"Oh, yes? I wasn’t in on that. What happened? I mean—what sort of control were you using?"
"Oh—" I could see that Russell wasn’t too sure whether he should tell Ligget or not. I already had the feeling that the atmosphere of this project was loaded with dozens of crosscurrents and conflicting ambitions. I was going to learn a lot about COMASAMPS.
"Yes?" Ligget said.
"We had his individuality circuits cut out. Effectively, he was just a set of conditioned reflexes."
"You say he reacted like a zombie?"
"Definite automatism. Very slow reactions, and, of course, no initiative."
"You mean he’d be very slow in his response to orders under those conditions, right?" Ligget looked crafty behind Russell’s back.
Russell whirled around. "He’d make a lousy soldier, if that’s what CIC wants to know!"
Ligget smoothed out his face, and twitched his shoulders back. "I’m not a CIC snooper, if that’s what you mean."
"You don’t mind if I call you a liar, do you?" Russell said, his hands shaking.
"Not particularly," Ligget said, but he was angry behind his smooth face. It helps, having immobile features like mine. You get to understand the psychology of a man who tries for the same effect.
August 16, 1974
It bothers me, not having a diary entry for the fourteenth, either. Somebody’s been working on me again.
I told Heywood about it. He shrugged. "Might as well get used to it, Pimmy. There’ll be a lot of that going on. I don’t imagine it’s pleasant—I wouldn’t like intermittent amnesia myself—but there’s very little you can do about it. Put it down as one of the occupational hazards of being a prototype."
"But I don’t like it," I said.
Heywood pulled the left side of his mouth into a straight line and sighed. "Like I said, Pimmy—I wouldn’t either. On the other hand, you can’t blame us if the new machine we’re testing happens to know it’s being tested, and resents it. We built the machine. Theoretically, it’s our privilege to do anything we please with it, if that’ll help us find out how the machine performs, and how to build better ones."
"But I’m not a machine," I said.
Heywood put his lower lip between his teeth and looked up at me from under a raised eyebrow. "Sorry, Pim. I’m kind of afraid you are."
But I’m not! I’M NOT!
August 17, 1974
Russell and Heywood were working late with me last night. They did a little talking back and forth. Russell was very nervous—and finally Heywood got a little impatient with him.
"All right," Heywood said, laying his charts down. "We’re not getting anywhere, this way. You want to sit down and really talk about what’s bothering you?"
Russell looked a little taken aback. He shook his head jerkily.
"No… no, I haven’t got anything specific on my mind. Just talking. You know how it is." He tried to pretend he was very engrossed in one of the charts.
Heywood didn’t let him off the hook, though. His eyes were cutting into Russell’s face, peeling off layer after layer of misleading mannerism and baring the naked fear in the man.
"No, I don’t know how it is." He put his hand on Russell’s shoulder and turned him around to where the other man was facing him completely. "Now, look—if there’s something chewing on you, let’s have it. I’m not going to have this project gummed up by your secret troubles. Things are tough enough with everybody trying to pressure us into doing things their way, and none of them exactly sure of what that way is."
That last sentence must have touched something off in Russell, because he let his charts drop beside Heywood’s and clawed at the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket.
"That’s exactly what the basic problem is," he said, his eyes a little too wide. He pushed one hand back and forth over the side of his face and walked back and forth aimlessly. Then a flood of words came out.
"We’re working in the dark, Vic. In the dark, and somebody’s in with us that’s swinging clubs at our heads while we stumble around. We don’t know who it is, we don’t know if it’s one or more than that, and we never know when the next swing is coming.
"Look—we’re cybernetics engineers. Our job was to design a brain that would operate a self-propulsive unit designed to house it. That was the engineering problem, and we’ve got a tendency to continue looking at it in that light.
"But that’s not the whole picture. We’ve got to keep in mind that the only reason we were ever given the opportunity and the facilities was because somebody thought it might be a nice idea to turn out soldiers on a production line, just like they do the rest of the paraphernalia of war. And the way COMASAMPS looks at it is not in terms of a brain housed in an independently movable shell, but in terms of a robot which now has to be fitted to the general idea of what a soldier should be.
"Only nobody knows what the ideal soldier is like.
"Some say he ought to respond to orders with perfect accuracy and superhuman reflexes. Others say he ought to be able to think his way out of trouble, or improvise in a situation where his orders no longer apply, just like a human soldier. The ones who want the perfect automaton don’t want him to be smart enough to realize he is an automaton—probably because they’re afraid of the idea; and the ones who want him to be capable of human discretion don’t want him to be human enough to be rebellious in a hopeless situation.
"And that’s just the beginning. COMASAMPS may be a combined project, but if you think the Navy isn’t checking up on the Army, and vice versa, with both of them looking over the Air Force’s shoulder—Oh, you know that squirrel cage as well as I do!"
Russell gestured hopelessly. Heywood, who had been taking calm puffs on his cigarette, shrugged. "So? All we have to do is tinker around until we can design a sample model to fit each definition. Then they can run as many comparative field tests as they want to. It’s their problem. Why let it get you?"
Russell flung his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it with all his weight. "Because we can’t do it and you ought to know it as well as I do!" He pointed over at me. "There’s your prototype model. He’s got all the features that everybody wants—and cutoffs intended to take out the features that interfere with any one definition. We can cut off his individuality, and leave him the automaton some people want. We can leave him his individuality, cut off his volition, and give him general orders which he is then free to carry out by whatever means he thinks best. Or, we can treat him like a human being—educate him by means of tapes, train him, and turn him loose on a job, the way we’d do with a human being."
The uneven tone built up in his voice as he finished what he was saying.
"But, if we reduce him to a machine that responds to orders as though they were pushbuttons, he’s slow. He’s pitifully slow, Vic, and he’d be immobilized within thirty seconds of combat. There’s nothing we can do about that, either. Until somebody learns how to push electricity through a circuit faster than the laws of physics say it should go, what we’ll have will be a ponderous, mindless thing that’s no better than the remote-control exhibition jobs built forty years ago.
"All right, so that’s no good. We leave him individuality, but we restrict it until it cuts his personality down to that of a slave. That’s better. Under those conditions, he would, theoretically, be a better soldier than the average human. An officer could tell him to take a patrol out into a certain sector, and he’d do the best possible job, picking the best way to handle each step of the job as he came to it. But what does he do if he comes back, and the officer who gave him the orders is no longer there? Or, worse yet, if there’s been a retreat, and there’s nobody there? Or an armistice? What about that armistice? Can you picture this slave robot, going into stasis because he’s got no orders to cover a brand-new situation?