The gloomy control booth, with its odor of charred wires, had taken on an eerie atmosphere for Ryder. The Soviet was talking about an entirely new dimension of thought in a field where Ryder considered himself competent, and very well-informed. On one hand, Savitsky's speech sounded as silly as a tale about witches and ghouls, while, on the other, the man's voice carried an unmistakable message of veracity, of confidence. Ryder tried to think through at least the immediate ramifications, but his mind kept jumbling with questions of possibility.
"Your… approach," Ryder said. "It can't destroy the subject, can it?"
Savitsky's voice was merely businesslike. "We haven't had that problem with the latest variant of our system. As you can imagine, my friend, there has been some trial and error. We found that machines can no more tolerate unlimited amounts of pain than can the human animal. And, you might say, some machines have weaker hearts than others. Just like men."
"Have you ever tried it on so sophisticated a system?"
Savitsky looked at him in surprise. "Of course not. We don't possess such a system."
Of course not. Foolish question. "Nick, I'm honestly… concerned. I don't want to waste this opportunity."
The Soviet began to lose his patience. "And what, then, is the American solution? What is your alternative? Weeks of trial and error? The cautious stripping of logic layer after logic layer, like peeling an onion that has no end? My country doesn't have weeks. We… may not have days." The anger went out of Savitsky's voice, and he looked away from Ryder, staring off through the two-way mirror, perhaps staring at a battlefield thousands of kilometers away. "There is no time," he said.
No, Ryder thought. Savitsky was right. There was no time. He remembered the morning briefing. The Seventh Cavalry about to be committed to battle. A world in collapse. And he had been thinking like a bureaucrat.
"You're right," Ryder told the Soviet. "Let's see what you can do."
The two men worked briskly, side by side, readying the banks of interrogation support computers. The system was operating on Meiji. In less than a second, the machines could ask more questions than had all of the human interrogators in preautomation history, and they could make their inquiries with a precision denied to human speech.
Savitsky adjusted the lighting out in the interrogation chamber so that the harshest spots shone down directly on the subject. The electronic jungle that filled the room receded into an artificial night out of which peered dozens of tiny colored eyes.
"Ready?" Savitsky asked.
Ryder nodded in agreement.
The process would begin with logical queries on the most elementary level, trying to get the subject to agree to propositions on the order of two plus two equals four. The complexity was not important. The point was to compromise the subject's isolation, to get a hook in, to induce interaction. The first stage was normally the most difficult. Working in through the security barriers and buffers, it could take weeks to get a military computer to concur with the most basic propositions. But, once you broke them down, the data came pouring out.
"Query bank on. Autobuffers active."
In front of them the green lines on the "pain" monitor flowed smoothly, ready to register the subject's reaction.
Looking at Savitsky's profile, Ryder was surprised to see jewels of sweat shining on the man's upper lip. The Soviet was nervous, after all.
Savitsky twisted a dial that might have been salvaged from an antique television set of the sort Ryder remembered from his grandmother's living room, where the device had delivered the world to a child snowed in on the Nebraska prairie.
The lines jumped on the response meter. The bright movement was startling in the darkness, and Ryder reacted as though he himself had received a slight shock.
The language flow reader registered a negative response. Savitsky quickly turned the "pain" back down, and the green lines settled, trembling for just a moment, then resuming their smooth, flat flow.
"Well," Savitsky said. "Now we try again."
He gave the dial a sharp turn.
The green lines fractured into jagged ridges and valleys, straining toward the borders of the monitor. But the interrogation support computers continued to report negative interaction.
Perspiration gleamed on Savitsky's forehead. He turned the control back to its zero position, and said, "You know, when I was beginning my training, so many years ago, everything started with the theory of interrogating humans. I had not yet specialized in automation. That came later. Anyway, they told us that the breakdowns often came very suddenly, that it was important not to feel despair. You might think, oh, I am never going to break this subject. But you had only to persist. Because, in the end, everyone broke." The Soviet stared out through the window, to where the miniature electronic brain lay still under the spotlights. "It will be interesting to see if the same holds true for machines."
Ryder followed his counterpart's stare. Certainly, there had been no visible change in the subject. Just a small, obviously inanimate black rectangle that looked as though it had been hewn from slate. Yet, he imagined that something about it had altered.
You need a good night's sleep tonight, he told himself.
"I'm going to break this bastard," Savitsky said, his voice full of renewed energy. It was unmistakably the energy of anger.
The Soviet twisted the dial again, jacking up the intensity well beyond the previous level. Whatever the machine was doing, Ryder only hoped that it would not destroy the captive treasure for nothing. In the name of some arcane mumbo jumbo.
The green lines on the monitor went wild. There was, of course, no sign of movement, no physical reaction from the subject. But Ryder suddenly felt something unacceptable in the atmosphere, a change that he could not put into words but that felt distinctly unpleasant and intense.
The unexpected flashing of the language flow reader, where an interrogation's results were reported, made Ryder jump.
The screen merely read, "Unintelligible response."
But that was where it started. It was the beginning of interaction, a sign of life.
"Jesus Christ," Ryder said. "You're getting something, Nick."
Beside him, the Soviet was breathing as heavily as if he had been delivering blows to a victim's head. He stared at Ryder as though he barely recognized him. Then he seemed to wake, and he turned the system's power down once again. The green lines calmed, but never quite regained their earlier straightness. They appeared to be shivering.
"I wonder," Savitsky said, "if our computers could understand the nature of a scream."
He twisted the dial again, sharply. With a grunting noise that was almost a growl, he wrenched it all the way around, focusing on the captured computer brain out on the interrogation table with something that resembled hatred. He kept his hand tightly fixed to the control, as though he might be able to force just a bit more power out of it that way.
The green lines on the "pain" register rebounded off the upper and lower limits of the screen.
It could not be true. Ryder refused to let himself believe it. It was only the result of too little sleep and bad nerves, of allowing oneself to become too emotional. It was crazy. But he could not help feeling that something was suffering.
Tonight, he promised himself, he wouldn't be such a stick-in-the-mud. He needed a few beers. To relax. To sleep.
Machines, Ryder told himself, do not feel pain. This is absurd.
Savitsky turned the dial down as though he were going to give the captured computer a respite, then, without warning, he quickly turned the intensity up to the maximum degree again.
Ryder felt an unexpected urge to reach out and halt the work of the other man's hand. Until he could get a grip on himself, sort things out.