When the course was over, Gann did not realize it. He went to sleep-exhausted, as he was always exhausted in this place. He tumbled into the narrow, hard bed in the solitary, tile-walled room. The voice under his pillow promptly began to recite to him:
. . generate a matrix K, utilizing the mechanism of associative retrieval to add contextual relationships to coordinate retrieval. Let the z'th row and the /th column show the degree of association . . ."
Some part of him was taking it in, he knew, but his conscious mind was hardly aware of it. All he was aware of was his own inadequacy. He would never match the pure, crystalline tones of Sister Delta Four and the other acolytes. He did not have the voice for it. He would never grasp and retain all the information theory and programming he had been taught. He did not have the training for it. . . .
He drifted off to sleep.
His cot was hard. The barracks were like an air-conditioned vault. Every night at lights-out it held eighty tired and silent trainees, every cot filled. And each morning, the harsh clanging of the reveille gong found a few cots empty.
No one spoke of the missing trainees. Their gear was gone with them, from the narrow shelves above the cots. Their names had been erased from the company rolls. They had ceased to exist. Nobody asked why.
One night, however, the shuffle of hurried feet awakened him. With a gasp of wild alarm, he sat up on his cot.
"Jim?" He whispered the name of the man in the next bunk, a new recruit, who had the physique of a wrestler and a pure tenor voice. His mother had bee$ a Togetherness singer, and his father had died for the Plan in space. "What-?"
"You're asleep, bud," a harsh whisper rasped in the dark. "Better stay that way."
A heavy hand caught his shoulder, shoved him down.
Gann wanted to help, but he was afraid. He watched as dark forms closed around the cot. He heard Jim's stifled gasp. He heard a muffled rattle of a voice. He heard the rustle of clothing, a metallic clink. The cot creaked. He closed his eyes as a thin blade of light stabbed at his face. Footsteps padded away.
He lay a long time in the dark, listening to the breath sounds of fewer than eighty sleeping men. Jim had treasured that red plastic medal that said his father had been a Hero of the Plan, Second Class. Jim's voice had been fine and true, but he had been too slow to learn the semantic calculus.
Gann wanted to help, but there was nothing he could do. The Machine required something mechanical in its selected servants; perhaps Jim had not been quite mechanical enough. Gann turned on the hard cot and began repeating to himself the semantic tensors; presently he slept again.
11
Two days later, entering the second phase of training, Gann remembered the first phase through a fog of exhaustion as something like a week end at a Togetherness beach hostel. The pressure never stopped.
"Look Mechanical!"
Bleak-voiced instructors hammered that injunction at him. Bright-eyed Togetherness girls cooed it to him, as he shuffled through the chow lines. Blazing stereo signs burned it into his retinas. Sleepless speakers whispered it endlessly under his pillow.
"Look Mechanical! . . . Act Mechanical! ... Be Mechanical!"
Each rasping sergeant and murmuring girl pointed out what that meant. To master the myriad difficult tone phonemes of Mechanese, a man had to become mechanical. The searing signs and the whispering speakers reminded him that those who failed went promptly to the Body Bank.
Locked in a stifling little examination cell walled with gray acoustic padding, he sat hunched over a black linkbox, straining to catch the fleeting inflections of its tinkling Mechanese.
"The candidate—" Even that word almost escaped him. "The candidate will identify himself."
His answering voice came out too harsh and too high. He gulped to clear his throat, and stroked his tonal beads.
"Candidate Boysie Gann." He swallowed again, and sang his serial number.
"Candidate Boysie Gann, you are under examination," the box purred instantly. "A passing score will move you one stage farther toward that high service which the Plan rewards with communion. But you must be warned that you are now beyond the point of return! The Plan has no place for rejects, with your classified knowledge and training—except in the salvage centers."
"I understand, and I live to serve." He sang the single difficult phoneme.
"Then the test will begin," the box chirped. "You will answer each question clearly and fully, in correct Mechanese. Each millisecond of delay and each tone defect will be scored against you. The Plan has no time to waste, nor space for error. Are you ready to begin?"
Hurriedly, he sang the tone that said, "I am ready to begin."
"Your response was delayed nine milliseconds beyond the optimum point," the box whined instantly. "Your initial tone was twelve cycles too high. Your tonal glide was abrupt and irregular. The duration of your utterance was one millisecond too long. These errors will be scored against you."
"I understand."
"That response was not required from you," the box snarled. "Your errors, however, have been analyzed and graphed. You will now prepare for your initial test question. . . . What is the first principle of mechanized learning?"
When he first tried to sing his answer, his voice came out too hoarse and too low. The box piped out a new total cumulative error before he had time to touch the beads to find the true tone and try again.
"Learning is action," his uneven tones came out at last. "That is the first principle of mechanized instruction. Right responses must be instantly reinforced. Wrong responses must be instantly inhibited. The first equation of mechanized instruction states that efficiency of learning varies inversely with the time elapsed between response and reward."
"Your accumulated total error is now four hundred and eighty-nine points," the box snarled. "You will prepare for the next question. . . . What is the second principle of mechanized instruction?"
He was sweating now as he crouched on the hard little seat. The small gray room seemed too small. The padded walls pressed in upon him. He felt almost suffocated, and he had to gasp for the breath for his hurried reply.
"Learning is survival," he sang the curt phonemes, trying to cut them off correctly. "Successful learning is the, adaptive way to life. Failure to learn is individual death. The second equation of mechanized instruction states that the speed of learning varies directly with the magnitudes of reward and punishment."
When he paused, the box chirped. Even to his straining ears, it was only a sharp metallic insect note, entirely meaningless. He had to whistle a request for the Machine to repeat.
"Your failure in reception scores ninety points against you." The notes from the box were only slightly slower and more intelligible.
"Your cumulative total is now six hundred and seventy-three points. Your right-wrong ratio has fallen into the danger zone."
The racing tinkle of merciless notes, sharp as shattering glass, gave him no time to recover his shattered confidence. He was only dimly conscious of the itching tickle of sweat on his ribs, the cold tingle of sweat on his forehead, the sting of sweat in his eyes.
"You will prepare for your next question." That was only a single gliding tone phoneme, gone in a few milliseconds, so brief he nearly missed it. "What is the third principle of mechanized instruction?"
He touched his beads for the tonal keys, and sang the required phonemes. "The third principle of mechanized instruction states that the greatest reward is the end of pain." His accumulated error mounted, and the merciless box demanded another principle of mechanized instruction—and yet another.
"Your test is ended," the box announced at last. "Your total accumulated error is five thousand nine hundred and forty points. You will report that total to your training group."