The Terminal Man
Page 15

"Yes," Ross said. "I know how Harry is." She looked at her watch, it was 1:47. There were only four hours left.
3
The first thing that Ellis noticed was the smell: hot, damp, fetid - a dark warm animal smell. He wrinkled his nose in distaste. How could Benson tolerate a place like this?
He watched as the spotlight swung through the darkness and came to rest on a pair of long tapering thighs. There was an expectant rustling in the audience. It reminded Ellis of his days in the Navy, stationed in Baltimore. That was the last time he had been in a place like this, hot and sticky with fantasies and frustrations. That had been a long time ago. It was a shock to think how fast the time had passed.
"Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the incredible, the lovely, Cynthia Sin-cere. A big hand for the lovely Cynthia!"
The spotlight widened onstage, to show a rather ugly but spectacularly constructed girl. The band began to play. When the spotlight was wide enough to hit Cynthia's eyes, she squinted and began an awkward dance. She paid no attention to the music, but nobody seemed to mind. Ellis looked at the audience. There were a lot of men here - and a lot of very tough-looking girls with short hair.
"Harry Benson?" the manager said, at his elbow. "Yeah, he comes in a lot."
"Have you seen him lately?"
"I don't know about lately," the manager said. He coughed. Ellis smelled sweet alcoholic breath. "But I tell you," the manager said, "I wish he wouldn't hang around, you know? I think he's a little nuts. And always bothering the girls. You know how hard it is to keep the girls? Fucking murder, that's what it is."
Ellis nodded, and scanned the audience. Benson had probably changed clothes; certainly he wouldn't be wearing an orderly's uniform any more. Ellis looked at the backs of the heads, at the area between hairline and shirt collar. He looked for a white bandage. He saw none.
"But you haven't seen him lately?"
"No," the manager said, shaking his head. "Not for a week or so." A waitress went by wearing a rabbitlike white fur bikini. "Sal, you seen Harry lately?"
"He's usually around," she said vaguely, and wandered off with a tray of drinks.
"I wish he wouldn't hang around, bothering the girls," the manager said, and coughed again, sweetly.
Ellis moved deeper into the club. The spotlight swung through smoky air over his head, following the movements of the girl on stage. She was having trouble unhooking her bra. She did a sort of two-step shuffle, hands behind her back, eyes looking vacantly out at the audience. Ellis understood, watching her, why Benson thought of strippers as machines. They were mechanical, no question about it. And artificial - when the bra came off, he could see the U-shaped surgical incision beneath each breast, where the plastic had been inserted.
Jaglon would love this, he thought. It would fit right into his theories about machine sex. Jaglon was one of the Development boys and he was preoccupied with the idea of artificial intelligence merging with human intelligence. He argued that, on the one hand, cosmetic surgery and implanted machinery were making man more mechanical, while on the other hand robot developments were making machines more human. It was only a matter of time before people began having sex with humanoid robots.
Perhaps it's already happening, Ellis thought, looking at the stripper. He looked back at the audience, satisfying himself that Benson was not there. Then he checked a phone booth in the back, and the men's room.
The men's room was small and reeked of vomit. He grimaced again, and stared at himself in the cracked mirror over the washbasin. Whatever else was true about the Jackrabbit Club, it produced an olfactory assault. He wondered if that mattered to Benson.
He went back into the club itself and made his way toward the door. "Find him?" the manager asked.
Ellis shook his head and left. Once outside, he breathed the cool night air, and got into his car. The notion of smells intrigued him. It was a problem he had considered before, but never really resolved in his own mind.
His operation on Benson was directed toward a specific part of the brain, the limbic system. It was a very old part of the brain, in terms of evolution. Its original purpose had been the control of smell. In fact, the old term for it was rhinencephalon - the "smelling brain."
The rhinencephalon had developed 150 million years ago, when reptiles ruled the earth. It controlled the most primitive behavior - anger and fear, lust and hunger, attack and withdrawal. Reptiles like crocodiles had little else to direct their behavior. Man, on the other hand, had a cerebral cortex.
But the cerebral cortex was a recent addition. Its modern development had begun only two million years ago; in its present state, the cerebral cortex of man was only 100,000 years old. In terms of evolutionary time scales, that was nothing. The cortex had grown up around the limbic brain, which remained unchanged, embedded deep inside the new cortex. That cortex, which could feel love, and worry about ethical conduct, and write poetry, had to make an uneasy peace with the crocodile brain at its core. Sometimes, as in the case of Benson, the peace broke down, and the crocodile brain took over intermittently.
What was the relationship of smell to all this? Ellis was not sure. Of course, attacks often began with the sensation of strange smells. But was there anything else? Any other effect?
He didn't know, and as he drove he reflected that it didn't much matter. The only problem was to find Benson before his crocodile brain took over. Ellis had seen that happen once, in the NPS. Ellis had watched it through the one-way glass. Benson had been quite normal - and suddenly he had lashed out against the wall, striking it viciously, picking up his chair, smashing it against the wall. The attack had begun without warning, and had been carried out with utter, total, unthinking viciousness.
Six a.m., he thought. There wasn't much time.
4
"What is it, some kind of emergency?" Farley asked, unlocking the door to Autotronics.
"You could say so," Morris said, standing outside, shivering. It was a cold night, and he had been waiting half an hour. Waiting for Farley to show up.
Farley was a tall, slender man with a slow manner. Or perhaps he was just sleepy. He seemed to take forever to unlock the offices and let Morris inside. He turned on the lights in a rather plain lobby-reception area. Then he went back toward the rear of the building.
The rear of Autotronics was a single cavernous room. Desks were scattered here and there around several pieces of enormous, glittering machinery. Morris frowned slightly.
"I know what you're thinking," Farley said. "You're thinking it's a mess."
"No, I- "
"Well, it is. But we get the job done, I can tell you that." He pointed across the room. "That's Harry's desk, next to Hap."
"Hap?"
Farley gestured to a large, spidery metal construction across the room. "Hap," he said, "is short for Hopelessly Automatic Ping-pong Player." He grinned. "Not really," he said. "But we have our little jokes here."
Morris walked over to the machine, circled around it, staring. "It plays ping-pong?"
"Not well," Farley admitted. "But we're working on that. It's a DOD - Department of Defense- grant, and the terms of the grant were to devise a ping-pong-playing robot. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking it isn't an important project."
Morris shrugged. He didn't like being told what he was thinking all the time.
Farley smiled. "God knows what they want it for," he said.
"Of course, the capability would be striking. Imagine - a computer that could recognize a sphere moving rapidly through three-dimensional space, with the ability to contact the sphere and knock it back according to certain rules. Must land between the white lines, not off the table, and so on. I doubt," he said, "that they'll use it for ping-pong tournaments."
He went to the back of the room and opened a refrigerator which had a big orange RADIATION sign on it, and beneath, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. He removed two jars. "Want some coffee?"
Morris was staring at the signs.
"That's just to discourage the secretaries," Farley said, and laughed again. His jovial mood bothered Morris. He watched as Farley made intant coffee.
Morris went over to Benson's desk and began checking the drawers.
"What is it about Harry, anyway?"
"How do you mean?" Morris asked. The top drawer contained supplies - paper, pencils, slide rule, scribbled notes and calculations. The second drawer was a file drawer; it seemed to hold mostly letters.
"Well, he was in the hospital, wasn't he?"
"Yes. He had an operation, and left. We're trying to find him now."
"He's certainly gotten strange," Farley said.
"Uh-huh," Morris said. He was thumbing through the files. Business letters, business letters, requisition forms...
"I remember when it began," Farley said. "It was during
Watershed Week."
Morris looked up from the letters. "During what?"
"Watershed Week," Farley said. "How do you take your coffee?"
"Black."
Farley gave him a cup, stirred artificial cream into his own. "Watershed Week," he said, "was a week in July of 1969. You've probably never heard of it."
Morris shook his head.
"That wasn't an official title," Farley said, "but that was what we called it. Everybody in our business knew it was coming, you see."
"What was coming?"
"The Watershed. Computer scientists all over the world knew it was coming, and they watched for it. It happened in July of 1969. The information-handling capacity of all the computers in the world exceeded the information-handling capacity of all the human brains in the world. Computers could receive and store more information than the 3.5 billion human brains in the world."
"That's the Watershed?"
"You bet it is," Farley said.
Morris sipped the coffee. It burned his tongue, but he woke up a little. "Is that a joke?"
"Hell, no," Farley said. "It's true. The Watershed was passed in 1969, and computers have been steadily pulling ahead since then. By 1975, they'll lead human beings by fifty to one in terms of capacity." He paused. "Harry was awfully upset about that."
"I can imagine," Morris said.
"And that was when it began for him. He got very strange, very secretive."
Morris looked around the room, at the large pieces of computer equipment standing in different areas. It was an odd sensation: the first time he could recall being in a room littered with computers. He realized that he had made some mistakes about Benson. He had assumed that Benson was pretty much like everyone else - but no one who worked in a place such as this was like everyone else. The experience must change you. He remembered that Ross had once said that it was a liberal myth that everybody was fundamentally the same.
Lots of people weren't. They weren't like everybody else.
Farley was different, too, he thought. In another situation, he would have dismissed Farley as a jovial clown. But he was obviously bright as hell. Where did that grinning, comic manner come from?
"You know how fast this is moving?" Farley said. "Damned fast. We've gone from milliseconds to nanoseconds in just a few years. When the computer ILLIAC I was built in 1952, it could do eleven thousand arithmetical operations a second.
Pretty fast, right? Well, they're almost finished with ILLIAC IV now. It will do two hundred million operations a second. It's the fourth generation. Of course, it couldn't have been built without the help of other computers. They used two other computers full time for two years, designing the new ILLIAC."
Morris drank his coffee. Perhaps it was his fatigue, perhaps the spookiness of the room, but he was beginning to feel some kinship with Benson. Computers to design computers - maybe they were taking over, after all. What would Ross say about that? A shared delusion?
"Find anything interesting in his desk?"
"No," Morris said. He sat down in the chair behind the desk and looked around the room. He was trying to act like
Benson, to think like Benson, to be Benson.
"How did he spend his time?"
"I don't know," Farley said, sitting on another desk across the room. "He got pretty distant and withdrawn the last few months. I know he had some trouble with the law. And I knew he was going into the hospital. I knew that. He didn't like your hospital much."
"How is that?" Morris asked, not very interested. It wasn't surprising that Benson was hostile to the hospital. Farley didn't answer. Instead, he went over to a bulletin board, where clippings and photos had been tacked up. He removed one yellowing newspaper item and gave it to Morris.
It was from the Los Angeles Times, dated July 17, 1969.
The headline read: UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL GETS NEW COMPUTER. The story outlined the acquisition of the IBM System 360 computer which was being installed in the hospital basement, and would be used for research, assistance in operations, and a variety of other functions.
"You notice the date?" Farley said. "Watershed Week."
Morris stared at it and frowned.
5
"I am trying to be logical, Dr. Ross."
"I understand, Harry."
"I think it's important to be logical and rational when we discuss these things, don't you?"
"Yes, I do."
She sat in the room and watched the reels of the tape recorder spin. Across from her, Ellis sat back in a chair, eyes closed, cigarette burning in his fingers. Morris drank another cup of coffee as he listened. She was making a list of what they knew, trying to decide what their next step should be.
The tape spun on.
"I classify things according to what I call trends to be opposed," Benson said. "There are four important trends to be opposed. Do you want to hear them?"
"Yes, of course."
"Do you really?"
"Yes, really."
"Well, trend number one is the generality of the computer. The computer is a machine but it's not like any machine in human history. Other machines have a specific function - like cars, or refrigerators, or dishwashers. We expect machines to have specific functions. But computers don't. They can do all sorts of things."