"I'd figured out that Brackwell was the master designer of the bioelectronics circuit of a spy satellite. I didn't know that the satellite was called EVE or that she had the capability to beam in on ninety thousand individuals simultaneously. Or that the beams enabled her to follow each visually and tap in on their speech vibrations. Or that she could activate phone circuits with a highly variable electromagnetic field projected via the beam.
"My visitor said that I was not, for an instant, to suppose that EVE had somehow attained self-consciousness. That would be impossible. But I wonder.
"I also wonder if a female designer-engineer-scientist could, unconsciously, of course, design female circuits? Is there some psychic influence that goes along with the physical construction of computers and associated circuits? Can the whole be greater than the parts? Is there such a thing as a female gestalt in a machine?"
"I don't go for that metaphysical crap," Smith said.
"What does Brackwell say?"
"She says that EVE was simply malfunctioning."
"Perhaps man is a malfunctioning ape," Lane said. "But could Sue have built her passion for me into EVE? Or given EVE circuits which could evolve emotion? EVE had self-repairing capabilities, you know, and was part protein. I know it sounds crazy. But who, looking at the first apeman, would have extrapolated Helen of Troy?
"And why did she get hung up on me, one out of the ninety thousand she was watching? I had a dermal supersensitivity to the spy beam. Did this reaction somehow convey to EVE a feeling, or a sense, that we were in rapport? And did she then become jealous? It's obvious that she modulated the beams she'd locked on Leona and Rhoda so that they saw green where the light was really red and did not see oncoming cars at all.
"And she worked her modulated tricks on Daniels and that poor jet pilot, too."
"What about that holograph of Dr. Brackwell?"
"EVE must've been spying on Sue, also, on her own creator, you might say. Or -- and I don't want you to look into this, because it won't do any good now -- Sue may have set all this up in the machinery, unknown to her colleagues. I don't mean that she put in extra circuits. She couldn't get away with that; they'd be detected immediately, and she'd have to explain them. But she could have put in circuits which had two purposes, the second of which was unknown to her colleagues. I don't know.
"But I do know that it was actually Sue Brackwell who called me that last time and not EVE. And I think that it was this call that put into EVE's mind, if a machine can have a mind in the human sense, to project the much-glamorized holograph of Sue. Unless, of course, my other theory is correct, and Sue herself was responsible for that."
Smith groaned and then said, "They'll never believe me if I put all this in a report. For one thing, will they believe that it was only free association that enabled you to get eye in the sky from 'The egg and I' and 'Sky-blue waters'? I doubt it. They'll think you had knowledge you shouldn't have had and you're concealing it with that incredible story. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes. But then, I don't want to be in my shoes.
"But why did EVE blow up? Lackalas says that she could be exploded if a destruct button at control center was pressed. The button, however, was not pressed."
"You dragged me away just in time to save my life. But EVE must have melted some circuits. She died of frustration -- in a way, that is."
"What?"
"She was putting out an enormous amount of energy for such a tight beam. She must have overloaded."
Smith guffawed and said, "She was getting a charge out of it, too? Come on!"
Lane said, "Do you have any other explanation?"
The Alley Man
This seems to have called forth either cries of "Bravo!" or "Abomination of abominations!"
Philip Klass (William Tenn) admired it and said that if it had been sent to Playboy (where he was an editor at the time), it probably would have sold there. If I remember correctly, it came in second to Reyes's "Flowers for Algernon" (both appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) in the 1960 Hugo contest. Afterward, I heard from about a dozen people that they would have voted for it, but didn't bother to vote at all, because they assumed it would win.
I have no doubt, however, that the better story won. If Keyes is Cellini, I'm Gutzon Borglum.
In any event, there must have been some who had the same reaction as Jim Harmon, well- known nostalgic, and Avram Davidson, a highly erudite fantasist and a philanthropist, who thought that "The Alley Man" was a stench in the nostrils of Heaven.
Read it and decide.
An independent New York producer began making it into a movie but he ran out of money. Another producer wanted to pick up an option on it, but he called me a week after I'd made the deal with the first party. So much for square eggs.
Now that the use of four-letter words and explicit description of sexual intercourse are permitted in books, I could have dropped the original euphemisms, such as "shirt" and "figuring," from the text. But I don't see that substituting real-life language adds anything. In fact, the original terms give Old Man's speech an extra paleolithic patina.
"The man from the puzzle factory was here this morning," said Gummy. "While you was out fishin."
She dropped the piece of wiremesh she was trying to tie with string over a hole in the rusty window screen. Cursing, grunting like a hog in a wallow, she leaned over and picked it up. Straightening, she slapped viciously at her bare shoulder.
"Figurin skeeters! Must be a million outside, all try in to get away from the burnin garbage."
"Puzzle factory?" said Deena. She turned away from the battered kerosene- burning stove over which she was frying sliced potatoes and perch and bullheads caught in the Illinois River, half a mile away.
"Yeah!" snarled Gummy. "You heard Old Man say it. Nuthouse. Booby hatch. So... this cat from the puzzle factory was named John Elkins. He gave Old Man all those tests when they had him locked up last year. He's the skinny little guy with a moustache 'n never lookin you in the eye 'n grinnin like a skunk eatin a shirt. The cat who took Old Man's hat away from him 'n woun't give it back to him until Old man promised to be good. Remember now?"
Deena, tall, skinny, clad only in a white terrycloth bathrobe, looked like a surprised and severed head stuck on a pike. The great purple birthmark on her cheek and neck stood out hideously against her paling skin.
"Are they going to send him back to the State hospital?" she asked.
Gummy, looking at herself in the cracked full-length mirror nailed to the wall, laughed and showed her two teeth. Her frizzy hair was a yellow brown, chopped short. Her little blue eyes were set far back in tunnels beneath two protruding ridges of bone; her nose was very long, enormously wide, and tipped with a broken-veined bulb. Her chin was not there, and her head bent forward in a permanent crook. She was dressed only in a dirty once-white slip that came to her swollen knees. When she laughed, her huge breasts, resting on her distended belly, quivered like bowls of fermented cream. From her expression, it was evident that she was not displeased with what she saw in the broken glass.
Again she laughed. "Naw, they din't come to haul him away. Elkins just wanted to interduce this chick he had with him. A cute little brunette with big brown eyes behint real thick glasses. She looked just like a collidge girl, 'n she was. This chick has got a B.M. or somethin in sexology --"
"Psychology?"