The Cosmic Computer quotes

Conn Maxwell, at the armor-glass front of the observation deck, watched the landscape rush out of the horizon and vanish beneath the ship, ten thousand feet down.

He thought he knew how an hourglass must feel with the sand slowly draining out.

It had been six months to Litchfield when the Mizar lifted out of La Plata Spaceport and he watched Terra dwindle away. It had been two months to Litchfield when he boarded the City of Asgard at the port of the same name on Odin.

Was Poictesme a Graveyard of Dreams? No; Junkyard of Empire. The Terran Federation had impoverished a hundred planets, devastated a score, actually depopulated at least three, to keep the System States Alliance from seceding.

It hadn’t been a victory. It had only been a lesser defeat.

There was a crowd, almost a mob, on the dock; nearly everybody in topside Litchfield. He spotted old Colonel Zareff, with his white hair and plum-brown skin, and Tom Brangwyn, the town marshal, red-faced and bulking above everybody else.

“Its memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning all its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations, and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce new facts, and predicting future events, and …”

And if you’d asked such a computer, “Is there a God?” it would have simply answered, “Present.”

“We’d have won the War, except for Merlin,” Zareff was declaring.

As lost and wretched as Kurt Fawzi or Judge Ledue, if they lost their belief in Merlin. He started to say something like that, and then thought better of it.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

He paused for effect, then continued: “That can mean only one thing. Systematic suppression, backed by the whole force of the Terran Federation. A gigantic conspiracy of silence!”

Brother! If they swallow that, I have it made; they’ll swallow anything!

They did, all but Lucas. He banged his fist on the table.

“Where do you suppose it is?” Kurt Fawzi was asking. “Up at the very top, I suppose. Let’s go up and work down; I can’t wait till we’ve found it.”

Like a kid on Christmas Eve, Conn thought. And there was no Santa Claus, and Christmas had been abolished.

The place was built in concentric circles, level above level. Combat equipment nearest the tunnel exit and nearest the vertical shaft, and ambulances and decontamination units and equipment for relief and rebuilding next. Storerooms, mile on circular mile of them.

They had gathered here, and talked for a long time. Then they had risen, for a final toast, and when it was drunk, they had hurled their glasses against the wall and smashed them.

Then they had gone out, leaving the broken glass and the empty bottles; knowing that they would never return.

He looked down the starlit Mall ahead of him. Somebody, maybe Lester Dawes and Morgan Gatworth and Lorenzo Menardes, had gotten things finished and cleaned up. The pavement was smooth and unbroken; the litter had vanished.

“It’s done wonderful things already, just because people started looking for it,”

he said. “Some of these days, they’re going to realize that they had Merlin all along and didn’t know it.”

They even found refrigerators and freeze-bins full of meat and vegetables fresh after forty years. That surprised everybody, for the power units had gone dead long ago. Then it was noticed that they were covered with collapsium.

Anything that would stop cosmic rays was a hundred percent efficient as a heat insulator.

Coming in, the first day, Conn had seen an almost completed hypership bulking above the domes and roofs of Port Carpenter in the distance. He saw it again on screen from a pickup atop the central tower.

There were any number of ways in which a work-robot could be shot out of commission with a pistol. All of them would be by the purest of pure luck.

The next time we go into a place like this, Conn thought, we take a couple of bazookas along.

“Turn everything off and let’s go. See what we can do outside.”

It had gone crazy, literally. It had been getting too many contradictory orders from its supervisor, and its circuits were overloaded and its relays jammed.

Rats in mazes and human-type people in financial difficulties go psychotic in very much the same way.

The two surviving all-purpose robots were also headed for a padded repair shop. They had come close enough to each other to activate their anticollision safeties. Immediately, they flew apart.

If left alone, their power units would run down in a year or so; until then, they would keep on trying.

Soulless intelligences, indeed!

Then it occurred to him that for the past however-long-it-had-been he hadn’t heard from Mohammed Matsui. He jiggled his radio.

“And that’s what Father and I are trying to do.

You’re going into the woods with a book on how to chop down a tree, and no ax.

” Fawzi looked at him in surprise, started to say something, and thought better of it. “If we want prosperity, we need tools. Our problem is loss of markets.

The man was a lunatic; he made Fawzi’s office gang look frigidly sane. Furthermore, he was an ignoramus. He had no idea what a computer could or couldn’t do.

Anybody who could build a computer of the sort he thought Merlin was wouldn’t need it, he would be God.

As he talked, Conn began to be nagged by an odd sense of recognition. He’d seen this Carl Leibert before, somewhere, and somehow he was sure that the long white hair and the untrimmed beard weren’t part of the picture. That puzzled him.

Klem Zareff fell in with him as they were going to dinner. “Revealed in a dream!” the old Rebel snorted. “

One thing you can always get away with lying about is what you dream.

”

… and Charley Gatworth were teaching themselves and each other hyperspatial astrogation, which was the art of tossing a ship into some everythingless noplace outside normal space-time, and then pulling her out again by her bootstraps at some other place in the normal continuum, light-years away.

Roughly, it compared to shooting hummingbirds on the wing, blindfolded, with a not particularly accurate pistol, from a mile-a-minute merry-go-round.

That was something you could only do with a computer. A human, with a slide rule, a pencil and pad, could figure it out, of course—if he had fifty-odd thousand years to do it. A good computer did it in thirty seconds.

Fortunately, these two hated each other as venomously as both did the Cybernarchists, and spent most of their energies attacking each other’s meetings. The news-services were beginning to publish casualty lists, some heavy enough for outpost fighting between a couple of regular armies.

One thing, it helped the employment situation. Everybody was hiring mercenaries.

“But what,” Conn asked, “are the sane people doing?”

“Murchison!” Lucas hooted. “Why, he’s nobody! Federation Minister-General; all the authority of the Terran Federation, and nothing to enforce it with.

He doesn’t have a position, here; he has a disease. Sleeping sickness.

”

He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on Koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going to take charge here.

He had just been unanimously elected Indispensable Man.

“Bless you, young man!” Carl Leibert cried. “At last, the Great Computer! Those who come after will reckon this the Year Zero of the Age of Regeneration. I will go to my chamber and return thanks in prayer.”

“The controls and programming machine for Merlin.” He turned to Kurt Fawzi. “You always claimed that Merlin was here in Force Command. You had it backward.

Force Command is inside Merlin.

”

“No more Federation?” Judge Ledue asked incredulously. “Why, the Federation, the Federation …”

The Federation would last forever. Anybody knew that. There just couldn’t be no more Federation.

“That’s right,” Shanlee said. “We had trouble believing it, too. Remember, we were Federation officers. The Federation was our religion. Just like patriotism used to be, back in the days of nationalism. We checked for error. We made detail analyses.

“That’s right,” Shanlee said. “We had trouble believing it, too. Remember, we were Federation officers.

The Federation was our religion.

Just like patriotism used to be, back in the days of nationalism. We checked for error. We made detail analyses. We ran it all over again. It was no use.