“I don’t agree with that.”
“A scientist asks me what goes on within a cell, and I tell him. But if he had studied the cell himself, even though the study required many years, he would have ended not only with this knowledge, but with much other knowledge, of things he does not even suspect to be related. He would have acquired many new processes of investigation.”
“But surely, in some cases, the knowledge is useful in itself. For instance, I hear that they’re already using a process you suggested for producing uranium cheaply to use on Mars. What’s harmful about that?”
“Do you know how much of the necessary raw material is present? Your scientists have not investigated that, and they will use up all the raw material and discover only too late what they have done. You had the same experience on Earth? You learned how to purify water at little expense, and you squandered water so recklessly that you soon ran short of it.”
“What’s wrong with saving the life of a dying patient, as some of those doctors did?”
“The first question to ask is whether the patient’s life should be saved.”
“That’s exactly what a doctor isn’t supposed to ask. He has to try to save them all. Just as you never ask whether people are going to use your knowledge for a good purpose or a bad. You simply answer their questions.”
“I answer because I am indifferent, and I care nothing what use they make of what I say. Are your doctors also indifferent?”
Siebling said, “You’re supposed to answer questions, not ask them. Incidentally, why do you answer at all?”
“Some of your men find joy in boasting, in doing what they call good, or in making money. Whatever mild pleasure I can find lies in imparting information.”
“And you’d get no pleasure out of lying?”
“I am as incapable of telling lies as one of your birds of flying off the Earth on its own wings.”
“One thing more. Why did you ask to talk to me, of all people, for recreation? There are brilliant scientists, and great men of all kinds whom you could have chosen.”
“I care nothing for your race’s greatness. I chose you because you are honest.”
“Thanks. But there are other honest men on Earth, and on Mars, and on the other planets as well. Why me, instead of them?”
The Sack seemed to hesitate. “Your choice gave me a mild pleasure. Possibly because I knew it would be displeasing to those men.”
Siebling grinned. “You’re not quite so indifferent as you think you are. I guess it’s pretty hard to be indifferent to Senator Horrigan.”
This was but the first part of many conversations with the Sack. For a long time Siebling could not help being disturbed by the Sack’s warning that its presence was a calamity instead of a blessing for the human race, and this in more ways than one. But it would have been absurd to try to convince a government body that any object that brought in so many millions of credits each day was a calamity, and Siebling didn’t even try. And after awhile Siebling relegated the uncomfortable knowledge to the back of his mind, and settled down to the routine existence of Custodian of the Sack.
Because there was a conversation every twenty hours, Siebling had to rearrange his eating and sleeping schedule to a twenty-hour basis, which made it a little difficult for a man who had become so thoroughly accustomed to the thirty-hour space day. But he felt more than repaid for the trouble by his conversations with the Sack. He learned a great many things about the planets and the system, and the galaxies, but he learned them incidentally, without making a special point of asking about them. Because his knowledge of astronomy had never gone far beyond the elements, there were some questions—the most important of all about the galaxies—that he never even got around to asking.
Perhaps it would have made little difference to his own understanding if he had asked, for some of the answers were difficult to understand. He spent three entire periods with the Sack trying to have that mastermind make clear to him how the Sack had been able, without any previous contact with human beings, to understand Captain Ganko’s Earth language on the historic occasion when the Sack had first revealed itself to human beings, and how it had been able to answer in practically unaccented words. At the end, he had only a vague glimmering of how the feat was performed.
It wasn’t telepathy, as he had first suspected. It was an intricate process of analysis that involved, not only the actual words spoken, but the nature of the ship that had landed, the spacesuits the men had worn, the way they had walked, and many other factors that indicated the psychology of both the speaker and his language. It was as if a mathematician had tried to explain to someone who didn’t even know arithmetic how he could determine the equation of a complicated curve from a short line segment. And the Sack, unlike the mathematician, could do the whole thing, so to speak, in its head, without paper and pencil, or any other external aid.
After a year at the job, Siebling found it difficult to say which he found more fascinating—those hour-long conversations with the almost all-wise Sack, or the cleverly stupid demands of some of the men and women who had paid their hundred thousand credits fir a precious sixty seconds. In addition to the relatively simple questions such as were asked by the scientists or the fortune hunters who wanted to know where they could find precious metals, there were complicated questions that took several minutes.
One woman, for instance, had asked where to find her missing son. Without the necessary data to go on, even the Sack had been unable to answer that. She left, to return a month later with a vast amount of information, carefully compiled, and arranged in order of descending importance. The key items were given the Sack first, those of lesser significance afterward. It required a little less than three minutes for the Sack to give her the answer that her son was probably alive, and cast away on an obscure and very much neglected part of Ganymede.
All the conversations that took place, including Siebling’s own, were recorded and the records shipped to a central storage file on Earth. Many of them he couldn’t understand, some because they were too technical, others because he didn’t know the language spoken. The Sack, of course, immediately learned all languages by that process he had tried so hard to explain to Siebling, and back at the central storage file there were expert technicians and linguists who went over every detail of each question and answer with great care, both to make sure that no questioner revealed himself as a criminal, and to have a lead for the collection of income taxes when the questioner made a fortune with the Sack’s help.
During the year Siebling had occasion to observe the correctness of the Sack’s remark about its possession being harmful to the human race. For the first time in centuries, the number of research scientists, instead of growing, decreased. The Sack’s knowledge had made much research unnecessary, and had taken the edge off discovery. The Sack commented upon the fact to Siebling.
Siebling nodded. “I see it now. The human race is losing its independence.”
“Yes, from its faithful slave I am becoming its master. And I do not want to be a master any more than I want to be a slave.”
“You can escape whenever you wish.”
A person would have sighed. The Sack merely said, “I lack the power to wish strongly enough. Fortunately, the question may soon be taken out of my hands.”
“You mean those government squabbles?”
The value of the Sack had increased steadily, and along with the increased value had gone increasingly bitter struggles about the rights to its services. Financial interests had undergone a strange development. Their presidents and managers and directors had become almost figureheads, with all major questions of policy being decided not by their own study of the facts, but by appeal to the Sack. Often, indeed, the Sack found itself giving advice to bitter rivals, so that it seemed to be playing a game of interplanetary chess, with giant corporations and government agencies its pawns, while the Sack alternately played for one side and then the other. Crises of various sorts, both economic and political, were obviously in the making.