Chapter VIII

In his office high in the tower of Orientation Center, Dr. Bernard Jackson put down the report of the Twelfth Sector Watch Police and sighed. He removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, his features haggard with strain.

“Action completed,” he said finally to Dr. Flora Johns, who occupied a chair nearby. “Everything went precisely according to schedule. I hope it works out. I liked those two. Remember what he called himself and the girl? A Rillo range sire and a salt grass heifer! I’ve got an idea he’ll change his mind about her before long!”

“I fail to see why it was necessary to order the Police to deliberately shoot her,” Flora Johns said with a tartness that verged on bitterness. “She might have been killed. We don’t know yet how serious the injury was. The Police aren’t that good at shooting a moving target from a plane.”

“It was a necessary risk. You know that. You read the Machine’s instructions.”

“But I don’t always believe them!”

“It was necessary because he would have taken her to the first Outlander Settlement, left her there, and gone on his own way. And if he had suggested anything else she would have opposed it.

“It was absolutely necessary to put her in a state of complete dependency on him for a long enough period to enable her to overcome her resistance to his presence. The injury was the only available means.”

“So says that idiot Machine!”

Dr. Jackson smiled.

“Careful, Flora--even the walls have ears. Or so it is said.”

“I don’t care! If the Machine was going to drag us in for insubordination it would have happened long ago. Sometimes I wonder just what the devilish thing is up to, anyway!”

“That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he said slowly. “And I think that with this present case I’ve been able to figure it out.”

“What have you figured out?”

“The Machine has recognized from the beginning that we’ve asked it for more than it could deliver. We’ve always assumed that we had succeeded in creating a Machine that could think like a man. We forgot there are two answers to the problem of creating equal thinking in men and machines.

“We haven’t built a Machine that thinks like a man. Instead, we’ve developed a generation of men that think like machines!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just that. We’ve leveled men and machines to the same category, but not by raising machine thinking. We’ve done it by lowering men. So today we have thinking machines, all right. Millions of them. All over the globe. We call them men!”

“The Machine has its judgment circuits--”

“Fortunately, yes. And this gives it just sufficient ability to recognize its own failure--and wisdom enough to turn the problem back where it belongs.

“What essential difference there is between true human thought, and the kind of thought we’ve developed in the Machine, I don’t know. And I don’t think the Machine knows. But it’s throwing the problem back to the only possible source of solution: human beings. Don’t you see?”

Dr. Flora Johns was staring through the windows of the tower to the glistening city beyond. “If only you were right!” she whispered.

“I have to be right!” Dr. Jackson exclaimed. “It’s the only possible answer. If it weren’t, you and I would have been ordered drawn and quartered long ago. But the Machine picked us--and scores of others like us.

“It keeps us in our present positions and gives out wholly insane instructions--by accepted understanding of its purposes. It gives out pairings like this one we’ve just handled. And provides a clear path for their escape to the Outlander settlements, and insures that they will stay together in spite of themselves. I tell you the Machine is bent on seeing that we somehow rectify our own mistakes and make men out of those millions of thinking machines that inhabit the world!”

“But to what purpose?” Flora Johns cried. “We’ll be going back to the chaos from which we escaped by the very creation of the Machine. It has showed us how to insure peace, prosperity, happiness. We’ve got the perfection of society that men struggled for thousands of years to obtain!”

Dr. Jackson shook his head.

“No. What we _have_ got isn’t it. We may have come close, but for all practical purposes we’ve run up a blind alley. We can thank whatever Providence is watching over us that the Machine has been capable of recognizing that fact.

“Our failure is in turning over final thought and judgment to something outside ourselves. Until we are able to take the responsibility and work out answers with our own personal gray matter, we have not solved the problem. Certainly, our existing solution is a failure.

“Maybe a definite, positive solution is unobtainable. Perhaps the only answer is in the continued searching for an answer. I don’t know, and I feel certain the Machine doesn’t know. But it’s trying to develop a sector of humanity that might be able to find out!”

“It sounds right,” Flora Johns whispered again, and now her eyes were aglow. “It _has_ to be right!”