Joe snatched the letter. “What?”
“I’ll have to report this to security, Joe.”
Kayden glanced up at him. There was no trace of expression on Roger Wald’s gray face. “You will?”
“Certainly. I’m going to write a detailed report. I certainly hope I won’t forget to send it over to them. Would you like me to get you a good text on neurology?”
Kayden saw the flicker in the gray eyes. He grinned. “You’re O.K., Roger. Yes. Get me a text.”
At three in the morning, Kayden finished the book and tossed it aside, turned out his light. But he couldn’t sleep. Jane had been the first one to make sense. She had guided him to the heart of the problem. A mechanical approach to thinking. When he did fall asleep, it was to dream of her.
Dr. Zander stood up behind his desk and said firmly: “It is unthinkable, Mr. Kayden! An absurdity!”
“You just work here, Doc. I know what I want.”
“You want to run a kindergarten, yes?”
“Possibly. I said to turn off the juice to all your gimmicks. Now listen to what I have to say. What are the two processes in the human mind that we’re trying to duplicate? We’re trying to build engrams, habitual pathways through the mind. Also, we’re trying to create a process of synthesis. Do you agree?”
Zander sat down and said, sullenly: “If you say so, Mr. Kayden.”
Kayden suddenly leaned across the desk and fluttered a paper out of the line of Zander’s vision. Zander turned his head quickly.
“You see what you did? When you saw motion out of the corner of your eye, your nerves told the muscles of your neck to turn your head. You didn’t think about it. That’s an engram, an habitual pattern a mile wide. It would take conscious and hard thought to keep you from turning your head. Does an infant? No. The engram is developed. Listen to me — and stop acting so sullen and superior.
“Take synthesis. In cases of anxiety neurosis, the patient can make no decisions. He thinks of all possible eventualities and they frighten him. Some psychopaths think of no related fact except the one they have in their mind at the moment. In the first place, there is too much synthesis. In the second place there is too little.
“Combine those two factors. Suppose you had a machine into which you built, through varying strengths of electrical current across a field, varying factors of resistance, the faculty of being able to find a path of least resistance depending on the circuit where the electrical impulse started. If your chemists could devise some sort of molecular memory factor, you would have a continually decreasing resistance across this hypothetical field for certain standard questions. In other words, engrams! Don’t you see? Habitual thought patterns! Any new item would have to find its own way across, but the old ones would have an established channel.”
Zander looked faintly interested. He said: “I think I see what you mean, but—”
“Now add the quality of synthesis. I can think of one way to do it. Use a shifting ratio. Each fact stored in the machine’s memory is given a ratio number. Through a sliding value scale, you can alter the ratio numbers in the same way that they affect the problem at hand. For example, the machine may know something about rabbits. If the question you ask the machine, the task you set for it, concerns the orbit of Uranus, then rabbits would get a ratio number of zero. If you’re talking about waltzing mice, rabbits might have a distant bearing and get a very small ratio number. If you’re talking about lettuce, rabbits might have a high ratio number. You people should be able to figure out some method of making the ratio numbers plus and minus. Then, in effect, the machine could add up the pro side, the con side, and arrive at a decision. The decision arrived at would set up the beginning of an habitual pattern across this field I was talking about, thus eliminating some of the processes when a related question is asked. Tell me this, Zander: Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Zander examined his pink, dimpled knuckles. “In a way, I do. It is... is very new, yes? Hard to adjust oneself.”
“Natürlich, my friend. But if your technicians can work it out, it would be beautiful. Just imagine. With any question asked of it, the machine would be able to call on all the vast stored knowledge of the ages, go through the weighing motions, and come up with an unemotional answer. That would be creative thought, because the new is always born from the old. We even had the wrong slant on creativeness. There isn’t any such thing. It’s all a question of engrams and synthesis.”
Zander said, “So for this... for this dream of yours, you want everything we are doing scrapped? You want us to start from scratch with nothing but our developments in memory storage facility?”
“I want you to do just that.”
“You have my verbal resignation. I’ll confirm it.”
Kayden leaned back in his chair and smiled at the ceiling. He said softly, “Citizens of North America. Today Dr. Artur Zander resigned from the Thinking Machine Project. Joseph Kayden, in charge of the Project, has announced that, with success in sight, Dr. Zander resigned because of petty jealousy, because he didn’t wish to take orders from a man with fewer degrees than he has. Dr. Zander attempted to refute this statement, but in view of the record of failure of the Project during the time that Dr. Zander—”
“Wait, Mr. Kayden. I have been thinking, and possibly there is more in what you suggest than I at first realized and I would—”
Kayden grinned at him, “Doc, I don’t want to force you. I want you to work for me because you want to work for me. How about it? I’ll let you resign and I won’t say one little word. Of course, it’ll be tough for me trying to bumble along with men who don’t have your background.”
For the first time, Zander gave him an almost human smile. “I stay.”
Eleven weeks later Wald stood in Kayden’s office saying, “Joe, why don’t you go down on the floor. They should be running the first test. They were hooking up when I went by.”
“Why should I?” Kayden snarled. “If it works, a grateful government raises my pay and keeps me on the stinking job of managing the monster. If it doesn’t work, I’m stuck here until it does. Heads you win; tails I lose. Why don’t you go down?”
Kayden sat alone as dusk gradually misted the office, hazing the sharp edges of the furniture, obscuring the picture of Jane on his desk.
The door opened and Dr. Zander walked in. He didn’t say a word. He stood in front of the desk. Kayden switched on the light and saw to his surprise that tears were running down Zander’s cheeks.
“So it didn’t work,” he said dully.
In a monotone, Zander said: “The first question asked was: ‘What hath God wrought?’ The answer was vocal. After a few seconds it said: ‘There is no adequate definition of God except that He must exist in the spirits of men, in their hearts and minds. Man, this day, has completed a machine, a device, which, in its mechanical wisdom, well help Man to clarify and explain his environment. But the machine will never supplant the mind of Man. The machine exists because of Man. It is an extension of the inquisitive spirit of Man. Thus, in one sense, it can be said that God, as the spirit of Man, has builded for His use a device to probe the infinite.’ ”
Kayden couldn’t speak. He licked his dry lips.
“Some of them screamed and ran from the room. Some of them thought that it was a trick of some sort. To the rest of us the Machine is already a personality. And yet nothing that it said was emotional. It was factual. The question was asked. It dipped into its store of knowledge and came up with the simplest and most direct answer. The thing knew that it had been built. It knew that it existed. Its existence is a fact. Its own recognition of that fact is something that I hadn’t anticipated.”