ROBOT RUNS LOOSE; TERRORIZES TASMANIA
2 Dead, 7 Injured after Rampage
IS THERE AN UPPER LIMIT TO INTELLIGENCE?
Study Suggests Few Meet Their Potential
Social Conditions Get in Way
Beliefs Block Mental Processes
Trick Is to Keep Open Mind, According to Experts
PATENT GRANTED TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
“Bob White” Gets Groundbreaking Authorization
MIT Project Develops New Sensing System
Next: Are AIs Sentient? James Watson Parker: “They Have No Souls”
LONGEVITY BREAKTHROUGH IMMINENT?
Today’s Infants May Get Indefinite Life Span
World Council Debates “Talis” Research “Where Will We Put Everybody?”
MIDDLE EAST TURMOIL UNLIKELY TO END SOON
DODGERS TRADE FOR BAXTER
HURRICANE SEASON WILL START
EARLIER THIS YEAR, LAST LONGER
Storm Intensity Likely to Continue to Grow
Atmosphere Seeding Helps, “But Probably Too Little Too Late”
STOCKS MOVE TO RECORD HIGHS
LITERACY RATE IN NAU CONTINUES TO DROP
AI Might Write New War and Peace, But Will Anybody Read It?
BEEMER CLAIMS HARM FROM RELIGIOUS TEACHING
Anti-Christ Loose in North Carolina?
chapter 17
Intelligence is like pornography. I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.
— Gregory MacAllister, “Keeper of the Keys”
One of the things MacAllister disliked about the Salvator was that, unless you were on the bridge, you had no windows. On the Evening Star, the walls of the dining area had been transparent, and even his compartment had provided a view of the stars. The Salvator was oppressive. The outside world was limited to what you could see on a set of display screens. It wasn’t at all the same thing.
Hutch had explained to him once that windows, viewports in the vernacular, needed special reinforcement because they didn’t withstand air pressure well, and it was simply safer not to have them, to use monitors instead. Nevertheless, he didn’t like it very much. He wondered what the Orion tour ships were like.
They were seated in the common room. The ship was still accelerating away from Earth, preparing to make its jump into the foggy morass they called hyperspace. Amy couldn’t take her eyes off the displays, and he could hear Valya on the bridge talking to the AI again. MacAllister was trying to manage a conversation with Eric. But the guy’s enthusiasm for the flight was almost beyond bearing. “Something I’ve wanted to do all my life, Mac,” he said. “I can hardly believe I’m here.” And: “Look at that moon. Isn’t that incredible?” And: “A lot of people don’t like to admit it, but in the end this is the way we’ll define ourselves. Make the stars our own, or sit home.” He’d attempted a piercing look, in case MacAllister missed the implied criticism. The guy was as subtle as an avalanche.
Amy Taylor was also awed by the experience. But she was fifteen, so it was tolerable. She’d opened a book, Norma Rollins’s The Nearby Stars, but she was too absorbed in the receding Earth-moon system to pay much attention to it. She told MacAllister she knew about his exploits on Deepsix and asked him to describe the experience. That was the way she’d put it. Exploits. In fact all he’d done was try to stay alive for a few days while Hutch figured out a way to save all their asses.
Amy seemed to have done surprisingly well for herself, considering she was growing up under the care of a full-time politician. The mother had run off years before with the senator’s campaign manager, abandoning both her husband and Amy. That must have been hard to take, and he wondered whether her desire to follow in Hutch’s footsteps didn’t really mask a desire to get away from her life at home.
Eventually the acceleration eased off, and Valya came back to join them. She inquired whether everybody was feeling all right, then told them they’d be jumping in about six hours.
“We’re headed where first?” asked MacAllister. “Something-or-other Cygnus?”
“61 Cygni,” she said. “It’s eleven light-years out. Takes about a day to get there.” She was wearing a white jumpsuit. Her red hair, cut shorter than it had been in Tampa, looked more military.
The furniture wasn’t especially comfortable. MacAllister grumbled at the prospect of having to deal with it for the next few weeks. “How long have you been doing this?” he asked Valya. “Piloting Academy ships?”
“Almost fifteen years,” she said.
“You don’t get bored?”
“Never.”
He recalled Hutch’s talking about how tiresome it could get, how pilots often made the same flights back and forth. How it could go on for months. Or the long flights. The mission to Lookout had taken the better part of a year one way. He tried to imagine being cooped up inside these bulkheads until next January.
Amy must have read his expression. “I wouldn’t want that either,” she said. “But you can get pretty cooped up groundside, too.” She’d come aboard prepared to talk like a pilot. Groundside. Bulkheads. I’m going aft for a minute when she was talking about the washroom. The kid was right at home. But talk was cheap. MacAllister was prepared to give her a couple days before the idealism came crashing down. “If my father had his way,” she continued, “I’d be stuck the rest of my life in courtrooms and offices.”
“And on beaches and at parties,” said MacAllister. “You won’t find many of those out here.” As a rule, he didn’t approve of adolescents. They were rarely smart enough to understand the depths of their inexperience. To be aware they really didn’t know anything. The few he encountered invariably behaved as if their opinions were as valid as his. Amy was no exception. But there was a degree of shyness about the child and an intellectual openness that engaged his sympathy. She thought the world a friendly and well-lighted place, where people really cared about each other, and all the stories had happy endings.
“Mac,” she said, “I was surprised when I heard you were coming.”
“Why was that?”
“You don’t like the Academy.”
MacAllister tried to explain his position. It was hard to do with Eric sitting there casting disapproving glances his way and Valya rolling her eyes.
When he’d finished, she looked at him a long time. Finally, she said quietly, “It’s wrong, Mac. We went over the greenhouse thing in school. It’s not just a matter of money. Ms. Harkin says it’s people’s attitudes that have to change.”
“Ms. Harkin’s your teacher?”
“In Current Events, yes.”
“She’s right. But that doesn’t justify wasting money somewhere else.”
Amy’s eyes got very round. “It’s not a waste, Mac.”
Valya smiled. “As long as we have people like you, Amy, we’ll be okay.”
“They’ll never shut it down,” said Eric, his eyes locked on the receding moon. “They could no more do that than the Europeans could have turned their backs on America after Columbus.”
“Or we could have gone to the moon,” said MacAllister, “then forgotten how to do it.”
Eric was one of those people who would spend his life reaching for something better than he had because he wasn’t smart enough to realize what really mattered. MacAllister thought how much better the world would be if there were fewer people like Eric and more like himself. Pragmatists. People who kept open minds. Who were content to live their lives, enjoy the sunrise, make the moment count.
THEY HAD AN uneasy dinner. MacAllister understood he was the cause of that. Eric and Amy both wanted to talk about where they were going, how exciting it all was, but he loomed over the general enthusiasm like a dark cloud. He couldn’t help it. Couldn’t pretend to get excited because they were going somewhere to look at a star up close. You’ve seen one burning gasbag, you’ve seen them all. But he tried. While they dined on roast beef he made occasional comments about how he’d never been to 61 Cygni, or 63 Cygni, or whatever it was, and wasn’t that where the alien monument was? He knew damned well it was, but it sounded self-effacing. Even if he wasn’t a good enough actor to ask the question as if he really cared.