Men And Machines Part 2

"So what's going on? No one tells me anything," replied Johnny Peters.

"You don't know?" asked Walter Long incredulously.

"No, I don't."

Harry Warren looked at the control console full of meters, dials, and multicolored pilot and warning lamps. "Is that thing functioning properly?"

Peters cast a rapid eye over the board. "Perfectly," he said, reaching out and giving one small k.n.o.b an imperceptible turn.

"How can you be so sure so fast?"

"There isn't a red lamp showing," he said with a sweeping wave of his hand. "Blue-green indicates operating circuits that are functioning properly; yellow-orange indicates feed-back information-a continuous incoming flow of variables-that keep the operating circuits so properly adjusted that they maintain a continuous show of blue-green. Hasn't been a red lamp shown since I've been with Teleportransit, but I'm told that whistles blow, bells ring, cannon are fired and-"

"Well, something's gone to h.e.l.l in a handbasket."

"For instance, what?"

"Our teleport system isn't working."

"Nonsense!" Peters pointed to a large dial. "Load's low tonight, but we're still making a couple of-"

"Stop them!" yelled Walter Long. "Peters, since somewhere about a quarter to five this evening, people have been a-pouring into the entrances, and not coming out of the exits."

"But that can't happen."

"You explain that to four million commuters-if we ever get 'em back."

"And if we don't, you try to explain it to their heirs and a.s.signs," said Harry Warren.

"Is this condition local or widespread?" asked Peters.

"It's the entire system."

"No," said Peters, "I mean, has Pittsburgh or Greater Chicago reported the same mess-up?"

"That we don't know."

"Then let's find out," said Peters. On the console, he snapped a switch. A videoplate came to life, there was a brief ringback burr, and then a man's face appeared.

"Peters here, Megapolis. Teleportransit, Inc."

"Hi. James Gale. Pittsburgh Rapid. What's on your mind?"

"Have you any trouble reports?"

"No. What kind of trouble?"

"No tie-ups?"

"No. Now what can happen to a teleport circuit to tie it up?"

"I don't know, but everybody who goes into our machine just simply stays there."

"But that's not possible."

"All right. So that makes it a manifestation of the supernatural and it's swallowed more'n four million commuters, and it's continuing to swallow them at the rate of about fifteen hundred per minute."

"Turn it off," advised Jim Gale.

"I don't dare," said Johnny Peters. "I have the uneasy feeling that continued operation is the only contact that lies between here and the limbo they're lost in. I've no sound, scientific logic for that queasy feeling; it's just a conviction that I must follow." He turned to look at Walter Long and Harry Warren. Both of them looked blank until Johnny Peters said, "Unless I'm ordered to," at which they both shook their heads violently.

"Well, this I've got to see," said Gale. "I'm coming over."

"Whoa!" cried Peters. "I'd advise some other mode of transportation."

"Urn ... guess you're right. So is there anything I can do to help?"

"Yes," said Walter Long quickly. "Get in touch with your top-level technical staff and tell them what we're up against. You can also call Boston and Was.h.i.+ngton and ask them what to do. See if the best technical brains of all three cities can get trains or cars to come here as fast as possible. In the meantime, we'll have to muddle through with a junior technician, a business administrator, and one puzzled personnel relations counsel."

Throughout Megapolis, the news was spreading fast. In an earlier day, the radio in the automobile or in the depot bar would have spread the news like wildfire. But the habit of the commuter was to get where he was going first, and then relax to get the news. The news was thus delayed in its dissemination by the recipient's habits, not by any machination of press, government, big business, or unfavorable foreign powers.

The transits-per-minute meter began to taper off in an increasing drop as the news was spread. But it did not drop to zero because there were those that had not heard, those who did not believe, a number whose curiosity exceeded their good sense, a few misguided self-sacrificers, and a low but continuous counting rate pegged up by sheer habit. For just as people during a power failure will enter a room and flip the light switch in a reflex action, people preoccupied with other things turned into the teleport booth out of habit and whisked themselves into limbo.

More time pa.s.sed; it takes time for the central nervous system of a vast Megapolis to react to a widespread emergency. Had one called two and the two then called four, and the four called eight, the word would have spread fast. But plans and programs such as this fail unsafely at the first breach in the pattern for there is no way of bridging the missing link. So in the usual ponderous way, the commissioners called the captains and the captains notified their lieutenants, and soon the word was spread to the patrolmen. And where there was a missing link to bridge, the radio called the patrolmen, firemen off-duty, members of the civil defense, and anybody who could be sworn to duty.

And not a few of these succ.u.mbed to habit by trying to take the teleport system to the teleport station they'd been a.s.signed to prevent people from using.

Ultimately, the stations were under control and the transits-per-minute meter was down to an unreadable, but still-not-zero figure. By this time, the hidden, unknown plane beyond the entrance of the teleports had its share of policemen and other keepers of the civic peace.

Johnny Peters looked at the ma.s.s of gray hammertone finish, chromium, and gla.s.s, and he realized a helplessness, a complete futility, the utter impossibility of doing anything useful. For what had always worked properly had stopped abruptly at about four-thirty in the afternoon. It was as if the sun, having come up on time since the dawn of eyes to watch for it, failed to show.

For Teleportransit was to Megapolis as hundreds of other teleport companies were to their respective cities. Take twelve years of handling commuter traffic five days each week and multiply that by the number of cities that had solved the commuting problem by licensing teleport companies, then quote the figure as a statistic with zero accidents in transit. The odds begin to approach the probabilities that the sun will not be late tomorrow morning.

Still, to Johnny Peters, Walter Long, and Harry Warren, there was no realization of the enormity of the situation. It was too impersonal, too remote, too vast. That four or five million human souls had vanished into their machinery was a fact they could not comprehend.

But as the word spread throughout the city, millions of individuals became intimately aware of a shocking, abrupt personal loss. And for the number who fold their hands and say "Kismet," there are an equal number who want to strike back. And so part of the public became a mob.

The night watchman on duty at the main door of the Teleportransit Building saw the mob approach but did not comprehend until the leaders crashed the big plate gla.s.s doors with a timber. As the mob came boiling into the lobby of the building, the night watchman fled in terror, taking the obvious way out along with two of the mob who pursued him into the teleport booth.

Had there been no stairs, the elevator system might have cooled some of the anger, for a mob completely articulated into tiny groups out of communication with one another loses the ability to regenerate its ma.s.s anger. The leaders, without a shouting ma.s.s behind them, might have listened to reason. But the elevators, at night, would respond only to authorized employees with special keys. And so the mob, strung into a broad-fronted wave, trailed up the stairs after the leaders. The toil of climbing added to their anger.

To prove the paranoiac quality of the mob, the air-conditioning in the Teleportranist Building did not give them any comfort; it made them resent even more the men they held responsible because they sat in comfort to perpetrate the outrage.

Within the equipment room, the status remained quo. But not for long.

The heavy doors m.u.f.fled the sound of the mob; by the time the noise penetrated loud enough to attract the three men in the room, the same timber used to crash the main doors came hurtling through the doors to the equipment room.

The foremost of the mob milled into the room and grabbed the three men. There were shouts of lynch-law: "Give it to 'em!" and "String 'em up!" and someone with a length of clothesline weaseled his way through the mob to the fore.

A slipknot is not as efficient as the hangman's noose with its thirteen turns, but it is effective. It is also terrifying. Being in the hands of a mob is panic-making in its own right. The sight of rope adds terror. Such shock makes some people faint, some are simply stunned into inaction, and some enter a strange mental stage through which they watch the proceedings without realizing that the mob is going to harm them.

Some men take on a madman's fury, break free, and try to run.

As three of the mob held Johnny Peters, a fourth started to put the slipknot over his head, while the fifth tossed the other end of the clothesline over a ceiling strut. Johnny Peters lashed out, broke the grip of the three who held him, smashed the noose-holder in the face, and took off through the room, scattering the mob by sheer force. Behind him trailed the clothesline, for his wild, round-house swing had pa.s.sed through the noose.

Wildly, Johnny Peters headed for the only haven he knew, and as the door to the teleport booth closed behind him, the man who held the end of the rope shook it with a mad roaring laugh: "He ain't going nowhere!"

With deliberation, he started to collect the line, hand over hand. It slung in a tightening catenary from the ceiling strut over to the teleport booth door frame.

Unmindful of his tether, Johnny Peters fished his key out, plugged it in, and twisted.

With a roar, three of the mob grabbed the rope and hauled. The end, cut clean, pulled out of the door frame gasket and trailed across the floor; the three who had hauled went a-sprawl. For, as a moment of thought must reveal, the system could hardly teleport a material body instantaneously into an enclosed exit booth without creating an explosion of thermonuclear proportions. The teleport booths were carefully made to rigid dimensions; in the transit, everything contained in one went to the other; they swapped.

Johnny Peters disappeared trailing his length of line.

Johnny Peters was in a nearly indescribable state of-awareness. There was no sense of feeling; the tactile sense no longer existed. The sensitive tip of the tongue did not send continuous messages to the brain about the state of teeth or the amount of saliva. The telemetry that provides feedback of limb position was missing. Pressure against the feet was gone, as if there were no gravity.

Where he was, there was no sound. Or, if sound existed there, he had not the ears with which to hear-nor taste, nor sight, nor olfactory sense.

Yet he felt an awareness of self, of being, of existing.

A remnant of long-forgotten Latin occurred, "Cogit, ergo sumt." And he wondered whether his Latin was correct. But right or wrong in the cla.s.sics, Johnny Peters thought, and therefore he existed.

And once this became evident to Johnny Peters, there came the usual return of hope, for so long as life existed, there was hope of getting back from whatever strange plane he had entered. Then, with panic subsiding, Johnny Peters became faintly aware of others.

This, too, was a strange awareness. In life, for example, on a streetcar or subway, a person is aware of the presence of others because every sensory channel is bombarded, a.s.saulted, overloaded. One can say, "They were so thick I could taste it!" and not be far from wrong because the chemicals that carry the spoor of close-packed humanity to the sense of smell are soluble in water; in saliva the smell becomes a taste.

This was, or was it, like telepathy?

What is telepathy like? Does the telepath dial a mental address and then carry on a two-way remark-and-rejoinder, or does he broadcast on an open band? Can he extract the mental peregrinations of someone who is unaware of this invasion of privacy, or does the human desire for privacy act as a barrier? Is that why telepathy is not a going process?

In any event, Johnny Peters was aware of the presence of others; perhaps it is better to say that he was aware of the awareness of others. Then as this awareness became stronger and less puzzling, he became vaguely and faintly cognizant of ident.i.ty. Not ident.i.ty in the sense that an individual is identified, but rather in the sense that his awareness included a number of separate ent.i.ties. He recognized none of them, which may not be surprising since he had, by now, about five million individuals for company.

Johnny Peters knew how the teleport worked, but still had difficulty in freeing his mind of the feeling that others who had used the teleport booth in the equipment room of the Teleportransit Building should be somewhere just beyond the entrance portal. Where they were he could not imagine, but he knew that the medium was not like a plugged tunnel, even though the tunnel albeit virtual, was the foundation for the teleport'.

For when the junction of a diode is very thin, and the energy of the electrons is very low, Heisenberg's Uncertainty says that they have a definite probability of crossing the forbidden gap in the junction and appearing on the other side. In the tunnel diode, simple probability is loaded with a voltage bias so that a current flows across the forbidden gap; electrons pa.s.s through invisibly as if they flowed through a tunnel. The teleport performed the same operation with humans and things-or had until five million people occupied the forbidden gap between terminals.

And so the people, instead of compact, locatable ent.i.ties, were diffused essences of their beings, their awarenesses, occupying a volume of probability that encompa.s.sed and more likely exceeded the most distant of Teleportransit's wide-flung network of terminals.

Aware that he was mingled with other ent.i.ties, Johnny Peters felt the need of finding and identifying someone, anyone he knew as an individual; an awareness that was not simply another being, but a definite being. Simple want called her name to mind, and somehow he formed the silent concept: "Trudy!"

It gave directivity to his being, and cleared things; now he became aware of others, trying to make contact in the same way. Some of them had. Two were commenting on the situation in exceedingly uncomplimentary terms; in fact, they made his mind blush. Another was radiating the concept that he didn't know where he was but at least he wasn't suffering from the heat.

Johnny Peters tried again. "Trudy!"

If a completely diffused being had feelings, he might have felt something. Instead, he merely became aware of being surrounded by more essences of awareness, a mental crowding. This corresponded to his concept of the volume of probability; given absolutely zero energy, the probability was equally good to be anywhere in the Universe. But as the energy became significant, the volume of probability shrunk. Furthermore, there was a higher probability of occupying the center or near-center of the volume than occupying the outer edges. The distribution, of course, was Gaussian.

Then he became aware of a reply. The concept, "Johnny?"

"Yes, Trudy."

"What happened? Where are we?"

"Where we are I don't know," he formed. "It's supposed to be a forbidden gap between terminals that nothing can occupy. That's why nothing ever got lost before. It's either here or there, but never between."

"I don't see," came the faltering reply. "But what happened?"

"I don't know, but I think it's some sort of traffic jam on the teleport."

"But why?"

"Lord knows. Let's figure it out after we find out how to get out of this in-between mess."

"Do you think you can?"

"I'm not too sure, but Joe Fellowes must be in this mess somewhere."

"Let's both call him."

Together, they formed the concept, "Joe Fellowes!" Again there was the awareness of something s.h.i.+fting, of a mental crowding; a reshuffling of the ent.i.ties.

Trudy radiated, "Johnny?"

"Yes?"

"Johnny-I get the distinct impression of a baby crying."

"Uh-yeah."

The awareness of reshuffling became intense. At one point, Johnny Peters caught a thought that might have been a reply from Joe Fellowes.

"Trudy?"

"Yes, Johnny?"

"Let's try Joe Fellowes again."

"No, let's try Irma Fellowes. I think women are more sensitive."

"Only a woman would make that statement," was his response, "but I'll try anything."

Now the reshuffling was almost a physical motion; the awareness of movement through a densely packed medium, of motion blocked from time to time, of packing tight, of flowing ever-so-slowly through extreme difficulty toward some focal point.