Chapter 15

Pok! Pok! Ping!

Pok! Pok! Ping!

Pok! Pok! Ping!

Pok! Pok! Ping!

The action around the handball court was beautiful to watch. The robot mechanism behind Bart Stanton would fire out a ball at random intervals ranging from a tenth to a quarter of a second, bouncing them off the wall in a random pattern. Stanton would retrieve the ball before it hit the ground and bounce it off the wall again to strike the target on the moving robot. Stanton had to work against a machine; no ordinary human being could have given him any competition.

Pok! Pok! Ping!

Pok! Pok! Ping!

Pok! Pok! PLUNK.

“One miss,” Stanton said to himself. But he fielded the next one nicely and slammed it home.

Pok! Pok! Ping!

The physical therapist who was standing to one side, well out of the way of those hard-slammed, fast-moving drives, glanced at his watch. It was almost time.

Pok! Pok! Ping!

The machine, having delivered its last ball, shut itself off with a smug click. Stanton turned away from the handball court and walked toward the physical therapist, who was holding out a robe for him.

“That was good, Bart,” he said. “Real good.”

“One miss,” Stanton said as he shrugged into the robe.

“Yeah. Your timing was off a shade there, I guess. It’s hard for me to tell till I look at the slow-motion photographs. Your arms and hands are just blurs to me when they’re moving that fast. But you managed to chop another ten seconds off your previous record, anyway.”

Stanton looked at him. “You reset the timer again,” he said accusingly. But there was a grin on his face.

The P.T. man grinned back. “Yup. Come on, step into the mummy case.” He waved toward the narrow niche in the wall of the court, a niche just big enough to hold a standing man. Stanton stepped in, and various instrument pickups came out of the walls and touched him at various points on his body. Hidden machines recorded his heartbeat, his blood pressure, his brain activity, his muscular tension, his breathing, and several other factors.

After a minute the P.T. man said, “Okay, Bart, that’s it. Let’s hit the steam box.”

Stanton stepped out of the niche and accompanied the therapist to another room, where he took off the robe again and sat down on the small stool inside an ordinary steam box. The box closed, leaving his head free, and the box began to fill with steam.

“Did I ever tell you just what it is that I don’t like about that machine?” Stanton asked as the therapist draped a heavy towel around his head.

“Nope. Didn’t know you had any gripe. What is it?”

“You can’t gloat after you beat it. You can’t walk over and pat it on the shoulder and say, ‘Well, better luck next time, old man.’ It isn’t a good loser, and it isn’t a bad loser. The damned thing doesn’t even know it lost, and even if it did, it wouldn’t care.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” said the P.T. man, chuckling. “You beat the pants off it and what d’you get? Nothing. Not even a case of the sulks out of it.”

“Exactly. And what’s worse, I know perfectly good and well that it’s only half trying. The stupid gadget could beat me easily if you just turned that knob over a little more.”

“Yeah, sure. But you’re not competing against the machine, anyway,” the therapist said. “What you’re doing, you’re competing against yourself, trying to beat your own record.”

“I know. And what happens when I can’t do that any more, either?” Stanton asked. “I can’t just go on getting better and better forever. I’ve got limits, you know.”

“Sure,” said the therapist easily. “So does anybody. So does a golf player, for instance. You take a golf player, he goes out and practices by himself to try to beat his own record.”

“Bunk! Hogwash! The real fun in any game is beating someone else! The big kick in golf is winning over the other guy in a twosome.”

“How about crossword puzzles or solitaire?”

“When you solve a crossword puzzle, you’ve beaten the guy who made up the puzzle. When you play solitaire, you’re playing against the laws of chance, and that can become pretty boring unless there’s money on it. And, in that case, you’re actually trying to beat the guy who’s betting against you. What I’d like to do is get out on the golf course with someone else and do my best and then lose. Honestly.”

“With a handicap...” the therapist began. Then he grinned weakly and stopped. On the golf course, Stanton was impossibly good. It had taken him a little while to get the knack of it, but as soon as he got control of his club and knew the reactions of the ball, his score started plummeting. Now it was so low as to be almost ridiculous. One long drive to the green and one putt to the cup. An easy thirty-six strokes for eighteen holes! An occasional hole-in-one sometimes brought his score down below that; an occasional wormcast or stray wind sometimes brought it up.

“Sure,” said Stanton. “A handicap. What kind of a handicap do you want me to give you to induce you to make a fifty-dollar bet on a handball game with me?”

The physical therapist could imagine himself trying to get under one of Stanton’s lightning-like returns. The thought of what would happen to his hand if he were accidentally to catch one made him wince.

“We wouldn’t even be playing the same game,” said Stanton.

The therapist stepped back and looked at Stanton. “You know,” he said puzzledly, “you sound bitter.”

“Sure I’m bitter,” Stanton said. “All I ever get is just exercise. All the fun has gone out of it.” He sighed and grinned. There was no point in upsetting the P.T. man. “I guess I’ll just have to stick to cards and chess if I want competition. Speed and strength don’t help anything if I’m holding two pair against three of a kind.”

Before the therapist could say anything, the door opened and a tall, lean man stepped into the foggy air of the room. “You are broiling a lobster?” he asked the P.T. man blandly.

“Steaming a clam,” the therapist corrected. “When he’s done, I’ll pound him to chowder.”

“Excellent. I came for a clambake.”

“You’re early, then, George,” Stanton said. He didn’t feel much in the mood for lightness, and the appearance of Dr. Yoritomo did nothing to improve his humor.

George Yoritomo beamed broadly, crinkling up his narrow, heavy-lidded eyes. “Ah! A talking clam! Excellent! How much longer does this fine specimen of clamhood have to cook?” he asked the P.T. man.

“About twenty-three more minutes.”

“Excellent!” said Dr. Yoritomo. “Would you be so good as to return at the end of that time?”

The therapist opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again, and said: “Sure, Doc. I can get some other stuff done. I’ll see you in twenty-three minutes. But don’t let him out of there till I get back.” He went out through the far door.

After the door closed, Dr. Yoritomo pulled up a chair and sat down. “There have been new developments,” he said, “as you may have surmised.”

The physical therapist, like many other of the personnel around the Institute, knew of Stanton’s abilities, but he didn’t know the purpose of the long series of operations that had made him what he was. Such persons knew about Stanton himself, but they knew nothing of any connection with the Nipe, although they might suspect. And all of them kept their knowledge and their suspicions to themselves.

“I guessed,” Stanton said. “What is it, George?” He flexed his muscles under the caress of the hot, moist currents in the box.

He wondered why it was so important that the psychologist interrupt him while he was relaxing after strenuous exercise. Yoritomo looked excited in spite of his attempt to be calm. And yet Stanton knew that, whatever it was, it wasn’t anything tremendously urgent or Dr. Yoritomo would be acting a great deal differently.

Yoritomo leaned forward in his chair, his thin lips in an excited smile, his black-irised eyes sparkling. “I had to come tell you. The sheer, utter beauty of it is too much to contain. Three times in a row was almost absolute, Bart. The probability that our hypotheses were correct was computed as straight nines to seven decimals. But now! The fourth time! Straight nines to twelve decimals!”

Stanton lifted an eyebrow. “Your Oriental calm is deserting you, George. I’m not reading you.”

Yoritomo’s smile became broader. “Ah! Sorry. I refer to the theory we have been discussing. About the peculiar mentality of our friend, the Nipe. You remember?”

Stanton remembered. After six years of watching the recorded actions of the Nipe, Dr. Yoritomo had evolved a theory about the kind of mentality that lay behind the four baleful violet eyes in that snouted alien head. In order that his theory be validated, it was necessary that the theory be able to predict, in broad terms, the future actions of the Nipe. Evidently that proof had now come. The psychologist was smiling and rubbing his long, bony hands together. For Dr. George Yoritomo, that was almost the equivalent of hysterical excitement.

“We have been able to predict the behavior of the Nipe!” he said. “For the fourth time in succession!”

“Great,” Stanton said. “Congratulations, George. But how does that fit in with the rule you once told me about? You know, the one about experimental animals.”

“Ah, yes,” Yoritomo said, nodding his head agreeably. “The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior. ‘A genetically standardized strain, under precisely controlled laboratory conditions, when subjected to carefully calibrated stimuli, will behave as it damned well pleases.’ Yes. Very true.”

He held up a cautionary finger. “But an animal could not do otherwise, could it? Only as it pleases. Could it do anything else? It could not please to behave as something it is not, could it?”

“Draw me a picture,” Stanton said.

“What I mean,” Yoritomo said, “is that any organism is limited in its choice of behavior. A hamster, for example, cannot choose to behave in the manner of a rhesus monkey. A dog cannot choose to react as a mouse would react. If I prick a white mouse with a needle, it may squeal or bite or jump--but it will not bark. Never. Nor will it, under any circumstances, leap to a trapeze, hang by its tail, and chatter curses at me. Never.”