And think of the consequences of that—I mean, the negative consequences of the babies that Kitty and I didn't have. Did we miss out on a new Mozart? A Lee Harvey Oswald? Maybe just a hell of a solid Brooklyn fireman who might have saved a more largely consequential life than his own, or mine? Think of them. And that's all you can do with those particular consequences, because they didn't get born.
Percival Christopher Wren didn't mean to kill Paulie. The sad old derelict on the fire escape never intended to break up Kitty and me. Intentions don't matter.
We all live in each others' pockets. If I drive -my car along Mulholland Drive tonight, I only mean to keep my date with that pretty publicity girl from Paramount. I don't even know you're alive, do I? But the car is burning up the gasoline and pumping out the poison gas that makes the smog; and maybe it's just that little bit of extra exhaust fume in the air that bubbles your lungs out with emphysema. It doesn't matter to you what I mean to do. You're just as dead. I don't suppose I ever in my life really meant to hurt anybody, except possibly that J.B. company clerk. But he got off without a scratch, and meanwhile I may be killing you.
So I walk out on my balcony and stare through the haze at the lights of Los Angeles. I look at where they all live, the black militants and the aerospace engineers, the Desilu sound men and the storefront soul-savers, the kids who go to the Academie Fran§aise and the little old ladies with/"Back Up Our Boys" bumper stickers on their cars. I remember what they, and you, and each and every one of you have done to me, this half a century I've been battered and bribed into my present shape and status; but what are they, and all of you, doing to each other this night?
The Schematic Man
Playboy once had an illustration that they liked so well that they wanted to get a story written around it, and they asked me to write it. They were paying, I think, $750 for a very short story at that time, so I did. In fact, I wrote them two stories for the same illustration, and they bought one.
The other was this one, "The Schematic Man." 1 really had thought they might buy it, and it puzzled me that they hadn't, so 1 put it in my file in the hope that time would make clear to me why they hadn't snapped it up, and I forgot it. Until a couple of years later, when I came across it, and read it, and still could not see why they hadn't bought it.
So I retyped it, making a few fairly small revisions, and sent it off to them, and this time they did buy it .. . not for $750, but for $2,000.
I know I'm not really a funny man, but I don't like other people to know it. I do what other people without much sense of humor do: I tell jokes. If we're sitting next to each other at a faculty senate and I want to introduce myself, I probably say: "Bederkind is my name, and computers are my game."
Nobody laughs much. Like all my jokes, it needs to be explained. The joking part is that it was through game theory that I first became interested in computers and the making of mathematical models. Sometimes when I'm explaining it, I say there that the mathematical ones are the only models I've ever had a chance to make. That gets a smile, anyway. I've figured out why: Even if you don't really get much out of the play on words, you can tell it's got something to do with sex, and we all reflexively smile when anybody says anything sexy.
I ought to tell you what a mathematical model is, right? All right. It's simple. It's a kind of picture of something made out of numbers. You use it because it's easier to make numbers move than to make real things move.
Suppose I want to know what the planet Mars is going to do over the next few years. I take everything I know about Mars and I turn it into numbers—a number for its speed in orbit, another number for how much it weighs, another number for how many miles it is in diameter, another number to express how strongly the Sun pulls it toward it and all that. Then I tell the computer that's all it needs to know about Mars, and I go on to tell it all the same sorts of numbers about the Earth, about Venus, Jupiter, the Sun itself—about all the other chunks of matter floating around in the neighbourhood that I think are likely to make any difference to Mars. I then teach the computer some simple rules about how the set of numbers that represents Jupiter say, affects the numbers that represent Mars: the law of inverse squares, some rules of celestial mechanics, a few relativistic corrections —well, actually, there are a lot of things it needs to know. But not more than I can tell it.
When I have done all this—not exactly in English but in a kind of language that it knows how to handle—the computer has a mathematical model of Mars stored inside it. It will then whirl its mathematical Mars through mathematical space for as many orbits as I like. I say to it, "1997 June 18 2400 GMT," and it . . . it . . . well, I guess the word for it is, it imagines where Mars will be, relative to my back-yard Questar, at midnight Greenwich time on the 18di of June, 1997, and tells me which way to point.
It isn't real Mars that it plays with. It's a mathematical model, you see. But for the purposes of knowing where to point my little telescope, it does everything that "real Mars" would do for me, only much faster. I don't have to wait for 1997; I can find out in five minutes.
It isn't only planets that can carry on a mathematical metalife in the memory banks of a computer. Take my friend Schmuel. He has a joke, too, and his joke is that he makes 20 babies a day in his computer. What he means by that is that, after six years of trying, he finally succeeded in writing down the numbers that describe the development of a human baby in its mother's uterus, all the way from conception to birth. The point of that is that then it was comparatively easy to write down the numbers for a lot of things that happen to babies before they're born. Momma has high blood pressure. Momma smokes three packs a day. Momma catches scarlet fever or a kick in the belly. Momma keeps making it with Poppa every night until they wheel her into the delivery room. And so on. And the point of that is that this way, Schmuel can see some of the things that go wrong and make some babies get born retarded, or blind, or with retrolental fibroplasia or an inability to drink cow's milk. It's easier than sacrificing a lot of pregnant women and cutting them open to see.
O.K., you don't want to hear any more about mathematical models, because what kicks are there in mathematical models for you? I'm glad you asked. Consider a for instance. For instance, suppose last night you were watching the Late, Late and you saw Carole Lombard, or maybe Marilyn Monroe with that dinky little skirt blowing up over those pretty thighs. I assume you know that these ladies are dead. I also assume that your glands responded to those cathode-tube flickers as though they were alive. And so you do get some kicks from mathematical models, because each of those great girls, in each of their poses and smiles, was nothing but a number of some thousands of digits, expressed as a spot of light on a phosphor tube. With some added numbers to express the frequency patterns of their voices. Nothing else.
And the point of that (how often I use that phrase!) is that a mathematical model not only represents the real thing but sometimes it's as good as the real thing. No, honestly. I mean, do you really believe that if it had been Marilyn or Carole in the flesh you were looking at, across a row of floodlights, say, that you could have taken away any more of them than you gleaned from the shower of electrons that made the phosphors display their pictures?