I asked, “Why did you send for me?”
“The machine has written another novel. I have just finished typing it out—I can’t very well send microfilm off to my publisher, and it would be risky to hire the typing done. The thing is, this new novel is so different from Early Noon that I’m not sure I can offer it as my work. I want you to read it and tell me if you think I can get away with it. I hope you think I can, because this new one is my masterpiece.”
“Is that thing set to write nothing but novels?” I asked.
“No, no, damn it,” said Tom with irritation. “You don’t understand. It works at random. It can write anything. That’s the trouble—most of its output is useless to me. It has done a complete Julius Caesar, for example—and thirty of the Sonnets. It has produced several letters of application for the job of school-bus driver in Wyandotte, Ohio, in 1933. It has made dozens of dirty limericks, and has actually invented a new vice by describing it in a story. It has written the diary of a sixteen-year-old moron named Artie Messer for the year 1967.
“It has given me thousands of things I can’t use!” He shouted the last two words and ground an ice cube to bits with his teeth, making me wince. “Want ads! Soldiers’ letters home! Contracts!
“Contracts! Hundreds of pages of aforesaids and whereases, and I have to read it all because I never know when the damned machine will switch to another subject. Once it did five chapters of a novel I would like to have written, and then switched to a recipe for spoon bread in the style of Clementine Paddleford.
“Three months ago it produced a lost comedy of Aristophanes in an English translation by Gilbert Murray. Murray died in 1957. Now, is this a real lost comedy of Aristophanes? Or is the play itself, like the Murray translation of it, just an invention of the machine?
“I have no way of knowing. The Julius Caesar is real, and the Wyandotte, Ohio, letters are false—there’s no such town. But real or false, the Aristophanes is great and ought to be added to world literature. Yet how can I arrange an authentic-looking situation in which to rediscover it?”
He shrugged and smiled. “It isn’t easy,” he said. “If I could write at all, I could do my own stuff in less time than it takes to read all the junk the machine produces.
“I could stop, I guess. Just throw the switch and quit; take up chess, or travel. But there’s a fascination to it. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in—Shakespeare, Aristophanes, new works of real importance coming out of infinity, out of nowhere. I like being a famous writer. So I go on reading, day after day.”
“Where is the new manuscript?”
“Over there.” He indicated a manila envelope on the porch floor.
“When I read Early Noon,” I said, “I felt in touch with a first-rate mind. I was surprised and a little jealous that the first-rate mind was yours. But it was not yours—I was touched and moved by a random pattern of electrons made by a machine. No mind was involved at all?”
“No. They can do that sort of thing nowadays,” said Tom.
It was dark. I phoned Anne and asked her to turn on the lights along one of our fences which guide me to a landing in our pasture. Then I said good night to Tom and flew home with his manuscript. The next afternoon I took it to my office and began to read.
The novel was new and strange. Its events took place in the United States and in the present day, yet reading it was like entering a new country where the trees, birds, and stones were different from any known before. It took the old threads of the English language and wove them into something fine and new. Like Tom, I thought it a masterpiece. But I was worried, almost frightened, by the fact that it wasn’t real.
In the late afternoon I switched on a light, noting that I would have to join Anne and my mother for a drink soon or they would wonder what was wrong. But just at that moment I grew puzzled. I turned back and reread a page. Then, making an exultant guess as to what I had discovered, I put down the manuscript and went to join my family.
After dinner I returned to the novel and read it to the end, and knew that I had guessed right. The machine had left the book unfinished. Tom had completed the twelfth chapter himself, and added three more. His real reason for asking me to read the book was not to get my opinion of its style but to see whether I could tell the difference between the machine’s work and his imitation of it.
I read Tom’s chapters again, savoring his ineptitude. I imagined his rage as, peering into his microfilm viewer with tired eyes, he saw this golden stream cut off, replaced by something trivial or stupid. I imagined, too, his agony in writing those final chapters, bad as they were.
The next morning I flew again to Tom’s house. He came out to the landing strip to meet me. Climbing out of my little plane, holding his manuscript in my hand, I walked toward him. I arranged on my face a knowing, smiling, cynical look that would tell him I had guessed his secret.
And Tom was walking toward me. Behind him the sky dropped to a flat horizon forty miles away. We were two tiny figures on an enormous windy world, approaching each other on a concrete prairie where grass had grown for thousands of years but grew no more. Like me, Tom held a manuscript. He looked at me fearfully, with far more knowledge in his eyes than I held in mine.
“I know,” he said. “The machine wrote this yesterday.” He handed me his manuscript. I read the first lines of it, and the pale arch of the sky turned to stone. Fear stabbed me like a pin going through a specimen. I did not know whether I had just been created or was about to be destroyed. I only knew that some fearful power had reached down from the sky and trapped us. For the opening words of the machine’s latest work were these:
“Tom Trimble and I have been next-door neighbors all our lives, though our houses are six miles apart. We run adjoining ranches in that part of Texas where cedar, prickly pear, and prairie dogs are the chief nuisances and, in a dry year, twenty-five acres of land are needed to support a single cow....”
A SIGH FOR CYBERNETICS
by Felicia Lamport
Dr. Norbert Wiener, a pioneer in the use of electronic brains, warns that computing machines, now working faster than their inventors, may go out of control and cause widespread destruction.—News Item
OBVIOUS!
by Michael Ffolkes
‘What d’you mean—’obvious to the meanest intelligence!’ “
I REMEMBER BABYLON
by Arthur C. Clarke
To build the better mousetrap has become—in this day of technological marvels—the easiest part of the job. It’s getting the word to the path-beating public that really counts. And the path itself tends to resemble a nightmare behaviorist’s maze (to switch rodents and metaphors) in which all the entrances are through opinion-taking and all the exits by way of opinion-making.