“Go ahead,” Rudak conceded cheerfully. “I’ll help the others.”
In two bounds he caught up to the “thoughtless ones,” pushed them aside, crawled under the tortoise, grunted, and lifted it on his back. “Catch me if you can!” he thundered in a strained voice, and he started to run at a gallop toward the settlement.
The thoughtless ones rushed after him, whooping. Evgeny grabbed the hind leg, balanced it across the back of his neck like a yoke, and started jogging after them. The leg was serrated, and fairly heavy.
“I’m taking bets for the hind leg,” proclaimed Pavel Rudak from the doorway of the laboratory. “I’ll even bet my own hind leg that our correspondent is tormented by thirst!”
Evgeny, who was sitting by the laboratory wall, sighed quietly, and fanned himself with somebody’s straw hat. His neck burned. “You win,” he moaned.
“Where are the thoughtless servants? How dare they abandon such an honored guest? It’s an affront to the entire European Information Center!”
“Your thoughtless servants are worshiping the hind leg in the building across the way,” answered Evgeny, getting up. “They asked me to wait here for a little while. They said you would be back in a minute. That was just half an hour ago.”
“Disgraceful!” Rudak said with some embarrassment. “Let’s go, Comrade Slavin. I’ll try to make amends for their crimes. I’ll slake your thirst and throw open unto you the hatches of the coolers.”
“Get to it!”
Rudak took him by the arm and brought him at an angle across the street, to a tidy white cottage. It was clean and cool there. Rudak sat him down at the table, placed in front of him a glass, a decanter, and a bucket of ice, and set about playing host. “There’s no delivery line here,” he boomed. “We do the cooking ourselves. In cyberkitchens.”
“A UKM-207?” asked Evgeny.
“No, I have an American system.”
Evgeny did not eat. He drank and watched Rudak eating. Rudak cleaned his plate, emptied his jug, and admonished, “You don’t have to look at me that way. That’s yesterday’s supper, today’s breakfast, and today’s dinner.”
Evgeny stealthily emptied the very last out of the jugs and thought, And today’s supper.
“You’re in luck, correspondent,” Rudak continued. “Things really are interesting around here nowadays. They will be even more interesting tomorrow, when Professor Lomba, the director of the CODD project, gets back.”
“I’ve seen Professor Lomba,” said Evgeny.
Rudak stopped eating and quickly asked, “When?”
“Early this morning, in Gibson. He was consulting an acquaintance of mine. Only I didn’t know he was the director of the CODD project.”
Rudak lowered his eyes and once again set to eating. “What did you think of him?” he inquired after a moment.
“How should I put it…?” said Evgeny. “He seemed gloomy more than anything.”
“Mmm, yes,” drawled Rudak. He pushed the plate away. “This evening will be very interesting.” He sighed. “Well, Comrade Slavin, please ask your questions.”
Evgeny hurriedly loaded the dictaphone. “First of all,” he said, “what is the Great CODD?”
“One moment.” Rudak leaned against the back of his armchair and put his hands behind his head. “First I must ask you something. What sort of education have you had?”
“I graduated from the medical institute, the institute of journalism, and the training courses for a spaceflight surgeon.”
“And all that was a century and a half ago,” Rudak elaborated. “And nothing else?”
“I’ve traveled over the whole Planet as a correspondent, an old newshound. My field of scientific interest is comparative linguistics.”
“So,” said Rudak. “And you haven’t heard anything about Komatsuwara’s seven principles?”
“Nothing.”
“Nor, of course, about the algebra of information fields?”
“No.”
“Nor about the fundamental theorem of information dissipation?”
Evgeny kept silent. Rudak thought a moment and said, “All right. The court understands everything. We will do all we can. Just listen very carefully, and if I get carried away, grab me by the hind leg.”
This is what Evgeny understood: The Collector of Dispersed Data was intended primarily for the collection of dispersed data. This, to be sure, was clear enough from the name. “Dispersed data” meant traces of all events and phenomena dispersed in space and time. Komatsuwara’s first principle (the only one he could understand) stated that nothing in nature, and even more in society, ever disappeared without a trace—everything left evidence. The overwhelming majority of these traces were to be found in the form of extremely dispersed data. In the last analysis, they had the form of energy of one sort or another, and the collection problem was much complicated by the fact that over millions of years the original forms underwent repeated changes. In other words, the traces were laid one upon another, mixed up, and often were erased by traces of subsequent events and phenomena. It was theoretically possible to find and restore any trace—the trace left by the collision of a quantum of light with a molecule in the hide of a brontosaurus, or the trace of a brontosaurus tooth on a tree fern. The Great CODD had been built for the searching out, the sorting, and the comparing of these traces, and for their transformation into the original forms of data—for instance, into images.
Evgeny picked up only an extremely murky impression of how the Great CODD worked. First he imagined billions upon billions of cybernetic protozoan microinformants, which would wander in clouds throughout the whole world, climbing to the very stars, collecting dispersed traces of the distant past and dragging them to some immense mechanical memory storehouse. Then his imagination sketched for him a web of wires embracing the whole Planet, stretching between gigantic towers which were scattered in hundreds over islands and continents from pole to pole. In short, he didn’t understand a thing, but did not ask again: he decided that sometime he would listen to the dictaphone tape a few times at leisure, with the corresponding books before his eyes, and then he would understand it all. But then, when Rudak began to discuss the results of his work, Evgeny forgot even about the monsters.
“We have managed to get some very interesting pictures and even entire episodes,” Rudak said. “Of course, the overwhelming majority of materials are waste—hundreds and thousands of frames superimposed one upon another, and the data filter simply breaks down when it attempts to separate them. But still we’ve been able to see something. We have witnessed the flash of a supernova near the sun one hundred million years ago. We have seen the struggles of dinosaurs and episodes of the Battle of Poitiers, the starships of alien visitors to Earth, and something else strange, incomprehensible, to which we so far have nothing corresponding or even analogous.”
“Would it be possible to have a look?” Evgeny asked with a quiver.
“Of course. But let’s return to this afternoon’s topic.”
The Great CODD was not only a collector of dispersed data. It was an unusually complicated and highly independent logical-analytical computer. Its levels held, besides billions of memory cells and logic elements, besides every possible information transformer and filter, its own workships, which it controlled itself. It could even build onto itself, creating new elements and models, and developing its own data. This opened up wide possibilities for its use beyond its primary purpose. At present, for example, it was carrying out all calculations for the Australian economic sphere, was being used to solve many problems in general cybernetics, and was performing functions of precise diagnostics, having for this purpose branches in all the major cities of the Planet and on some off-planet bases. Besides all this, the Great CODD undertook “fortune telling.”