The Monkey Wrench - Gordon R. Dickson, ebook, Temp
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
THE MONKEY WRENCH
by
Gordon R. Dickson
Cary Harmon was not an ungifted young man. He had the intelligence to carve himself a position as a
Lowland society lawyer, which on Venus is not easy to do. And he had the discernment to consolidate
that position by marrying into the family of one of the leading drug-exporters. But, nevertheless, from the
scientific view-point, he was a layman; and laymen, in their ignorance, should never be allowed to play
with delicate technical equipment; for the result will be trouble, as surely as it is the first time a baby gets
its hands on a match.
His wife was a high-spirited woman; and would have been hard to handle at times if it had not been for
the fact that she was foolish enough to love him. Since he did not love her at all, it was consequently both
simple and practical to terminate all quarrels by dropping out of sight for several days until her obvious
fear of losing him for good brought her to a proper humility. He took good care, each time he
disappeared, to pick some new and secure hiding place where past experience or her several years’
knowledge of his habits would be no help in locating him. Actually, he enjoyed thinking up new and
undiscoverable bolt-holes, and made a hobby out of discovering them.
Consequently, he was in high spirits the grey winter afternoon he descended unannounced on the
weather station of Burke McIntyre, high in the Lonesome Mountains, a jagged chain of the deserted
shorelands of Venus’ Northern Sea. He had beaten a blizzard to the dome with minutes to spare; and
now, with his small two-place flier safely stowed away, and a meal of his host’s best supplies under his
belt, he sat revelling in the comfort of his position and listening to the hundred and fifty mile per hour,
sub-zero winds lashing impotently at the arching roof overhead.
“Ten minutes more,” he said to Burke, “and I’d have had a tough time making it!”
“Tough!” snorted Burke. He was a big, heavy-featured, blond man with a kindly contempt for all of
humanity aside from he favoured class of meteorologists. “You Lowlanders are too used to that present
day Garden of Eden you have down below. Ten minutes more and you’d have been spread over one of
the peaks around here to wait for the spring searching party to gather your bones.”
Cary laughed in disbelief.
“Try it, if you don’t believe me,” said Burke. “No skin off my nose if you don’t have the sense to listen
to reason. Take your bug up right now if you want.”
Page 1
“Not me,” Cary’s teeth flashed. “I know when I’m comfortable. And that’s no way to treat your guest,
tossing him out into the storm when he’s just arrived.”
“Some guest,” rumbled Burke. “I shake hands with you after the graduation exercises, don’t hear a
word from you for six years and then suddenly you’re knocking at my door here in the hinterland.”
“I came on impulse,” said Cary. “It’s the prime rule of my life. Always act on impulse, Burke. It puts the
sparkle in existence.”
“And leads you to an early grave,” Burke supplemented.
“If you have the wrong impulses,” said Cary. “But then if you get sudden urges to jump off cliffs or play
Russian Roulette, you’re too stupid to live, anyway.”
“Cary,” said Burke heavily, “you’re a shallow thinker.”
“And you’re a stodgy one,” grinned Cary. “Suppose you quit insulting me and tell me something about
yourself. What’s this hermit’s existence of yours like? What do you do?”
“What do I do?” repeated Burke. “I work.”
“But just how?” Cary said, settling himself cosily back into his chair. “Do you send up balloons? Catch
snow in a pail to find how much fell? Take sights on the stars? Or what?”
Burke shook his head at him and smiled tolerantly.
“Well, if you insist on my talking to entertain you,” he answered, “I don’t do anything so picturesque. I
just sit at a desk and prepare weather data for transmission to the Weather Centre down at Capital
City.”
“Aha!” Cary said, waggling a forefinger at him in reproof. “I’ve got you now. You’ve been lying down
on the job. You’re the only one here; so if you don’t take observations, who does?”
“The machine does, of course. These stations have a Brain to do that.”
“That’s worse,” Cary answered. “You’ve been sitting here warm and comfortable while some poor little
Brain scurries around outside in the snow and does all your work for you.”
“As a matter of fact you’re closer to the truth than you think; and it wouldn’t do you any harm to learn a
few things about the mechanical miracles that let you lead a happy ignorant life. Some wonderful things
have been done lately in the way of equipping these stations.”
Cary smiled mockingly.
“I mean it,” Burke went on, his face lighting. “The Brain we’ve got here now is the last word in that type
of installation. As a matter of fact, it was just put in recently – until a few months back we had to work
with a job that was just a collector and computer. That is, it collected the weather data around this station
and presented it to you. Then you had to take it and prepare it for the calculator, which would chew on it
for a while and then pass you back results which you again had to prepare for transmission downstairs to
the Centre.”
Page 2
“Fatiguing, I’m sure,” murmured Cary, reaching for the drink place handily on the table beside his chair.
Burke ignored him, caught up in his own appreciation of the mechanical development about which he was
talking.
“It kept you busy, for the data came in steadily; and you were always behind since a batch would be
accumulating while you were working up the previous batch. A station like this is the centre-point for
observational mechs posted at points over more than five hundred square miles of territory; and, being
human, all you had time to do was skim the cream off the reports and submit a sketchy picture to the
calculator. And then there was a certain responsibility involved in taking care of the station and yourself.
“But now” – Burke leaned forward and stabbed a finger at his visitor – “we’ve got a new installation that
takes the data directly from the observational mechs – all of it – resolves it into the proper form for the
calculator to handle it, and carries it right on through to the end results. All I still have to do is prepare the
complete picture from the results and shoot it downstairs.
“In addition, it runs the heating and lighting plants, automatically checks on the maintenance of the
station. It makes repairs and corrections on verbal command and has a whole separate section for the
consideration of theoretical problems.”
“Sort of a little tin god,” said Cary nastily. He was used to attention and annoyed by the fact that Burke
seemed to be waxing more rhapsodic over his machine than the brilliant and entertaining guest who, as far
as the meteorologist could know, had dropped in to relieve a hermit’s existence.
Burke looked at him and chuckled.
“No,” he replied. “A
big
tin god, Cary.”
“Sees all, knows all, tells all, I suppose. Never makes a mistake. Infallible.”
“You might say that,” answered Burke, still with a grin on his face.
“But those qualities alone don’t quite suffice for elevating your gadget to godhood. One all-important
attribute is lacking – invulnerability. Gods never break down.”
“Neither does this.”
“Come now, Burke,” chided Cary, “you mustn’t let your enthusiasm lead you into falsehood. No
machine is perfect. A crossed couple of wires, a burnt out tube and where is your darling? Plunk! Out of
action.”
Burke shook his head.
“There aren’t any wires,” he said. “It uses beamed connections. And as for burnt out tubes, they don’t
even halt consideration of a problem. The problem is just shifted over to a bank that isn’t in use at the
time; and automatic repairs are made by the machine itself. You see, Cary, in this model, no bank does
one specific job, alone. Any one of them – and there’s twenty, half again as many as this station would
ever need – can do any job, from running the heating plant to operating the calculator. If something
comes up that’s too big for one bank to handle, it just hooks in one or more of the idle banks – and so
on until it’s capable of dealing with the situation.”
“Ah,” said Cary, “but what if something
did
come up that required all the banks and more too?
Page 3
Wouldn’t it overload them and burn itself out?”
“You’re determined to find fault with it, aren’t you, Cary,” answered Burke. “The answer is no. It
wouldn’t. Theoretically it’s possible for the machine to bump into a problem that would require all or
more than all of its banks to handle. For example, if this station suddenly popped into the air and started
to fly away for no discernible reason, the bank that first felt the situation would keep reaching out for help
until all the banks were engaged in considering it, until it crowded out all the other functions the machine
performs. But, even then, it wouldn’t overload and burn out. The banks would just go on considering the
problem until they had evolved a theory that explained why we were flying through the air and what to do
about returning us to our proper place and functions.”
Cary straightened up and snapped his fingers.
“Then it’s simple,” he said. “I’ll just go in and tell your machine – on the verbal hookup – that we’re
flying through the air.”
Burke gave a sudden roar of laughter.
“Cary, you dope!” he said. “Don’t you think the men who designed the machine took the possibility of
verbal error into account? You say that the station is flying through the air. The machine immediately
checks by making its own observations; and politely replies, ‘Sorry, your statement is incorrect’ and
forgets the whole thing.”
Cary’s eyes narrowed and two spots of colour flushed the skin over his cheekbones; but he held his
smile.
“There’s the theoretical section,” he murmured.
“There is,” said Burke, greatly enjoying himself, “and you could use it by going in and saying ‘consider
the false statement or data – the station is flying through the air’ and the machine would go right to work
on it.”
He paused, and Cary looked at him expectantly.
“But –” continued the meteorologist, “it would consider the statement with only those banks not then in
use; and it would give up the banks whenever a section using real data required them.”
He finished, looking at Cary with quizzical good humour. But Cary said nothing.
“Give up, Cary,” he said at last. “It’s no use. Neither God nor Man nor Cary Harmon can interrupt my
Brain in the rightful performance of its duty.”
Cary’s eyes glittered, dark and withdrawn beneath their lids. For a long second, he just sat and looked,
and then he spoke.
“I could do it,” he said, softly.
“Do what?” asked Burke.
“I could gimmick your machine,” said Cary.
Page 4
“Oh, forget it! Don’t take things so seriously, Cary. What if you can’t think of a monkey wrench to
throw into the machinery? Nobody else could, either.”
“I said I could do it.”
“Once and for all, it’s impossible. Now stop trying to pick flaws in something guaranteed flawless and
let’s talk about something else.”
“I will bet you,” said Cary, speaking with a slow intensity, “five thousand credits that if you will leave me
alone with your machine for one minute I can put it completely out of order.”
“I don’t want to take your money, even if five thousand
is
the equivalent of a year’s salary for me. The
trouble with you is, Cary, you never could stand to lose at anything. Now, forget it!”
“Put up or shut up,” said Cary.
Burke took a deep breath.
“Now look,” he said, the beginnings of anger rumbling in his deep voice. “Maybe I did wrong to needle
you about the machine. But you’ve got to get over the idea that I can be bullied into admitting that you’re
right. You’ve got no conception of the technology that’s behind the machine, and no idea of how certain I
am that you, at least, can’t do anything to interfere with its operation. You think that there’s a slight
element of doubt in my mind and that you can bluff me out by proposing an astronomical bet. Then, if I
won’t bet, you’ll tell yourself you’ve won. Now listen, I’m not just ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine
per cent sure of myself. I’m one hundred per cent sure of myself and the reason I won’t bet you is
because that would be robbery; and besides, once you’d lost you’d hate me for winning for the rest of
your life.”
“The bet still stands,” said Cary.
“All right!” roared Burke, jumping to his feet. “If you want to force the issue, suit yourself. It’s a bet.”
Cary grinned and got up, following him out of the pleasant, spacious sitting room, where lamps dispelled
the gloom of the snow-laden sky beyond the windows, and into a short, metal-walled corridor where
ceiling tubes blazed. They followed this for a short distance to a room where the wall facing the corridor
and the door set in it were all of glass.
Here Burke halted.
“There’s the machine,” he said, pointing through the transparency of the wall and turning to Cary behind
him. “If you want to communicate with it verbally, you speak into that grille there. The calculator is to
your right, and that inner door leads down to the room housing the lighting and heating plants. But if
you’re thinking of physical sabotage, you might as well give up. The lighting and heating systems don’t
even have emergency manual controls. They’re run by a little atomic pile that only the machine can be
trusted to handle – that is, except for an automatic set-up that damps the pile in case lightning strikes the
machine or some such thing. And you couldn’t get through the shielding in a week. As for breaking
through to the machine up here, that panel in which the grille is set is made of two-inch thick steel sheets
with their edges flowed together under pressure.”
“I assure you,” said Cary, “I don’t intend to damage a thing.”
Page 5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]