In this particular case, though, she found an article that had been published in New New a few years before the war, in a journal of applied psychology: “Aptitude Induction Through Voluntary Hypnotic Immersion.” She’d had a sort of morbid interest in hypnosis ever since the interview that preceded this job, so she read it.
After a couple of paragraphs, she punched up the author’s name and found that he was still alive. She finished the article and called him. He was at a seminar; she left a message and they wound up meeting after dinner at the social sciences faculty lounge.
The lounge must have been a very comfortable place once. Now half of it was partitioned off for someone’s “temporary” living quarters, and all of the couches and chairs had been crowded into the space that was left. She recognized Dr. Demerest—they hadn’t talked but she’d punched up his dossier after the computer made the appointment—standing in the corner, trying to make the beverage dispenser work. He was a short bald man in his nineties. She picked her way around the furniture and introduced herself.
“Dr. O’Hara?” A few dozen more lines appeared in his forehead (no eyebrows to raise). “I expected, never mind what I expected, coffee?”
“Tea, please. Or anything it will surrender.”
He was shaking the machine gently. “It doesn’t respond to violence. Somebody must have hit it.” He waved O’Hara to a nest of easy chairs. “Machines do sulk. I’ve been humoring this one for thirty years.” He wiggled the T button and it agreed to produce a cup of tea. He drew another one and joined her.
He held his cup in both hands and squinted at her. “Give me a moment to adjust here. We’re the same grade but you’re evidently younger than most of my students. Janus start-up. Crazy stunt. You really think that damned thing is going to fly?”
“A lot of people do,” she said quietly.
“A lot of people think Jesus is coming in a Buick. But you. Do you think it’ll fly? You plan to go?”
“At first I didn’t…didn’t think it would work and wouldn’t go even if it did. Now I guess I’ll go if they take me. Whether it works out, they say that depends on whether they can get the neutrino coupler to work.”
He shook his head. “Going to be dull around here after all the crazy people leave. What’s a demographics coordinator and what does she want with an old interface psychologist?”
“I read the article you wrote in ‘82 about aptitude transfers. It looks like a technique we could use. But there aren’t any later references. Did you ever follow it up?”
“Hm. Did and didn’t.” He rubbed his long nose, remembering. “Sort of farmed it out, set it up as a doctoral project for a couple of exchange students. One of those things. They went back to Mazeltov.” He shrugged. Nobody in Mazeltov had survived the war.
“We stayed in contact, of course. I have all their raw data and their preliminary findings. Haven’t got around to putting it into publishable form. But it does confirm the validity of the technique. What does that have to do with demographics?”
“Well, we have a problem. We’re trying to create a sort of microcosm, a miniature replica of the human race.”
“Ah. But you only have, what is it? Ten thousand people? I see. You want a file of dopplegangers.” He shook his head in a series of short jerks. “Hm. Take forever. Might not work at all.”
“I was thinking of a more limited application, at first, anyhow. For instance…glass-blowers. Not for jewelry and such, but the people who custom-design equipment for scientists and medical people. There is only one person alive who does that. She’s over a hundred.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Before the war there were almost a half-million specifically named occupations. Less than a tenth of them have any living practitioners.”
“Hm. You can’t think that more than a thousand of them are relevant to your bunch. Mostly still available, engineer types.”
“Even so. I’ve come up with literally hundreds of instances like the glass-blower. Where the only people who have an aptitude either don’t want to go or can’t.”
“Oh, I think I see. I see your problem.” He blew on his tea and stared into it “You understand the limitations of the induction technique?”
“I’m not sure. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”
“All right. I take this crotchety old glass-blower and try to talk her into spending a week or ten days living in the psych lab. Suppose she agrees—and she has to want to; if I coerce her it probably won’t work. Then I try to put her into a state of extreme hypnotic receptivity, suggestibility. Have you ever been hypnotized?”
“Once.”
“You probably know it doesn’t work with everybody. Some people, you can put into a deep trance with a few minutes of quiet talking. Others you can shoot full of drugs and they resist you all the way.
“If your glass-blower is receptive, I put her under and then hook her up to the machine. The semantic computer part talks to her. The biologue part coordinates what she’s saying to her physical state: skin temperature, pulse, blood pressure, brain waves. Mostly brain waves, in twelve frequencies.
“It’s rather hard work. With a hundred-year-old, I’d probably want to spend a couple of weeks, not keep her under more than two or three hours a day. Eventually, though, I’d have a cybernetic profile of her attitudes toward just about everything, and incidentally a fairly complete biography. You know the Turing paradox?”
“Touring as in traveling?”
“Never mind. What it boils down to is that if you put her behind a screen, and put a voice-simulation output to the semantic computer behind another screen, and talked to them…well, you’d be hardpressed to tell which one was the human. I could tell, because I know some good trick questions…pardon me. Old men ramble.
“So you have this cybernetic glass-blower. It does you absolutely no good. No lungs. So you take an appropriate subject and run the process in reverse. This is even harder work, physically, because what you’re doing is manipulating his blood pressure and so forth, induction field for the brain waves, while you suggest he make the same response as the old glass-blower. The computer, that is, suggests it.
“When he comes out of it, he won’t know a damned thing about glass-blowing. But he will sure as hell want to learn, and he’ll learn fast and well, if he’s at all suited for the profession. You wouldn’t want to take someone with low manual dexterity, of course. There are more subtle screening criteria, too. You wouldn’t take someone who had injured himself severely with glass as a child. He’d be a nervous wreck all his life.”
“The instance you used was motivating a one-armed man to play the violin.”
“He’d kill himself. He couldn’t live with it. And the process isn’t really reversible; you could put him back under and motivate him to play some one-handed instrument, but that wouldn’t erase his wanting to play the violin.”
“That’s something I wanted to know. You could take a pianist and motivate him to study the violin—and he wouldn’t transfer all his energy to the violin? He’d still play the piano?”
“We didn’t pursue that too far. The danger’s obvious. Motivate him to play every damned instrument in the orchestra. You’ll turn him into a zombie. Indecision, depression. He’ll pick up a horn and play a few notes and then walk over to the harp and then have an irresistible urge to play the piano, and so forth. Drive him mad in a week. You’re a polymath, aren’t you?”
O’Hara nodded slowly.
“Thought I saw a gleam in your eye. How many degrees do you have?”