"Oh, I'm pretty sure we can say that," replied Minault cheerfully. "Fantastic amounts of knowledge, of course; but a sort of definite rudimentary intelligence as well. But I don't think that's what you meant to ask. What you meant to ask was whether the Complex-Major-Super-Complex, I understand a lot of people have begun calling it lately - has an ego, a conscious identity and personality of its own."
"Well... yes," she said.
"I thought so. Well, the answer to that, lady and gentlemen, is astoundingly enough, Yes, it has."
The group in the room, which had settled back to listen to a Socratic dialogue between the young woman and Minault, woke up suddenly and muttered disbelief.
"Oh, not in the human sense, not in the human sense," said Minault, waving them back to calmness. "I don't mean to insult your credulity. But surely you all realize that sooner or later a point of complication had to be reached where a certain amount of elementary reasoning power was necessary to the machine. In fact, why not? It's a very handy thing to have a machine that can reason, and consequently protect itself from falling into its own errors."
"Ah," said Paul's large salesman-type companion from the earlier gathering. "In that case I fail to see - that is, the implied problem was one of control, which we wished to avoid. Wasn't it?"
"I was," said Minault; peering at the large man, "explaining the personality of the Complex-Major."
"Ah, I see," said the large man, sitting back. He blew his nose.
"Your question was a good one," said Minault, "but slightly premature. For the moment, you must understand what I mean by a machine ego. Think of the growing Complexes of computer-directed equipment back on Earth as if they were an animal whose purpose is to take over more and more of the work of keeping mankind alive and well. It grows until it is the means by which mankind is kept alive and well; it grows until a certain amount of independent reasoning ability must be built into it, so that it doesn't provide fine weather for California when that action will later on cause hailstorms on the Canadian wheat crop. Given this much of a thinking creature, what's the next evolutionary step?"
"An instinct for self-preservation?" asked the girl quickly, while the large man was clearing his throat preparatory to another "ah."
"Quite right."
"Ah, I should think it would regard human actions not in line with its reasoning-ah-like grit in a smooth-running motor, so to speak?"
"Would it have that much power of imagination?" asked the girl. She and the large man were both looking at Minault, who sat relaxed, peering at them.
"I did not mean actual imagination. Ah-it was an illustration."
"A rather good one," said Minault, as the girl opened her mouth again. "The Complex-Major is a sort of benevolent monster whose only desire is to choke us with a surfeit of service and protection. It has a sort of mechanical intelligence with no specific locus, but an instinct to protect itself and its ability to go on taking over control of human caretaking. And it does regard not only us in the Chantry Guild, but all those whose independence manifests itself in the taking of drugs, joining of cult societies, or any non-machine-planned action, as a sort of grit in its smooth-running motor. A grit that one day must be neatly cleaned out."
He glanced toward the back of his group of auditors.
"Yes?" he asked.
Paul, turning, saw a young, swarthy-skinned man in the back putting his hand back down.
"It seems," said this man, "almost silly to be going to all this trouble just to oppose a pile of equipment, no matter how complicated."
"My dear young friend," said Minault, "we in the Chantry Guild are not opposing a pile of equipment. We're opposing an idea - an idea that has been growing for some hundreds of years - that happiness for the human race consists of wrapping it tighter and tighter in the swaddling bands of a technological civilization." He stood up. "I think that should be enough to chew on for the moment. I suggest you all think the situation over."
He got down from the platform and headed toward the door of the room. His audience rose and also began to move out, and the orderly manner of the room dissolved into a babble of conversation and people slowly swarming out the exit As Paul pushed his way out the door behind Minault, he caught sight of the girl, who had just buttonholed the large man.
"I think you're quite wrong about the power of imagination you implied to the Complex-Major," she was saying, severely.
Chapter 13
"You've handled explosives before?" asked the lean instructor with the sun-leathered face above the open collar. He was holding a package of plastic, adhesive blasting jelly with a three-minute pinch fuse.
"Yes," said Paul.
Paul stood on one cliff-edge of a remarkably realistic simulation of a mountain gorge some five hundred feet wide, across which had been thrown the thin long web of a temporary snap-to arch bridge of magnesium-alloy sections. The bridge-end by which Paul and the instructor stood, just the two of them, had been anchored in a local timber cradle, or box, filled with loose rock. And the cradle extended its wooden underarms in support about fifteen feet out from the lip of the cliff.
"This amount of jelly," said the instructor, hefting it, "can be carried inconspicuously in a brief case and still leave room for enough other material to make it look as if the brief case is full. It's powerful enough to cut two or three of those timbers or one or two of the metal members you see there. How would you go about completely knocking out this bridge with it?"
Paul looked again at the bridge. In the past nine days since his first class he had been put through a number of sessions - that was the only word to describe them. They appeared to be classes, on a strange variety of subjects, some of which appeared to bear no relation to the
Chantry Guild. The longest of them had lasted not much more than twenty minutes, and the information imparted by each of them had been obscure. In fact, it had not been quite clear whether the intent of the sessions had been to inform or to test the journeyman audience, which seemed to consist of different individuals from session to session. Paul was privately of the opinion that the intent had been both to inform and test - and probably, as well, to stimulate and confuse. Some of the journeymen, he was sure, were ringers. Some of the sessions had been nonsense.
And this session - himself alone with the instructor, the explosive, and the simulated bridge in the mountains on Earth. Was it instruction, test, nonsense - or something else?
The simulation was a magnificent job. For the scene it pretended to show was clearly an impossibility, here deep under the surface of Mercury's rocky hide. What Paul's eyes saw was a gorge at least eight hundred feet in depth, up from which came the distant sound of a narrow mountain river in its gallop to lower levels. The air was the thin, dry air of high altitudes. The sky was cloudless.
The question was, How much was real and how much false? For if the blasting-jelly block was real, and it was to be set off in the reality of a small underground room of the size Paul had had his sessions in lately, then it would take Alternate Laws indeed to show cause why Paul and the instructor should survive the explosion. Paul laid his hand on the timber cradle and looked over the cliff edge. His gaze plunged away into spray-misted depths. There was distance down there, by any test of his feelings. Just how much, he could not be sure. But it felt deep below the cliff. On the other hand, under his hand the materials of the bridge felt solid but deceitful.
"Well," said Paul, "I'm no expert on bridges. But I imagine the trick would be to break this end loose, so that it falls. If this end goes down, it'll tear the other end loose and it'll all drop into the gorge."