A Touch of Infinity by Howard Fast Page A

life as the American way?”
    â€œI’m not sure that’s to the point.”
    â€œBilly, I’ve never seen you like this before. I would have said you’re the most confident man on earth. Do you want me to take this out of your hands and give it to the Attorney General? He has a damn good legal staff, and if they put their heads together, they’ll come up with something that will hold up in court.”
    â€œThat’s not it. He asks a question point-blank. It’s a moment of truth.”
    â€œWe’ve had our moments of truth before, and we’ve lived through them.”
    â€œThis one’s different.”
    â€œWhy?”
    Billy looked at the President, and the President looked at Billy, and after a long, long moment of silence, the President nodded.
    â€œHopeless?”
    â€œI thought of something,” Billy said.
    â€œWhat? I’ll put every resource of the country at your disposal.”
    â€œWhen you come right down to it,” Billy said, “it’s the showing cause that breaks our back. It’s one thing to preach in the big stadium at Houston; but when you say your piece at the United Nations, for example, it doesn’t hold water.”
    â€œThe hell it doesn’t.”
    â€œWell, with England and Guatemala, but where’s the plain majority we had ten years ago?”
    â€œWe’re no worse than any other country and a damn sight better than the Reds.”
    â€œThat’s the crux of it,” Billy said.
    â€œYou said you thought of something.”
    â€œI did. Let’s take that big computer you have down at Houston. Suppose we start programming it. We’ll throw everything into it, the good and the bad—get the best men in the field to program it, and keep throwing facts into it—say for a week or ten days.”
    â€œWe don’t know how much time we have.”
    â€œWe have to presume that He knows what we’re doing. And so long as He knows that we’re working on the show cause order, He’ll wait.”
    â€œIsn’t that a calculated risk, Billy?”
    â€œI’d say it’s more of an educated guess. Good heavens, He’s got all the time in the world. He invented it.”
    â€œThen why don’t we bring IBM into it? They can throw together a set of computers that will make the thing down in Texas—that’s where the big one is—look like a kiddy toy.”
    â€œIf the government will foot the bill. I’m not sure that the IBM folk will see it just our way.”
    More or less in that fashion the IBM project came into being. Since they had a free hand to call on their own computer centers as well as what they had set up for the Department of Defense, it was no more than two weeks before they began the programming. Day and night, facts were fed into the giant complex of computers, day after day, not by a single person but by over three hundred computer experts; and precisely thirty-three days after they began, the job was done. The computer complex was the repository of all the facts available concerning the current role of the human species on the planet Earth.
    It was three o’clock in the morning when the last fact was fed into the humming machine. At Central Control, a sleepless President and his Cabinet and some two dozen local luminaries and representatives of foreign countries waited. Billy waited with them. And the world waited.
    â€œWell, Billy?” the President asked.
    â€œWe’ve given it the problem and the facts. Now we want the answer.” He turned to the Chief Engineer of IBM. “It’s your move now.”
    The Chief Engineer nodded and touched a button. The gigantic complex of computers came alive and hummed and throbbed and blinked and flashed, took a full sixty seconds to digest the information that had been fed to it, and then took ten seconds more to imprint the information on a piece of tape.
    No one moved.
    The