Kayden nodded. “All you’ve done, in other words, is build yourself an automatic library.”
Zander’s eyes widened and narrowed quickly. “You are perceptive, Mr. Kayden. In effect, that is what we have. As yet we have no indication of the least creative impulse in the equipment, or how to initiate it. We have had hopes. At one time, in answering an astronomy question the machine faltered and then wrote, ‘The moon is ardium.’ We were excited and we speculated about new elements, until we discovered that it was merely a partial short in the wiring that had escaped the specialized equipment we have built for the sole purpose of diagnostics and repair.”
“And what is the current program?”
“We are feeding the machine more data each day. Each day we expand the memory factor. Our present theory is that eventually, under the pure mass of data given it, the machine itself will break down. Psychoneurosis on a mechanical plane if you will. The place and manner of the breakdown may in itself stimulate us to provide it with some form of intellectual selectivity.” He smiled woodenly. “We would all be very happy if the last words of the machine were, ‘The hell with it!’ ”
“But you keep giving it these problems.”
“Quite right. The problems are our control. So long as the machine merely repeats back to man what man has fed into it, it will be a failure. So far, that is all that it does. The problems are our continual check to see if by any chance the machine has struck on any creative method.”
“If the creative method isn’t built into it, how do you expect it to acquire it?”
Zander’s smile was broader. “That, my young friend, was the problem which stopped your predecessor. And now it is your problem. If you want to come with me, I’ll show you the mechanics of the machine.”
Kayden rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “No thanks. I’ll look at the woods from a distance and climb the individual trees later. I want some time to think about it.” Zander stood up, smirked. “What are your orders, sir?”
Joseph Kayden looked at him in irritation. “Follow existing orders until they’re countermanded.”
Zander sighed, smiled in a superior fashion and picking up some papers from his desk began to work.
Outside Roger Wald said, “He... he’s a bit peculiar, Mr... I mean... Joe.”
“O.K. I’m going to wander around. You get me fixed up with something to live in besides that shoebox with running water.” Wald hurried off.
Kayden wandered around. He talked to watchmen, electricians, lab assistants, cooks, janitors. At six he was back in his room with his mind full of figures. Nearly nine hundred people lived and worked within the Project Area. Since its inception, the Project had used up over nine hundred millions. There was little chance of a complete cancellation of the Project, as no politician would be willing to take the chance of saying to the people that all that had gone before was a dead loss.
He sat on his bed and stared out the window at the low, pale buildings. Someone had told him that he had an office, but he was too discouraged to even find it. Probably a secretary or two went with the office. “What are your orders, Mr. Kayden? What are you going to do next, Mr. Kayden?”
Roger Wald came at six, eager and breathless. “Your place is ready, Mr. Kayden. I ordered a complete prefab, entirely equipped. The crew has offloaded it at the north end of the area.” Wald had one of the little cars used within the Project area waiting and he helped Joseph Kayden with his luggage.
The pre-fab was small, but luxurious. Kayden felt better as soon as he walked in. He said, “All I need now is Jane.”
“Jane?” Wald asked politely.
“My wife.”
“Oh, of course. Too bad she isn’t permitted.”
“I’d like to take a run down to New York and get stinking,” Kayden said wistfully.
Wald flapped his pale hands. “That isn’t allowed either.”
Wald had dinner brought to the prefab and they ate together. After dinner he sat in front of the synthetic fire, after shooing Wald away, and began smoking jittery cigarettes.
“Jail,” he muttered. “Prison! What am I accused of, judge? Joe Kayden, head of the Automatic Mechanical Library of Nonessential Information. I’d like to kick Zander’s fat head. What do they expect me to do? Hide inside the machine and give the right answers?”
He walked nervously back and forth through the rooms, kicking petulantly at the furniture, scowling at the rugs. Jane might have a plan. Any plan. The whole thing seems wrong. The wrong slant. The wrong angle. A machine that thinks. What is thinking? Got to get basic about it. Very basic. They’re too loaded up with tubes and connections. Need Jane around.
Slowly he felt the pressure of responsibility settling over him. Kayden, the fall guy. The stooge. When would he see Jane? Two months. And then it wouldn’t be like being with her. Chaperoned!
He left the prefab and started to walk. The area was brilliantly floodlighted. After sixty steps a guard stopped him and sent him home. He told the guard that he was in charge of the place, but the guard rested a hand lightly on the deadly air gun and said that no exceptions were made and that the guard detail answered to the War Department, not to the Head of Project.
Two weeks later and twelve pounds lighter, Joe Kayden sat at his big desk in the executive offices and wrote his fifth letter to Jane. It was the third time he had written the same letter. The first two versions had been returned because of matters touched on which concerned the Project. Jane’s letters to him carried so little real news that he suspected that she was having the same trouble, but, of course, would not be permitted to say so in a letter.
She was living in El Paso, where she had found an apartment, and she missed him and she was looking forward to seeing him in New York when he got his first leave.
He puzzled over his letter, trying to find some acceptable way of telling her that he was getting no place on the Project. He watched the shaking of his own hands as he lit another cigarette. He wondered how long he would last — whether it would be better to fake a mental upset as soon as possible. But the thought of the shock treatments scared him. There might be a subsequent personality change which would alienate Jane.
At last he wrote, “I’m very, very happy here, and things are going very, very well. I’m as happy as I told you I’d be when we parted.”
The next morning he had her answer. “Darling, I’m so glad that you’re happy,” she wrote. And then she ignored the entire matter. She babbled away about how she felt that her letters were probably “engramatical,” about how she had played tennis and that the girl she met kept putting “lobes” over her head, about how she was enjoying the “frontal” apartment, about a new three-di movie she had seen about a “Woman of Syn,” about how she had been looking over some of her old school “thesis.”
He felt a quick wave of pity. Jane was trying so hard to be gay in her letters, but he could see that she was going to pieces. Her spelling was usually perfect. He shoved her letter into the top drawer of the desk, and sat, brooding, cursing the fate that had stuck him into the Project.
After lunch he reread her letter. Its absurdity struck him again. Surely Jane knew how to spell “sin.” Jane had a fine neurological education and had had two years of advanced psychiatric nursing.
As he read the letter he took a pencil and circled the obvious errors in spelling. Wald came in and said, “What are you doing?”
“Oh, the wife wrote me and I think she’s going to pieces. Look at the mistakes.”
Wald picked the letter up and glanced at the circled words. He frowned. “Joe, does she know any neurology?”
“Why, yes! Why?”
“Look at this. Engram. Know what this is? A lasting trace left in an organism by psychic experience. And look at this! Frontal. And over here is lobe. Add syn to thesis and you have synthesis. Hey, this is a code, Mr. Kayden!”