“Survival things, Rog. We’ve got a lot of data from Willy. I think we can do it.”
“Thanks. I wish you were a little more sure.”
“Oh, I’m sure enough,” said Brad, grinning. “This didn’t catch me entirely by surprise.”
Torraway said, his throat half-closed and his voice thin, “You mean you let Willy go ahead and—”
“No, Roger! Come on. Willy was my friend, too. I thought there was enough of a safety factor to at least keep him alive. I was wrong, and I’m at least as sorry as you are, Roger. But we all knew there was a risk that the systems wouldn’t work right, that we’d have to do more.”
“That,” said Griffin heavily, “was not made very clear in your progress reports.” The deputy director started to speak but Griffin shook his head. “We’ll come to that another time. What are you saying now, Bradley? You’re going to filter out some of the information?”
“Not just filter it out. Mediate it. Translate it into a form Roger can handle.”
“What about Torraway’s point that a man is more complicated than a frog? Have you ever done this with human beings?”
Surprisingly, Brad grinned; he was ready for that one. “As a matter of fact, yes. About six years ago, before I came here — I was still a graduate student. We took four volunteers and we conditioned them to a Pavlovian response. We flashed a bright light in their eyes, and simultaneously rang an electric doorbell that pulsed at thirty beats a second. Well, of course, when you get a bright light in your eyes, your pupils contract. It isn’t under conscious control. You can’t fake it. It is a response to light, nothing else, just an evolutionary capacity to protect the eye from direct sunlight.
“That sort of response, involving the autonomic nervous system, is hard to condition into human beings. But we managed it. When it takes, it sets pretty firmly. After — I think it was after three hundred trials apiece, we had the response fixed. All you had to do was ring the bell, and the subjects’ pupils would shrink down to dots. You follow me so far?”
“I remember enough from college to know about Pavlovian reflexes. Standard stuff,” said Griffin.
“Well, the next part wasn’t standard. We tapped into the auditory nerve, and we could measure the actual signal going to the brain: ding-a-ling, thirty beats per second, we could read it on the oscilloscope.
“So then we changed the bell. We got one that rang at twenty-four beats a second. Care to guess what happened?” There was no response. Brad smiled. “The oscilloscope still showed thirty beats a second. The brain was hearing something that wasn’t really happening.
“So, you see, it isn’t just frogs that do this sort of mediation. Human beings perceive the world in predigested ways. The sensory inputs themselves edit and rearrange the information.
“So what I want to do with you, Roger,” he said genially, “is give you a little help in interpretation. We can’t do much with your brain. Good or bad, we’re stuck with it. It’s a mass of gray jelly with a capacity-limiting structure and we can’t keep pouring sensory information into it. The only place we have to work is at the interface — before it hits the brain.”
Griffin slapped his open palm on the table. “Can we make the window date?” he growled.
“I can but try, sir,” said Brad genially.
“You can but get your ass in a crack if we buy this and it doesn’t work, boy!”
The geniality faded from Brad’s face. “What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to tell me the odds!” Griffin barked.
Brad hesitated. “No worse than even money,” he said at last.
“Then,” said Griffin, smiling at last, “let it be so.”
Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes.
He slowed down to let Brad catch up with him. “Brad,” he said, “you’re pretty sure of what you were saying?”
Brad slapped him gently on the back. “More sure than I said, to tell you the truth. I just didn’t want to stick my neck out for old Griffin. And listen, Roger, thanks.”
“For what?”
“For trying to warn me today. I appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” said Roger. He stood there for a moment, watching Brad retreating back, and wondering how Brad knew about something he had told only to his wife.
We could have told him — as in fact we could have told him many, many things, including why the polls showed what they showed. But no one really needed to tell him. He could have told himself — if he had allowed himself to know.
Seven
Mortal Becoming Monster
Don Kayman was a complex man who never let go of a problem. It was why we wanted him on the project as areologist, but it extended to the religious part of his life too. A religious problem was bothering him, in the corner of his mind.
It did not keep him from whistling to himself as he shaved carefully around his Dizzy Gillespie beard and brushed his hair into a neat pageboy in front of his mirror. It bothered him, though. He stared into the mirror, trying to isolate what it was that was troubling him. After a moment he realized that one thing, at least, was his T-shirt. It was wrong. He took it off and replaced it with a double-knit four-colored turtleneck that had enough of the look of a clerical collar to appeal to his sense of humor.
The interhouse phone buzzed. “Donnie? Are you nearly ready?”
“Coming in a minute,” he said, looking around. What else? His sports jacket was over a chair by the door. His shoes were shined. His fly was zipped. “I’m getting absent-minded,” he told himself. What was bothering him was something about Roger Torraway, for whom, at that moment, he felt very sorry.
He shrugged, picked up his jacket, swung it over his shoulder, went down the hall and knocked on the door of Sister Clotilda’s nunnery.
“Morning, Father,” said the novice who let him in. “Take a seat. I’ll get her for you.”
“Thanks, Jess.” As she disappeared down the hall Kayman watched her appreciatively. The tight-fitting pants-suit habit did a lot for her figure, and Kayman let himself enjoy the faint, antique feeling of wickedness it gave him. It was a gentle enough vice, like eating roast beef on Friday. He remembered his parents doggedly chewing the frozen deep-fried scallops every Friday night, even after the dispensation had become general. It was not that they felt it was sinful to eat meat, it was simply that their digestive systems had become so geared to fish on Friday that they didn’t know how to change. Kayman’s feelings about sex were closely related to that. When the celibacy rule had been lifted, it had not taken away the genetic recollection of two thousand years of a priesthood that had pretended it didn’t know what its sexual equipment was for.
Sister Clotilda came briskly into the room, kissed his freshly shaved cheek and took his arm, “You smell good,” she said.
“Want to get a cup of coffee somewhere?” he asked, guiding her out the door.
“I don’t think so, Donnie. Let’s get it over with.”
The autumn sun was a blast, hot air up out of Texas. “Shall we put the top down?”
She shook her head. “Your hair will blow all over. Anyway, it’s too hot.” She twisted in the seat belt to look at him. “What’s the matter?”
He shrugged, starting the car and guiding it into the automatic lanes. “I — I’m not sure. I feel as if I have something I forgot to confess.”
Clotilda nodded appraisingly. “Me?”
“Oh, no, Tillie! It’s — I’m not sure what.” He took her hand absent-mindedly, staring out the side window. As they passed over a throughway he could see the great white cube of the project building off on the horizon.