“Can you come over?” he asked quietly. His request alarmed me. I understood that he meant right now. He had not telephoned in more than a year.
I got into my little plane and, flying low, followed the old horse trail and the telephone line beside it. (It is possible to drive from my ranch to Tom’s, but the trip takes more than an hour.) From the air, the wings, pools, terraces, and garages that Tom’s wives had added to the original house looked like a jumble of movie sets of different scales and periods. Landing on Tom’s big paved strip, I taxied my little plane up to the old house, which turns its back to the recent additions and faces open country.
Tom was sitting on the old front porch, drinking Scotch. We are both thirty-eight now, but he looks younger than that, and younger than I. A rancher looks competent and calm, even in a bad year; being boss gives him that. But Tom had added to his calm the arrogance, the elegance, all the last refinements that money can confer, and had ended up in indifference and boredom. Still he was an impressive sight in his rancher’s clothes and boots and British grooming. His eyes looked tired.
Drinking, we talked about cattle for a while. We watched a vapor trail that seemed to create itself as an invisibly distant bomber drew it in the sky. When the long white stroke had blurred, Tom asked, “Have you read my book?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t write it.”
“Who did?”
“Nobody. It’s a long story. That’s why I asked you to come—I want to tell you.
“You know things have gone badly for me since the war. The ranch doesn’t support me; I support it. Guests have come and gone for years, yet often I feel that in all that time I haven’t spoken to another person. Laura lives now in a specially created environment, but the world they arrange for her pleasure in the sanitarium is no more artificial than the one I live in.
“I have been bored; tortured with boredom. So I decided to look back over my life until I found an ambition somewhere—or even just a good intention—and pick it up again and carry it out. The best thing I could find was my old resolve to be a writer. Do you remember when we used to talk about it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I bought a typewriter and sat in front of it for weeks. Nothing happened. Or rather, the inevitable happened. Sitting there, empty as a drum, I began to figure out how money could be converted even into talent—or anyway into an imitation of it.
“Do you remember the old theory about putting ten monkeys to work at ten typewriters, just hitting the keys at random? The argument was that if you kept them at it a million years they would write the complete works of Shakespeare. Along with trillions of pages of gibberish, of course. It was a question of mathematical probability— sooner or later, in a million years, one of the monkeys would just happen to hit the keys in the sequence that would produce Hamlet, and another would do Lear, and so on.
“But monkeys are old-fashioned and too slow; now we have electrons. Every time a new calculating machine appears, somebody announces that it can solve in thirty seconds problems that would require seven years of figuring with pencil and paper. Or something like that. And this is possible because the work is done by streams of electrons moving along wires at the speed of light.
“The problem, then, was simple: change the work of the electrons from calculating to typing. In effect, devise an automatic typewriter that would race along, completely out of control, at maybe a million words a minute. With no mind to guide it, the thing would produce staggering mountains of nonsense, but would, by the laws of probability, make sense a tiny fraction of the time.”
“And you actually did it,” I said.
“Well, I had it done. In New York I found a man to put the machine together—a fellow named David R. Sere. He worked for I.B.M., designing computers. I hired him away from them and brought him here. I outlined the problem to him in New York. He chose the components he thought he would need and rode with them in a freight car all the way to San Angelo. He slept beside them on a cot, the way a kid sleeps by his bull at the Fat Stock Show.”
“Then you have the thing here?”
“Yes. Want to see it?”
He led me through the old house and into a wing that had been built by his second wife, Alicia. We entered the enormous living room. Its curtains were closed; Tom pressed the wall switch and the room was filled with soft, rich light that some decorator had contrived to make women beautiful and parties successful. The furniture had been pushed back to the walls. Tom’s machine stretched along the center of the rug like a procession of stunted mechanical elephants, linked trunk to tail. For it consisted of several gray metal cabinets with a minimum of lights and switches and no dials at all, connected by many wires of different colors. I listened but heard no sound.
“Is it working?” I asked.
“Yes.”
(Later, bending over it, I heard a hum like that of a forgotten radio whose station has signed off for the night— the very sound of emptiness. It was the only noise the thing made.)
“It’s not quite what I expected,” I told him. “You know— in cartoons you see big cabinets with rows of lights.”
“The problem was different here. See this little one on the end?” It was a box less than three feet high. “It’s the smallest unit, but it does the basic work. The other components are simply devices for getting the stuff out to the light of day.”
He led me to the little cabinet—the creative one. “This is where electronic impulses, each representing a different word, are mixed at random. Even David Sere doesn’t know how fast it works—it may turn out a billion words of mixture an hour, or maybe only a million. It isn’t like a typewriter, after all. It makes the mixture from words, not letters.
“We could have put the entire Unabridged Dictionary into its vocabulary, but then we would have gotten back prose with such odd words as ‘sope,’ ‘paktong,’ and ‘thirl’ in it, and I didn’t want that. In the end we gave it a generous English vocabulary and a few tags of French, German, and Latin.”
Tom touched the second cabinet. “This is the scanner. Producing the mixture is simple, but it takes lots of wires and circuits and stuff to scan the mixture and know when it ceases to be gibberish and starts making sense. Other parts of the scanner fill the basement and three bedrooms upstairs. Sere spent months ‘instructing’ it—adjusting the mechanism to accept sense-making combinations of words and reject nonsense.
“When the scanner accepts part of the mixture as sensible English, it diverts the electron stream into this cabinet, which is called Memory. Memory is simply a recording device, necessary because there is no process that can print the stuff as fast as the machine produces it. Memory stores it, then feeds it out slowly—still as nothing but a code and electron pattern—to the next component, which converts the code into English and prints it on microfilm.
“Every morning I snip off a bit of microfilm and develop it myself. The output ranges from six to ten inches of film a day. I have a little darkroom over there. Then I sit down at an ordinary microfilm viewer to see what the machine has written.”
“And that’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it. That’s how I produced my novel.”
We returned to the front porch. Tom poured Scotch over ice cubes and added pipeline water. It was near sunset now. The air had cooled a degree or two and even the horned frogs were casting shadows. Some of Tom’s calves began bellowing, at a distance that turned the sounds to music.
“How many people know that a machine wrote Early Noon?” I asked.
“Three. You and I and David R. Sere. But I don’t worry about Sere, he’s perfectly safe—hardly human at all. I laid down specifications for him, and then went out and found him—in Manhattan, of course. He took me to a health-food shop on Sixth Avenue, and over nuts and raisins and spinach juice he told me that his lifelong ambition had been just to sit somewhere and think. Well, he’s doing it now—in a furnished room in Bayonne, New Jersey, at my expense.”