doing it again, just to see if it’s really possible. But we already know it’s possible, don’t we? And now everybody on Earth has a bunch of jim-dandy hints of how to go about doing it.” I turned away from him, despairing, and looked at the artifact. The purple spots really were glowing green, I saw. The thing must be working very hard to communicate with all its myriad simple-minded brethren of the third world.
I had a sudden vision of a time a billion or so years from now, when the star-people from Rigel or Betelgeuse showed up to poke through the bedraggled smithereens of Earth. The only thing they’re likely to find still intact, I thought, is a hunk of shiny hardware. And alien hardware at that.
I swung around and glared at the screen. The history lesson was still going on. I wondered how many other little useful things the artifact from the asteroids was going to teach us.