The Nail and the Oracle (23 page)

The admiral projected two loud syllables of a guffaw and said, “Of course.” The colonel looked pained. The civilian, bright-eyed, made a small nod which clearly said, One up for you, boy.

Jones put on his used-car-salesman face. “Honestly, gentlemen, it embarrasses me to draw a parallel like that. I believe with all my heart that each of you has the best interests of our nation foremost in his thoughts. As for myself—security? Why, I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been cleared all the way back to
Pithecanthropus erectus
.

“So much for you, so much for me. Now, as for ORACLE, you know as well as I do that it is no ordinary computer. It is designed for computations, not of math, specifically, nor of strictly physical problems, though it can perform them, but for the distillation of human thought. For over a decade the contents of the Library of Congress and other sources have poured into that machine—everything: novels, philosophy, magazines, poetry, textbooks, religious tracts, comic books, even millions of personnel records. There’s every shade of opinion, every quality of writing—anything and everything that an army of over a thousand microfilming technicians have been able to cram into it. As long as it’s printed and in English, German, Russian, French, or Japanese, ORACLE can absorb it. Esperanto is the funnel for a hundred Oriental and African languages. It’s the
greatest repository of human thought and thought-directed action the world has ever known, and its one most powerful barrier against error in human affairs is the sheer mass of its memory and the wide spectrum of opinion that has poured into it.

“Add to this its ability to extrapolate—to project the results of hypothetical acts—and the purposely designed privacy structure—for it’s incapable of recording or reporting who asked it what question—and you have ORACLE, the one place in the world where you can get a straight answer based, not in terms of the problem itself, but on every ideological computation and cross-comparison that can be packed into it.”

“The one place I couldn’t get a straight answer,” said the civilian gently.

“To your particular question. Sir, if you want that answer, you have got to give me that question.” He checked a hopeful stir in the other two by adding quickly, “and yours. And yours. You see, gentlemen, though I am concerned for your needs in this matter, my prime concern is ORACLE. To find a way to get one of the answers isn’t enough. If I had all three, I might be able to deduce a common denominator. I already have, of course, though it isn’t enough: you are all high up in national affairs, and very close to the center of things. You are all of the same generation” (translation: near the end of the road) “and, I’m sure, equally determined to do the best you can for your country” (to get to the top of the heap before you cash in). “Consider
me
,” he said, and smiled disarmingly. “To let me get this close to the answer
I
want; namely, what’s wrong with ORACLE, and then to withhold it—–isn’t that sort of cruel and unusual punishment?”

“I feel for you,” said the civilian, not without a twinkle. Then, sober with a coldness that would freeze helium into a block, he said, “But you ask too much.”

Jones looked at him, and then at the others, sensing their unshakable agreement. “OK,” he said, with all the explosive harshness he could muster, “I’m done here, I’m sick of this place and my girl’s sick of being by herself, and I’m going home. You can’t call in anyone else cause there isn’t anyone else: my company built ORACLE
and my men were trained for it.”

This kind of thing was obviously in the colonel’s idiom. From far back in his throat, he issued a grinding sound that came out in words: “You’ll finish the job you were ordered to do, mister, or you’ll take the consequences.”

Jones shouted at him, “Consequences? What consequences? You couldn’t even have me fired, because I can make a damn good case that you prevented me from finishing the job. I’m not under your orders either. This seems a good time to remind you of the forgotten tradition that with this”—he took hold of the narrow lapel of his own sports jacket—“I outrank any uniform in this whole entire Pentagon.” He caught the swift smile of the civilian, and therefore trained his next blast on him. “Consequences? The only consequence you can get now is to deny yourself and your country the answer to your question. The only conclusion I can come to is that something else is more important to you than that. What else?” He stood up. So did the officers.

From his chair, the civilian said sonorously, “Now, now … gentlemen. Surely we can resolve this problem without raising our voices. Mr. Jones, would the possession of two of these questions help you in your diagnosis? Or even one?”

Breathing hard, Jones said, “It might.”

The civilian opened his long white hands. “Then there’s no problem after all. If one of you gentlemen—”

“Absolutely not,” said the admiral instantly.

“Not me,” growled the colonel. “You want compromise, don’t you? Well, go ahead—you compromise.”

“In this area,” said the civilian smoothly, “I possess all the facts, and it is my considered judgment that the disclosure of my question would not further Mr. Jones’ endeavors.” (Jones thought, the admiral said the same thing in two words.) “Admiral, would you submit to my judgment the question of whether or not security would be endangered by your showing Mr. Jones your question?”

“I would not.”

The civilian turned to the colonel. One look at that rock-bound countenance was sufficient to make him turn away again, which,
thought Jones, puts the colonel two points ahead of the admiral in the word-economy business.

Jones said to the civilian, “No use, sir, and by my lights, that’s the end of it. The simplest possible way to say it is that you gentlemen have the only tools in existence that would make it possible for me to repair this gadget, and you won’t let me have them. So fix it yourself, or leave it the way it is. I’d see you out,” he added, scanning the walls of the tiny room, “but I have to go to the john.” He stalked out, his mind having vividly and permanently photographed the astonishment on the admiral’s usually composed features, the colonel’s face fury-twisted into something like the knot that binds the lashes of a whip, and the civilian grinning broadly.

Grinning broadly?

Ah well, he thought, slamming the men’s-room door behind him—and infuriatingly, it wouldn’t slam—Ah well, we all have our way of showing frustration. Maybe I could’ve been just as mad more gently.

The door moved, and someone ranged alongside at the next vertical bathtub. Jones glanced, and then said aloud, “Maybe I could’ve been just as mad more gently.”

“Perhaps we all could have,” said the civilian, and then with his free hand he did four surprising things in extremely rapid succession. He put his finger to his lips, then his hand to the wall and then to his ear. Finally he whisked a small folded paper out of his breast pocket and handed it to Jones. He then finished what he was doing and went to wash up.

Shh. The walls have ears. Take this.

“All through history,” said the civilian from the sink, his big old voice booming in the tiled room, “we read about the impasse, and practically every time it’s mentioned, it’s a sort of preface to an explanation of how it was solved. Yet I’ll bet history’s full of impasses that just couldn’t be solved. They don’t get mentioned because when it happens, everything stops. There just isn’t anything to write down in the book anymore. I think we’ve just seen such an occasion, and I’m sorry for each of us.”

The old son of a gun! “Thanks for that much, anyway, sir,” Jones
said, tucking the paper carefully away out of sight. The old man, wiping his hands, winked once and went out.

Back in his office, which seemed three times larger than it had been before the conference, Jones slumped behind his desk and teased himself with the small folded paper, not reading it, turning it over and over. It had to be the old man’s question. Granted that it was, why had he been so willing to hand it over now, when three minutes earlier his refusal had been just about as adamant as—adamant? So, Jones, quit looking at the detail and get on the big picture. What was different in those three minutes?

Well, they were out of one room and into another. Out of one room that was damn well not bugged and into one which, the old man’s pantomime had informed him, may well be. Nope—that didn’t make sense. Then—how about this? In the one room there had been witnesses. In the second, none—not after the finger on the lips. So if a man concluded that the civilian probably never had had an objection to Jones’ seeing and using the question, but wanted it concealed from anyone else—maybe specifically from those other two … why, the man had the big picture.

What else? That the civilian had not said this, therefore would not bring himself to say it in so many words, and would not appreciate any conversation that might force him to talk it over. Finally, no matter how reluctant he might be to let Jones see the paper, the slim chance Jones offered him of getting an answer outweighed every other consideration—except the chance of the other two finding out. So another part of the message was: I’m sitting on dynamite, Mr. Jones, and I’m handing you the detonator. Or: I trust you, Mr. Jones.

So be it, old man. I’ve got the message.

He closed his eyes and squeezed the whole situation to see if anything else would drip out of it. Nothing … except the faint conjecture that what worked on one might work on the other two. And as if on cue, the door opened and a bland-faced major came in a pace, stopped, said “Beg pardon, sir. I’m in the wrong room,” and before Jones could finish saying “That’s all right,” he was gone. Jones
gazed thoughtfully at the door. That major was one of the colonel’s boys. That “wrong room” bit had a most unlikely flavor to it. So if the man hadn’t come in for nothing, he’d come in for something. He hadn’t taken anything and he hadn’t left anything, so he’d come in to find something out. The only thing he could find out was whether Jones was or was not here. Oh: and whether he was or was not alone.

All Jones had to do to check that out was to sit tight. You can find out if a man is alone in a room for now, but not for ten minutes from now, or five.

In two minutes the colonel came in.

He wore his “I don’t like you, mister” expression. He placed his scarred brown hands flat on Jones’ desk and rocked forward over him like a tidal wave about to break.

“It’s your word against mine, and I’m prepared to call you a liar,” grated the colonel. “I want you to report to me and no one else.”

“All right,” said Jones, and put out his hand. The colonel locked gazes with him for a fair slice of forever, which made Jones believe that the Medusa legend wasn’t necessarily a legend after all. Then the officer put a small folded paper into Jones’ outstretched palm. “You get the idea pretty quick, I’ll say that, mister”; he straightened, about-faced and marched out.

Jones looked at the two scraps of folded paper on the desk and thought, I will be damned.

And one to go.

He picked up the papers and dropped them again, feeling like a kid who forces himself to eat all the cake before he attacks the icing. He thought, maybe the old boy wants to but just doesn’t know how.

He reached for the phone and dialed for the open line, wondering if the admiral had had it canceled yet.

He had not, and he wasn’t waiting for the first ring to finish itself. He knew who was calling and he knew Jones knew, so he said nothing, just picked up the phone.

Jones said, “It was kind of crowded in here.”

“Precisely the point,” said the admiral, with the same grudging approval the colonel had shown. There was a short pause, and then the admiral said, “Have you called anyone else?”

Into four syllables Jones put all the outraged innocence of a male soprano accused of rape. “Certainly not.”

“Good man.”

The Britishism amused Jones, and he almost said Gung ho, what?; but instead he concentrated on what to say next. It was easy to converse with the admiral if you supplied both sides of the conversation. Suddenly it came to him that the admiral wouldn’t want to come here—he had somewhat farther to travel than the colonel had—nor would he like the looks of Jones’ visiting him at this particular moment. He said, “I wouldn’t mention this, but as you know, I’m leaving soon and may not see you. And I think you picked up my cigarette lighter.”

“Oh,” said the admiral.

“And me out of matches,” said Jones ruefully. “Well—I’m going down to ORACLE now. Nice to have known you, sir.” He hung up, stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, put the two folded papers in his left pants pocket, and began an easy stroll down the catacombs called corridors in the Pentagon.

Just this side of ORACLE’s dead-end corridor, and not quite in visual range of its security post, a smiling young ensign, who otherwise gave every evidence of being about his own business, said, “Light, sir?”

“Why, thanks.”

The ensign handed him a lighter. He didn’t light it and proffer the flame; he handed the thing over. Jones lit his cigarette and dropped the lighter into his pocket. “Thanks.”

“That’s all right,” smiled the ensign, and walked on.

At the security post, Jones said to the guard, “Whoppen?”

“Nothing and nobody, Mr. Jones.”

“Best news I’ve had all day.” He signed the book and accompanied the guard down the dead end. They each produced a key and together opened the door. “I shouldn’t be too long.”

“All the same to me,” said the guard, and Jones realized he’d been wishfully thinking out loud. He shut the door, hit the inner lock switch, and walked through the little foyer and the swinging door which unveiled what the crew called ORACLE’s “temple.”

He looked at the computer, and it looked back at him. “Like I told you before,” he said conversationally, “for something that causes so much trouble, you’re awful little and awful homely.”

ORACLE did not answer, because it was not aware of him. ORACLE could read and do a number of more complex and subtle things, but it had no ears. It was indeed homely as a wall, which is what the front end mostly resembled, and the immense size of its translators, receptors, and the memory banks was not evident here. The temple—other people called it Suburbia Delphi—contained nothing but that animated wall, with its one everblooming amber “on” light (for the machine never ceased gulping its oceans of thought), a small desk and chair, and the mechanical typewriter with the modified Bodoni typeface which was used for the reader. The reader itself was nothing more than a clipboard (though with machined guides to hold the paper exactly in place) with a large push button above it, placed on a strut which extended from the front of the computer, and lined up with a lens set flush into it. It was an eerie experience to push that button after placing your query, for ORACLE scanned so quickly and “thought” so fast that it was rapping away on its writer before you could get your thumb on the button.