James P. Hogan - Code of the Lifemaker

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Code of the Lifemaker

By James P. Hogan

Prologue

THE SEARCHER

1.1 MILLION YEARS B.C.;

1,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE SOLAR SYSTEM

HAD ENGLISH-SPEAKING HUMANS EXISTED, THEY WOULD PROBABLY have translated

the spacecraft's designation as "searcher." Unmanned, it was almost a mile

long, streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it

operated fully under the control of computers. The alien civilization was

an advanced one, and the computers were very sophisticated.

The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was

the fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race

of alien gods, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasn't much to

look at—an airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of

boulders and debris from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of

volcanic ash and dust—but the searcher's orbital probes and surface landers

found a crust rich in titanium, chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese,

uranium, and many other valuable elements concentrated by thermal-fluidic

processes operating early in the planet's history. Such a natural abundance

of metals could support large-scale production without extensive dependence

on bulk nuclear transmutation processes—in other words, very

economically—and that was precisely the kind of thing that the searcher had

been designed to search for. After completing their analysis of the

preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed

and transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their

intentions, and then activated the vessel's descent routine.

Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with

imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers,

radiation monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the

ship and dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface

features selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the

ship and processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked,

legged, and wheeled mining, drilling, and transportation robots went out to

begin feeding ores and other materials back to where more machines had

begun to build a fusion-powered pilot extraction plant. A parts-making

facility was constructed next, followed by a parts-assembly facility, and

step by step the pilot plant grew itself into a fully equipped,

general-purpose factory, complete with its own control computers. The

master programs from the ship's computers were copied into the factory's

computers, which thereupon became self-sufficient and assumed control of

surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.

Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as intended, but the

alien engineers had created their own counterpart of Murphy and allowed for

his law in their plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and

routine wear and tear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down

causes of production rejects and adjusted the machines for drifting

tolerances; breakdown teams brought in malfunctioning machines for repair;

and specialized scavenging robots roamed the surface in search of wrecks,

write-off's, discarded components, and any other likely sources of parts

suitable for recycling.

Time passed, the factory hummed, and the robot population grew in number

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and variety. When the population had attained a critical size, a mixed

workforce detached itself from the main center of activity and migrated a

few miles away to build a second factory, a replica of the first, using

materials supplied initially from Factory One. When Factory Two became

self-sustaining, Factory One, its primary task accomplished, switched to

mass-production mode, producing goods and materials for eventual shipment

to the alien home planet.

While Factory Two was repeating the process by commencing work on Factory

Three, the labor detail from Factory One picked up its tools and moved on

to begin Factory Four. By the time Factory Four was up and running,

Factories Five through Eight were already taking shape, Factory Two was in

mass-production mode, and Factory Three was building the first of a fleet

of cargo vessels to carry home the products being stockpiled. This

self-replicating pattern would spread rapidly to transform the entire

surface of Zeus IV into a totally automated manufacturing complex dedicated

to supplying the distant alien civilization from local resources.

From within the searcher's control computers, the Supervisor program gazed

out at the scene through its data input channels and saw that its work was

good. After a thorough overhaul and systems checkout, the searcher ship

reembarked its primary workforce and launched itself into space to seek

more worlds on which to repeat the cycle.

FIFTY YEARS LATER

Not far—as galactic distances go—from Zeus was another star, a hot, bluish

white star with a mass of over fifteen times that of the Sun. It had formed

rapidly, and its life span—the temporary halt of its collapse under

self-gravitation by thermonuclear radiation pressure—had demanded such a

prodigious output of energy as to be a brief one. In only ten million years

the star, which had converted all the hydrogen in its outer shell to

helium, resumed its collapse until the core temperature was high enough to

bum the helium into carbon, and then, when the helium was exhausted,

repeated the process to begin burning carbon. The ignition of carbon raised

the core temperature higher still, which induced a higher rate of carbon

burning, which in turn heated the core even more, and a thermonuclear

runaway set in which in terms of stellar timescales was instantaneous. In

mere days the star erupted into a supernova—radiating with a billion times

the brightness of the Sun, exploding outward until its photosphere enclosed

a radius greater than that of Uranus' orbit, and devouring its tiny flock

of planets in the process.

Those planets had been next on the searcher's list to investigate, and it

happened that the ship was heading into its final approach when the star

exploded. The radiation blast hit it head-on at three billion miles out.

The searcher's hull survived more-or-less intact, but secondary x-rays and

high-energy subnuclear particles—things distinctly unhealthy for

computers—flooded its interior. With most of its primary sensors bumed out,

its navigation system disrupted, and many of its programs obliterated or

altered, the searcher veered away and disappeared back into the depths of

interstellar space.

One of the faint specks lying in the direction now ahead of the ship was a

yellow-white dwarf star, a thousand light-years away. It too possessed a

family of planets, and on the third of those planets the descendants of a

species of semi-intelligent ape had tamed fire and were beginning to

experiment with tools chipped laboriously from thin flakes of stone.

Supernovas are comparatively rare events, occurring with a frequency of

perhaps two or three per year in the average galaxy. But as with most

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generalizations, this has occasional exceptions. The supernova that almost

enveloped the searcher turned out to be the first of a small chain that

rippled through a localized cluster of massive stars formed at roughly the

same time. Located in the middle of the cluster was a normal, longer-lived

star which happened to be the home star of the aliens. The aliens had never

gotten round to extending their civilization much beyond the limits of

their own planetary system, which was unfortunate because that was the end

of them.

Everybody has a bad day sometimes.

ONE MILLION YEARS B.C.

One hundred thousand years after being scorched by the supernova, the

searcher drifted into the outer regions of a planetary system. With its

high-altitude surveillance instruments only partly functioning and its

probes unable to deploy at all, the ship went directly into its descent

routine over the first sizeable body that it encountered, a frozen ball of

ice-encrusted rock about three thousand miles in diameter, with seas of

liquid methane and an atmosphere of nitrogen, hydrogen, and methane vapor.

The world came nowhere near meeting the criteria for worthwhile

exploitation, but that was of no consequence since the computer programs

responsible for surface analysis and evaluation weren't working.

The programs to initiate surface activity did work, however, more or less,

and Factory One, with all of its essential functions up and running to at

least some degree, was duly built on a rocky shelf above an ice beach

flanking an inlet of a shallow methane sea. The ship's master programs were

copied across into the newly installed factory computers, which identified

the commencement of work on Factory Two as their first assignment.

Accordingly Factory One's Supervisor program signaled the ship's databank

for a copy of the "How to Make a Factory" file, which included a set of

subfiles on "How to Make the Machines Needed to Make a Factory," i.e.,

robots. And that was where everything really started to go wrong.

The robots contained small internal processors that could be reprogramed

via radiolink from the factory computers for each new task to be

accomplished. This allowed the robots to proceed with their various jobs

under autonomous local control and freed up the central computers for other

work while they were waiting for the next "Done that—what do I do now?"

signal. Hence many software mechanisms existed for initiating data

transfers between the factory computers and the remote processors inside

the robots.

When the copying of the "How to Make a Factory" file from the ship to

Factory One was attempted, the wrong software linkages were activated;

instead of finding their way into the factory's central system, the

subfiles containing the manufacturing information for the various robots

were merely relayed through the factory and beamed out into the local

memories of the respective robot types to which they pertained. No copies

at all were retained in the factory databank. And even worse, the originals

inside the ship managed to self-destruct in the process and were

irretrievably erased. The only copies of the "How to Make a Fred-type

Robot" subfile were the ones contained inside the Fred-types out on the

surface. And the same was true for all the other types as well.

So when the factory's Supervisor program ordered the Scheduler program to

schedule more robots for manufacture, and the Scheduler lodged a request

with the Databank Manager for the relevant subfiles, the Databank Manager

found that it couldn't deliver. Neither could it obtain a recopy from the

ship. The Databank Manager reported the problem to the Scheduler; the

Scheduler complained to the Supervisor; the Supervisor blamed the

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Communications Manager; the Communications Manager demanded an explanation

from the Message Handler; and after a lot of mutual electronic

recriminations and accusations, the system logging and diagnostic programs

determined that the missing subfiles had last been tracked streaming out

through the transmission buffers on their way to the robots outside. Under

a stem directive from the Supervisor, the Communications Manager selected a

Fred from the first category of robots called for on the Scheduler's list,

and beamed it a message telling it to send its subfile back again.

But the Fred didn't have a complete copy of the subfile; its local memory

simply hadn't been big enough to hold all of it. And for the same reason,

none of the other Freds could return a full copy either. They had been

sprayed in succession with the datastream like buckets being filled from a

fire-hose, and all had ended up with different portions of the subfile; but

they appeared to have preserved the whole subfile among them. So the

Supervisor had to retrieve different pieces from different Freds to fit

them together again in a way that made sense. And that was how it arrived

at the version it eventually handed to the Scheduler for manufacture.

Unfortunately, the instruction to store the information for future

reference got lost somewhere, and for each batch of Freds the relevant "How

to Make" subfile was promptly erased as soon as the Manufacturing Manager

had finished with it. Hence when Factory One had spent some time producing

parts for Factory Two and needed to expand its robot workforce to begin

surveying sites for Factory Three, the Supervisor had to go through the

whole rigmarole again. And the same process was necessary whenever a new

run was scheduled to provide replacements for robots that had broken down

or were wearing out.

All of this took up excessive amounts of processor time, loaded up the

communications channels, and was generally inefficient in the ways that

cost accountants worry about. The alien programers had been suitably

indoctrinated by the alien cost accountants who ran the business— as

always—and had written the Supervisor as a flexible, self-modifying

learning program that would detect such inefficiencies, grow unhappy about

them, and seek ways to improve things. After a few trials, the Supervisor

found that some of the Freds contained about half their respective

subfiles, which meant that a complete copy could be obtained by

interrogating just two individuals instead of many. Accordingly it made a

note of such "matching pairs" and began selecting them as its source for

repeat requests from the Scheduler, ignoring the others.

Lost along with the original "How to Make a Fred" subfiles were the

subsubfiles on "Programs to Write into a Fred to Start It Up after You've

Made It." To make up for the deficiency, the Supervisor copied through to

the Scheduler the full set of programs that it found already existing in

the Freds selected to provide reproduction information, and these programs,

of course, included the ones on how to make Freds. Thus the robots began

coming off the line with one-half of their "genetic" information

automatically built in, and a cycle asserted itself whereby they in turn

became the source of information to be recombined later for producing more

Freds. The method worked, and the Supervisor never figured out that it

could have saved itself a lot of trouble by storing the blueprints away

once and for all in the factory databank.

The program segments being recombined in this way frequently failed to copy

faithfully, and the "genomes" formed from them were seldom identical, some

having portions of code omitted while others had portions duplicated.

Consequently Freds started taking on strange shapes and behaving in strange

ways.

Some didn't exhibit any behavior at all but simply fell over or failed

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during test, to be broken down into parts again and recycled. A lot were

like that.

Some, from the earlier phase, were genetically incomplete —"sterile" —and

never called upon by the Supervisor to furnish reproductive data. They

lasted until they broke down or wore out, and then became extinct.

Some reproduced passively, i.e., by transmitting their half-subfiles to the

factory when the Scheduler asked for them.

A few, however, had inherited from the ship's software the program modules

whose function was to lodge requests with the Scheduler to schedule more

models of their own kind—program modules, moreover, which embodied a

self-modifying priority structure capable of raising the urgency of their

requests within the system until they were serviced. The robots in this

category sought to reproduce actively: They behaved as if they experienced

a compulsion to ensure that their half-subfiles were always included in the

Scheduler's schedule of "Things to Make Next."

So when Factory One switched over to mass-production mode, the robots

competing for slots in its product list soon grabbed all of the available

memory space and caused the factory to become dedicated to churning out

nothing else. When Factory Two went into operation under control of

programs copied from Factory One, the same thing happened there. And the

same cycle would be propagated to Factory Three, construction of which had

by that time begun.

More factories appeared in a pattern spreading inland from the rocky

coastal shelf. The instability inherent in the original parent software

continued to manifest itself in the copies of copies of copies passed on to

later generations, and the new factories, along with their mixed

populations of robot progeny, diverged further in form and function.

Material resources were scarce almost everywhere, which resulted in the

emergence of competitive pressures that the alien system designers had

never intended. The factory-robot communities that happened to include a

balanced mix of surveyor, procurement, and scavenger robots with

"appetites" appropriate to their factories' needs, and which enjoyed

favorable sites on the surface, usually managed to survive if not flourish.

Factory Ten, for example, occupied the center of an ancient meteorite

crater twelve miles across, where the heat and shock of the impact had

exposed metal-bearing bedrock from below the ice; Factory Thirteen

established itself inside a deep fissure where the ice beneath was

relatively thin, and was able to melt a shaft down to the denser core

material; and Factory Fifteen resorted to nuclear transmutation processes

to build heavier nuclei from lighter ones frozen in solution in the ice

crust. But many were like Factory Nineteen, which began to take shape on an

ill-chosen spot far out on a bleak ice field, and ground to a halt when its

deep-drilling robots and transmutation reactors failed to function, and its

supply of vital materials ran out.

The scavenger and parts-salvaging robots assumed a crucial role in shaping

the strange metabolism that was coming into being. Regardless of what the

Schedulers in the various factories would have liked to see made, the only

things that could be assembled readily were the ones for which parts were

available, and that depended to a large degree on the ability of the

scavengers to locate them, or alternatively to locate assemblies suitable

for breaking down—"digesting"—and rebuilding into something useful. Factory

Twenty-four was an extreme case. Unable to "metabolize" parts directly from

any source of raw materials because of the complete failure of its

materials-procurement workforce, it relied totally on its scavengers.

Factory Thirty-two, on the other hand, could acquire raw materials but

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couldn't use them since it had been built without a processing facility at

all. Its robots delivered instead to Forty-seven, which happened to produce

parts for some of the scavengers being manufactured by Thirty-two, and the

two factory-robot organisms managed to coexist happily in their bizarre

form of symbiosis.

The piles of assorted junk, which shouldn't have accumulated from the

earlier phases of the process but had, were eaten up; the machines that

broke down were eaten up; and the carcasses of defunct factories were eaten

up. When those sources of materials had been exhausted, some of the

machines began to eat each other.

The scavengers had been designed, as they had to be, to discriminate

between properly functioning machines and desirable products on the one

hand and rejects in need of recycling on the other. However, as with

everything else in the whole, messed-up project, this function worked well

in some cases, not so well in others, and often not at all. Some of the

models turned out to be as likely to attempt the dismantling of a live,

walking-around Fred as of a dead, flat-on-its-back one. Many of the victims

were indifferent to this kind of treatment and soon died out, but others

succeeded in developing effective fight-or-flee responses to preserve

themselves, thus marking the beginnings of specialized prey and predators

in the form of "lithovores" and "artifactovores."

This development was not always an advantage, especially when the loss of

discrimination was total. Factory Fifty was consumed by its own offspring,

who began dismantling it at its output end as soon as they came off the

assembly line, and then proceeded proudly to deliver the pieces back to its

input end. Its internal repair robots were unable to undo the undoings fast

enough, and it ground to a halt to become plunder for marauders from

Thirty-six and Fifty-three. The most successful factory-robot organisms

protected themselves by evolving aggressive armies of "antibody" defenders,

which would recognize their own factory and its "kind" and leave them

alone, but attack and attempt to destroy any "foreign" models that ventured

too close. This gradually became the dominant form of organism, usually

associated with a distinct territory which its members cooperated in

protecting collectively.

By this time only a few holes in the ground remained at opposite ends of

the rocky shelf to mark where Factories One and Two had once stood. They

had failed to keep up with the times, and the area had become the domain of

Factory Sixty-five. The only trace left of the searcher spacecraft was a

long, rounded depression in the ice beach below, on the shore of the liquid

methane sea.

The alien engineers had designed the system to enjoy full planetary

communications coverage by means of satellites and surface relays, but the

idea hadn't worked too well since nothing had been put into orbit and

surface relays tended not to last very long. This enabled some of the

organisms without strong defenses to remain protected, for a while, from

the more metal-hungry empires by sheer distance. But, to allow for

communications blackouts and interference, the aliens had also provided a

backup method of program and data exchange between robots and factories,

which took the form of direct, physical, electrical interconnection. This

was a much slower process than using radiolinks, naturally, since it

required that the robots travel physically to the factories for

reprograming and reporting, but in a self-sustaining operation far from

home the method was a lot better than nothing. And it kept the accountants

happy by protecting the return on the investment.

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With defects and deficiencies of every description appearing somewhere or

other, it was inevitable that some of the organisms would exhibit partial

or total communications breakdowns. Factory Seventy-three, built without

radio facilities, was started up by programs carried overland from

Sixty-six. None of its robots ever used anything but backup mode, and the

factories that it spawned continued the tradition. But this very fact meant

that their operating ranges were extended dramatically.

So the "defect" turned out to be not so much of a defect after all.

Foraging parties were able to roam farther afield, greatly enlarging their

catchment areas, and they frequently picked up as prizes one or more of the

territories previously protected by geographical remoteness. Furthermore,

selective pressures steadily improved the autonomy of the robots that

operated in this fashion. The autodirected types, relying on their

comparatively small, local processors, tended to apply simple solutions to

the problems they encountered, but their close-coupled mode of interaction

with their environment meant that the solutions were applied quickly: They

evolved efficient "reflexes." The teledirected types, by contrast, tied to

the larger but remote central computers, were inclined to attempt more

comprehensive and sophisticated solutions, but —as often as not—too late to

do any good. Autodirection thus conferred a behavioral superiority and

gradually asserted itself as the norm, while teledirection declined and

survived only in a few isolated areas.

The periodic instinct to communicate genetic half-subfiles back to their

factories had long become a universal trait among the robots— there could

be descendants only of ancestors who left descendants—and they responded to

the decline of radio as a means of communication by evolving a compulsion

to journey at intervals back to the places whence they had come, to return,

as it were, to their "spawning grounds." But this method of reproduction

had its problems and posed new challenges to the evolutionary process.

The main problem was that an individual could deliver only half its genome

to the factory, after which the Supervisor would have to store the

information away until another robot of the same type as the first happened

to show up with a matching half; only then could the Supervisor pass a

complete copy to its Scheduler. If, as frequently happened, the Supervisor

found itself saturated by a peak workload during the intervening period, it

was quite likely to delete the half-subfile and allocate the memory space

to other, more urgent things—bad news for the Fred that the data had come

from, who would thus have enacted the whole reproductive ritual for

nothing. The successful response to this problem came with the appearance

of a new mode of genetic recombination, which, quite coincidentally, also

provided the solution to an "information crisis" that had begun to restrict

the pool of genetic variation available for competitive selection to draw

on for further improvement.

Some mutant forms of robot knew they were supposed to output their

half-subfiles somewhere, but weren't all that sure, or perhaps weren't too

particular, about what they were supposed to output it into. Anything with

the right electrical connections and compatible internal software was good

enough, which usually meant other robots of the same basic type. And since

a robot that had completed its assigned tasks was in a receptive state to

external reprograming, i.e., ready for fresh input that would normally come

from the factory system, an aspiring donor had little trouble in finding a

cooperative acceptor, provided the approach was made at the right time. So

to begin with, the roles adopted were largely a matter of circumstance and

accidental temperament.

Although the robots' local memories were becoming larger than those

contained in their earlier ancestors, the operating programs were growing

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in size and complexity too, with the result that an acceptor still didn't

possess enough free space to hold an entire "How to Make a Fred" subfile.

The donor's half, therefore, could be accommodated only by overwriting some

of the code already residing in the acceptor. How this was accomplished

depended on the responses of the programs carried inside the various robot

types.

In some cases the incoming code from the donor was allowed to overwrite

entire program modules inside the acceptor, with the total loss to the

acceptor of the functions which those modules controlled. This was usually

fatal, and no descendants came into being to repeat such mistakes. The

successful alternative was to create space by trimming nonessential code

from many modules, which tended to leave the acceptor robot with some

degradation in performance—usually manifesting itself as a reduction in

agility, dexterity, and defensive abilities— but at least still

functioning. The sacrifice was only temporary since the acceptor robot

would be reprogramed with replacement modules when it delivered its genetic

package at the factory.

But in return for these complications and superficial penalties came the

immense benefit that the subfiles presented at the factories were complete

ones—suitable for dispatch to the Schedulers without delay and the

attendant risk of being deleted by overworked Supervisors. The new method

thus solved the reliability problem that had plagued the formerly universal

"asexual" mode of reproduction.

The information crisis that it also solved had developed through the

"inbreeding" caused by the various Supervisors having only the gene pools

of their respective "tribes" available to work with, which made

recombination difficult because of the restrictive rules imposed by the

alien programers. But the robots swapping genes out on the surface were not

always averse to adventuring beyond the tribal limits, knew nothing and

cared less about programers' rules, since nothing approaching intelligence

or awareness was operative yet in what was unfolding, and proceeded to

bring half-subfiles together haphazardly in ways that the aliens' rules

didn't permit and which the Supervisors would never have imagined. Most of

the offspring resulting from these experiments didn't work and were

scrapped before leaving the factories; but the ones that did radiated

functionally outward in all directions to launch a whole new, qualitatively

distinct phase of the evolutionary process.

The demands of the two sexual roles reinforced minor initial physical

differences and brought about a gradual polarization of behavioral traits.

Since a female in a "pregnant" condition suffered the loss of some measure

of self-sufficiency for the duration, her chances of delivering

(literally!) were improved considerably if her mate happened to be of a

disposition to stay around for a while and provide for the two of them

generally, thus helping to protect their joint genetic investment.

Selection tended, therefore, to favor the genes of this kind of male, and

by the same token those of the females who mated preferentially with them.

As a consequence a female trait emerged of being "choosy" in this respect,

and in response the males evolved various repertoires of rituals, displays,

and demonstrations to improve their eligibility.

The population had thus come to exhibit genetic variability and

recombination, competition, selection, and adaptation—all the essentials

for continuing evolution. The form of life—for it was, wasn't it?—was

admittedly somewhat strange by terrestrial standards, with the individuals

that it comprised sharing common, external reproductive, digestive, and

immune systems instead of separate, internal ones . . . and of course there

were no chains of complicated carbon chemistry figuring anywhere in the

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scheme of things. ... But then, after all, what is there apart from

chauvinism to say it shouldn't have been so?

KARL ZAMBENDORF STOOD GAZING DOWN OVER SEVENTH AVENUE from the window of

his penthouse suite in the New York Hilton. He was a tall man in his early

fifties, a little on the portly side but with an erect and imposing

bearing, graying hair worn collar-length and flowing, bright, piercing

eyes, and hawklike features rendered biblically patriarchal by a pointed

beard that he bleached white for effect. Although the time was late in the

morning, Zambendorf's breakfast tray on the side table beside the window

had only recently been discarded, and he was still in his shirt-sleeves

from sleeping in after his team's late-night return from its just completed

Argentina tour.

A prominent Argentine news magazine had featured him as THE AUSTRIAN

MIRACLE-WORKER on its cover for the previous week's issue, and the hostess

of one of the major talk shows on Buenos Aires TV had introduced him as

"Perhaps one of the most baffling men of the twenty-first century, the

scientifically authenticated superpsychic ..." Thus had Latin America

greeted the man who was already a media sensation across the northern

continent and Western Europe, and whose ability to read minds, foretell the

future, influence distant events, and divine information inaccessible to

the human senses had been proved, the public was assured, by repeated tests

to be beyond the power of science to explain.

"Karl, I don't like it," Otto Abaquaan said from behind him. Zam-bendorf

pursed his lips and whistled silently to himself while he waited for

Abaquaan to continue. The exchange had become a ritual over the years they

had worked together. Abaquaan would voice all the reasons why they

shouldn't get involved and couldn't afford the risks, and Zam-bendorf would

explain all the reasons why they didn't have any choice. Abaquaan would

then reconsider, and eventually, grudgingly, he would concede. Having

disposed of the academic issues, they would then proceed somehow to resolve

the crisis. It happened that way about once a week. Abaquaan went on, "We'd

be out of our minds to get mixed up in it. The whole situation would

involve too much of the wrong kind of exposure. We don't need risks like

that."

Zambendorf turned away from the window and thrust out his chin. "It was

reported as if it were our idea in the first place, and it received a lot

of news coverage," he said. "We can't afford to be seen to back down now.

On top of that, it would destroy our credibility not only with a lot of the

public, but with GSEC . . . and GSEC can do us a lot of good, Otto. So the

situation didn't work out as we expected. What's new? We're stuck with it,

but we can handle it."

Otto Abaquaan, a handsomely lean and swarthy Armenian with black hair, a

droopy mustache, and deep brown, liquid eyes, rubbed his nose with a

knuckle while he considered the statement, then shook his head and sighed.

"Why the hell did you have to get us into it, Karl? You said the GSEC Board

would never take any notice of a turkey like Hendridge. That was why the

rest of us agreed to go along with the crazy idea—because there would be

all kinds of good publicity opportunities when GSEC turned it down . . .

you said." He threw out his hands and sent an exasperated look up to the

ceiling. "But now what have we got? Mars! ... as if we didn't have better

things to do than go fooling around on Mars for six months. Is there really

no way we can get ourselves out of this?"

Zambendorf shrugged unconcernedly and showed his empty palms. "Certainly—we

can call the whole thing off and admit to the world that we never really

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expected anybody to take us seriously . . . because that's how they'll see

it. And as for better things to do, well, maybe we could spend the time in

better ways and then, maybe not. Who knows? When was the last time a

psychic operated from Mars? The situation might turn out to have

opportunities we never thought of."

"Very philosophical," Abaquaan commented, with less than wild enthusiasm.

It was all very well for Zambendorf to talk about grandiose schemes and

opportunities; it would be Abaquaan and the rest of the team who did the

legwork.

"'Philosophical,' my dear Otto, is the state of mind one reverts to when

unable to change anything anyway. And that's the situation we are in. In

short, we don't have a choice."

GSEC, General Space Enterprises Corporation, and NASO—the European-American

military and civilian North Atlantic Space Organization that had grown from

a merger of many of the former interests of NASA, ESA, and NATO—were

funding expansion of one of the pilot bases on Mars to test ideas on the

organization of extraterrestrial communities as a prelude to the

construction of full-scale colonies. A GSEC director by the name of Baines

Hendridge—a long-standing true believer in ESP and the "paranormal," and a

recent convert to the Zambendorf cult—had proposed sending Zambendorf with

the mission in order to perform the first-ever tests of clairvoyance and

psychic communication over interplanetary distances, and to conduct ESP

experiments in conditions free from terrestrial "interference." Zambendorf,

confident that the GSEC Board would never go along with the idea, had

reacted with a show of enthusiasm, partly because anything else would have

failed the expectations of the faithful and partly to set the stage in

advance for exploiting another "Scientists Back Off Zambendorf Challenge"

story when the proposal was turned down. Baines Hendridge's influence had

turned out to be greater than he had calculated, however, and the Board's

acceptance of the proposal had left Zambendorf in a position that he could

retreat from only at the cost of more public ignominy than his image could

afford.

"I guess you're right," Abaquaan conceded after a short silence. "But I

still don't like the idea of getting mixed up with a NASO space mission."

He shook his head again, dubiously, "It's not like dealing with the public.

There are some good scientists in that outfit ... in a different league

from the assholes we're used to handling. It's risky."

"Scientists are the easiest to fool." That was one of Zambendorf's favorite

lines. "They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore

misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything

has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children

and conjurors—they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I

feel quite confident."

Abaquaan smiled humoriessly. "Confidence is what you feel when you don't

really understand the situation." He raised his arm to glance at his

wristset.

Zambendorf was about to reply when the call tone sounded from the room's

comnet terminal. Abaquaan walked across to answer it. The screen came to

life to show the smooth, clean-cut features of Drew West, Zambendorf's

business manager, calling from another suite farther along the hallway.

"Those NBC people should be arriving downstairs anytime now," West said.

"You'd better be getting on down to the lobby." Clarissa Eidstadt, who

handled the team's publicity affairs, had arranged for a short television

interview to be taped that morning, for screening later in the day to mark

Zambendorf's return to New York.

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