The God Machine Read online

  Oh, not the wrecked car.

  The accident.

  The one that opened a cybernetics Pandora's box. And plunged me into the kind of nightmare you don't even find in your worst dreams.

  The worst kind of nightmare. The kind that's real. From which you don't wake up.

  Kim told me everything she knew. I learned more from my own confrontation with 79. With what Kim had told me, plus my interrogations of the cybernetics brain, I began to fit together the pieces. I interviewed our chief programmers; I demanded records of the tests and experiments during the past several weeks.

  It didn't seem possible. I didn't rush to any conclusions. Things didn't come that fast to me. I had to put it together slowly, cross-check hundreds of details. Slowly the nightmare began to form, like wisps and tendrils of fog in the back of my mind. Swirling and elusive, but real. Terribly real.

  Imagination is a precious commodity of intelligence. I wasn't lacking in any. But I forced mine down, stifled it, fought to keep from leaping to conclusions. I didn't want—I mean, there couldn't be allowed any room for error in this thing. Not any, because it was . . . well, "unexpected" is such an inadequate word.

  And while I was trying to make sense out of something impossible, I kept hearing a strange sound.

  It almost began to haunt me. It was thin, and barely discernible. But it was there, all right.

  It was the thin trickle of laughter somewhere in a deep well of my own mind.

  It sounded like the laughter of Selig Albracht.

  21

  he was uncomfortable. He fidgeted with his hands, little nervous motions that betrayed his attempts to appear casual and unworried. He sat in the chair at the side of my control desk in my apartment office, his eyes darting from one part of the room to another. For several minutes I pretended to be busy, studying papers on my desk, while I actually studied him.

  But why should Ed Taylor be uncomfortable, irritable, looking as if he expected someone to drag him away at any moment? Taylor was one of our better programmers, a natural adept at working alpha-wave patterns with the computer. He fitted smoothly into the program, regarded 79 as just another machine, and had proved eminently satisfactory in his work.

  He was also the most relaxed person on the staff, I reminded myself. Correction. That was past tense. Now he appeared as if the slightest noise would break him into pieces. But from what Kim had told me about the "incident" with him, I didn't blame Ed Taylor. I forced any conclusions from my mind.

  Things promised to be bad enough without my going off on uneducated tangents. I turned to face him.

  "Well, that's out of the way," I said by way of preamble, doing my damnedest to be casual with him. I wasn't, of course. I was even tighter than the unhappy, bedeviled man sitting with me. He started suddenly at the sound of my voice, wincing at his own reaction.

  "Miss Michele filled me in, Ed," I said slowly. "But only in general terms," I added quickly. I didn't want Taylor to feel I knew that much about what had happened with him. I wanted it in his own words. "I wanted to speak with you myself," I went on.

  He nodded, remaining silent. Damn! I hoped it wouldn't be necessary to play a cat-and-mouse game.

  "I understand you fainted while you were on duty," I said abruptly.

  His eyes widened, showing fright. He leaned forward, his hands fluttering. "But I've never ... I mean, I've never passed out before, Mr. Rand! I swear it! Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. I—I . . ."

  I held up my hand to cut the flow of words. "Hey, take it easy." I laughed. "You're not on trial, Ed.

  No one's brought you here for punishment. I just want to get all the information I can." I offered a cigarette to him; he grabbed it and lit up with shaking hands.

  "Let me get something clear with you, Ed," I said carefully. "This isn't a court or anything of the sort. I asked you here because reports are cold and impersonal things. I can't tell that much from them. I need your help," I said as earnestly as I could, which was easy to say because it was absolutely the truth.

  He sank back in his chair, sucking deeply on the cigarette. His voice was suddenly subdued and weak. "I thought I might be in, well, you know what I mean, Mr. Rand. I've been worried out of my mind about it, worried that I was going to be fired." His eyes had the expression of a whipped dog. Whatever had happened, it went deeper than any of us realized.

  "For the record, then," I said quickly, "so there won't be any misunderstanding, Ed. You haven't fallen from grace; your position with the project is not jeopardized; and no one has even given the slightest thought to letting you go." I smiled at him. "It just so happens that you're one of the best programmers, and we need you more than you need us."

  "Christ, I'm glad to hear you say it, Mr. Rand," he said with a brief smile of his own. "I—I feel better already."

  So much for that.

  I plunged. "Kick it off from the beginning, Ed. The whole thing—just as it happened."

  His brow creased as he went back in his mind, and immediately there appeared again the agitation and sense of upset.

  "Take your time," I said, hoping to keep him at low key, "We're in no rush. And remember what I said—I need information. I need your help in this thing."

  "Okay, Mr. Rand," he replied, settling down. "You know the tests I was running?"

  I nodded and tapped the papers on my desk. "Uh-huh. You were handling the systems of visual identification—new scopes as they related to the alpha-wave programming." I lit a cigarette and wasted several seconds blowing smoke into the air. "If I remember correctly, we had more than the oscilloscopes going in the tests. Blinking light patterns, and so forth."

  "That's right, Mr. Rand," he said, eager suddenly to share the experience, to pass on to another person some of the load he'd been carrying.

  "All right, then, Ed," I prompted him, "why don't you just tell it to me in your own way? In your own words."

  He went back to the tests he was conducting. "Well, it was the standard setup. I mean, the EEG

  wires, and so forth. I had been running block messages in Morse to 79. Nothing spontaneous. The messages were given to me the night before so I. could study them, sort of get them down comfortably in my own mind, so that when I alpha-patterned them there wouldn't be any hesitation on my part. It sort of makes it easier when you know ahead of time what you're going to be saying."

  I nodded, not speaking.

  "The idea was that I would transmit to the 'brain.' We weren't interested in getting two-way communication, and we programmed the system simply to receive the messages as part of a test. Miss Michele, she, uh, was in charge of this phase. She had a couple of other people in the cubicle with us.

  They were taking notes, getting tape and film records. We wanted to see if the blink response of the control board could give us the same information, or maybe more than the oscilloscopes. Sort of a free-wheeling setup."

  He stubbed out the cigarette, reaching automatically for another one. I'd never recalled Ed Taylor as a chain smoker.

  "Well, everything went along fine. I mean, no sweat with any part of the tests," he said by way of explanation. "The trouble came when we started the second phase, when the 'brain' would be answering me."

  "What do you mean by 'trouble,' Ed?" I didn't want to push, but at the same time I didn't want to lose the track on which he was now moving.

  Ed Taylor's face screwed up. "Maybe 'trouble' isn't the right word, Mr. Rand," he said, groping for a better means of communicating to me what had happened. "You see, nothing took place all of a sudden. It's hard to describe and—" He looked up at me, fearful that he was botching it.

  I waved away his apprehension. "You're doing fine. Don't let me put words in your mouth," I said.

  "Take your time; find it in your own way."

  He nodded slowly. "As you know, Mr. Rand, when you're transmitting you watch the prompter,"

  he continued. "Makes it easier and keeps you from forgetting as you go along. But when
you're receiving from the 'brain'—especially when you're in a test like that one, I mean, there's no need to pay attention to the alpha pattern coming back because it's strictly for test recording—you don't have to watch anything.

  Anything in particular. When the answers started coming back I could, well, not hear, but sort of, umm, well, feel them. No sweat with that. I just didn't have to pay attention. They were stock items, the regular question-answer routine we've done so many times."

  He grinned sheepishly. "In fact, its easy to get bored when you're doing that. You know something's going on up there," he tapped his head, "but you don't have to listen in. Miss Michele, and the others, they were recording everything, taking it down, like I said. The only thing that was new in the cubicle were the lights. The blink-pattern tests."

  He seemed to be encountering difficulty, and thought carefully to find the right words. "That's when the trouble, the feeling I got then, that this was when the trouble began. That's when it seemed to start, the best I could remember, anyway."

  I nodded to urge him on.

  "Well, I was looking at the main panel," he said slowly. "There was a large lens—a wide light, sort of an orange-red, quite different from amber or red. In between, sort of. And the blink pattern was matching the oscilloscope waves. There would be a blink just as the waves peaked on the scope. I found this more interesting than looking at nothing in the room, and I began watching it. I found myself staring at it, I guess. You know how it is, Mr. Rand," he said, unknowingly begging for agreement. "You've really got nothing to do, something catches your eye, and you play a, well, a sort of game with yourself, watching the thing, letting your mind ride with the patterns."

  "I know." He was running with it now; I didn't want to interfere.

  He rubbed his cheek, thinking deeply. "Well, the overhead lights were off. The bright ones. That gave us a better picture of the scopes, I guess. Anyway, I stared at the lens, the orange-red one that blinked when the scope waves peaked. And then things sort of got a little crazy."

  I forced myself to remain casual. "How do you mean that, Ed?"

  His hands moved uncomfortably. "It's hard to say, Mr. Rand. One moment I was looking at the light, the blinking—I remember the reflection seemed to fill my glasses as I stared at it—and then suddenly it wasn't blinking any more. It was a, well, a steady light."

  "Had it been turned on that way?"

  "No." He said that clearly. "That's what I thought at the moment. That a switch had gone bad and the light was now on, just like any light. But that wasn't it." He shook his head slowly. "Miss Michele tried to explain that to me, but I guess I'm still pretty confused about it all. I mean, she said that the blinking pattern remained, only that I wasn't consciously paying attention to it any more."

  I made a fast mental note to check that out with Kim. And to check all the records. I thought I knew what was giving fits to Ed Taylor, but I held off going any further until I had some more information.

  "That does sound a bit odd," I agreed with Taylor. "Did she tell you the blink rate?"

  "Sure. It was standard, Mr. Rand. We usually run between sixteen and twenty peaks per second,"

  he said. "The working range is twelve to thirty, but that's one extreme to the other."

  I knew that, of course.

  ". . . and she said we were holding about nineteen—eighteen or nineteen—per second."

  I chewed my lip. "Ed, you know you can't see a blink rate of nineteen per second, don't you?"

  "Yeah. That sort of shook me when I started the alpha tests," he said easily. "Then it was Dr.

  Vollmer, I think, explained to me that I was correlating the blinks. I mean, even though my eyes wouldn't register that fast a beat as a blinking light—I would see it as a steady light—I knew about the blink rate; I was controlling my own alpha-wave pattern, and so I knew it. Inside me I knew this was so. He said—Dr. Vollmer, I mean—he said that it was something like an optical illusion, but one that was taking place within the brain."

  "He was right, too," I added, hoping that Taylor would accept in my own words that what had happened to him, in his "seeing" a blink pattern too fast for the eyes to notice as separate flashes of light, wasn't at all unusual for an alpha adept.

  "But where did the trouble begin?" I prodded gently. "When did you get the feeling that something was going wrong?"

  The aura of discomfort was over him again. I cursed to myself; he was as touchy as a nervous cat.

  "Well, I'm sort of piecing it together now, Mr. Rand. Like knowing things now, that Miss Michele told me about, that I didn't know before."

  "Take it any way you like, Ed," I said to calm him down.

  "The way I look at it is that—it's hard to get all this straight —well, suddenly the blinking pattern was wrong." He shook his head, a miserable expression on his face. "Suddenly it wasn't blinking any more. That's the steady light I told you about. It was steady, all right. Just a steady light. Miss Michele told me that the blink pattern had never changed—she showed me the recording to prove it—that it was going on just like before."

  He looked up, a hint of defiance in his voice. "But that's not how it was to me," he said. "Just that steady light, and getting bigger and bigger all the time."

  I didn't know that. "What do you mean, Ed?"

  "The light, that orange-red light. Suddenly it seemed to expand. No," he corrected himself. "Not suddenly. A gradual and steady expansion would be more like it."

  He had started to perspire as if under some growing strain. But why?

  "I remember that my glasses were the same orange-red color," he said slowly. "As if the glass had been tinted. I don't know why, but it seemed like that. And there was something else that was awfully strange. I'd never felt it before."

  His body stiffened, and he became almost antagonistic, as if knowing before he spoke the words that I wouldn't believe him. "It was time, Mr. Rand. Time."

  "What happened, Ed?"

  "Time. It began to slow down, as if the seconds were dragging, and everything was stretching out.

  And the light got brighter and brighter until it began to fill the entire room." The words spilled in a rush from his lips. "It all happened before I knew it was happening and yet it seemed to take forever. I got scared. Real scared, I mean. All the way through me. I had this feeling that it was wrong, all wrong; that everything was wrong. And there was this terrible blazing light, the orange-red light from the panel. It seemed to be all over the room and inside me, and it scared the absolute bejesus out of me and I tried to speak; I wanted to tell them to turn off the light, but I couldn't talk, and I couldn't move. You ever have a dream like that, Mr. Rand, where you're in a fight with someone and you want to hit him but you can't move your hands; you just can't move them; it's like everything is in glue?" He leaned back, gasping, the perspiration glistening on his face.

  "That's what it was like. That Goddamned light, and time, it was gone, and I tried to shout at them, tried to get up, but I couldn't. I just couldn't. And . . . and . . ." His voice trailed away and he stared at the floor.

  "And that's when you fainted," I added.

  "I don't know," he mumbled. "But that's what they told me. Later, I mean. They said I was out for about ten minutes. I didn't remember a thing about it." His eyes were imploring. "Jesus, Mr. Rand, but I was scared. Real scared. What's going to happen now?"

  I glanced at the papers on my desk. "Something a lot more pleasant than what happened before," I said with a smile. "I've studied the medical reports. You've got a pretty common disease, Ed. Around here especially."

  He waited for me to continue.

  "You've been working too hard," I said lightly. "Just plain old-fashioned drudgery got you down, that's all. The medical report says you're almost worn out. But there's an easy cure for that."

  He still waited, afraid to interrupt.

  "Plain old rest, Ed. That's all. You could have keeled over anywhere. At home watching a television show, driving your c
ar; anywhere. But you're a lucky bastard. Since it happened while you were on the job, you get the benefits of your employment."

  "What do you mean, Mr. Rand?"

  I grinned. "I mean you get thirty days off—medical rest, so to speak. With full pay, I should add."

  He beamed. "That's a lot of fishing a man can do. In thirty days, I mean."

  We laughed together.

  I didn't tell him that before he lost consciousness in the test cubicle he had gone into hysterical, uncontrolled convulsions.

  22

  major harold konigsberg, MD, USAF, sat across my desk, relaxed behind a long Jamaica cigar I'd offered him when he came to the apartment. Major Konigsberg, flight surgeon at the Air Force Academy, had come in response to a call I'd put in to him. If I were moving along the right path, then the major could well fill in the missing pieces to the puzzle of Ed Taylor.

  Kim sat in with us. For the most part she had been witness more than participant in the exchange between myself and the major. Konigsberg had read her report on the incident of Ed Taylor. Before the major asked some questions of his own, I wanted him to have as much information as I'd obtained so far.

  That alone had been a sticky proposition. Security. It leaped up between myself and the major like a dragon's tooth. I raised all kinds of hell with Tom Smythe to break down the security barriers. Tom came through only after he'd run his own check on Konigsberg, grilled the man personally, and sworn him to silence. If the major even remembered anything after he left the meeting with Kim and myself, Smythe told him grimly, he'd be shipped to Greenland for the next hundred years.

  It didn't seem to bother Konigsberg. I think that in the fourteen years of his military service he must have heard the same speech seven times every year. Smythe seems to forget that there are security zealots sprinkled liberally throughout the government and that their messages all have the same weary sound to them.

  Major Konigsberg read Kim's official report, raised his eyebrows several times, puffed earnestly on the cigar, and then lowered the report to my desk. He flicked ashes into the waste-basket near his chair and looked at me.