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“But I mean,” she went on, rubbing her plump hands slowly together, “that was fifty thousand dollars; fifty—thousand—dollars. Yet all they did was call him; one phone call. What could your father be pla
Joe Ma
Mike, filled with the conscious wisdom of a new adult, said, “Maybe it’s something subconscious, Pop. Some resentment against your supervisor.”
“So that I would want to kill him? No!”
“Won’t they tell you what it is, Pop?”
His mother interrupted again, “No, they won’t. We’ve asked. I said they were ruining our standing in the community just being here. The least: they could do is tell us what it’s all about so we could fight it, so we could explain.”
“And they wouldn’t?”
“They wouldn’t.”
Mike stood with his legs spread apart and his hands deep in his pockets. He said, troubled, “Gee, Mom, Multivac doesn’t make mistakes.”
His father pounded his fist helplessly on the arm of the sofa. “I tell you I’m not pla
The door opened without a knock and a man in uniform walked in with sharp, self-possessed stride. His face had a glazed, official appearance. He said, “Are you Joseph Ma
Joe Ma
“Joseph Ma
“For what reason? What have I done?”
“I am not at liberty to discuss that.”
“But I can’t be arrested just for pla
The officer was impervious to the logic. “You will have to come with me.”
Mrs. Ma
And Ma
The door closed behind him and Mike Ma
Ben Ma
If Multivac took away, Multivac could also give. Ben had been at the ceremonies that very day. He had heard this man, Randolph Hoch, speak of Multivac and all that Multivac could do. It could direct the government and it could also unbend and help out some plain person who came to it for help.
Anyone could ask help of Multivac and anyone meant Ben. Neither his mother nor Mike were in any condition to stop him now, and he had some money left of the amount they had given him for his great outing that day. If afterward they found him gone and worried about it, that couldn’t be helped. Right now, his first loyalty was to his father.
He ran out the back way and the officer at the door cast a glance at his papers and let him go.
Harold Quimby handled the complaints department of the Baltimore substation of Multivac. He considered himself to be a member of that branch of the civil service that was most important of all. In some ways, he may have been right, and those who heard him discuss the matter would have had to be made of iron not to feel impressed.
For one thing, Quimby would say, Multivac was essentially an invader of privacy. In the past fifty years, mankind had had to acknowledge that its thoughts and impulses were no longer secret, that it owned no i
Of course, it got prosperity, peace, and safety, but that was abstract. Each man and woman needed something personal as his or her own reward for surrendering privacy, and each one got it. Within reach of every human being was a Multivac station with circuits into which he could freely enter his own problems and questions without control or hindrance, and from which, in a matter of minutes, he could receive answers.
At any given moment, five million individual circuits among the quadrillion or more within Multivac might be involved in this question-and-answer program. The answers might not always be certain, but they were the best available, and every questioner knew the answer to be the best available and had faith in it. That was what counted.
And now an anxious sixteen-year-old had moved slowly up the waiting line of men and women (each in that line illuminated by a different mixture of hope with fear or anxiety or even anguish—always with hope predominating as the person stepped nearer and nearer to Multivac).
Without looking up, Quimby took the filled-out form being handed him and said, “Booth 5-B.”
Ben said, “How do I ask the question, sir?”
Quimby looked up then, with a bit of surprise. Preadults did not generally make use of the service. He said kindly, “Have you ever done this before, son?”
“No, sir.”
Quimby pointed to the model on his desk. “You use this. You see how it works? Just like a typewriter. Don’t you try to write or print anything by hand. Just use the machine. Now you take booth 5-B, and if you need help, just press the red button and someone will come. Down that aisle, son, on the right.”
He watched the youngster go down the aisle and out of view and smiled. No one was ever turned away from Multivac. Of course, there was always a certain percentage of trivia: people who asked personal questions about their neighbors or obscene questions about prominent personalities; college youths trying to outguess their professors or thinking it clever to stump Multivac by asking it Russell’s class-of-all-classes paradox and so on.
Multivac could take care of all that. It needed no help.
Besides, each question and answer was filed and formed but another item in the fact assembly for each individual. Even the most trivial question and the most impertinent, insofar as it reflected the personality of the questioner, helped humanity by helping Multivac know about humanity.
Quimby turned his attention to the next person in line, a middle-aged woman, gaunt and angular, with the look of trouble in her eye.
Ali Othman strode the length of his office, his heels thumping desperately on the carpet. “The probability still goes up. It’s 22.4 per cent now. Damnation! We have Joseph Ma
Leemy turned away from the telephone. “No confession yet. He’s under Psychic Probing and there is no sign of crime. He may be telling the truth.”
Othman said, “Is Multivac crazy then?”
Another phone sprang to life. Othman closed co
“What do you mean, as they have been?’”
“The original instructions were for the house arrest of Joseph Ma
“Well, extend it to the rest of the family until you are informed otherwise.”
“Sir, that is the point. The mother and older son are demanding information about the younger son. The younger son is gone and they claim he is in custody and wish to go to headquarters to inquire about it.”