An xt called stanley, p.7
An XT Called Stanley, page 7
“What’s wrong?” Jean asked. “Your hands are all sweaty.”
“Excuse me a second,” I said and headed for the bathroom. I took two anti-nausea pills and washed my face. “Why now?” I pleaded. When I arrived in New Hope the lower gravity hadn’t bothered my stomach one bit. I waited in the bathroom a few minutes hoping the pills would take effect. Finally I went out. Jean’s dress was no longer in disarray and she had tied her hair in her usual pony tail. She was reading. I could see she was annoyed.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
She took a breath and held it for a second. “I suppose I’m expected to go to bed with you now. Well, I won’t. I don’t go to bed on the first, second or any date. I haven’t been to bed with a man and I’m not going to until it’s with my husband.”
“Is your family out of the stone age?” I asked.
“No, I just respect some things.”
“Respect, you mean repress. The Puritan ethic went out centuries ago.”
“I want to tell my husband he’s the only one.”
“How are you going to get a husband if you don’t go to bed with him?” I said sharply.
“I don’t think that’s what you’re offering,” she shot back.
For a moment neither of us spoke. Then Jean smiled. “Do you want your letter sweater back?” she asked.
It wasn’t Jean I was mad at. We ended up watching a movie. Afterwards I walked her back to her dorm.
“Would you come to church with me tomorrow?” Jean asked. “I’ll pick you up at ten forty?”
“I’ll meet you afterwards,” I said.
The church was an auditorium off Fourth Alley on Level Three. I waited outside while the people filed out, some of them stopping to shake hands with a white-robed minister. I recognized John Bruno and Sheila Towers coming out together and went over to speak to them.
“Jean’s inside serving coffee,” John said. “If you want to sneak in the back way there’s a door just down the alley.”
Inside there were about twenty people milling around and chatting. Jean was in the back stacking dirty coffee cups into metal racks.
“How’d you get stuck with this job?” I asked, coming up behind her.
“It’s an honor,” Jean said, tuning around and smiling. “Would you like a cup of real coffee? This is the real thing, imported from Earth.”
“How do you afford it?” I asked.
“Oh, Mr. Martin gave it to us. He gave the church some money with specific instructions that it be used to import real coffee for the church’s coffee hour. We have to keep it under lock and key or it gets stolen. The minister has the only key.”
I became intrigued with the coffee maker next to Jean. It had two dials and a couple of valves. “Mr. Martin also gave that to the church,” Jean said. “If you’re so interested in it I’ll let you clean it.”
“What an honor,” I said.
While I was putting the coffee maker back together the minister came over to hang up his vestments in the church closet. He was a handsome man a little shorter than Jean. Whenever he looked at me he knitted his eyebrows in a worried expression.
“Were you in church?” he asked me.
“I, ah…” I stammered.
“Bob’s helping me clean up,” Jean explained.
“You realize,” he said sharply to Jean, “this coffee was expressly given for the benefit of church goers.”
“Don’t worry,” Jean shot back, “he hasn’t had any of our sacred coffee.”
For a moment the minister just looked at Jean like he didn’t believe what he’d heard. “Well, make sure you lock up,” he said quickly and turned to go.
“He’s a son of a bishop,” Jean said after he’d gone. “I don’t know why he ever became a minister.”
During these weeks I spent a lot of time with Jean. My work on the central processing unit was done. The job had been submitted to the Steig Assembler. They expected to take about five weeks with it. If you know what the Assembler can do you know that’s an incredible amount of circuitry. This job took the record for the biggest single item job. I confessed to Max my apprehension. “If it doesn’t work we’re going to look pretty stupid.”
“I’m not worried,” Max said. “We’ll just say it’s all your fault.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t worry. The aliens are really smart. They know about cosmic rays.”
“Cosmic rays,” I repeated.
“Yes,” Max said. “Sometimes a cosmic ray will trigger a micro-circuit. That’s why computer circuitry is redundant.”
“Eee,” I moaned, realizing the truth of Max’s words. “I forgot about that.”
“But they didn’t,” Max said. “The I.Q. machine’s redundant but it’s not a trivial redundancy. That’s why I had you build the central processing unit. I knew you’d follow their directions and not try to impose our standard codes and practices. Your lack of knowledge was a virtue. Don’t worry, Bob, it’ll fly.”
During this time I met Jean’s parents and later her brother and his wife. Jean usually called her parents on Sunday and a couple of times she made the call from my apartment. They asked me a lot of questions about my job, where I’d grown up and the like. Jean was quite protective of me. At one point Jean’s mother remarked, “Maybe Bob would like to answer for himself.” After the initial discussion I was happy to drop into the background.
I was a little nervous about introducing Jean to my mother and my mother was instantly wary of Jean. I knew this because she adopted an overly gracious and at the same time patronizing attitude toward her.
“It must be exciting to be a secretary at the Space Studies Institute,” she said to Jean.
I knew my mother had people under her who hired and fired secretaries by the dozens. She considered being a secretary at Jean’s level about as exciting as changing diapers. I think Jean detected the patronage in my mother’s manner but decided not to show it.
“I like it,” Jean said. “They’re interesting people at the Institute.”
My mother nodded. “I understand you’re from the Boston area.”
“Yes,” Jean answered. “My family makes sails in Salem.”
“Oh, how interesting,” my mother said with an enthusiasm I knew not to be genuine. With this encouragement, Jean began to explain the business.
“What on earth prompted you to leave Salem for outer space?”
Jean looked at me for a second. “I wanted to try something different.”
“I dare say,” my mother said.
Jean didn’t say anything directly afterwards, but I could tell she was a little shaken by the encounter with my mother. Jean looked to me for a reassurance which I didn’t give her.
“Don’t you think she’s a little too serious?” my mother asked me the next time she called.
“Jean?” I said. “She’s got a good sense of humor.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Mother said, looking at her nails which she’d just been filing. “She seems, what shall I say, a little intense.”
“Well,” I said with a shrug, “maybe she was a little nervous.”
“What’s she got to be nervous about?” Mother said, tossing her nail file on the coffee table. “It’s fine with me that she’s sleeping with you. It’s good you’re getting some experience. But watch out, some girls think that if they go to bed with you they own you. I’m afraid Jean is the possessive type. You’ve got…”
“I haven’t been to bed with her,” I interrupted.
Mother stopped and looked at me. She could see that I was perfectly serious. “What is she, the virgin queen?”
“You don’t have to warn me,” I said, looking my mother in the eye. “She scares me enough already.”
“Scares you?”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s not the sort of girl you fool around with.”
Mother brushed my words away with a wave of her hand. “Don’t worry. Young girls are often very intense. They grow out of it after their first affair. You always do take everything so seriously. Relax and have some fun.”
But I couldn’t relax. In my rational moments I knew I should break up with Jean and get myself another girl, a girl who didn’t act like she was living in the middle ages. But I couldn’t let Jean go. And the more I was with her the more I wanted to go to bed with her. She may have been a virgin but she certainly wasn’t cold and aloof. When I kissed her and held her she kissed me back with a fire and passion that was more devastating than any amount of expertise. I found there was a cave man inside me that wanted her regardless of the consequences. The cave man frightened me. He wasn’t nice and he was completely beyond reason. Occasionally Jean would yell at him and together we would bury him. But no sooner was he buried than Jean would dig him up, like the night she accused me of being distant and then she told me that John and Sheila were sleeping together. The cave man was never buried for long. But Jean didn’t know that I was more afraid of him than she was. I knew we were playing with fire.
The first week of November the Steig Assembler completed our job order. I heard the sound of someone opening up the office across the hall from me and two voices I didn’t recognize. Going out to investigate, I found two men in white coats unloading several yellow cases under Max’s supervision.
“Would you certify this,” one man asked Max, handing him a certification card.
It was now official. Max had taken possession of the super brain. The two men in white coats departed and Max began installing the various components in a black cabinet on the far side of the room.
“Should I get the others?” I asked.
“In a moment,” Max answered.
A moment was more like two hours as Max made various adjustments. I sat down on a couch and waited anxiously.
The office was actually two offices which had been combined into one at Max’s request. It looked more like the living room of a deluxe apartment than a computer room. There were two dark red couches, one facing the wall-sized projection screen and a second one off to one side. In front of the couch facing the projection screen was a black glass coffee table partially covered with Tom’s green sensing plate. There were two large potted plants on end tables at either end of the couch. The sound pillars for the super brain were at the front of the room.
At the back of the room behind the couch Max worked on the circuit modules for the super brain. I waited while Max muttered to himself.
“O.K.,” he finally said, closing up the black cabinet. “We’re all set. Do you want to get the others?”
I rushed out to get Tom and Roger. When we got back Max had the black cabinet open again.
“Just a moment, gentlemen,” Max said, closing up the cabinet. “This is it, gentlemen. Contact.”
And nothing happened.
“Damn,” Max said, opening up the black cabinet again.
“What’s wrong?” Tom asked.
“It’s stuck in a damn loop,” Max said, looking at the print screen covering the circuit modules. “The CPU keeps requesting the same dose over and over again.”
We all stood patiently around while Max tried one thing after another. Tom would occasionally suggest something and Max would reply that he’d already thought of that. After half an hour, Max turned away with a sigh and Tom began to fiddle.
“What the hell is wrong?” Tom asked after several tries.
“It’s the central processing unit,” Roger said. “We know everything else works.”
“Everything’s been checked and rechecked,” I said. “Each module passed its checking program.”
“It’s the central processing unit,” Roger reaffirmed. “I told you we shouldn’t have had Bob build it.”
“How do you know it’s not the memory?” I said, raising my voice.
“Because I’ve checked it,” Roger said evenly.
“Well, I’ve checked the modules. They were checked at the Steig plant before delivery.”
“Well, you obviously made a mistake,” Roger said flatly.
I confess I was close to tears. The assembly of the central processing unit had cost the Federal Security Agency a hundred times my Salary and just possibly it was a piece of junk. If there was an error among those billions of circuit elements I’d never find it. I wished I’d never come to New Hope.
“Cool it,” Max said, looking at Roger. “Let’s not get worked up about this. It’s probably something very simple. The best thing to do is just forget about it for now. Go out and get drunk. It’s probably so obvious, we just need some distance.”
That evening I ate with Max, Tom and Roger at Einstein Hall. Max had asked me if I wanted to join them and under the circumstances, I thought I’d better accept. I left a message for Jean.
Einstein Hall is supposedly patterned after the hall at Queen’s College, Oxford. There are long tables and stately chairs made of glass but giving the appearance of wood and even a musty odor, a creation of New Hope chemistry. Dinner begins at precisely nineteen-thirty. But with all the pomp and ceremony it was still the same cafeteria food served on the same glass plates.
After dinner Max asked me to join Tom and Roger at his club, but I slipped away. I wanted to get back to my apartment where Jean was waiting. She sat on the couch and knitted while I told her everything that had happened.
“Do you think you can get it going?” she asked when I was through.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Roger claims it’s all my fault it doesn’t work.”
“He would,” Jean said, biting a knitting needle while she fished for something in her bag.
“I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is it’s a hell of a lot to pay for something that doesn’t work.”
Jean took the knitting needle out of her mouth and looked at me. “It’s not your fault,” she said seriously.
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t deliberately sabotage it, did you?”
“No,” I admitted.
“You’ve done your best. What more can they expect?”
When I thought about it I realized it was true. I had done my best and I would do my best to get the super brain going and if Roger wanted to assign blame that was his problem.
“You’re right,” I said, putting my arm around her. Jean put down her knitting.
Starting an ordinary computer presents a problem. A computer executes instructions which are stored in memory, but when you first turn on a computer the memory is blank. The computer can’t do anything because there are no instructions in the memory to execute. The solution to the problem is a self-loading instruction. The computer will accept the instruction, “Load the following instructions into memory.” The computer then loads those instructions in memory and then begins to execute them in order. With those instructions you can tell the computer to load more instructions. It’s like gaining entrance to an enemy castle. You have to get someone inside to let down the drawbridge. The super brain was designed on different principles than our computers but still there could have been an analogy.
That was a week filled with frustration. It ended with me taking Max’s original advice. Jean and I got drunk. Sally Haskins talked Jean into bringing me to party at Teeman Hall. Sally moved with a faster crowd and I think she thought Jean could use some loosening up. It was a wild party. I should have remembered from my college days never to trust a punch. It’s also possible that there was something in the punch besides alcohol.
My father had once told me that if I was ever considering marrying a girl I should get her good and drunk first. My father offered this advice in a joking manner but I knew he was serious. “If you don’t like her when she’s drunk, beware.” I liked Jean very much when she was drunk. And she liked me. After kissing her at one of the tables on the darker side of the room I asked if she wanted to come back to my apartment. She said “yes.” And from the way I was holding her and she was leaning on me, there was no ambiguity as to what “yes” meant. But what they say about strong drink proved true. It left the desire but took away the performance. We rushed back to my apartment and got into bed together only to fall asleep. Sometime in the early morning hours I was aware she was stirring. She had gotten up and was dressed.
“I’ve got to go,” she said.
“No,” I said. I grabbed her and kissed her and for a second I thought she was going to stay. But she broke away and was gone.
“Damn,” I said.
The next morning I awoke knowing how to start the super brain. I disregarded my hangover in my excitement and jumped into my clothes and rushed over to the Institute. At seven on Saturday there was practically no one there. I was glad of that. If my idea didn’t work, I wouldn’t have to announce the fact. I was convinced it was the timing of the high speed memory file. Feverishly I worked to expose the timing circuitry. I retarded the memory cycle a few microseconds and turned on the super brain. Nothing happened. It didn’t even cycle at all. I tried advancing the memory cycle. Once I had advanced the memory cycle a few microseconds beyond the null point, the brain stopped cycling altogether.
“Damn,” I said out loud. “I was so sure that was the problem.”
There was nothing to do but return the memory cycle to its original null setting and lock it. No one would be the wiser. I returned the memory cycle to precise synchronization and locked it. I started the brain up, still hoping, but it was still in that infernal loop.
“Damn,” I yelled. “Why don’t you start!”
And it did.
CHAPTER III Birth
All persons, both male and female, employed at New Hope must follow one of the approved birth control methods. Since medical termination of pregnancy is forbidden in space, birth control methods which prevent conception must be used. Most women prefer the Hall treatment which suppresses ovulation and menstruation. Men usually elect reversible vasectomy. Individuals who had already taken permanent or reversible contraceptive measures before their arrival at Space Immigration must have these measures verified.
