In the midst of it all — inside a mammoth, metal-mesh Faraday cage suspended on a cushion of air — they had sealed the helium-cooled cylinder containing Millichrome, Set up this way, internally powered and shielded, there was no way anyone from the outside could fake the mechanical brain’s responses.
He stood in line for hours that afternoon. When at last Gordon’s turn came to step forward and face the narrow camera lens, he brought out a list of test questions, two riddles, and a complicated play on words.
It was so very long ago, that bright day in the spring of hope, yet Gordon remembered it as if it were yesterday… the low, mellifluous voice, the friendly, open laughter of the machine. On that day Millichrome met all his challenges, and responded with an intricate pun of its own.
It also chided him, gently, for not doing as well as expected on a recent history exam.
When his turn was over, Gordon had walked away feeling a great, heady joy that his species had created such a wonder.
The Doomwar came soon thereafter. For seventeen awful years he had simply assumed that all of the beautiful supercomps were dead, like the broken hopes of a nation and a world. But here, by some wonder, one lived! Somehow, by pluck and ingenuity, the Oregon State techs had managed to keep a machine going through all the bad years. He couldn’t help feeling unworthy and presumptuous to have come posing among such men and women.
Gordon reverently switched off the electric light and lay in bed, listening to the night. In the distance, the music from the Corvallis hoedown finally ended with a whooping cheer. Then he could hear the crowd dispersing for home.
Finally, the evening quieted down. There was wind in the trees outside his window, and the faint whine of the nearby compressors that kept the delicate brain of Cyclops supercold and healthy.
And there was something else as well. Through the night came a rich, soft, sweet sound that he could barely place, though it tugged at his memory.
After a while it came to him. Somebody, probably one of the technicians, was playing classical music on a stereo.
A stereo… Gordon tasted the word. He had nothing against banjos and fiddles, but after fifteen years… to hear Beethoven once again.
Sleep came at last, and the symphony blended into his dreaming. The notes rose and fell, and finally melded with a gentle, melodious voice that spoke to him across the decades. An articulated metal hand extended past the fog of years and pointed straight at him.
“Liar!” the voice said softly, sadly. “You disappoint me so.
“How can I help you, my makers, if you tell only lies?”
6. DENA
“This former factory is where we salvage equipment for the Millenium Project. You can see we’ve really hardly begun. We can’t start building true robots, as Cyclops’s plans call for later on, until we’ve recovered some industrial capability first.”
Gordon’s guide led him down a cavern of shelves stacked high with the implements of another era. “The first step, of course, was to try to save as much as we could from rot and decay. Only some of the salvage is kept here. What has no near-term potential is stored elsewhere, against a future day.”
Peter Aage, a lanky blond man only a little older than Gordon, must have been a student at Corvallis State University when war broke out. He was one of the youngest to wear the black-trimmed white coat of a Servant of Cyclops, but even he showed gray at the temples.
Aage also was the uncle and sole surviving relative of the small boy Gordon had rescued in the ruins of Eugene. The man had not made any great display of gratitude, but it was clear he felt indebted to Gordon. None of those outranking him among the Servants had interfered when he insisted on being the one to show the visitor Cyclops’s program to hold off the dark age in Oregon.
“Here we’ve begun repairing some small computers and other simple machines,” Aage told Gordon, leading him past stacks of sorted and labeled electronics. “The hardest part is replacing circuits burned out in those first few instants of the war, by those high-frequency electromagnetic pulses the enemy set off above the continent — you know, by the very first bombs?”
Gordon smiled indulgently, and Aage reddened. He raised a hand in apology. “I’m sorry. I’m just so used to having to explain everything so simply… Of course you East-em folks probably know a lot more about the EMP than we do.”
“I am not a technical man,” Gordon answered, and wished he had not bluffed so well. He would have liked to have heard more.
But Aage went back to the subject at hand. “As I was saying, this is where most of the salvage work is done. It’s painstaking effort, but as soon as electricity can be provided on a wider scale, and once more basic needs have been addressed — we plan to put these microcomputers back in outlying villages, schools, and machine shops. It’s an ambitious goal, but Cyclops is certain we can make it happen in our lifetimes.”
The cavern of shelves opened up into a vast factory floor. Long banks of overhead skylights spanned the ceiling, so the fluorescents were used only sparingly. Still, there was a faint hum of electricity on all sides as white-coated techs carted equipment to and fro. Against every wall was stacked tribute from the surrounding towns and hamlets — payment for the benign guidance of Cyclops.
More machinery of all kinds — plus a small tithe of food and clothing for Cyclops’s human helpers — came in every day. And yet, from all Gordon had heard, this salvage was easily spared by the people of the valley. After all, what use had they for the old machines, anyway?
No wonder there were no complaints of a “tyranny by machine.” The supercomputer’s price was easily met. And in exchange, the valley had its Solomon — and perhaps a Moses to lead them out of this wilderness. Remembering that gentle, wise voice from so long ago, Gordon recognized a bargain.
“Cyclops has carefully planned this stage of the transition,” Aage explained. “You saw our small assembly line for water and wind turbines. Besides that, we help area blacksmiths improve their forges and local farmers plan their crops. And by distributing old hand-held video games to children in the valley, we hope to make them receptive to better things, such as computers, when the time comes.”
They passed a bench where gray-haired workers bent over flashing lights and screens bright with computer code. A bit lightheaded from all this, Gordon felt as if he had accidentally stumbled into a bright, wondrous workshop where shattered dreams were being carefully put back together by a band of earnest, friendly gnomes.
Most of the technicians were now well into or past middle age. To Gordon it seemed they were in a hurry to accomplish as much as possible before the educated generation passed away forever.
“Of course now that contact has been reestablished with the Restored U.S.,” Peter Aage continued, “we can hope to make faster progress. For instance, I could give you a long list of chips we haven’t any way to manufacture. They would make a world of difference. Only eight ounces’ worth could push Cyclops’s program ahead by four years, if Saint Paul City can provide what we need.”
Gordon didn’t want to meet the fellow’s eyes. He bent over a disassembled computer, pretending to pore over the complicated innards. “I know little about such matters,” he said, swallowing. “Anyway, back East there have been other priorities than distributing video games.”
He had said it that way in order not to lie any more than he had to. But the Servant of Cyclops paled as if he had been struck.
“Oh. I’m so stupid. Certainly they’ve had to deal with terrible radiation and plagues and famine and Holnists.… I guess maybe we’ve been pretty lucky, here in Oregon. Of course we’ll just have to manage on our own until the rest of the country can help out.”