"I doubt it. I would have remembered."
He shook his head.
"You've got a way of bothering a man's thinking that rings a faint bell," he went on. "You trouble me, sir."
"That was my intention."
"Are you staying here in town?"
"No."
"Give me a number where I can reach you, will you? If I have any new thoughts on this thing, I'll call you."
"I wish you would have them now, if you are going to have them."
"No, I've got some thinking to do. Where can I get hold of you later?"
I gave him the name of the motel I was still checked into in St. Louis. I could call back periodically for messages.
"All right," he said, and he moved toward the partition by the reception area and stood beside it.
I rose and followed him, passing into that area and pausing at the door to the hall.
"One thing…"I said.
"Yes?"
"If it does show up and you do stop it, will you call me and tell me that?"
"Yes, I will."
"Thanks then, and good luck."
Impulsively, I extended my hand. He gripped it and smiled faintly.
"Thank you. Mister Donne."
Next. Next, next, next…
I couldn't budge Dave, and Leila Thackery had given me everything she was going to. No real sense in calling Don yet, not until I had more to say.
I thought it over on my way back to the airport. The pre-dinner hours always seem best for talking to people in any sort of official capacity, just as the night seems best for dirty work. Heavily psychological, but true nevertheless. I hated to waste the rest of the day if there was anyone else worth talking to before I called Don. Going through the folder, I decided that there was.
Manny Burns had a brother, Phil. I wondered how worthwhile it might be to talk with him. I could make it to New Orleans at a sufficiently respectable hour, learn whatever he was willing to tell me, check back with Don for new developments, and then decide whether there was anything I should be about with respect to the vessel itself.
The sky was gray and leaky above me. I was anxious to flee its spaces. So I decided to do it. I could think of no better stone to upturn at the moment.
At the airport, I was ticketed quickly, in time for another close connection.
Hurrying to reach my flight, my eyes brushed over a half-familiar face on the passing escalator. The reflex reserved for such occasions seemed to catch us both, because he looked back, too, with the same eyebrow twitch of startle and scrutiny. Then he was gone. I could not place him, however. The half-familiar face becomes a familiar phenomenon in a crowded, highly mobile society. I sometimes think that that is all that will eventually remain of any of us: patterns of features, some a trifle more persistent than others, impressed on the flow of bodies. A small-town boy in a big city, Thomas Wolfe must long ago have felt the same thing when he had coined the word "manswarm." It might have been someone I'd once met briefly, or simply someone, or someone like someone, I had passed on sufficient other occasions such as this.
As I flew the unfriendly skies out of Memphis, I mulled over musings past on artificial intelligence, or AI as they have tagged it in the think-box biz. When talking about computers, the AI notion had always seemed hotter than I deemed necessary, partly because of semantics. The word "intelligence" has all sorts of tag-along associations of the non-physical sort. I suppose it goes back to the fact that early discussions and conjectures concerning it made it sound as if the potential for intelligence was always present in the array of gadgets, and that the correct procedures, the right programs, simply had to be found to call it forth. When you looked at it that way, as many did, it gave rise to an uncomfortable deja-vu, namely, vitalism. The philosophical battles of the nineteenth century were hardly so far behind that they had been forgotten, and the doctrine which maintained that life is caused and sustained by a vital principle apart from physical and chemical forces, and that life is self-sustaining and self-evolving, had put up quite a fight before Darwin and his successors had produced triumph after triumph for the mechanistic view. Then vitalism sort of crept back into things again when the AI discussions arose in the middle of the past century. It would seem that Dave had fallen victim to it, and that he'd come to believe he had helped provide an unsanctified vessel and filled it with Something intended only for those things which had made the scene in the first chapter of Genesis…
With computers it was not quite as bad as with the Hangman, though, because you could always argue that no matter how elaborate the program, it was basically an extension of the programmer's will and the operations of causal machines merely represented functions of intelligence, rather than intelligence in its own right backed by a will of its own. And there was always Godel for a theoretical cordon sanitaire, with his demonstration of the true but mechanically improvable proposition.
But the Hangman was quite different. It had been designed along the lines of a brain and at least partly educated in a human fashion; and to further muddy the issue with respect to anything like vitalism, it had been in direct contact with human minds from which it might have acquired almost anything, including the spark that set it on the road to whatever selfhood it may have found. What did that make it? Its own creature? A fractured mirror reflecting a fractured humanity? Both? Or neither? I certainly could not say, but I wondered how much of its self had been truly its own. It had obviously acquired a great number of functions, but was it capable of having real feelings? Could it, for example, feel something like love? If not, then it was still only a collection of complex abilities, and not a thing with all the tagalong associations of the non-physical sort which made the word "intelligence" such a prickly item in AI discussions; and if it were capable of, say, something like love, and if I were Dave, I would not feel guilty about having helped to bring it into being. I would feel proud, though not in the fashion he was concerned about, and I would also feel humble…Offhand though, I do not know how intelligent I would feel, because I am still not sure what the hell intelligence is.
The day's-end sky was clear when we landed. I was into town before the sun had finished setting, and on Philip Burns' doorstep just a little while later.
My ring was answered by a girl, maybe seven or eight years old. She fixed me with large brown eyes and did not say a word.
"I would like to speak with Mister Burns," I said. She turned and retreated around a comer. A heavyset man, slacked and undershirted, bald about halfway back and very pink, padded into the hall moments later and peered at me. He bore a folded newssheet in his left hand.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"It's about your brother," I answered.
"Yeah?"
"Well, I wonder if I could come in? It's kind of complicated."
He opened the door. But instead of letting me in, he came out.
"Tell me about it out here," he said.
"Okay, I'll be quick. I just wanted to find out whether he ever spoke with you about a piece of equipment he once worked with called the Hangman."
"Are you a cop?"
"No."
"Then what's your interest?"
"I am working for a private investigation agency trying to track down some equipment once associated with the project. It has apparently turned up in this area and it could be rather dangerous."
"Let's see some identification."
"I don't carry any."
"What's your name?"
"John Donne."
"And you think my brother had some stolen equipment when he died? Let me tell you something…"
"No. Not stolen," I said, "and I don't think he had it."
"What then?"
"It was, well, robotic in nature. Because of some special training Manny once received, he might have had a way of detecting it. He might even have attracted it. I just want to find out whether he had said anything about it. We are trying to locate it."