"Chad Oliver - Blood's a Rover" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

While his body healed, Conan Lang lived on the star cruiser. There was plenty of time to think. Even
for a race with a life span of almost two hundred years, the days and the weeks and the months can seem
interminable. He asked himself all the old questions, examined all the old answers. Here he was, on a star
ship light-years from home, his body burned, waiting to go back to Sirius Ten to change the life of a
planet. What thin shreds of chance, what strange webs of history, had put him there? When you added
up the life of Conan Lang, of all the Conan Langs, what did you get? Where was Earth going, that pebble
that hurled its puny challenge at the infinite?
Sometimes, it was all hard to believe.


It had all started, he supposed, with cybernetics. Of course, cybernetics itself was but the logical
outgrowth of a long cultural and technological trend. For centuries, manтАЩs ally, the machine, had helped
him physically in his adjustment to his environment. What more natural than that it should one day help
him mentally as well? There was really nothing sinister about thinking machines, except to a certain breed
of perpetually gloomy poets who were unable to realize that values were never destroyed but were
simply molded into new patterns in the evolution of culture. No, thinking machines were fine and
comfortingтАФfor a while.
But with the dawn of space travel, manтАЩs comfortable, complacent progress toward a vague
somewhere was suddenly knocked into a cocked hat. ManтАЩs horizons exploded to the rims of the
universe with the perfection of the star driveтАФhe was no longer living on a world but in an inhabited
universe. His bickerings and absurdities and wars were seen as the petty things they wereтАФand man in a
few tremendous years emerged at last from adolescence.
Science gave to men a life span of nearly two hundred active years and gave him the key to forever.
But there was a catch, a fearful catch. Man, who had had all he could do to survive the conflicts of local
groups of his own species, was suddenly faced with the staggering prospect of living in an inhabited
universe. He had known, of course, about the millions and millions of stars, about the infinity of planets,
about the distant galaxies that swam like island universes through the dark seas of space. But he had
known about them as figures on a page, as photographs, as dots of unwinking light in a telescope. They
had been curiosities, a stimulus to the imagination. Now they were vital parts of his life, factors to be
reckoned with in the struggle for existence. In the universe were incredible numbers of integers to be
equated in the problem of survivalтАФand the mind of man could not even learn them all, much less
form intelligent conclusions about future actions.
And so, inevitably, man turned again to the machine. But this time there was a difference. The
machine was the only instrument capable of handling the dataтАФand man in a million years could not even
check its most elementary conclusions. Man fed in the facts, the machine reached the conclusions, and
man acted upon themтАФnot through choice, but simply because he had no other guide he could trust.
Men operated the machinesтАФbut the machines operated men.
The science of cybernetics expanded by leaps and bounds. Men made machines to develop new
machines. The great mechanical brains grew so complex that only a few men could even pretend to
understand them. Looking at them, it was virtually impossible to believe that they had been born in the
minds of men.
The machines did not interfere in the everyday routine of livingтАФman would never submit to that, and
in problems which he could understand he was still the best judge of his own happiness. It was in the
larger problems, the problems of manтАЩs destiny in the universe in which he found himself, that the great
brains were beyond value. For the machines could integrate trends, patterns, and complexes of the
known worlds and go on from there to extrapolate into the unknown. The machines could, in very
general terms, predict the outcome of any given set of circumstances. They could, in a very real sense,
see into the future. They could see where Earth was headed. And Earth was headed for disaster.