The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

SOMETHING INVENTED ME by R. C. Phelan

1960 was the year for breakthroughs and breakdowns in communications. The most dramatic to my mind (after “Ozma”) was the device called the “People-Machine” built by an outfit called Simulmalics, Inc., the machine is a conventional IBM 704; but programmed with a—sensationally —unconventional “mathematical model of the United States electorate,” distilled from thousands of pollsters’ files. Designed by a Director of Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and a Yale psychologist, the machine’s first job was for the Democratic campaign committee In the Presidential election.

Meanwhile, Cornell researchers were teaching another electronic brain how to read. The “Perceptron” is designed with “electrical counterparts of eyes, nerve fibers, and nerve cells,” to enable it to read and use ordinary language, instead of mathematical codes. During the same year, the Air Force put a new type of IBM to work translating technical works from Russian into English.

All this might have been happier news had it not coincided with a rash of metal-wig-flipping by Brains already in use: wrong scoring in college tests, for instance, and a hilarious series of goofs in a robotized Providence, R. I., post office. Tends to make one wonder if we may not be “building in” more parallels-with the human brain than we intended?

Tom Trimble and I have been next-door neighbors all our lives, though our houses are six miles apart. We run adjoining ranches in that part of Texas where cedar, prickly pear, and prairie dogs are the chief nuisances and, in a dry year, twenty-five acres of land are needed to support a single cow. When we were boys and our fathers owned the ranches, they were friends, as Tom and I were.

They shared only one thing: the cost of bringing a tutor down from the North each year to teach Tom and me through the winter. One year the tutor stayed at our house, the next year with the Trimbles. The specialties of these young men varied—one was mathematical, one was historical, and several of them were literary.

A ranch is a big and sparsely furnished place, where a boy’s imagination gets a hard workout. A good supply of books is much appreciated and used. For a year or two, in our teens, Tom and I agreed that we would very likely become great writers. Our literary tutors encouraged us.

Because riding twelve miles a day on horseback was a bore, I used to stay for weeks at the Trimbles’ house when the tutor was there, and the next year Tom would stay with us. We kept in touch with our families over the party-line telephone, receiving instructions and reporting on our behavior. We liked this arrangement all the better since, as host and guest, we could get out of more work than we could alone on the separate ranches.

Sometimes we liked to show off before our elders by discussing learned matters with the tutor in a man-to-man way. Or, if we chose, we could easily show off before him by outriding him or speaking border Spanish with the cowhands. Tom and I were completely at home in any level of the ranch society. At sixteen and seventeen we rode high, the masters of every situation. But at eighteen we were sent off to the University of Texas, where we discovered a big, bewildering new world. We went different ways in it, and our friendship melted slowly, like a snowman, keeping its form for a long time but shrinking. Before we were graduated, a wildcatter, drilling three hundred yards south of the Trimbles’ dipping vat, brought in a flowing well of oil. To this day no oil has been discovered on my family’s land.

Tom and I joined different services in the war. Returning with our wives, we settled down on the ranches. My father had died of a heart attack in 1944, and my mother was glad to hand over to me the job of managing the ranch.

Events had made Tom’s problems simpler than mine. His father had been murdered in a political plot. His mother had allowed every drop of crude oil to be pumped out of the Trimble wells and piped away. There remained only some vast empty spaces far beneath the surface of the ranch, and twenty-three million dollars of oil money in San Angelo banks. There had been twenty-four million, but Tom’s mother, a sweet, quiet woman, had returned to Natchez to marry her high-school sweetheart, now a widower in the cotton business. She had taken with her a make-up case containing a million dollars in cash and had left all the rest, along with the ranch, to her son.

But the ranch now had no water. Once the oil wells were pumped out, the water wells had gone dry on their own. Tom merely bought water a hundred miles to the east, and built a pipeline that brought it to his cows and his household plumbing.

On my mother’s ranch we had no oil, but we did have water. Our postwar problems were not much different from those of the 1930’s. In good years we had money in the bank, and in bad years we owed money to the bank, and either way our mode of life was the same. Small cattlemen live like that.

Tom, with his millions, lived differently. His first wife bore him a daughter, built an addition to the ranch house that was twice as big as the original structure, and divorced him. His second wife, a movie star, added a swimming pool and more guest suites to the house, and adopted three children.

His third wife was a sadly smiling, alcoholic beauty six years older than Tom. She stayed the longest, and while she was there they entertained so elaborately that they needed all the facilities the first two wives had installed, plus more housing for the staff. Tom sent his big plane to New York or Hollywood for weekend guests.

In those years the strongest connection between the two ranches was the old party-line telephone, though it was rarely used. Once or twice a year Tom phoned to invite Anne and me to one of his parties. Once or twice we went, and then we gave up going. We had seen the expenditure and had been impressed, and there was nothing else. We were content to sit on our own porch on Sunday evenings and hear, diminished by six miles of Western silence, the throb of engines as planes took off, bearing guests home to Hollywood, New Orleans, or Cuernavaca.

Eventually the decay of her beauty drove the third wife from drink to madness, and she was shut up in a private institution. The parties stopped; Tom lived alone. He trimmed his staff of cooks, gardeners, pilots, mechanics, and maids, until there remained only a few people to care for him and his cattle. And after a year of living in this solitude, Tom published a novel.

It was called Early Noon, and was a study of a Scottish family on a Peruvian plantation in the 1880’s. Many reviewers called it first-rate, and when I read it I agreed with them. It was so thorough, so surely based on a lifetime knowledge of time and place, that it convinced me that Tom was a kind of genius. I wondered if he had got his knowledge from drugged dreams. He was not Scottish and had never been to Peru. He could hardly have bought the novel for cash, as he bought his water, his house, and his guests, because no one who wrote like that would stoop to ghostwriting. I decided that Tom himself had done the work.

One day not long ago my wife called me to the phone. “It’s Tom,” she said.

“Can you come over?” he asked quietly. His request alarmed me. I understood that he meant right now. He had not telephoned in more than a year.

I got into my little plane and, flying low, followed the old horse trail and the telephone line beside it. (It is possible to drive from my ranch to Tom’s, but the trip takes more than an hour.) From the air, the wings, pools, terraces, and garages that Tom’s wives had added to the original house looked like a jumble of movie sets of different scales and periods. Landing on Tom’s big paved strip, I taxied my little plane up to the old house, which turns its back to the recent additions and faces open country.

Tom was sitting on the old front porch, drinking Scotch. We are both thirty-eight now, but he looks younger than that, and younger than I. A rancher looks competent and calm, even in a bad year; being boss gives him that. But Tom had added to his calm the arrogance, the elegance, all the last refinements that money can confer, and had ended up in indifference and boredom. Still he was an impressive sight in his rancher’s clothes and boots and British grooming. His eyes looked tired.

Drinking, we talked about cattle for a while. We watched a vapor trail that seemed to create itself as an invisibly distant bomber drew it in the sky. When the long white stroke had blurred, Tom asked, “Have you read my book?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t write it.”

“Who did?”

“Nobody. It’s a long story. That’s why I asked you to come—I want to tell you.

“You know things have gone badly for me since the war. The ranch doesn’t support me; I support it. Guests have come and gone for years, yet often I feel that in all that time I haven’t spoken to another person. Laura lives now in a specially created environment, but the world they arrange for her pleasure in the sanitarium is no more artificial than the one I live in.

“I have been bored; tortured with boredom. So I decided to look back over my life until I found an ambition somewhere—or even just a good intention—and pick it up again and carry it out. The best thing I could find was my old resolve to be a writer. Do you remember when we used to talk about it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I bought a typewriter and sat in front of it for weeks. Nothing happened. Or rather, the inevitable happened. Sitting there, empty as a drum, I began to figure out how money could be converted even into talent—or anyway into an imitation of it.

“Do you remember the old theory about putting ten monkeys to work at ten typewriters, just hitting the keys at random? The argument was that if you kept them at it a million years they would write the complete works of Shakespeare. Along with trillions of pages of gibberish, of course. It was a question of mathematical probability— sooner or later, in a million years, one of the monkeys would just happen to hit the keys in the sequence that would produce Hamlet, and another would do Lear, and so on.

“But monkeys are old-fashioned and too slow; now we have electrons. Every time a new calculating machine appears, somebody announces that it can solve in thirty seconds problems that would require seven years of figuring with pencil and paper. Or something like that. And this is possible because the work is done by streams of electrons moving along wires at the speed of light.

“The problem, then, was simple: change the work of the electrons from calculating to typing. In effect, devise an automatic typewriter that would race along, completely out of control, at maybe a million words a minute. With no mind to guide it, the thing would produce staggering mountains of nonsense, but would, by the laws of probability, make sense a tiny fraction of the time.”

“And you actually did it,” I said.

“Well, I had it done. In New York I found a man to put the machine together—a fellow named David R. Sere. He worked for I.B.M., designing computers. I hired him away from them and brought him here. I outlined the problem to him in New York. He chose the components he thought he would need and rode with them in a freight car all the way to San Angelo. He slept beside them on a cot, the way a kid sleeps by his bull at the Fat Stock Show.”

“Then you have the thing here?”

“Yes. Want to see it?”

He led me through the old house and into a wing that had been built by his second wife, Alicia. We entered the enormous living room. Its curtains were closed; Tom pressed the wall switch and the room was filled with soft, rich light that some decorator had contrived to make women beautiful and parties successful. The furniture had been pushed back to the walls. Tom’s machine stretched along the center of the rug like a procession of stunted mechanical elephants, linked trunk to tail. For it consisted of several gray metal cabinets with a minimum of lights and switches and no dials at all, connected by many wires of different colors. I listened but heard no sound.

“Is it working?” I asked.

“Yes.”

(Later, bending over it, I heard a hum like that of a forgotten radio whose station has signed off for the night— the very sound of emptiness. It was the only noise the thing made.)

“It’s not quite what I expected,” I told him. “You know— in cartoons you see big cabinets with rows of lights.”

“The problem was different here. See this little one on the end?” It was a box less than three feet high. “It’s the smallest unit, but it does the basic work. The other components are simply devices for getting the stuff out to the light of day.”

He led me to the little cabinet—the creative one. “This is where electronic impulses, each representing a different word, are mixed at random. Even David Sere doesn’t know how fast it works—it may turn out a billion words of mixture an hour, or maybe only a million. It isn’t like a typewriter, after all. It makes the mixture from words, not letters.

“We could have put the entire Unabridged Dictionary into its vocabulary, but then we would have gotten back prose with such odd words as ‘sope,’ ‘paktong,’ and ‘thirl’ in it, and I didn’t want that. In the end we gave it a generous English vocabulary and a few tags of French, German, and Latin.”

Tom touched the second cabinet. “This is the scanner. Producing the mixture is simple, but it takes lots of wires and circuits and stuff to scan the mixture and know when it ceases to be gibberish and starts making sense. Other parts of the scanner fill the basement and three bedrooms upstairs. Sere spent months ‘instructing’ it—adjusting the mechanism to accept sense-making combinations of words and reject nonsense.

“When the scanner accepts part of the mixture as sensible English, it diverts the electron stream into this cabinet, which is called Memory. Memory is simply a recording device, necessary because there is no process that can print the stuff as fast as the machine produces it. Memory stores it, then feeds it out slowly—still as nothing but a code and electron pattern—to the next component, which converts the code into English and prints it on microfilm.

“Every morning I snip off a bit of microfilm and develop it myself. The output ranges from six to ten inches of film a day. I have a little darkroom over there. Then I sit down at an ordinary microfilm viewer to see what the machine has written.”

“And that’s it?” I asked.

“That’s it. That’s how I produced my novel.”

We returned to the front porch. Tom poured Scotch over ice cubes and added pipeline water. It was near sunset now. The air had cooled a degree or two and even the horned frogs were casting shadows. Some of Tom’s calves began bellowing, at a distance that turned the sounds to music.

“How many people know that a machine wrote Early Noon?” I asked.

“Three. You and I and David R. Sere. But I don’t worry about Sere, he’s perfectly safe—hardly human at all. I laid down specifications for him, and then went out and found him—in Manhattan, of course. He took me to a health-food shop on Sixth Avenue, and over nuts and raisins and spinach juice he told me that his lifelong ambition had been just to sit somewhere and think. Well, he’s doing it now—in a furnished room in Bayonne, New Jersey, at my expense.”

I asked, “Why did you send for me?”

“The machine has written another novel. I have just finished typing it out—I can’t very well send microfilm off to my publisher, and it would be risky to hire the typing done. The thing is, this new novel is so different from Early Noon that I’m not sure I can offer it as my work. I want you to read it and tell me if you think I can get away with it. I hope you think I can, because this new one is my masterpiece.”

“Is that thing set to write nothing but novels?” I asked.

“No, no, damn it,” said Tom with irritation. “You don’t understand. It works at random. It can write anything. That’s the trouble—most of its output is useless to me. It has done a complete Julius Caesar, for example—and thirty of the Sonnets. It has produced several letters of application for the job of school-bus driver in Wyandotte, Ohio, in 1933. It has made dozens of dirty limericks, and has actually invented a new vice by describing it in a story. It has written the diary of a sixteen-year-old moron named Artie Messer for the year 1967.

“It has given me thousands of things I can’t use!” He shouted the last two words and ground an ice cube to bits with his teeth, making me wince. “Want ads! Soldiers’ letters home! Contracts!

“Contracts! Hundreds of pages of aforesaids and whereases, and I have to read it all because I never know when the damned machine will switch to another subject. Once it did five chapters of a novel I would like to have written, and then switched to a recipe for spoon bread in the style of Clementine Paddleford.

“Three months ago it produced a lost comedy of Aristophanes in an English translation by Gilbert Murray. Murray died in 1957. Now, is this a real lost comedy of Aristophanes? Or is the play itself, like the Murray translation of it, just an invention of the machine?

“I have no way of knowing. The Julius Caesar is real, and the Wyandotte, Ohio, letters are false—there’s no such town. But real or false, the Aristophanes is great and ought to be added to world literature. Yet how can I arrange an authentic-looking situation in which to rediscover it?”

He shrugged and smiled. “It isn’t easy,” he said. “If I could write at all, I could do my own stuff in less time than it takes to read all the junk the machine produces.

“I could stop, I guess. Just throw the switch and quit; take up chess, or travel. But there’s a fascination to it. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved in—Shakespeare, Aristophanes, new works of real importance coming out of infinity, out of nowhere. I like being a famous writer. So I go on reading, day after day.”

“Where is the new manuscript?”

“Over there.” He indicated a manila envelope on the porch floor.

“When I read Early Noon,” I said, “I felt in touch with a first-rate mind. I was surprised and a little jealous that the first-rate mind was yours. But it was not yours—I was touched and moved by a random pattern of electrons made by a machine. No mind was involved at all?”

“No. They can do that sort of thing nowadays,” said Tom.

It was dark. I phoned Anne and asked her to turn on the lights along one of our fences which guide me to a landing in our pasture. Then I said good night to Tom and flew home with his manuscript. The next afternoon I took it to my office and began to read.

The novel was new and strange. Its events took place in the United States and in the present day, yet reading it was like entering a new country where the trees, birds, and stones were different from any known before. It took the old threads of the English language and wove them into something fine and new. Like Tom, I thought it a masterpiece. But I was worried, almost frightened, by the fact that it wasn’t real.

In the late afternoon I switched on a light, noting that I would have to join Anne and my mother for a drink soon or they would wonder what was wrong. But just at that moment I grew puzzled. I turned back and reread a page. Then, making an exultant guess as to what I had discovered, I put down the manuscript and went to join my family.

After dinner I returned to the novel and read it to the end, and knew that I had guessed right. The machine had left the book unfinished. Tom had completed the twelfth chapter himself, and added three more. His real reason for asking me to read the book was not to get my opinion of its style but to see whether I could tell the difference between the machine’s work and his imitation of it.

I read Tom’s chapters again, savoring his ineptitude. I imagined his rage as, peering into his microfilm viewer with tired eyes, he saw this golden stream cut off, replaced by something trivial or stupid. I imagined, too, his agony in writing those final chapters, bad as they were.

The next morning I flew again to Tom’s house. He came out to the landing strip to meet me. Climbing out of my little plane, holding his manuscript in my hand, I walked toward him. I arranged on my face a knowing, smiling, cynical look that would tell him I had guessed his secret.

And Tom was walking toward me. Behind him the sky dropped to a flat horizon forty miles away. We were two tiny figures on an enormous windy world, approaching each other on a concrete prairie where grass had grown for thousands of years but grew no more. Like me, Tom held a manuscript. He looked at me fearfully, with far more knowledge in his eyes than I held in mine.

“I know,” he said. “The machine wrote this yesterday.” He handed me his manuscript. I read the first lines of it, and the pale arch of the sky turned to stone. Fear stabbed me like a pin going through a specimen. I did not know whether I had just been created or was about to be destroyed. I only knew that some fearful power had reached down from the sky and trapped us. For the opening words of the machine’s latest work were these:

“Tom Trimble and I have been next-door neighbors all our lives, though our houses are six miles apart. We run adjoining ranches in that part of Texas where cedar, prickly pear, and prairie dogs are the chief nuisances and, in a dry year, twenty-five acres of land are needed to support a single cow....”