«They were thorough,» he said. «Terrifyingly thorough. There’s no life here. None that we could find. Not even an insect. And why not, do you think? Perhaps because a bug might get itself entangled in a gear or something and bollix up the works. So the bugs must go.»
Griffith wagged his head. «In fact, they suggest the thinking of a bug itself. An ant, say. A colony of ants. A soulless mutual society that goes ahead in blind, but intelligent obedience toward a chosen goal. And if that were so, my friend, your theory that they used the calculator to work out economic and social theories is so much poppycock.»
«It’s not my theory,» Lawrence said. «It was only one of several speculations. Another equally as valid might be that they were trying to work out an answer to the universe, why it is and what it is and where it might be going.»
«And how,» said Griffith.
«You’re right. And how. And if they were, I feel sure it was no idle wondering. There must have been a pressure of some sort, some impelling reason why they felt that they must do it.»
«Go on,» said Taylor. «I can hardly wait. Carry out the fairy tale to its bitter end. They found out about the universe and—»
«I don’t think they did,» Buckley said quietly. «No matter what it was, the chances are against their finding the final answer to the thing they sought.»
«For my part,» said Griffith, «I would incline to think they might have. Why else would they go away and leave this great machine behind? They found the thing they wanted, so they had no further use for the tool that they had built.»
«You’re right,» said Buckley. «They had no further use for it, but not because it had done everything that it could do and that wasn’t quite enough. They left it because it wasn’t big enough, because it couldn’t work the problem they wanted it to work.»
«Big enough!» cried Scott. «Why, all they had to do was add another tier, all around the planet.»
Buckley shook his head. «Remember what I said about limiting factors? Well, there’s one that you can’t beat. Put steel under fifty-thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet’s surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.»
Griffith let out a long breath. «Obsolete,» he said.
«An analytical machine is a matter of size,» said Buckley. «Each integrator corresponds to a cell in the human brain. It has a limited function and capacity. And what one cell does must be checked by two other cells. The ‘tell me thrice’ principle of making sure that there is no error.»
«They could have cleared it and started over again,» said Scott.
«Probably they did,» said Buckley. «Many, many times. Although there always would have been an element of chance that each time it was cleared it might not be—well, rational or moral. Clearing on a machine this size would be a shock, like corrective surgery on the brain.
«Two things might have happened. They might have reached a clearance limit. Too much residual memory clinging to the tubes—»
«Subconscious,» said Griffith. «It would be interesting to speculate if a machine could develop a subconscious.»
«Or,» continued Buckley, «they might have come to a problem that was so complicated, a problem with so many facets, that this machine, despite its size, was not big enough to handle it.»
«So they went off to hunt a bigger planet,» said Taylor, not quite believing it. «Another planet small enough to live and work on, but enough bigger so they could have a larger calculator.»
«It would make sense,» said Scott, reluctantly. «They’d be starting fresh, you see, with the answers they had gotten here. And with improved designs and techniques.»
«And now,» said King, «the human race takes over. I wonder what we’ll be able to do with a thing like this? Certainly not what its builders intended it should be used for.»
«The human race,» said Buckley, «won’t do a thing for a hundred years, at least. You can bet on that. No engineer would dare to turn a single wheel of this machine until he knew exactly what it’s all about, how it’s made and why. There are millions of circuits to be traced, millions of tubes to check, blueprints to be made, technicians to be trained.»
Lawrence said sharply: «That’s not our problem, King. We are the bird dogs. We hunt out the quail and flush it and our job is done and we go on to something else. What the race does with the things we find is something else again.»
He lifted a pack of camp equipment off the floor and slung it across his shoulder.
«Everyone set to go?» he asked.
Ten miles up, Taylor leaned over the guardrail of the ramp to look down into the maze of machinery below him.
A spoon slid out of his carelessly packed knapsack and went spinning down.
They listened to it for a long time, tinkling as it fell.
Even after they could hear it no longer, they imagined that they could.
Masquerade
Clifford D. Simak’s journals show that he was paid $125 for this story. He sent it, under the title «Mercutian Masquerade,» to John W. Campbell, Jr., the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, on August 11, 1940, received news of its acceptance a week later, and it would appear in the March 1941 issue. The story seems to have been part of what the author intended to be a series of stories set on the various planets of our Solar System (a project that the author seemed to abandon before completion, which may be just as well).
It’s rather a peculiar story, with some disturbing elements, including its portrayal of the character «Old Creepy,» but I am interested in the similarity of the Roman Candles to the «Ghosts» of the story «Hermit of Mars,» which appeared less than two years earlier. (Another disturbing element here is the portrayal of a (human) person named Rastus. He is described once as «a smoke,» and once as a Negro; and he clearly presents a stereotype not unusual in pulp fiction of the 1930s. Clifford Simak did not use any of the more common derogatory terms, and he would never do another such portrayal.)
Just as an interesting historical aside: I note that the issue of Astounding in which «Masquerade» appeared also featured two stories by Robert A. Heinlein—a short story, and the conclusion of his serial, Sixth Column (which was published under his pseudonym, Anson MacDonald). (I find this interesting both because of the fact that the two future science fiction Grand Masters would always have great respect for each other—and because Cliff Simak used «Anson» in the name «Anson Lee,» which he would use a number of times in later, unrelated, stories.)
—dww
Old Creepy was down in the control room, sawing lustily on his screeching fiddle.
On the sun-blasted plains outside the Mercutian Power Center, the Roman Candles, snatching their shapes from Creepy’s mind, had assumed the form of Terrestrial hillbillies and were cavorting through the measures of a square dance.
In the kitchen, Rastus rolled two cubes about the table, crooning to them, feeling lonesome because no one would shoot a game of craps with him.
Inside the refrigeration room, Mathilde, the cat, stared angrily at the slabs of frozen beef above her head, felt the cold of the place and meowed softly, cursing herself for never being able to resist the temptation of sneaking in when Rastus wasn’t looking.