“Acknowledged,” said the computer, in Kussman’s voice. Paul grimaced. He would fix that, but later.

  He positioned the cylindrical chamber on its supports, connected it up between the urea pyrolyzer and the trialine receiver, and turned on the Variac heater for the pyrolyzer. He looked at his watch. It was nine forty.

  And now he thought: If I mention atmospheric pressure, the run will be rejected by Kussman’s constraint. The computer will erase everything. But maybe I can work it in somehow. Meanwhile, why take chances? He dug Serane’s last notebook from his briefcase, turned to the last blank page, and began writing up a duplicate of the run.

  It would take about ten minutes for the pyrolyzer to heat to temperature and then another ten for the catalyst to be activated. The first trialine would come over at about ten or ten fifteen. The whole thing would be over by midnight.

  He spoke into the computer mike: “The time is ten-oh-eight. The pyrolysis products from Uriah’s urea are

  now entering the catalyst chamber. I can see the vapor tendrils swirling through the silica-ash packing.” “Acknowledged,” said the computer.

  And now to make a slight correction. He addressed the console. “It is not absolutely required that you speak in Kussman’s voice, is it?”

  “No.”

  “I want you to use another voice.”

  “Do you have an exemplar?”

  “A few words on a tape.”

  “It may require considerable assistance on your part. In addition to providing the exemplar, you may have to make selections from various enuncial and regional models.”

  “I want to try. Male, age twenty-two. Native Texan. Full southwestern drawl. Now, here’s the only speech sample I have.” He snapped the little cassette into the console pocket and flipped the switch. After a moment the slow whisper began. “This is my last will and testament. I wish to be cremated. My books, my diaries, what few things I have, I leave to Paul.”

  “Now then,” said Paul, “your name is Billy.”

  “Yes, but before we proceed, we’d better have a vowel/consonant check.” It was still Kussman’s voice. “Go ahead,” said Paul.

  The console began with various shadings of vowels. How would Billy say it? Paul picked one out of the uttered possibilities. Then the labials, dentals, glottals, fricatives.

  “And don’t forget,” admonished Paul, “that in Texas, a simple declaratory sentence tends to rise in intonation, almost like a question. That’s to make sure the listener is listening.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There’s no ‘g’ in ‘listening.’ ”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  Paul switched on the visi receptor. “Here’s your picture. You had it taken for the TCU yearbook, when you were a junior. Register it, then feed it back on your screen.”

  “Like this?” It was done instantly. The likeness was a simple duplicate of the photo-portrait.

  “Like that. Now, when you speak, let your lips move. As though your face were alive and speaking to me.”

  “I’m not programmed for that.”

  “You can do it.”

  “How?”

  “Open your mouth when you speak. Spread your lips when you say ‘ee,’ round them when you say ‘o.’ Half of it is suggestion, anyhow—like ventriloquism.”

  “See the boats by the seashore … ?” It was Billy’s voice, totally. And the face was all Billy. The eyes seemed to sparkle. Light and shadow flickered along the cheekbones. The face had come alive. A patch of goosebumps crept across Paul’s upper back.

  “Great!” he said huskily. “You’re doing beautifully!”

  “Shore! Boy howdy! You all!”

  “Well, no need to overdo it.”

  The portrait broke into Billy’s crooked smile. Paul found himself grinning back—an interchange that acknowledged their cherished mutual secret: that the world was peopled by bizarre idiots, and that they were among the worst.

  At this point (as if the night were not yet sufficiently strange) a further thing happened. The TV holograph beams activated. A life-size figure in blue jeans and cotton T-shirt stood there by the computer terminal. In a casual movement a hand came up and brushed the long hair back from the forehead.

  Paul’s eyes bugged, and he had trouble breathing. “Billy?” he whispered.

  The figure yawned and stretched. “Just who did you think it was?”

  “Well, you, I guess …”

  “So why all the excitement? And what’s all this stuff? What are you up to?”

  Paul said, “I’m making a run that may give a biologically active trialine.”

  “Ah.” The holo walked over to the hood, studied the setup briefly, then adjusted the heater dial.

  Paul raised his arm in alarm. “No, don’t touch—!” “Look, you nut, you had it at three fifty. That’s too high. That’ll give you the racemate. At three twenty-five you may get something that will save your life.” And then it really hit him. “But you’re a holo! You can’t really move anything.”

  “You’re quite right. The holographic pressure interface won’t be invented for another fifteen years. Laser-force-field combination.”

  “But that’s not all,” accused Paul. “Don’t pretend you’re a real genuine hologram. The lasers can’t possibly form an interference pattern way over there.” “Well, Pud,- of course they can’t. They don’t have to. Haven’t you heard of ion transfer? Or don’t you know anything?” He swept the hair back over his forehead with an impatient gesture so tantalizingly familiar that it made Paul gasp.

  And there was that other thing. “You called me Pud,” said Paul. That one went back to early childhood.

  “You would prefer P. Henry Blandford, Esquire?” The figure walked leisurely back to the computer terminal and propped his elbows on the visi box. “I promise I won’t interfere again. Tell me the whole story.”

  Paul’s head was spinning. Where to start? He said, “You died of novarella.”

  “So you say.”

  “This will be a new kind of trialine. It may cure novarella.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “We crushed the ammonite, and the pieces were activated by your ashes. Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember the ammonite?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “It begins at Black Bridge. You remember Black Bridge, the railroad bridge near Damascus. You and I used to take the old Malibu out there, for picnics. We’d look for fossils in the creekbed. The abutment foundations for the bridge were made mostly of giant ammonites—seashells from the Cretaceous. They were all solid stone.” He paused uncertainly. “Billy, is it really you?”

  “We don’t have much time. Get on with your wild tale.”

  “We had an argument about whether it was possible for a porous ammonite to survive all these millions of years since the Cretaceous. I said yes; you said no. Then one night—”

  “Yes, then one night… ?”

  “A month or so after you died, I walked out to Black Bridge. I got there about midnight.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I picked up three fist-sized stones, walked out on the bridge a few yards, and listened. There was a faint backdrop of night noises. That was all. I tossed one of the stones through the girders into the gorge. Far below, the splash came back, clear, distinct. I put the other two is my jacket pocket.

  “I would now cross the bridge. I listened again; I did not want a train to catch me in the middle of the span. But there was no sound, nothing. I started across, then stopped. Something was wrong. It was too quiet. I listened again.

  “The world was suddenly soundless. I felt my skin ripple. I peered across the bridge in the moonlight. The rails were visible only to the halfway point. There they seemed to disappear into black fog. In fact, the whole bridge seemed to vanish there.

  “I remember thinking, this was still a bridge, but it was no longer the bridge that carried the trains of the Southern Pacific across Sticks Creek to Corsicana and points south. At this moment it was the juncture of two worlds.

  “The ties seemed to ascend like steps, inviting me. I drew the second stone from my pocket and tossed it into the blackness. It hit nothing. There was no splash from below. I thought, how could this be?

  “I peered outward over the ties. Something … someone … a figure … seemed to be standing there, backlit by the moonlight. The outlines of this … thing wavered and shimmered in the moonlight. I whispered, ‘Billy?’ But the figure made no reply. There was only the stillness. I took a step toward the figure, then another. The outline seemed to fade as I approached.

  “The night was changing. The cloud cover was thinning. I could see more of the bridge. I called to you: ‘Wait! Don’t go! Not yet!’

  “But the clouds passed, and the far end of the bridge seemed slowly to reappear, almost as though it had been recreated out of nothing. The creek noises returned. Frogs. Crickets. Night birds. The creek itself was running audibly. The moon was bright again. The wind was blowing.

  “It was over. I pulled the third stone from my pocket and looked at it in the moonlight. It was an ammonite. Nearly fist-sized, but very light. It was the rare, one-in-a-million porous type. A real museum specimen. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I passed it from one hand to the other, then put it back carefully in my pocket.

  “Billy, was it you? Was that you on the bridge that night?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Is that why you led me to the porous ammonite? For this run tonight?”

  “Tell me about the run.”

  “Ah, the run. Quite right.”

  He looked at his watch. “It is ten fifty. I am turning off the pyrolyzer. The receiver is full. Nothing more is coming over. The run is finished. I weigh the receiver.

  On subtracting the tare, I have a yield of three hundred grams. Hopefully, it is pure trialine. I am digging out a tiny crystalline needle from the receiving flask;

  I drop it in a test tube and add a little water. It di-solves in the right way—slowly and with dignity, like trialine, not with haste, like urea or guanidine. I add a drop of ammoniacal picric acid to the test tube. Beautiful golden floes characteristic of trialine picrate form instantly. It is pure trialine. And it has been formed in nearly theoretical yield. End of run.”

  “The run is complete?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you given all the conditions?”

  “I stated them as the run progressed. Along with some possibly extraneous matters.”

  “Paul, did you state the pressure?”

  “Pressure?”

  “I don’t think you gave the pressure.”

  Ah, of course. If he said the run had been made at atmospheric pressure, all of this would automatically be erased from the computer record. The great Kussman constraint. It was a good thing he was making an independent record in Serane’s notebook.

  “I will give you the pressure, but first I want you to do something for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “Prove that you are Billy.”

  “Is that so important to you? Well, let’s see. Here’s the position for the mate in four I announced in our very last game, on the dining room table, back at Deafsmith Street. It grew out of the exchange variation in Ruy Lopez. I had white.”

  A chessboard and pieces materialized in the holograph area in front of the terminal. White had an overwhelming attack. Paul didn’t search for the solution. “I don’t remember,” he muttered. “You could be making it all up.”

  “You just don’t like getting beat. And you always played a lousy Lopez. Well—”

  The holo zone crackled and flared. Paul jumped.

  Had the circuit blown? No. It was something else. Billy’s face emerged through a cloud of smoke. “We made gunpowder in the shack in the backyard. Fifteen charcoal, seventy-five potassium nitrate, ten sulfur. Remember?”

  “I—” Paul subsided into silence. Was he hallucinating?

  Finally the figure said, “The pressure, Paul.”

  What did it mean when you couldn’t tell whether you were conversing with a machine or with … some sort of intelligence? The famous Turing test. But what did it all mean? There was no way to know.

  And now Billy’s lips were moving again. He began to sing in a soft tenor:

  Is it true that I must die

  To save the rest?

  To save, must we destroy?

  (Did the blood of Iphigenia

  Fill the sails at Aulis

  And send the Greeks to Troy?)

  Then, Death, you owe me this:

  I leave wisdom, life, and laughter

  It was the Prophet’s Soliloquy, before he accepted the dagger in his heart. Billy’s favorite.

  The figure shrugged its shoulders. “But I see nothing convinces you. So I’ll be leaving.” He leaned over and spoke succinctly into the mike: “This trialine run is being conducted at atmospheric pressure.”

  This was not possible.

  First the face, then the whole figure began to fade in a mix of flickering gray streaks. And then it was gone.

  “Billy?” he whispered.

  “Identify.” The screen was blank. It was Kussman’s voice again.

  Paul knew that all that had gone before had now vanished from the data banks.

  “Identify, please.”

  “Go to hell.”

  There was a pause. “I am not programmed to perform that operation. I am turning off.”

  He sat there in a trance. He knew he could never bring himself to use the computer again.

  But he had to move. There was one final thing to do. Serane had to know. For this, he went back to his own office.

  Happily, Serane answered the phone. He sounded diffident, almost awed, when Paul gave him the yield. “I knew it would be good, but I didn’t believe it would be that good.”

  “I guess you had to turn in your badge to Humbert?” said Paul.

  “First thing this morning. But if you need me, maybe I could get special permission to get in.”

  “No. Stay put. Humbert would want to know why, and he’d tell Kussman. Kussman would chill the whole thing. I don’t want Kussman to know anything until I file the application. That’ll take a couple of days.” “If you come right down to it, Paul, I don’t know a hell of a lot about what you did.”

  “I followed your directions for the catalyst. And the rest was standard trialine procedure. Pyrolyzer, four hundred centigrade; catalyst, three twenty-five; receiver, one twenty-five. Time, one hour.”

  “Three hundred arid twenty-five degrees centigrade? Now that’s odd. Didn’t we talk about three fifty?”

  There would be no way to explain how a holo had turned the heat down. “Did we?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. I thought so, but I could be wrong. But the funny thing is, it really should be three twenty-five, not three fifty. I’ve been rethinking my calculations. At three fifty you get the racemate. You’ve got to drop to three twenty-five before you get an active isomer in a decent yield.”

  “Yeah, well, anyhow, I put the autotherm at three twenty-five.”

  Serane hesitated. “Paul, are you all right?”

  “Sure. It’s been a long day.”

  “Yes. It has. Well … you used ‘biological’ silica?” “Yes. An ammonite fossil. The one we discussed.” “And animal ashes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where, how? Where did you get all this stuff?”

  Paul hesitated. Serane didn’t have to know. “Mere mechanical details, John.”

  “Who made the mix?”

  “Bob Moulin.”

  “For God’s sake! You mean you got him to listen to you?”

  “John, he talks now. I guess you could say he’s cured. We had a very coherent discussion. He crushed the minerals, screened out the right particle sizes, slurried the ashes, and baked the mix while you and I were carousing at Halfway House.”

  “Well I’ll be damned. And I thought I knew everything that went on in that lab.”

  “You do now, John. That’s about it. ni get the patent application over to you to approve and sign early next week. And you won’t mind assigning it to the company, will you?”

  “No problem there, Paul. I’ll abide by my contract”

  At eleven thirty Paul closed up the bay, locked his desk, and went down to the parking lot.

  He knew he had a lot to think about. To start, he wondered whether the run—and Billy—had been fully erased, or whether it had merely been hidden away within the multifarious convolutions of International Computers at Lawrence, Kansas, ready to be brought forth again at the proper command or incantation. Or perhaps it might come forth of its own volition, in other programs, and under strange circumstances. He had heard of computer infection, where one program would influence one or more parallel but unrelated data banks. He remembered how Serane had been delayed in the tubes, on that first day, apparently because the Penn-New Haven tapes had been infected by the New York Central tapes. Also, Serane had told him of a mix-up in the early days of his secret chess loop, in which his simple pawn to king four was answered by a five-page war games program obviously emanating from the Pentagon. And then there had been the occasion (reported in the papers) when the Berlitz foreign language data bank had been stored near the Congressional Record file retrieval unit. Thereafter, when the reports of the House Un-American Activities Committee were called up, the printouts were in Russian. When the Slavonic infection was finally cured, the printouts switched to Vietnamese. The difficulty was brought under control only when the International Computer Corporation transferred all of its language banks from Lawrence, Kansas, to its Boise, Idaho, sub-depository. Even then, under occasional overload conditions, the speeches of the un-American chairman might appear in Mandarin Chinese. “Some inputs,” explained Serane, “are highly contagious. They enter, disappear (or you clean them out), and you think they’re gone forever, and then all of a sudden, no warning, they reappear in the oddest contexts.”

 

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