The Tomorrow File Page 26

  Heads snapped up. They looked at me expectantly.

  “For some time I haven’t been satisfied with the Genetic Rating program. It was originally established under the Fertility Control Act to be exactly what its title indicates: classification of objects by genetic quality. The big error was to assign to human examiners the authority to determine Genetic Ratings. There are good GE’s and there are bad ones. But all suffer from one defect: They are human. It was inevitable that subjective judgments would be made. The entire Genetic Rating program should have been computerized from the start."

  "That will be our first step. The switch to computerization can be made by administrative decree without enabling legislation. I anticipate very little opposition. As a matter of fact, I think the move will draw general approval. You’ve all heard the stories of bribery of GE’s, and other rumors as to how they are influenced by personal and political considerations. The main opposition will come from the GE’s themselves when they learn they’re being replaced by a King Mk. V. But there aren’t enough GE’s to cause a major flap, and they’ll be assured of transfer to other services with a rank-rate equal to or more than their present love."

  “Now I want you to work very closely with Data and Statistics in planning the programming for determining Genetic Ratings. Make certain that minus-ratings of sufficient weight are given for precisely those disorders for which we will eventually require sterilization.”

  A gasp ran around the room. They turned to look at one another. They understood now what I was planning.

  “Once computerized Genetic Ratings are operational—we should be able to do it in a year, at most—the Sterilization Addendum will then be submitted to Congress. We’ll have to give it an attractive title—like the Gene Pool Improvement Act, or something like that. It will be based solely on Genetic Ratings. The opposition will then find no human objects to debate. You can’t argue with mechanical thinking. Having already accepted computerized Genetic Ratings, they’ll find it difficult to object to the use of those ratings to improve the quality of life today and the quality of the gene pool tomorrow. I don’t say they’ll be completely silenced. Of course, they won’t be. But we’ll have broken their teeth. I think we can win this one, and the plan I have outlined is exactly how we’ll do' it. Any questions?”

  There were no questions.

  Phoebe Huntzinger returned from the Denver Field Office. She marched into my office. Her usual placidity was not evident. She was disturbed and trying to control it.

  “Phoebe,” I said, “how was the trip?”

  “The trip? Fine. I like it out there. Would you believe they still have snow up in the mountains?”

  “I believe. You like the objects?”

  “At the FO? Some good brains there, Nick.”

  “I know. So what’s the problem?”

  She tried to laugh. “It shows?”

  “It shows. A crisis at Denver?”

  “Not so much a crisis as just plain, everyday, run-of-the-mill stupidity.”

  “Can it be glossed?”

  “What? Oh, sure, Nick. It can be handled.”

  “All right. Then there’s no crisis. Now what is it?”

  “Do you know how they’re running this game?”

  “On this particular project? Roughly. Nine laser beams pick up the CNS electrical activity. They scan in overlapping disks, like radar beams. Right so far?”

  “Right.”

  “Electric synapses show on screen and at the same time the bedside computer determines location, duration, and strength of the cerebral signal. That information is amplified and fed into the master computer for translation into printout. From a trigger in the brain, we get an actual word in type. Correct?”

  “Correct. Pretty good for an old em like you. Is there anything going on in this Section you don’t know?”

  “Cut the kaka. What’s the problem?”

  “You’re hoping for a conception from the experimental object. A complete declarative sentence. Nick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Why impossible?”

  “What do you think is the vocabulary of the master computer? How many signals is it programmed to accept and translate into words?”

  “Oh . I don’t know. Three thousand? Five thousand?” “Two hundred.”

  “You’re joking?”

  “I’m not. That computer can never give you a conception, Nick. It only knows two hundred words, and almost all of them are adjectives and adverbs. Few verbs. No pronouns. It’s great for picking up sensations and emotions. Hot. Pink. Green. Soft. Blue. Happy. Red. But a complete conception? Forget it. Unless your idea of a declarative sentence is: ‘Sad red warm hurt cold loud.’ ”

  I got up, moved to the window, stared out into murky sky. I tried to control my anger. I knew there were two factors that negated the best efforts of the best futurists: human genius and human stupidity. You could construct the greatest mathematical model in the world, but all your agonized planning could be brought to dust by a

  leukemic dwarf creating a new idea in a hospice bed or by a stupid scientist who neglected an experimental element so basic that no one thought to question it.

  I turned to face Phoebe Huntzinger. I tried to smile. She tried. We both failed.

  “Not fatal,” I said. “Peter Stanley?”

  “The Team Leader? Yes, Nick. That’s his name.”

  “I’ll take care of him. Phoebe, does this project interest you?”

  “Yes. Very much. Let me serve on it, Nick. The things I do around here are routine. My Division runs itself. You know that.”

  “All right. That master computer in Denver—a Golem?”

  “Mk. III.”

  “What’s the storage potential?”

  “Vocabulary? Maybe ten thousand words tops, on the basis of input from the bedside computer.”

  “Flash WISSEC. They’ve got basic vocabulary lists from five words to fifty thousand. Ask for copies of one, three, five, and ten thousand words. Program Golem to its limit. Got that?” “Sure.”

  “What about the in-brain technology? Any chance of a foul-up there?”

  “I don’t know, Nick. It’s not my field.”

  I nodded. “I’ll take care of it. As soon as you get your word lists, get back to Denver and start the reprogramming. Thanks, Phoebe. ’ ’ She smiled warmly at me.

  “Nick, if I wasn’t married, I’d suggest you and I use each other. One night at least.”

  “Why not?” I said. “Your wife won’t mind. By the way, Phoebe, that Denver project never has been named. I’ve been carrying it on the budget under Gerontology Research. I think we’ll bring it out of the closet now and give it a name. Make the servers feel they’re on something important. We’ll call it Project Phoenix. ” “Whatever you say, Nick.”

  Paul Bumford returned from the San Diego Field Office on Thursday morning. He flashed my office to report in. On screen, he appeared thin, hard, drawn.

  “Tired?” I asked him.

  “Busted my ass,” he said. But he was not grumbling. If anything, he seemed proud of his labors, confident of his mastery of his new power.

  “How did you resolve the Chimerism debate?” I asked him.

  “I told them I would phase out the transplant program and provide more love for genetic manipulation. Nick?”

  “Excellent. Good judgment.”

  “I passed the test? Thanks, teacher.”

  “Paul, break the news gently to the Chimerism Team here. | Better yet, just don’t mention it. Reduce their love gradually over a j period of a year. Eventually, they’ll get the message.”

  “That’s what I planned to do,” he said crossly. “How about a ! serveout and swim later today?”

  “Fine. At the DIVSEC gym. Meet you about 1700.”

  At 1630,1 left my office and walked over to the small gym and j swimming pool on the compound grounds. It was not the large communal gym-pool, available to servers of all ranks, but
was located in what had formerly been the headquarters building of the Division of Security & Intelligence.

  When Angela moved DIVSEC to Washington, leaving behind only a guard company for compound security, their offices were I assigned to objects from other divisions who' required more room for their service. The small gym and swimming pool that had J formerly been reserved for the exclusive use of DIVSEC had now, by my decree, become a private facility for the use of PS-4 rank and | higher.

  Paul was serving out in the gym when I arrived. He was using the horizontal wallbars. Arms stretched over his head, he had suspended his body a few inches above the floor. With his back pressed against the bars, he was slowly raising and lowering his legs from ! the hips.

  I had changed to plastilast briefs in the locker room. Paul was wearing a plastilast clout. His body had always been androgynous. . But now he had lost weight; he had a waist; I could see his rib cage. He was no longer pudgy. I fancied even his skin tone had changed.

  It was no longer blushed. And it was taut. Plump curves had disappeared. Muscles were discernible.

  “You’re looking good,” I said.

  I jumped up to grab a bar alongside him. I began to replicate his ! exercise, lifting my legs from the hips, slowly, then slowly lowering them.

  “Nancy Ching?” I said. “What’s your input?”

  “Superior,” he gasped. “Elegant brain. Good ruler. Her servers follow.”

  “Use her?” I asked. “After I left?”

  “Yes,” he said. “At her cottage, north of La Jolla Bay.”

  I felt something.

  “Fine.” I exhaled. “She’s profitable.”

  “Election,” he said, trying to breathe deeply as he exercised. “Off-year election out there. Local Congressmen.”

  I turned my head to look at him. His lovely body was sheened, “Don’t tell me Nancy is involved? She’ll stop her career.” “No, no. She just mentioned this obso in office will probably be returned. She said he’s a clunk.”

  “So?”

  “His support is mostly from obsos. This is for the Tomorrow File. My idea. Nick, why should obsos have the vote? No one under sixteen has it. Why objects over, say, fifty or sixty? It’s not right. They don’t produce, and their consumption rate is nil.”

  “Disenfranchise the obsos? Good. Solve the political problem of their conservatism. Excellent thinking, Paul. Add it to the File. Let’s go to the bikes.”

  They were bicyclelike mechanical contrivances bolted to the floor. You could adjust the tension on the pedals. An odometer showed meters and kilometers. Paul and I mounted onto the saddles.

  “Set it at five,” I told him. “One new dollar on a kilometer.” “You’re on,” he said.

  We began to pedal madly.

  “That thing in Denver,” I said. “Printout from brain signals.” “Yes.”

  “I coded it Project Phoenix.”

  “Oh?”

  “The computerization was mucked.”

  I told him what Phoebe Huntzinger had told me, how the computer vocabulary had been shorted.

  “Oh, God,” he groaned.

  “Get rid of Peter Stanley. He’s the Team Leader.”

  He turned his head sideways to glance at me.

  “Terminate him with prejudice?” he said slowly.

  “Not permanently, you idiot. Transfer him. A tsetse fly station in darkest Africa—something like that. Just get rid of him.”

  “All right, Nick.”

  “I want you to go to Denver and check out the in-brain technology. There may be a balls-up there, too.”

  “Nick, for God’s sake, I’ve got a full plate.”

  “Then send Mary Bergstrom. She can compute what’s going on.”

  He was silent. We were both pedaling our stationary bicycles as hard as we could. Gripping handlebars with sweaty hands. Knees plunging up and down. Leaning forward. Gasping. Striving. “What’s, stressing you?” I panted.

  “You,” he said. “What you’re doing. Goddamn it, Nick, it’s my Division. I rule it. I’m AssDepDirRad. Can’t you let me make the decisions?”

  “You object to my decisions?”

  “No, but let me make them. Your decisions are operative, but I want to make them first. You’ve been acting like a—like a—” He paused in fury and frustration. “Like a mogul!” he burst out, pedaling crazily.

  “Mogul?” I shouted. “I haven’t heard that word in years!” “Well, that’s what you are—a mogul.”

  We pedaled away furiously, glancing occasionally at each other’s odometer. We were about equal. I strained to draw ahead. “Power,” I gasped. “I recognize the symptoms.”

  “Because you suffer from it yourself.”

  “Right! You don’t seek it out. It seeks you. It’s a passion, a virus. It’s incurable.”

  “You’ve got it and I’ve got it.”

  “Yes. Can’t we serve together?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “One kilometer,” I said, peering at my odometer. I stopped pedaling, swung off the saddle. I stood trembling, knees water, heart thudding. Paul stopped pumping, swung slowly from his machine.

  “You win,” he said. “Owe you a dollar.”

  He walked away. Steadily. Not looking back. I glanced at his odometer. It showed slightly over one kilometer.

  I took one hand off the wheel and placed it delicately on her hard, tanned thigh. She was wearing a miniskirt. Fresh zipsuits and makeup were in a small overnight case on the back seat.

  “Look what I have,” she said.

  She unzipped her purse. I took my eyes off the road a moment to glance down. A red dildo.

  “Got a jerk for Indians?” I asked her.

  She laughed.

  “I like the color: Come-Along Red. Nice?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Electric?”

  “Ultrasonic.”

  “Turn your bones to water,” I warned her.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Shock therapy?”

  “Well ... it just feels good.”

  “The endless problem of therapeutics,” I said. “Risk versus benefit.”

  She laughed again and hiked her little skirt higher.

  “You’re cute,” she said.

  I had been certain the day would prove a disaster. It began in rain, what Hibernians call a “soft day.” Gray, wet, endless. Not gusty or sweeping; nothing as dramatic as that. Just a slow, unreeling curtain of drifting water. Polluted enough to stain cloth.

  I requisitioned a hydrogen-powered sedan from the motor pool. Speed and acceleration were not the best, but it could churn out 100 kph without faltering. Just what we needed for the run south.

  Except that every driver in New York was going to Alexandria, Virginia, that Friday morning. Or so it seemed. It took us an hour to get through the new Morse Tunnel to Jersey City. The freeway south was clogged, an infarcted artery: stop start, start stop.

  Then suddenly, almost instantaneously, it ran free. I moved the hand accelerator switch. At the same time the curtain of rain lifted. Someone rolled it up. Just like that. The sun was there in a clearing sky. Blue. Maya Leighton sighed and pushed out her long legs. And I put my hand lightly on her bare, cool thigh. It might, I thought, it just might serve.

  “Maya, where are you from?”

  “GPA-5.”

  I guessed Iowa.

  “What made you pick geriatrics?”

  “I want to live forever.”

  She switched off the air conditioning and lowered the window on her side. I lowered mine. The fresh air seemed washed. Sun-warmed. She took off her jacket, unbuttoned her blouse to the waist, put her hand inside. She began to hum. Not a tune, a song. Just a hum, a not unpleasant drone. Her eyes were closed. “Maya, what do you want?”

  “Excitement,” she said drowsily.

  “I can give you that. Pain, too.”

  “That’s excitement,” she said faintly.

  I thought she might be napping. She was a lazy anima
l. She required long hours of sleep. I drove steadily, letting the astronauts zoom by. The wide road lulled. Suddenly, without willing it, I was at peace. We—she, I, the car—were floating and stationary. The new world revolved beneath our wheels.

  I made the long curve onto the new elevated freeway that had been completed north to Mt. Holly. Eventually it would link with the Morse Tunnel to Manhattan. At that point in time, it was completed from Mt. Holly south to Washington, D.C. Once on it, you were captive. You could turn off for Philadelphia, Wilmington, or Baltimore. Otherwise, you had no place to go until you saw the Capitol.

  “Good-bye, swans,” I said.

  “Good-bye, roadside paradise,” she said sleepily.

  “We’ll pull off,” I promised her. “They don’t let you starve. Exactly. Do you prefer a fake English tavern or a fake German biergarten?”

  “You decide,” she murmured. “You say.”

  Her hand flopped limply sideways. Into my lap. Her fingers tightened gently. She began to play.

  “Keep that up,” I warned her, ‘‘and the result will pop my zipper and poke up through the steering wheel. Then some idiot will cut in front. I’ll make a hard turn, and fracture my engorged penis. You, naturally, will then provide medical attention. And I will go to my very important dinner engagement this evening with my Laternen-pfahl in splints. Is that what you want?”

  “You’re mad,” she giggled.

  “I suspect so,” I sighed.

  She turned sideways on the passenger seat, lying with her head in my lap, her hips turned. I took my right hand off the wheel and slid it into her unbuttoned shirt. I pinched a nipple as hard as I could “between my knuckles.

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  We stopped for lunch at one of the approved turnoff ‘ ‘Rest-Ur-Haunts.” This one was a fake Italian ristorante. We dined under an outside arbor, enclosed by washable plastic lattice. Overhead were clumps of purple plastirub grapes and green leaves. On the tables were imitation empty Chianti bottles, fitted with plastiwax candles and flame-shaped bulbs with flickering filaments. Battery-powered. The false bottles even had browned, peeling labels. It was swell.

  We returned to the car trading small belches from the proveal, propep, natural spaghetti, red wine. Frank Lawson Harris, where are you now?