Self Portrait by Bernard Wolfe (short novels in english txt) 📖

"They don't want much from us," he said sarcastically. "They just want us to be God."

I didn't care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in the papers. I have to be God!

October 22, 1959

Don't know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course, he's very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn't even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out instructions. Still, there's something funny about the way he looks at me. There's a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come to think of it, he reminds me of Len.

Take this afternoon, for instance. I've just worked out an entirely different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack's eye for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face was expressionless.

"All right," I said. "Let's make a test. I understand you used to be quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a football and try to do it now."

He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.

"You seem to think something's pretty funny," I said.

"Don't get me wrong, Doc," he said, much too innocently. "It's just that I've been thinking. Maybe you'd have more luck if you thought of me as a bedbug."

"Where did you get that idea?"

"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night. He's got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in the business."

I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that way. I don't like his hanging around Kujack.

October 25, 1959

The boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how things were coming in the Pro lab.

"As I see it," I said, "there are two sides to the problem, the kinesthetic and the neural. We're making definite progress on the K side—I've worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors tied in, and I think it'll give us a leg that moves damned well. I don't know about the N side, though. It's pretty tough figuring out how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot simpler."

"You mean," the boss said with a smile, "that it's stumping you."

I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few things going on at IFACS that can be talked about, he's impatient for us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people get worried when they know there's something like IFACS going, but don't get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants to relieve the public's curiosity with a good, reassuring story about our work.

I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I've just begun to work on.

"By the way, sir," I said, "I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I didn't know he was here."

"Do you know him?" the boss said. "Good man. One of the best brains-and-games men you'll find anywhere."

I explained that Len had gotten his degree at M.I.T. the year before I did. From what I'd heard, I added, he'd done some important work on the Remington-Rand ballistics computer.

"He did indeed," the boss said, "but that's not the half of it. After that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a matter of fact, that's why he's here."

I said I hadn't heard about the chess player.

"As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you won't hear any more about it from me."

I'm no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself. If the boss's remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain capable of playing games has been developed, and that it's led to something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not having guessed it before.

Brains-and-games—that's what MS is all about, obviously. It had to happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess player, and out of the chess player came some kind of mechanical brain that's useful in military strategy. That's what Len Ellsom's in the middle of.

"Really brilliant mind," the boss said after we'd sawed for a while. "Keen. But he's a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn't that your impression?"

"Definitely," I said. "I'd be the last one in the world to say a word against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people take seriously. He used to write poetry."

"I'm very glad to know that," the boss said. "Confirms my own feeling about him."

So the boss has some doubts about Len.

October 27, 1959

Unpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, "Ollie, you've been avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till debt and death do us part."

I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed up when he's drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it wasn't anything like that; I'd been busy.

"If we're pals," he said, "come on and have a beer with me."

There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong records.

"Sorry, kid," he said. "I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but can't have a reunion without music, and there isn't a polka or cowboy ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on this side of the tracks." Len has always been very snobbish about my interest in folk music.

I asked him what he'd been doing during the day.

"Lushing it up," he said. "Getting stinking from drinking." He still likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form of protest against what he regards as the "genteel" manner of academic people. "I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village. Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our assets in the joints."

What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?

"Restless for going on three years now." His face grew solemn, as though he were thinking it over very carefully. "I'll amend that statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I've been a plain lush for going on three years. Ever since—"

If it was something personal—I suggested.

"It is not something personal," he said, mimicking me. "Guess I can tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years because I've been scared for three years. Been scared for three years because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess."

A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.

"Didn't tell you the whole truth the other day," Len mumbled. "I did work on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn't come to IFACS directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon—or, rather, to begin with there was Norbert Wiener back at M.I.T.—it's complicated...."

"Look," I said, "are you sure you want to talk about it?"

"Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve," he said belligerently. "Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern, no, Von Neumann and Morganstern. You remember, they did a mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker, tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their findings in a volume you certainly know, The Theory of Games.

"Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine that would play a better than average game of chess. Right after that, back in '49 or maybe it was '50, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said Wiener wasn't just talking, and to prove it he was going to build the robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth—forthwith—to do. Sometime in '53, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and assigned to Bell to work with him."

"Maybe we ought to start back," I cut in. "I've got a lot of work to do."

"The night is young," he said, "and you're so dutiful. Where was I? Oh yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn't so hot—it could beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great day in '55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in and taken over the whole project.

"Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world's champion chess player, sat him