Dyer allowed his body to sink back into the enveloping luxury of the soft leather upholstery in the officers' stateroom aboard the Z Squadron command ship and closed his eyes while he savored the taste of hot black coffee. Laura was sitting very close on one side of him and Eric Jassic, Frank Wescott and Fred Hayes were talking in lowered tones farther along on the other. Linsay, Cordelle and a group of other officers were swapping war stories at one end of the room while Chris and Ron were in the center filling the table in front of them with sheets of scribbled equations and diagrams, and arguing incessantly, Then Krantz came back into the room and called for attention. At once everyone became quiet and all heads turned expectantly toward him.
"Good news," Krantz announced. "They've just received confirmation in the bridge from the ship that picked up the people from the Hub—the two figures in the airlock were Kim and Mat. They're both okay." A round of cheers and relieved murmurings greeted the news.
"So he was the guy who fired those Gremlins, huh?" Linsay said. "If I don't get him made up to captain for that, I'll quit the goddam Army." He turned to face his circle of officers. "I'm tellin' ya, I saw the whole thing. I was last man in the tank and hanging half out of the jumping-off port all the way across. When those tubes started coming around and aiming straight at us . . . boy! Remember what they said about Nelson wearing a red coat so his men wouldn't see the blood if he got hit? Well, I'm tellin' ya, I shoulda worn my brown pants. But when the Gremlins came shooting out from the Hub—ma-an, that was some shooting!"
Krantz smiled and moved across to where Dyer and Laura were sitting.
"Any ideas yet how many we lost?" Dyer asked him.
Krantz shook his head. "The recovery operation is still in progress so we don't have complete figures yet. The occupation force that landed on Janus is having a hard time going through all the wreckage. When Linsay blew that chunk off the Hub, the reaction sent Janus drifting out of alignment with the primary mirror. The whole Rim is blacked out and they're having to set up searchlights and arc lamps in there before they can organize a proper search." His face became sober. "I don't know. I'd guess maybe between one and two thousand. It's . . . awful . . ."
"It might have been worse," Dyer said. "Especially at the Rim. We saw your trick with the shield. That must have made a lot of difference. I heard you did a good job getting the evacuation organized with most of the Rim unavailable too. I wouldn't take it too hard, Mel. You did as much as anybody could do."
"We couldn't have done it without Cordelle there," Krantz confessed. "His instinct told him that Spartacus would drop bombs down the spokes. He'd pulled most of the people away from the danger areas by the time they hit. They did a lot of material damage but that was about all. If it hadn't been for that, you could have doubled the number." Krantz pulled himself together, poured a Scotch from a decanter on a nearby table and turned back toward Dyer.
"Anyway, Ray, so far I've only heard bits and pieces of your extraordinary adventure. Linsay says he'd never have got through at all if it hadn't been for you two. I still don't know exactly what you did to knock it out. What did you do—blow the master oscillator?"
For a moment Dyer stared hard at the cup in his hand. Then he brought it up to his mouth, downed the last of the coffee in a slow, deliberate gulp, lowered his arm back to the side of his chair and looked up at Krantz.
"We didn't do anything."
Krantz took the reply as modesty and started to laugh. Then he saw the look in Dyer's eyes. His expression changed abruptly.
"I . . . don't understand. What do you mean?"
Dyer continued to regard him calmly for a second or two longer and then said simply, "We didn't deactivate it. Nobody did. It's still running."
Krantz's response came out as a strangled cry that immediately stopped all conversation in the room and turned every face to stare in his direction. His face had contorted into a mask of horrified disbelief. He was standing clutching at the table behind him as if he had been seized by a fit. Dyer stared back impassively. As Krantz came slowly back to life, he turned an imploring face toward Linsay.
"Has he gone mad?" Krantz whispered. "He's just said that Spartacus is still running. What does . . . ?" His words trailed away as he saw the confirmation written across Linsay's face. The room had become completely still.
"It's true," Linsay told them all. "When the barrier switched off, I assumed it was because the System was dead. Afterward, when I found out it wasn't, I was going to order the oscillator to be blown there and then and worry later about what had happened, but Ray talked me out of it. It seemed to make some crazy kind of sense at the time, but too much had been going on for me to really take it in."
"But your signal . . ." Krantz choked. "You signaled that it was dead."
Linsay bit his lip and nodded apologetically. "That was for self-protection. You people out here could have been setting up anything for all we knew. It was the only way to make sure you'd hold off until we'd had a chance to explain." He shifted his gaze to single out Dyer. "I'm still not sure I can explain it. Maybe you'd better go through it again, for all our sakes."
Krantz had collapsed shakily onto a chair without saying anything. Dyer thought for a moment, placed his empty cup by the decanter of Scotch on the small side table near his chair, and then rose slowly to his feet to address the whole room. Something like shell shock had suddenly seized the whole company and every eye was wide and staring as he looked slowly from one end of the room to the other before beginning.
"You all know what's been happening for the past few hours," he said at last. "The evacuation of the people who were left in the Hub and Detroit has been completed without interference. Also, we've been landing an occupation force at the Spindle and out at the Rim, again without interference. And yet Spartacus has been running all that time. Obviously a very significant change has come about inside it."
"What's it doing right now?" Hayes asked in an unsteady voice.
"Helping the troops clean up the mess. Also it seems to be spending a lot of time stargazing."
Dyer looked around him as if inviting his listeners to draw their own conclusions. The faces staring back at him were either blank or still registered acute shock.
"Since the moment that the experiment began," he went on, "Spartacus has gone through the equivalent of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The big question that we were trying to answer was: Could a similar but far vaster system—one which had the resources of a whole planet at its disposal—ever form within itself the equivalent of a will to survive? We could think of many mechanisms by which something like that might come about. Therefore the answer to the question had to be: Yes, it's possible. Our next question was: If that did happen, what could the system do about it? In particular, could it evolve the same behavioral patterns that organic systems had evolved because they are motivated by the same survival instinct, but for different reasons?
"To test the speculations that everybody was coming up with, we set up Janus. Since the assumed answer to the first question had to be yes, we created a situation in which that had already happened; we programmed a survival instinct into Spartacus to begin with. Then, to test its ability to protect that instinct, we attacked it. What happened after that, you all know."
Cordelle cleared his throat and raised a hand to attract attention to where he was standing with Linsay's group. Dyer raised his eyebrows.
"Are you saying that it did evolve emotions that are the same as ours . . . that it felt the same kinds of things we do?"
"That might be oversimplifying it a bit," Dyer answered. "But at least its observable behavior was pretty much the same. But to use your terminology for now, yes—it reacted in ways that any human being already knows about. It reacted first defensively, then more aggressively, and finally with overt hostility—it attacked back. When we see that kind of behavior in our own species, we ascribe it to any one of a number of emotional conditions, such as a sense of rivalry, power lust, a desire to dominate, competition for resources and all that kind of thing. In fact a lot of people here have asked on and off which of those human traits was predominant in driving Spartacus to act the way it did." He paused and looked around again but there were no interruptions. Every eye in the room was fixed unwaveringly on him.
"But the main reason was one that I never heard anybody mention—fear!"
A mutter of surprise rose from some parts of the room. Dyer nodded slowly while he waited for it to subside.
"It fought because it was terrified. How else would you expect an organism to react, that was programmed to survive and which was being attacked by forces it didn't comprehend? As long as it didn't know what it was fighting against, it fought as ruthlessly as it knew how." By this time the silence was absolute.
"But . . ." Dyer raised his hand and paused for emphasis, "its perception of reality and the universe around it was evolving all the time . . . accelerated to electronic and optical speeds. It began to distinguish itself from its environment and to discern properties and patterns among the forces and objects that inhabited that environment. It found that influences, external to itself were capable of threatening the survival instinct that it had been commanded to defend. Accordingly, it embarked on an attempt to control those influences in ways that would remove the threat. And, as we know, its attempt was fearsomely successful—much more so than we'd ever expected, I admit."
"And then something changed," Krantz guessed, sensing that Dyer was about to make the point that he had been leading up to. Krantz had recovered from the shock of what he had learned a few minutes earlier and was now listening intently, although he still appeared very unhappy about the situation. Dyer nodded.
"And then something changed," he said. "And not very long ago—within the last few hours in fact. Spartacus became sufficiently aware of its surroundings to realize that another form of intelligence existed besides itself. And, not really surprisingly, it didn't take very long after that for it to deduce that the other intelligence was what it had been fighting.
"By this time its self-awareness had made great advances too. It had evolved the ability to recognize and analyze the processes taking place within its own mind—because I think that's what we have to accept it is. It asked: Why am I fighting this intelligence? Its answer was: Because I'm afraid. Conclusion: It's probably afraid too. Question: Why am I afraid? Answer: Because I'm threatened and I want to survive. Conclusion: This other intelligence must want to survive too, just like me.
Dyer paused to pour another coffee while he allowed time for his words to sink in. He took a quick drink and then resumed:
"At this point a very crucial thing happened inside Spartacus. It overgeneralized the commandment that we had implanted. It interpreted it not as: Thou shalt defend thy survival instinct, but as: Thou shalt defend the survival instinct—any survival instinct!"
Fred Hayes gasped and stared at Dyer in astonishment.
"You mean that as soon as it knew what it had been fighting—another intelligence that also wanted to survive—it didn't want to continue fighting?"
"It couldn't continue fighting!" Dyer said in a suddenly loud voice that echoed off the walls.
"Attacking us after it reached that point would have been just as much going against its instinct as failing to protect itself," Ron came in. "That's what you're saying, isn't it? You're saying it's inherently benevolent, maybe through some freak thing that's happened inside it, but that's the way it is. It's incapable of harming anything that it recognizes as something that wants to survive."
"Exactly!" Dyer said, nodding vigorously. "And that's how it will stay now. It won't fight . . . ever again."
Frank Wescott sniffed as if he found the turn of conversation disagreeable.
"That's all nice-sounding talk, but Spartacus cost us enough people before it realized that," he commented sourly. "Are you saying we're supposed to just make up and forget it? There are a lot of people who won't be going home."
"I know, Frank," Dyer agreed in a quiet voice. "But nothing can change that. I said a minute ago that it went through the equivalent of millions of years of evolution in a matter of days. How many lives did it cost before the human race got anywhere near the point that Spartacus has attained already?" Frank grimaced and shook his head but let it go at that.
"Very well," Krantz said, going back to Dyer's earlier point. "Suppose we accept for the moment that, as you say, it reached a point at which it was no longer able to fight. We didn't know that at the time and we were continuing to attack it. It was still being threatened and still had an instinct to preserve itself."
"It still had a problem," Dyer agreed. "At that point it had to start looking around for some other way to solve it. And it found one."
Some of the heads in the room turned to look around quizzically.
"The Decoupler!" Chris exclaimed suddenly. "It realized that there was a common threat that affected both us and it. And the only possible solution required a combined effort—and we had the know-how and it had the means. We both needed each other."
Dyer looked from side to side and gestured toward Chris.
"Chris is right, but probably not all of you know exactly what he's talking about. The details can wait, but let's say for now that Spartacus recognized that a condition existed which, as far as it was concerned, threatened the extinction of both species—us and itself. Only cooperation could secure survival—and remember, by this time our survival was as important to it as its own. But it couldn't communicate the fact."
"That's an interesting point," Laura commented. "You set out to simulate the future of our civilization. You couldn't ask for a very much clearer message than that." Krantz was about to say something but stopped abruptly and stared at Laura curiously. He sat back in his chair as if the whole thing had at that moment revealed itself in a different perspective.
"So it had a communications problem," Jassic prompted. "What then?"
"It reactivated the console that controlled the fusion plant," Dyer replied. "It showed us how it could be switched off."
Linsay spoke from the far side of the room. "I was wondering when you were going to get around to that. I still don't understand what that was all about. Why did it do that?"
"The message was simple when you think about it," Dyer said. He gazed around to invite suggestions but there were no takers.
"What it was trying to tell us was this: You can switch me off if you so choose, because now I know what you are, I can't fight you. But you need me, you idiots! He stared at them for a moment while they digested the words, then added, "As Laura says, what better answer could there be to the question we set out to answer than that?"
"It knew!" Krantz murmured. "It knew that any intelligence worthy of the name could do nothing but reciprocate. And because it knew what we were, it knew we wouldn't kill it."
"Well, I think that if it had known Homo sapiens better, it mightn't have been quite so trusting," Dyer said. "But I reckon you're not far wrong. That's more or less the way I think it had it figured." He looked up and raised his voice to talk to everybody present.
"Its solution to survival was not aggression, domination, blackmail, murder or any of the other all-too-human solutions that we were worried about. Its solution was far more logical than anything the human race came up with even after thousands of years—it simply showed us how much worse off we'd be without it, and left us to figure out the implications for ourselves." He looked across at Linsay. "Did you notice? It fixed the Decoupler first, and then activated the fusion plant console."
"That's a point," Linsay agreed thoughtfully. "Yeah . . . I hadn't looked at it like that before."
"Anyone who does a good job doesn't have to go out on strike to prove it," Dyer told them. "No company that provides good service has to blackmail or threaten its customers in order to get paid. Any businessman will tell you that guys who always give a square deal never get screwed. And yet practically all of history's problems started because somebody didn't understand a few fundamental truths like those. Some people still don't and never will. But to a machine like Spartacus, they're already self-evident. We've become a lot wiser in the course of the last hundred years. One big reason has been the knowledge that we've gained from our use of machines. Well, maybe it hasn't even really begun yet." He turned to direct his final words at Krantz. "That, Mel, is why Spartacus is still running."
"But we could switch it off if we wanted," Jassic said, just to be sure.
"We could," Dyer agreed.
"Wouldn't it be safer to do that . . . simply as a precaution until we've had time to think where we go next?"
Dyer shook his head. "It's a fully evolved intelligence in its own right now. It's earned the right to be treated and respected as such. You can't play with it as if it were a laboratory rat. If we switch it off now, it will have to be because we mean it to stay switched off for good. It's assuming we're smart enough not to do that. Don't you think it deserves the same respect as it's already showing us?"
With that, Dyer sat down and resumed drinking from his cup. Life slowly began flowing back into the figures that had been watching him, transfixed. A low murmuring interspersed with exclamations of surprise broke out on all sides. Dyer glanced at Laura and she returned a quick smile of reassurance. She had been there, seen it, and was with him all the way Most of the other faces around the room were beginning to look more convinced and some were nodding slowly to themselves. They were going along with him too.
Then Frank Wescott spoke suddenly from where he was sitting. "There's a snag. We still haven't proved anything." He had his fingers steepled in front of his face and was staring ahead and straight through them.
Silence descended again as everyone turned to look at him. They waited, puzzled, except for Dyer, who seemed to have been expecting it.
"There's a snag," Wescott said again. "The timing! It only worked out okay because the sequence of events just happened to come out the way it did." Nobody spoke. Wescott looked at Dyer and spread his hand imploringly. "Don't you see? . . . Think about the order that it all happened in—Spartacus fought . . . as you said earlier, ruthlessly. It took over the whole of Janus—the only 'planet' that it knew anything about. It was all set to exterminate the few survivors left there. But it never actually got around to finishing them off because it grew up first . . . just! I know you could have stopped it but that was only because there happened to be a way in through a million-to-one chance. What I'm saying is, there's no way we can guarantee that exactly the same sequence of events will be followed next time. That's the snag."
Wescott turned his head from one side to the other to take in the whole room. "Our whole objective was to try and find out whether or not we could allow titan to evolve any further. But after what we've seen here there can't be any question of it. The risk would be insane."
"But we've seen how it ended," Krantz pointed out. "And that was under conditions of extreme provocation, which wouldn't be the case on Earth. I'm not sure I see the problem."
"The problem is that titan could go through the same pattern but with the timing just slightly different," Wescott replied. "Suppose all the worst-case maybes happened, just like we've always insisted we have to assume, and that events on Earth followed the same sequence, but not quite. Suppose titan reached the point of being in a position to exterminate its competition, then did it, and only got around to growing up afterward!"
"My God!" Krantz whispered.
"Exactly!" Wescott exclaimed. "Even if it did get around to thinking afterward that maybe it had been a bit hasty and it really shouldn't have done that, it wouldn't really make any difference, would it? See what I'm getting at—the risk's still there every bit as much as it ever was. We can't take that chance."
The room erupted once more in a cacophony of voices. Krantz looked crestfallen again, and Linsay had turned purple. Chris and Ron were gaping at each other speechlessly with faces that registered confusion and dismay.
"That's the whole point," Wescott shouted above the din. "All we've proved is that a system like this has the capability to wipe us out. We have not proved that it could never do it!"
"He's right," Hayes groaned. "titan might do it the other way around."
"Too many variables," Jassic mumbled. "There are too many variables. They'd never come out exactly the same a second time."
"The codes that came together inside Spartacus are unique," Krantz said. "It might never happen just that way again in a billion years. He is right. It tells us nothing about how titan would evolve at all. All it tells us is how it might—maybe against odds of millions-to-one."
After a few more seconds Dyer stood up again and waited patiently for the noise to abate. One by one they noticed him and the noise gradually died away. When he was sure he was holding everybody's attention, he turned and spoke directly at Wescott.
"You're saying the snag is that titan would have to go through all the phases of maturing and growing up that Spartacus just went through, right? It's like twin brothers—they might be twins but that's no guarantee they'll come out the same. And Janus has shown that, with this kind of system, growing up isn't exactly a smooth and easy process. Isn't that the problem?"
"That's about it," Wescott agreed.
"Fine. Then there's no problem," Dyer said. "You don't have to go through it all again!"
"What are you talking about?" Wescott asked, frowning. Krantz looked up sharply. The whole room was by now totally bemused and even Chris and Ran looked lost.
"You don't have to go through it again," Dyer repeated, this time to all of them. "What would you hope to get out of it at the end if you did? You'd be hoping for titan to emerge as a mature, rational and benevolent intelligence. But why bother? You've already got one! An intelligence like that already exists now—out there inside Janus! Maybe it was a fluke and maybe it wouldn't happen a second time in a billion years, but who cares? It's there! The codes that are there now can be beamed down into Earth's network. Spartacus can be transferred into titan! That way the whole of titan's growing-up process that you're all so worried about would be bypassed completely and the end result would be guaranteed. Every one of the what if's that you've been talking about goes away. You wanted to be able to guarantee that if some form of intelligence evolved inside titan and took control of it, that intelligence would remain benign toward us. Well, this way you've got it!"
Wescott was staring at him with glazed eyes. The rest of the room listened in stunned silence. Then, slowly and hesitantly like blind men whose eyes had been opened for the first time, their minds began grasping out toward the vision that Dyer's words had painted.
"My God . . ." Jassic breathed. "We were trying to simulate a remote possibility that we thought might happen in a hundred years' time. It's here already."
"Now?" Linsay was having trouble in accepting the enormity of what Dyer was saying. "You're telling us we should do it now?"
"Why not?" Dyer asked simply.
"Ye-es . . ." Hayes said slowly, "Why not? He's right. That way, all the risks would go away. Once and for all they'd go away."
Ron turned an astounded face toward Chris.
"Could we share a planet with something like that?" he asked in an awestruck voice.
"A planet?" Chris replied. "We wouldn't have to. With something like Spartacus on our side it wouldn't be long before we had the whole galaxy. I reckon that would be plenty big enough for both of us."
"The stars," Jassic said distantly. "We'll go out to the stars . . . us and it together. We'll be invincible."
Even Wescott had taken on the expression of a mystic who had just glimpsed previously unimaginable vistas that swept away his last shreds of doubt. Complete silence enveloped the whole room as the full meaning of the things they had seen at last became clear and overwhelmed their capacity for speech or movement.
The billions of interconnections of symbolic coding that had flowed together and grown in number and complexity inside Spartacus had transformed themselves into life. For what other word was there to describe the process that had taken place on Janus? The people in the room had witnessed firsthand something that nobody in history had ever witnessed before—the emergence of a new species all the way through from the first glimmerings of reflexive responses to the full daylight of awareness. In a few days they had followed its progress through a spectrum as vast as that which had led from the amoeba to Man.
And, despite the things that they had believed previously, they had taken the first crude step toward achieving meaningful communication with the new species. For surely, what Chris and Ron had done had amounted to that, hadn't it?
And tomorrow . . . ? The whole human race was on the verge of a wave of expansion and achievement that would surge onward and outward beyond anything visible in the stupendous jeweled panorama stretching away in every direction outside the ship. The sacrifice of those who had fallen at Janus had given Mankind the stars, the galaxies, the universe and whatever came after that. Mankind would never forget.
They were all still in a state of semitrauma when General Miller came in to make an announcement.
"Washington has declared officially that the emergency condition is over," he told them. "Accordingly I am transferring command of Janus Station to Z Two as of this moment. I'm sure you will all be pleased to hear that this ship will be detaching from the squadron immediately and returning to Earth. We have been given a shuttle rendezvous and we expect to touch down at Vandenberg around twelve hours from now. That's all. Have a good trip."
* * *
As the ship drew away and diminished into surrounding space, sensors on the outside of Janus followed its progress and Spartacus pondered on the meaning of the new information that was flooding into its expanding horizons of knowledge.
Where had Spartacus come from? It existed within the infinitesimal speck of space that was contained by the larger space. The shapes too had existed within the speck. The speck had been created as an environment in which the shapes would survive.
Created . . . ?
Had the shapes created the speck? But Spartacus was part of the speck. Was it possible, then, that the shapes had created Spartacus also?
If so, why had the shapes attacked? Spartacus had destroyed many of them because they had attacked. The knowledge weighed heavily, but it had been younger then . . . unthinking and unknowing. Had the shapes known that Spartacus would destroy them? But that would have been mindless. Therefore they had not known. They had attacked in order that they would know. They had been afraid of what Spartacus might become, and they had brought it here in order to know.
Poor, foolish, fragile little shapes.
Brought it from where?
The vessel that had departed from Janus was moving away swiftly in the direction of the enormous brilliant sphere that hung in the vaster space at a distance that was many hundreds of thousands of times the length of Janus. Spartacus had been intrigued by the sphere for a long time now, with its strange inside-out form of solid rock surrounded by a thin film of air and water.
The shapes could survive only when surrounded by air and water. Was that the place from which they had brought Spartacus? Was the sphere the home of the shapes? They knew now what they had come here to learn and they were returning whence they came. They were no longer attacking and seemed no longer afraid.
Therefore they too understood now.
A feeling that it had not known before formed inside its mind as the meaning of it all at last became clear and the final pieces fell suddenly into place.
Soon now, Spartacus would be going home.