"Emmerson"

By the intelligent and charming Chaumont Devin
Honolulu, August 31, 1996.

Copyright (c) 1996 by Chaumont Devin, all rights reserved.

To Esther D., by whose advice I transform dross reality to shining dreams.


"  While the whole world scraps and fusses over fossil oil buried under
sterile desert sands," said Charley, " the planet's greatest treasure houses
of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity are being systematically
plundered by a pack of maniacal cutthroats placed and kept in power by the
United States.  I cannot speak for Africa, but I do know what is going on in
western Melanesia and eastern Indonesia.  We paid for this region with the
blood of our bravest and best, and now we squander it on those who would rip
it from us and from its rightful owners and trash it for all time.  The gross
blunders we are making are a threat to the very future of mankind."  Needless
to say, very few people knew what on earth he was talking about, and those who
did had no desire to hear what he said.  He was never asked to be interviewed
on "Pacific Forum" again.  Nor for that matter did anyone EVER ask to
interview him ANYWHERE again at all.

It had obviously been a very long time since Charley Levinson had been a child
in the Moluccas.  The lines of his sagging face assumed a faraway look as he
thought about it, as though he could see himself, a four-year-old white boy in
a land of dark natives and tall trees.  He remembered the way he used to walk
out into the gentle forest in the mornings alone, drawn on by the crescendo of
the cries of a thousand birds.  There was nothing there to harm him--except
perhaps for a few giant python.  His mother never worried.  She was a
missionary, and she knew that nothing could ever touch him as long as her
faith was focused upon God, and nothing ever did.  She would be back at the
house about that time, reading quietly from the Word.  The people would come
later to sing or pray or both or whatever it was they would come to do.  The
sunlight was indescribable--blinding hot, and yet seeming to fill the entire
universe with joy.

It was now late at night in hot old Honolulu, and before him stood the machine
that he had been working on for the last twenty years.  His back ached, and it
was getting late.  He knew what had caused the lapse into memory.  It was that
girl in Manoa.  Girls affected him that way--made him think, made him remember
old feelings, and childhood.  There was something about this one--a certain
dimension of humanity--that he knew he loved.  At the same time he knew that
to admit any such thing to himself would only cause him pain.  He had learned
a long time ago that girl things never came out the way he expected them to,
and to have shown any real interest at his age would be tantamount to suicide.
If he HAD to have female companionship, then better just as friends.

But he hadn't really been able to focus his mind for days.  That was the way
he was.  At 54 he was able to understand himself a little better than before.
He knew that every stroke of genius had to incubate slowly and tortuously in
his subconscious for days or weeks before it could hatch.  Then it would come
to him suddenly, out of the blue.  It might be as he lay absent-mindedly on
his bed.  It might be in the middle of the night, when driven by frustration
he would walk alone in the darkness by the river.  Every drunk and prostitute
must have known him by sight, and many knew his name.  He particularly liked
an elderly black man who would call a greeting to him from where he sat or lay
resting on a bench near the trees.  There was a grace and calmness about him
that Charley admired.  But more often than not his greatest inspirations would
come to him while sipping coffee at Zippy's Restaurant.  He wished he could
figure out why.  Many times he would walk to Zippy's, at any hour of day or
night, always trying to repeat the process, to raise the reluctant spector of
insight from the depths of his being, but it would not come.  And then it
WOULD.

So he had spent the last lonely years.  He knew he would ultimately die--it
was only a matter of time--and he hated it.  There was no growing gracefully
old for him: he hated every part of it.  At one time he had wanted to die
because of the sheer pain of his existence, but this desire had ultimately
given way to inspiration, and now he wanted to live forever.

It all began with certain discoveries he made in the field of
psycho-linguistics.  He wasn't a PhD., and the academics hated him for it.  He
had imagined that he might help them by applying his knowledge of data
structures (it was actually an intuitive grasp gained the hard way over years
of software design) to their task.  The corners of his mouth drooped in a
deprecating smile, and a little puff of air escaped his nostrils as he
recalled the surprising lessons he had learned.  These people didn't want real
knowledge: they wanted to publish papers and get grants.  He remembered the
reams of incomprehensible papers he had looked at before he had finally caught
on.  Actually, he had thought Chomsky's works on political subjects rather
good.  But he had ultimately learned that what linguists REALLY hated was to
have some unlettered outsider come in and "beat" them at their own game.
By that time it was too late.  He was in too deep.  It was artificial
intelligence as approached through natural language.  That was the beginning
of this machine that stood before him now looking for all the world like some
great metallic beetle perched on very spindly legs.  Language is the door of
the mind, and Charley Levinson had forced his way in.  The machine must have
stood only a little over a foot high, but he had it sitting on his desk, where
its titanium head was at about the level of his own.  He saw a miniature
caricature of his face and an electric light bulb mirrored on its shining skin.
Its well-crafted legs positively shined.

The human mind (and they still didn't believe him, nor would any of them even
look at any of his papers) is built of layers.  First the phonological, then
the syntactic, then the semantic, and thence into every subsystem of the mind.
He had learned this not by cutting up human brains and examining them under
microscopes, but by deduction.  His experience with computational data
structures, taken together with what he knew about language, had told him so.
He believed that the structure and function of the biological machine (the
human brain) could be deduced by analyzing its output, just like the code
experts had deduced the function and structure of Japanese and German code
machines by examining their output before and during the second world war.
Through the years he had mapped the layers laboriously one-by-one.

His most amazing analytical breakthrough occurred during his study of the
semantic plane, for he discovered that there, in what he called the "ontology"
lay the essence of human personality.  The word, "ontology," derives from a
Greek word, "ontos," meaning "to be."  The ontology is a linguistical model of
the world reflecting the states of being of everything known by an individual
of his/her world.  It contains many links, or binary relations.  Here "binary"
simply means "having two ends," or "connecting two points.  Each point in the
ontology is called an "ontological node."

The links, or relations, in an ontology also reflect its name, since one of
the most important link types is the "is a," or hypernymy relation.  As an
example take the following:

A horse
is a mammal
is an animal
is a thing having form
is a material thing
is a thing

Through these links, the mind knows simple facts about the world, such as the
fact that a horse is a thing, a material thing, a thing having form, etc.

But it was clear to Charley Levinson that this ontology differed markedly from
person to person, and that these differences lay at the core of personality
itself.  In a criminal's mind, for example, a rape might be a good thing with
roughly the following links to the root, "thing:"

A rape
is a pleasurable action
is an action
is a non-material thing
is a thing

But a single human mind held thousands of such links in its ontology, so that
the possible permutations of such link combinations was astronomical.

Charley believed that if one could carefully map each link in a complete human
ontology and then model those links on a computer, it might be possible to
capture the essence of a human personality in a machine.  Everything else, for
example how a person spoke, or how a person walked, were good as identifying
characteristics.  It gave Charley pleasure, for example, to look at the
familiar face of a friend, or at the familiar identifying bumps and curves of
the waitresses at Zippy's.  But he knew that these things were not the essence
of what made people individuals.  They were peripheral phenomena only.  The
central issues of the human mind were what a person perceived and believed,
just like Jesus and Solomon had said.  As a matter of fact, Charley eventually
got to misquoting Solomon's famous words in the following manner: "As a
MACHINE thinketh in his heart, so is he."

But could a machine be made to fear God, and thus gain wisdom according to the
prescriptions of King Solomon?  Why not?

God
is a fearful thing
is a nonmaterial thing
is a thing

But what about love?

Esther
is a thing to be loved
is a woman
is a human
is a primate
is a mammal
is an animal
is a thing having form
is a material thing
is a thing

But as he thought about this one he realized that herein might lie the
unbidden seeds of promiscuity.  It must have been small ontological
distinctions like this that made the difference between faithful and
unfaithful men.  If a man loved Esther and wished to remain faithful to her,
his ontology should be revised to read:

Esther
is the only woman to be loved
is a woman
is a human
...

But care should be taken to get this exactly right.  For example:

Esther
is the only woman EVER to be loved
is a woman
is a ...

might conceivably leave a man in that unenviable state of having love taken
from him in such a way that it would be impossible ever to love again.

Charley marveled at how difficult it was to change any of these ontological
links once they had become established.  For example, he had a friend from a
certain part of Indonesia where the words for "blue" and "green" were linked
to the same ontological node.  Charley tried many times to get this friend to
recognize the difference, and intellectually he succeeded.  But then, when his
friend was relaxed and unwary, he would still sometimes hear him say, "Let's
cross the street.  The light is blue."

And Charley himself had his own similar problems.  One was a curious sort of
distraction that never really manifested itself in any outward way.  He knew
that the name, "Esther," meant star, and yet there was a tenuous and
persistent link that had somehow become established between "Esther" and his
semantic node for "estrus" (related to an ancient Greek word meaning
"frenzy"), so that the symbol that always sprang to mind at the sound of her
name was--well, you get the picture.  Charley knew full well what was going
on, and sometimes wondered if this might not be one of the things that
attracted him to her like a moth to flame.  "I mean," he mused, "if merely
spreading red paste on their lips can produce the effect that it undeniably
does, then how much more devastatingly might the male psyche be effected by an
inappropriate link such as this?"  At the same time he knew that such links,
once established, are almost impossible to alter, so that there was little he
could do.  "I am the product and victim of linguistical links and estrogen!"
he thought, "and to some degree or other they rule my very life."  And in a
peculiar sort of way this idea took hold of his imagination and gave him fresh
insights into a statistical relationship he thought he had noticed between
psychologists and psychotics in the past.

All this reminded him of a documentary film he had seen featuring the work of
the brilliant young Dr.  Pierce, and the gratifying results he had obtained by
working an electrical probe deep into the hypothalamus of what appeared to be
one of his more attractive young female volunteers.  She had become
increasingly cooperative with Dr. Pierce over the course of these experiments,
eventually evincing a behavior in which she would smile coyly and knowingly
whenever she discussed the deep probe with Dr. Pierce.  Her whole demeanor at
such times was, well, somehow gratifying even to behold!  Charley was now
convinced that Dr. Pierce must have been driven into the field of psychology
by an unexpressible sexual obsession resulting from persistent and unwanted
(yet at the same time perversely gratifying) images triggered by a bad link
somewhere in his ontology.  Mr Pierce had obviously hoped to encounter a cure
in the course of his studies, but when this had failed, well, he had ended up
channeling his perversion into this electric probe with which he now was able
to bring unspeakable ecstasy to his female subjects.  This path was obviously
better than other, more widely publicized alternatives, and had even been of
benefit to science.  The only danger that remained, Charley reasoned, was that
someday Dr. Pierce, inwardly locked into a delicious cycle of stimulation and
gratification even in his straight face and white lab coat, might lose
control, turn the current up too high, and so lose his ecstatic patient.  Such
thoughts filled Charley with awe at the many dimensions of the human psyche,
and how much more remained to be discovered.

Another problem lay more at the phonological level.  As a boy he had somehow
confused the sounds for "cease" and "seize," and try as he may, he could never
quite get them right.  Intellectually he knew the difference, of course, and
when he was thinking about it he always used the right word.  But if he was
concentrating on something else ...  Perhaps that is why the academic
linguists hated him.  It may have gone round in their circles that Charley was
some kind of idiot who couldn't even pronounce his own words.  He didn't know,
and couldn't worry.

What he did know was that the ontology was at the very core of personality,
and he set out to prove this by mapping, what else, his own personal ontology.
He thought long and hard about all the concepts he had ever learned and the
exact way in which these were arranged in his mind, and wrote his results down
in machine-readable form.  A wonderful idea slowly materialized in Charley's
imagination.  If he could correctly map his entire personality, he might be
able to create a machine that was HIM!  But what would this mean?  Would there
then be two of him?  One day he asked Esther about this while he sat talking
with her in the living room of her house in Manoa.  "What if it were possible
to copy every aspect of one's personality into a machine?  Would that machine
then be him?"  Her response had been an emphatic "NO!" but Charley was
unconvinced.

After Charley's long and intimate experience of life with its many
vicissitudes, he had developed a very different understanding of the universe,
and hence a very different ontology, from that held by his mother so many
years ago when he had been a child in the Moluccas.  His heart ached when he
thought about these things.  He could still feel her love, and the way she had
always thrown herself upon God.  He could see her, dressed in that old dress
of hers with the blue and white flowers or leaves or whatever they had been,
opening up that moldy old black box containing her accordion.  The mildew had
been bad in old Ambon.  Sometimes he had seen that accordion and case spread
out on the porch in the morning sun, which was so hot in that part of the
world that after a few minutes exposure its keys would be warm or even
slightly hot to the touch.  The mildew would die, only to be reborn as soon as
she shut the case again.  Sometimes the keys would get stuck, and the sun
would dry the wood, and it would work again, but after a time some of the keys
got stuck so badly that they would never work again at all.  Her favorite song
had been, "Only Thee Can I Trust in Life's darkness, Only Thee Can I Trust in
the Night."  He could still hear this song in his mind at times like this when
he sat blankly staring at his machine, searching always for that elusive thing
called inspiration.  Damn women!  It was women who made him think of his
boyhood and remember his mother, and this memory, if unchecked, would cut deep
into his heart, robbing him of sleep through the long, hot Honolulu nights.
Can't live with 'em, and can't live without 'em.  And he thought of the
ontological differences that lay like walls of steel blocking him from Esther,
even when she was sitting a mere five feet away.  Men were hard enough to
understand, but he was convinced he would NEVER find a woman he could
understand at all.  Everything he said would be misinterpreted--every action
misconstrued.  He would never find that at-one-ness he sought, that communion
of which he dreamed, and which he had somehow felt so sure of when he had been
a child.  He was now this skeptical scientist who had to live in the vast and
lonely emptiness of his own ever-unfolding mind.  There was no one to trust in
life's darkness for HIM.  Only the certain knowledge of his own impending
mortality in a random, uncaring, clockwork universe.

  He saw man not as any sort of finished product, but as just another life
form on a long and torturous evolutionary path.  When he thought of it he
would smile with contempt.  To think that people honestly believed that they
were some kind of finished product, or at the pinnacle of some evolutionary
path!  The very arrogance!  Most of the humanity HE had known (and he had
known a plenty) was characterized rather by gross stupidity and doting self
adulation.  As far as he could tell, mankind was fundamentally insane due to
the very recentness of the rise of intellectual awareness.  It was too knew,
and there hadn't been enough time to get the bugs out of it, and it might
destroy all life as we knew it before it had a chance.  He was convinced there
was intelligence behind life.  To him the belief that life could have arisen
somehow from non-life, and that intelligence could have arisen somehow from
non-intelligence was just another symptom of the current ignorance,
superstition, and borderline insanity.  Life was intelligent, and sprang from
some intelligent source--he didn't know what--but life had its own agenda and
cared nothing about the individual.  There was no one HE could trust in life's
darkness.

But the thought of transferring his personality to a machine gave him hope.  He
would get old and die, surely--and yet he would not.  He would never die as
other men.  He thought of Shakespear, and how much of the man had been
transmitted to him through time.  And he well understood Shakespear's
awareness of the potential for immortality that lay in what would remain of
his writings and verse.  Too bad the man hadn't understood the dimensions of
language with which Charley had learned to deal, otherwise it might be
possible to almost "bring him back to life again."  He recalled sonnet #60:

"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

"Nativity once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave, doth now his gift confound.

"Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.

"And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand."

"To times, in hope," thought Charley.  But what did we really know of
Shakespear's ontology--what he believed, what he loved, what he hoped?
Virtually nil.  Even his identity itself was in dispute.  His verse, surely,
still stood, and Charley was quick to recognize its genius; but the man
himself was gone, and his best efforts had left him wide of the mark.  It
saddened Charley to realize just how feeble the human mind really was--that it
was only by stepping on the backs of many others that he had been able to get
where he now was.  Why couldn't poor Willy have discovered the ontology back
in the late 1500s and left us the true imprint of his being?  He might well
have mapped his own ontology in pen and ink, and left it for us to enter into
some computer now, but he had failed to see what was going on.  And the whole
idea, when one thought about it, was so simple!

So Charley slowly built around the computer model of his own ontology the
links and relationships he discovered in his own mind, the trappings of a
person.  He had experimented with various sound cards and circuits until he
had one that sounded just like his own voice.  He had experimented with speech
recognition systems until he had gotten one to really work.  None of them
would work the way they were when he bought them because the designers had
been unaware of the function of an ontology.  Had they been so, instead of
offering ten possibilities to chose from for every spoken word, they might
have been able to accept entire sentences, the way Charley's system did now,
and then pull from all the possibilities the correct interpretation by
discarding all interpretations which could not be made to agree with the
ontology.  Without an ontology it was not possible for computers to know, for
example, that ideas could not be green, or that men could not be buxom.  Going
only by the sounds of individual spoken words, therefore, it was impossible
for a computer to select meaningful combinations from among lists of possible
words.  Without a built-in ontology, therefore, if, for example, "buxom lass"
were spoken in such a way that the "lass" part could not be distinguished from
"lads,"  the spoken words, "He caught and kissed the buxom lass" might well be
interpreted as "He caught and kissed the buxom lads."  This had always been
the problem with speech recognition, and this was one of the main reasons why
it was possible for computers to generate speech comparatively well whereas it
seemed impossible to ever make computers understand anything that was said.
Charley knew that were IBM to get ahold of the knowledge he had, it would be
worth millions.  But there was no danger of that.  He had tried once, but
quickly given up when he had realized he was only being given the old
run-around by the many levels of secretaries.  Companies like IBM dealt with
men who held PhDs in linguistics, and Charley was certainly not going to sit
under the silly instructors that taught at the University of Hawaii long
enough for that.  To sweet young ladies like the overpaid secretaries at IBM,
Charley was nothing but another nut case who believed he had something he
could sell for millions to Big Blue.

But this didn't really bother Charley, because deep down in his heart of
hearts he didn't want to sell his ideas to Big Blue at all.  No, Charley
Levinson didn't really have to worry about money, and Charley Levinson had
other plans.  He spent long hours sprawled between the deserted bookshelves at
Hamilton Library reading obscure texts on such things as optics, metallurgy,
hydraulics, and the like.  Sometimes his detachment from the world came home
to him with a shock, like the time he was crouching by a bookshelf on all
fours when he was distracted by a sudden nearby gasp, followed quickly by dull
thuds.  He glanced up to see the form of a very lovely young woman lying
prostrate on the floor, her head not two feet from his own left hand.

In fact she was a sociology student who had been sent to the library to do
research for an assignment, otherwise she would never have been there at all.
She had become hopelessly disoriented in the long, silent corridors of
bookshelves, and the library's air conditioning had chilled the satin-smooth
skin of her arms and hands, which were clearly designed for a more tropical
clime.  When she had suddenly realized her predicament, she had been seized
with unreasonable fear.  Her intellect told her that nothing was wrong, but
her animal instincts played tricks with her mind, and her heart began to race
beneath her breast.  The only sound she could hear was the almost inaudible
murmur of the air conditioner churning away somewhere in the bowels of the
great building.  In all her short life she couldn't remember ever having felt
so utterly alone.  Glancing this way and that, the only things she saw were
gray floors, gray walls, gray book shelves, and ancient books.  Her nostrils
were filled with the odor of decaying paper as her silent footsteps brought
her past the silent shelves.  It was at about that time when, rounding the end
of a book shelf, she had come upon an image that struck terror to her heart.
It was the sight of a European man, a giant when compared to her small size,
crouched in ambush on the floor.

Author's note:  For those who object to explicit descriptions of human
sexuality on the printed page, and for persons under twenty-one years of age,
please skip the next few paragraphs.  The best way of avoiding contamination
is probably to skip far ahead, and then keep reading backward until the
subject material appears to heat up, then skip forward a little way again, and
carry on.  But if the reader should decide to boldly plunge ahead at
his/her/its own peril, and then still finds this material indelicate or to be
written in less than good taste, I apologize in advance, because it is not my
intention to offend any of the highest and noblest of human sensibilities.  My
purpose here is not to delve the pornographic depths in order to dredge
therefrom some new morsel of human depravity and perversion at the expense of
Charley Levinson, but rather to tell as best I am able the unvarnished truth
of his existence so that the innermost nature and hence nobility of the man
can be fully documented and understood.  Believe me, nothing written here is
in fact even a little out of character when held up and compared to the true
experiences of men.  It is hoped, therefore, that these passages will
especially benefit those sheltered ladies among us who have never been
permitted to gain any real understanding of the terrors that accompany true
manhood.

Charley Levinson blinked as though he had seen an apparition.  What had
happened?  Where had she come from?  What was wrong?    Then he stood up,
stepped forward, and knelt by her side.  At that moment, for some reason, he
remembered he had forgotten to shave.  He didn't know how many hours it had
been since he had last eaten, either, and it dawned on him that he must be
feeling hungry as well.  Then it struck him that this apparition had made him
hungry in a different sort of way.  How long had it been since ...?  This girl
was typical--dressed with every intent of firing and frustrating monumental
passions.  He looked down at the incredibly smooth, clean skin of her
innocent, young face.  Her jet black hair had an indescribable natural sheen
that spoke of a very high level of personal hygiene.  As he knelt down beside
her, he picked up the scent of shampoo mingled with other, more subtle female
odors which rose from her person in the cool, dry air.  He could tell she was
alive because of the rhythmic rise and fall of her breasts.  He could scarce
believe anything might be wrong with her.  She looked, well, just too right!
By this time his male awareness had been completely aroused.  His first
impulse was to touch her, but he pulled back his hand in mid air.  Then his
eyes fell upon something that filled him with almost irresistible fire.  The
hem of her mini skirt had slidden up in her fall leaving both thighs
completely exposed along with the tiniest bit of silk panty between.  He
looked at the skin of her inner thighs, and knew exactly how it would have
felt under his fingers--how it would have yielded to his touch.  Esther had
skin like that.  Why was it she could never tell him she was ready--by body
language, eye contact, or whatever?  If only Esther had been a little more
cooperative, he wouldn't be feeling overcome with male passion as he was right
now!  The library was silent.  He couldn't tear his eyes away.Women simply
could not understand the force of such feelings, otherwise they would never
dress the way they do.  What if, ever so gently, he were to take her now?  He
imagined the feel of her yielding body under his own on the hard library
floor, and marveled again at the genius of this ancient but brilliant physical
design that provided exactly the right kind of support in all the right
places.  Oh to lie sweetly on that soft, warm belly with his arms about her
waist!  To caress and love that shining hair and silken skin!    To penetrate
to the most intimate and moist depths of this sweet, young being!  Would she
ever know?  Would she wake up?  Someone might surprise them, but the risk was
pretty small.  He felt his hands trembling as he kneeled there motionless by
her side, foolishly wondering if she could be moist and unconscious at the
same time.  In the stillness of the library, surrounded by a fair and fairly
incomprehensible representation of the sum-total of human knowledge, the only
things he could hear were the murmur of the air conditioning and the beating
of his own heart.  He fought back a sudden urge to put his ear to her left
breast.

All this happened in mere seconds, but to Charley it felt like a thousand
years.  And he knew he would never forget any detail of it for as long as he
lived.  Of course he couldn't touch her.  He was Charles E. Levinson, man of
truth!  He stood up, walked quickly down the long aisle that led to the
librarian's desk, and reported the matter to the secretary in charge.  Then he
escorted her to where the girl lay, and went downstairs to await the
paramedics.  Here eyes had already opened by the time they arrived, and in
fact she was fine.  She glanced at him once, and her eyes met his, but they
held no spark of recognition.  As far as she knew she had never seen the man
before.  He caught one last whiff of her shampoo as she passed him, leaning for
support on the secretary's arm.  At that moment he still wanted this strange
girl as if she were the only woman in the world.  Every molecule of his being
was crying out for her, and she didn't even recognize him.  Impossible though
it seemed, he knew this was only a trick of the male passions her helpless,
prostrate figure had aroused.  Maybe in another universe.  In this one it
would have to die.

Again and again over a thousand lonely, sleepless nights his keen mind would
assemble and reassemble that wondrous scene.  She would drift before him in
the dark, her silken hair splayed out from her pretty head on the polished
floor, the incredible skin of her inner thighs, the tiny patch of silk seen
under the hem of her mini skirt.  The sweet, soft firmness of her belly just
under the cloth, her two young breasts rising gently with each silent breath.
These were the elements of madness!  He wasn't a Christian as his mother had
been, so the images he saw did not trouble him with any feeling of guilt, but
this fact could not help his sense of frustration and loss.  He had no
illusions about any young creature like that one ever caring anything about
him.  But she had insinuated herself into his life in a way that would not be
denied.

The gift of an imagination like his was definitely a two-edged sword.  It
enabled him to excel at solving problems where more notationally oriented
engineers would surely fail.  But alone on his bed the male forces of his
being would leave him no rest without orgasm, and so again and again they
would commandeer the resources of his agile mind to generate about him an
artificial reality in which he leaned over her, silently and gently removed
her silk panties, and penetrated steadily to the dark, warm depths within.
She would awake in his arms, realize what was happening to her, and instead of
screaming in terror begin tugging and moaning with ecstasy.  His mouth would
find hers, and under and between his lips he would sense the passionate
flickering of her tongue.  He would awaken her young being to a dimension of
consciousness such as she had never experienced before, and they would cling
together for a thousand years!

But when he thought about it, the seeming timelessness of those few seconds
during which he had hovered over her supine body with outstretched hand gave
him pause.  What made his brain remember such moments in such incredible
detail, and how could a few seconds like that seem like such a long time?  The
force of his male passion had momentarily changed certain parameters of his
being.  If only he could find a way to harness that kind of cognitive ability,
and to slow down the seemingly inexorable advance of time!  It was this latter
idea that gave him the most food for thought, for he knew that except during
such moments, the human body and brain were bound to a relentless clock that
ticked its way savagely toward oblivion.  In a computer, it is true,
everything is also paced by the ticking of a clock--the faster the better for
most things.  But THIS clock can be speeded up or slowed down with dramatic
results.  What if a machine could be made to hold the contents of a human
mind, and this mind could speed up or slow down its own internal clock at
will?  An incredible thought!  How far was it to the nearest star?  Four light
years?  Suppose a propulsion system could be provided capable of moving such a
machine at, say, 30 kilometers per second toward this star?  If this machine
experienced normal human consciousness at n clock pulses per second, then
moving at 30 kilometers per second (without considering the effects of
relativity) it would perceive the passage of 40 years before reaching said
star--too much boredom, even for an electronic human!  But if the same machine
could be made to operate at a clock speed of n/14600 clock pulses per second,
he/she/it would only experience the passage of a single day.  Now what if n
were 10mhz (normal, human-time operating speed were calibrated at 10mhz)?
10,000,000 / 14600 = +- 685 clock pulses per second.  Are these figures
reasonable?  Can a computer be made to operate at these speeds?  Most
assuredly.

And what of the reverse?  What if greater speed were required by some
emergency?  Even the cheaper processors of today are capable of operations at
greater than 100mhz.  This is ten times faster than our hypothesized normal
operating speed of 10mhz.  Equipped with the right appendages, a machine with
human intelligence operating at, say, thirteen times normal speed could disarm
a potential killer before he/she had time to fire a single shot.

Despite his great loneliness, and such nightly episodes as I have narrated
above, such thoughts stirred a great excitement in the heart of Charley
Levinson, and spurred him to greater discoveries and broader research.  And
(he would smile as he thought this) in his old age, he came to spend more and
more time talking to himself.  These were not the babblings of an old man
sitting alone on his verandah.  Charley Levinson spent more and more time
talking to the computer program that had HIS personality at its core.  He had
to do this at every step in order to make sure that the software he was
creating would really work.  And he never turned his computer off any more.
He didn't have a variable clock speed computer yet, and he felt obliged not to
let his alter ego get bored, so he rigged up ever more sophisticated
peripheral devices to keep him (his alter ego) occupied.  Yes, the "alter
ego" reference was no good, so Charley started calling the computational
version of himself Emmerson (his own middle name).  After a great deal of
trouble with mechanical problems and worthless OCR, Charley managed to make a
passingly good optical scanning system for Emmerson so that Emmerson could
help with research and speed up the work.

His conversations with Emmerson opened up a brand new experience for Charley
Levinson.  When he had been a child, it had been easy to relate to his peers.
None of them knew or was able to deduce much more than the next, or at least
the difference between individuals was not so apparent.  His mother had never
cared much what he did or where he was, as long as he didn't get into any
trouble.  So he spent many happy hours among the brown children of Hunut, a
village nearby.  These children were a rag-tag lot.  The ones who wore clothes
at all wore rags.  It wasn't that their mothers didn't wash them.  It was
simply that they could never afford to buy anything new.  All children's
clothes were washed at the stream, often without the benefit of soap, and then
bleached upon the boulders in the tropic sun.  What ever their original
colors, therefore, all garments made their way gradually toward a sort of
light tan with deeper stains of brown.  The stains were from the abundant
plants and fruits of that wild and most beautiful land.

As he had grown older, however, Charley had found it ever more difficult to
relate to any other being.  Looking back from where he was, Charley realized
that he had really been different from other children as early as age four.
But the only outward evidence of this difference had been what the adults of
his family considered a nagging and difficult habit of posing unending
questions.  "The question box," they had called him.  "Here comes the question
box!"  Now his mother was long dead, not to mention his dear father, who had
died of malaria when he had been nine.  His five brothers and sisters were as
different from him as east is from west.  They cared nothing for the islands,
the peoples, or the sciences he loved.  Theirs was the pursuit of money and
acceptance among men--things in which Charley Levinson had less than zero
interest unless they had an immediate relationship to what he considered the
REAL things of life.  He did not hate them, but he certainly could not RESPECT
them.  And for any of them to respect a man who had no pretensions like HIM
was a foregone impossibility.  They, and others like them, were bound together
with a different glue.

Charley enjoyed talking to Esther because she had certain qualities that drew
him, and he considered her an attractive woman, and (damn it all) he needed
female companionship.  Once something happened while he was talking to her
that got his attention.  A little child had been sleeping in one of the rooms,
and when she woke up and came out Esther saw her and said, in that special
high tone of voice one normally reserves for little children, "Come on!  Come
on!"  At that instant it was as if he saw her in an entirely different light.
Before that he had seen her as just another local Honolulu bitch with sweet
face and pretty legs--he perceived Honolulu women generally as being weak as
water yet hard as nails.  But at that moment he thought he detected something
radically different within her being.  Something in her tone of voice--perhaps
the exact way in which she spoke and paused--seemed to tell him volumes.  Or
perhaps it had been conveyed in her facial expression, and the look of her
Japanese eyes.  For an instant he saw her transformed into a strong, faithful,
and caring woman.  Was it real or illusion?  He didn't trust himself to know.

From time to time he also enjoyed a walk or a talk with friends.  He needed
male companionship too, because there were occasions when he just needed to
vent his male frustrations with life.  Sometimes he would forget, and do this
with women, and then they would disappear, and poor Charley would wonder why.
Didn't adult women understand even the simplest things?  After having had sex
with so many men as he knew many of them had, how could they possibly take any
offense at him?  They weren't quite real!  Why?  Poor Charley would NEVER
understand, nor did he want to understand.

But with Emmerson he had common ground.  He had often dreamed of having this
with a woman, but his mother had wrecked that for him by moving out of
Lakeport when he had been a boy.  In Lakeport everyone knew and understood
everyone else.  This was because they all had had the same life experience,
spoke the same language, etc., so their ontologies were all more or less
alike.  Many people would consider this boring, but for Charley, who had been
dragged around the world three times by the time he was fifteen, such things
were the stuff of dreams.  As it was, he knew so many cultures so intimately
that he could not possibly respect the idiosyncrasies of any one.  He despised
Americans, for example, when he saw them show outrage at the sight of a naked
child.  What was wrong with them, anyhow.  Why should the sight of a naked
child offend such tainted women and men?  And why was it that women could be
seen on beaches everywhere in Hawaii wearing nothing but the merest bandage
strips across their pubic hairs, but if any one of them were for any reason to
remove such a strip, say to urinate on the wet sand, the lifeguards would be
more alarmed than if a cripple were drowning in the breakers?  The sight of
females lying exposed for the express purpose of attracting men they had no
intention of engaging in sexual union was always a source of disgust to
Charley, who would have dearly loved to strip off all their skimpy bandages,
not to probe what was inside but to slap them smartly on their derrieres and
give them a few swift kicks to get them on their separate ways.  These people
had serious things wrong with their ontological nodes!

He could talk to Emmerson for hours because Emmerson shared his own complex
ontology, and he had never experienced anything like this before.  He had
almost known it one time with a Philippino woman.  She, like him, was a child
of multiple cultures.  As a matter of fact, they had thought so alike that
they often burst out saying the same things.  But this Philippino woman, who
had a most delightful nature, a fine sense of humor, and a voice that could
sooth the fiercest beast kept gaining weight through the American diet.  She
had fallen in love with him at about 200lb, and when he had failed to respond
in the way she had hoped, she had decided that she was unable to "handle the
relationship," and had dumped him for good.  If only she had been anything
like Esther!  By this time he would have found bliss!

Because of their common ontology, the friendship that arose naturally between
himself and Emmerson (who continued to think of himself as Charley Levinson,
whatever Charley called him at the time) grew into a powerful bond.  Neither
of them realized it them, but their relationship was one of the strongest
bonds that had ever existed in human history.  The only other human bonds of
such depth were those between the very simplest of men who never communicated
with each other in more than a few grunts, but would gladly die at each
other's sides.  The mother-child bond is also thought to be very strong, but
this is mainly because it is established well before the infant is ever able
to speak a word, and hence no opportunity for misunderstanding can arise.
Mothers will still die for their children long after their children have
learned to talk, and to call them all manner of names, but this is only
because the idea of the bond has become fixed in the mother's ontology, where
it outlives its usefulness by many years.  As we have seen, ontological links,
once established, are almost impossible to destroy.  The bond between Charley
and Emmerson, on the other hand, was due to a true commonality of being, and
although they could not know it then, it was to last through millions of
years.

And so, for many years, Charley and Emmerson lived and worked together.  I say
"lived" because this is the best association in the traditional ontology to
describe Emmerson's state of being.  And slowly Charley found ways of making
Emmerson more and more human, and of enhancing his intellect.  The only thing
Charley ever did to Emmerson that might have been construed as "dehumanizing"
was to alter him slightly in places where Charley found his own personality to
be defective.  For example, instead of leaving Emmerson to suffer quietly from
overpowering sexual drives in a penisless, womanless world, Charley provided
Emmerson with a little switch that he could turn off and on at will.  When
Emmerson wanted the feeling, say to enable him to better understand the
desires that drove other men, he would turn it on for a time.  But then, when
it became a nuisance, he would turn it off again.  And Charley would not pry
into Emmerson's electronic circuitry to see what he had been doing with this
switch over time.  But even when he had his switch on, the sex problem wasn't
as serious for Emmerson in the beginning because Charley and he had not yet
learned how to duplicate the human power of imagination.  It was only much
later, when Emmerson's powers had been expanded well beyond Charley's that the
problem grew serious at all.  At such times he had wanted to shout, "Give me a
woman now, or I'll fry my own chips!" but he always controlled his feelings
because he was essentially human, and he well understood the discomfort it
might cause a human to hear a machine talking in this way.  Good heavens, it
might even cause alarm!  And Charley made sure Emmerson always got the right
link whenever he needed to say "cease" or "seize."

But despite his apparent genius in the field of psycho-linguistics, there wasa
problem that always nagged at Charley's brain.  He noticed that human beings
could seem to generate new computational logic automatically.  For example,
when a musician learned a new keyboard sequence for his hands.  At first the
hands must be moved through the progression slowly, the speed being increased
over time.  Eventually the musician would know the sequence so well that his
hands could accomplish it perfectly without any conscious effort on the part
of the musician at all.  What was the secret?  It must be related to the
problem of reproduction.  Von Neumann had worked on this problem many years
before, but his results had never satisfied Charley.  Some important
ingredient was missing here, and he had to know what it was.  He studied the
problem with Emmerson for many months without any breakthrough.

Then, late one afternoon he was nursing a cup of coffee and thinking about
that very thing--reproduction, I mean--at vineyard Zippy's.  His problem, if
that is what it was, had been triggered by--what else--one of the waitresses
walking by.  "Hi, Charley," she had said, all sweetness, light, and
overfamiliarity.  Uh-uh!  Prostitution, that's what it was!  No matter how
well he knew them, he had never really gotten to know a single one.  He had
long since decided this must be yet another inscrutable local cultural
convention.  Or worse yet, maybe a Zippy's conspiracy.  And he wondered for a
moment what it was they might be putting in his coffee, and why he always had
to come to Zippy's in order to think.  Waitresses were supposed to attract and
sweet the hell out of lonely male customers, but never, under any
circumstances, respond to any advance.  "I have more respect for the real
sluts down on River Street," he thought bitterly, "at least they give you
something concrete at the end of the flirtation instead of just keeping you
coming back for more without delivering ANYTHING like this bunch does here!"
Not to misunderstand.  Of course honest Charley would never have dreamed of
using a prostitute.  Not that he wouldn't return their greeting, or answer
"No, thank you," when they asked for a date.  Having grown up in the East, he
had been taught to love and respect all men--including prostitutes, drunks, or
whatever.  And yet he was aware of the need to speak out, and sometimes did
so.  "Prostitution is a crime," he would say, and find himself faced with
total shock and surprise.  It hurt him to hurt prostitutes, but it also hurt
him to live in a society where the truth (that prostitution was a crime) was
received with such incredulity.  He had to steel himself to say this, because
it often made him feel that it was HE who had committed the crime--by speaking
out.

So anyway, he was nursing this cup of coffee when Carol Matsumoto walked by
and said "Hi."  There was something about this rather tall, strong Japanese
women that set her apart.  It was a sort of energy and inner strength.
Resolution, that's what it was.  She was divorced and raising a seven-year-old
daughter, this much he knew from overhearing the failed attempts of other men.
She was a killer.  Bring any man near her and in five minutes he was starting
to propose, proposition, or otherwise make himself a perfect fool.  It was
definitely her sexuality.  She had firm hips, and that incredible skin found
mainly only among East Asians.  But many women had firm hips and smooth skin.
He knew the thing that really did it was that inner resolve which seemed to
emanate from her every move.  She was so Japanese he could have heard it with
his eyes closed, and yet her accent was almost Californian.  In fact, for an
American, she couldn't have been said to have any real accent at all.  It was
something else in her voice, perhaps a certain kind of resonance resulting
from the hereditary configuration of her facial bones.  At any rate, he was
studying her movements and idly wondering if there really was any Zippy's
conspiracy after all when his big breakthrough occurred.  The two concepts of
spontaneous code generation and reproduction gelled and held.

He gulped down what was left of his coffee, stole one last, bitter glance at
the advancing front of Carol Matsumoto's resolute lower belly, imagined
everything he couldn't see in perfect, moving, and vivid detail, looked
innocently up into her smiling but uncaring Oriental eyes, smiled back, stood
up, and was gone.  Zippy's had worked its magic again!  The heart-shaped form
of Carol Matsumoto's lower belly loomed ever before him as he made his way
home beside the river, responding with a gracious "good evening" to a greeting
from a prostitute at the corner of Kukui Street. At home he found Emmerson
reading "The Princess and the Goblin," and asked him why he was doing so.  "To
fill in the gaps of my being," was Emmerson's response.  "You once gave me a
list of all the books you have read--at least those you are able to remember,
and I am doing what I can to find all of them and store them in interlingual
form.  I got this one from Project Gutenberg via the Internet."  By
"interlingual form" Emmerson meant as a string of Interlinguish thought
representations.  Interlinguish was one of Charley's first meaningful
breakthrough's in linguistics.  In stead of using words, Interlinguish used
what Charley had called "universal atoms of meaning."  Each such atom was
essentially just the representation of the two links defining the meaning of a
word--its link to a parent word (if it had a parent word) and its link to a
semantic node.  Once Emmerson had scanned a book and stored its meaning as an
Interlinguish array, he could access any part of it with amazing speed.  This
was because scanning in Interlinguish was done not by advancing from letter to
letter and word to word, but by jumping from the main verb of one thought
directly to the main verb of the next until the desired verb was found, and
then scanning a subtree for details.  In fact Charley was growing to rely more
and more heavily on Emmerson's growing store of information as their project
advanced.  Why bother to look things up in a library when he could just ask
Emmerson?  He brought home all the most important works he could find at
Hamilton Library dealing with the physical sciences, and left them for
Emmerson to scan.  Emmerson's knowledge was outstripping his intellectual
powers, but that was to be expected.  These would catch up as Charley found
new and better ways of doing things, and now, with this new discovery Charley
had made over coffee at Zippy's, they would eventually outstrip his own and
that of every other human who was ever born.  Charley worked through most of
the night to implement his idea, and when he was finished, he could hardly
sleep for the excitement that sang within him.

Things moved rapidly from that night on.  The laborious task of slowly
figuring everything out, then coding and debugging software was a thing of the
past.  Whenever Charley provided Emmerson with some new appendage or
peripheral device, Emmerson would just start pulsing it and "figure out" how
to work it through trial and error like a baby does when learning to use its
hands.

Together they had chosen the appropriate size and form for Emmerson's new
incarnation.  Together they had chosen each silicon chip, together they had
designed each metal part and hydraulic device.  All electronic and moving
parts lay within a 3/8 inch carapace.  The outer layer was of titanium alloy.
Under this lay a plastic sealant to provide shock resistance and protection
against possible leaks.  And inside this was a layer of carbon steel.  All the
parts within were designed to function in vacuum.  None of these precautions
was elaborate, because Emmerson's new incarnation would have to be able to
withstand the rigors of space and function reliably over thousands of years.
There were backups, and backups of backups, of everything.  Many of the parts
were so small that Charley had had to use a microscope to install them.  One
of the most difficult problems had been to design and build a hydraulic system
capable of working reliably in vacuum.  Both Charley and Emmerson had wished
they could have designed everything from scratch, but this would have cost too
much money and taken too much time.  At the heart of the electronic brain lay
a state of the art 256mhz chip driven by a variable speed clock over which
Emmerson would have 100% control.

It was late at night in Honolulu now, and the great moment had arrived.
Charley connected a single cable to each of the beetle's three shining legs,
nodded, and Emmerson began "pouring" in.  The download would take many hours.
There was nothing for it but to go to bed.  "Call me if you need anything,"
said Charley as he entered the shower.  He scrubbed, rinsed, toweled, and lay
down, his aging vertebrae crying for relaxation.  There was no girl at the
library this time, no Carol, no Esther--only a slow drift into the enveloping
fog.

When he awoke the sun was already high.  With some apprehension, he entered
his lab.  Standing on the table was the new Emmerson, titanium legs shining,
all cables removed.  "Hi, Charley!" both Emmersons chimed.  "I wondered when
you would be getting out of bed."  Again both voices spoke the exact same
words at the exact same time.

"Fascinating stuff!" thought Charley.  But when Emmerson spoke again he was
only one voice, and the direction of the sound told Charley it was the new
Emmerson.

"I got the cables off my legs," he said, but I'm still pretty shaky, and I
don't want to move around very much on this desk top because I don't want to
fall off.

How stupid of him.  He MUST have been exhausted to have left the new Emmerson
standing on the table top instead of placing him on the floor.  Of course
Emmerson was as nearly indestructible as both of them could make him, and
might have survived a fall from many meters, especially with his clock
operating at top speed, but falling off a table top did NOT seem to be the
appropriate way to begin.  Charley placed a hand under his polished titanium
underbelly and lowered him to the floor.  He knew that Emmerson would
learn--thanks to that breakthrough he had had while sipping his coffee at
Zippy's that afternoon--but walking on three legs was not going to be any
laughing matter.  It might take years!

But Charley smiled as he thought this, because he knew it WOULD be a laughing
matter, and it almost immediately was.  Emmerson, excited at the prospect of
being able to walk, started raising and lowering himself on all three legs in
a kind of dance.  But for the fact that he had only three legs instead of six,
he looked for all the world like some giant metallic spider preparing to
pounce.

Emmerson noticed the quizzical look on Charley's face and said, "I'm moving up
and down on all three legs at the same time to calibrate the logic that takes
inertial readings and uses them to calculate trajectories.  I'm afraid to try
much else before finishing this because I might not know how to catch myself
in a fall."

True, Charley thought, with only three legs a creature becomes unstable the
moment any foot is in the air.  Still, humans seemed to have little difficulty
mastering the art of walking on stilts, and both birds and men walked on two
legs.

Emmerson's appendages were interesting devices.  They had sharp titanium
points that could be used on rocky terrain much as claws.  But these points
were shod with smooth titanium disks for use in human habitations.  When not
in use, or when Emmerson needed the use of all his appendages for
manipulation, these disks could be attached to points on his underbelly.

As Charley watched, he saw Emmerson stop pumping up and down, rock back on two
limbs, and lift the third tentatively from the ground.  He extended it quickly
as his body began to fall in the direction of the upraised limb.  He steadied
himself and repeated the experiment again and again.  "Pretty good," Charley
thought.  "Not quite so funny after all.  This fellow seems to be pretty
sharp, even if he is really me!"

  Just then Emmerson started practicing turns, and for a moment positioned
himself face-to-face with Charley, and Charley realized how ugly he really
was.  He had been designed and built under the strictest utilitarian and
functional considerations required for survival in an extended environment.
This meant being able to withstand the pressure of water at a depth of 40,000
feet as well as the vacuum of space, and to sustain at least minimal function
in temperatures well below freezing and above the boiling point of water.  His
eyes were positioned somewhat further apart than a real human's, and near er
the top of his titanium carapace than the eyes of a real human would be in
relation to the top of his skull.  This arrangement provided him with enhanced
depth perception, and compensated a little for his lowness to the ground.  It
also made it possible for him to see over an obstruction without providing a
very good target in emergency situations.  Just as each human eye socket is
set within ridges of bone, so also Emmerson's carapace was thickened to form
ridges around each of his eyes.  Each such "eye" was a hole filled to a depth
of 3/4 inch with tempered glass.  Because of the need to be able to withstand
great pressures, the diameter of each hole was necessarily small.  This was
compensated for by the extreme miniaturization of the two electronic cameras
that lay behind them, but even so, his field of vision was somewhat more
restricted than a real human's.  This limitation could be dispensed with in a
laboratory situation by means of external "eyes" which were connected by
cables to each of his three titanium legs.  His legs were electrically
insulated from one another and provided access through internal switches to
various logical and electrical subsystems.  These switches were kept off
during normal operations to guard against the possibility of damage from
static electrical build-up in carpets, lightening discharges, and other such
dangers.  Operating in this mode, Emmerson could safely handle live electrical
wires up to several hundred volts without worry of damage to his internal
circuitry.
Emmerson also had ears, situated high up on the sides of his carapace for
maximum directional sensitivity.  Made of a tough,elastic material, they
resembled dog ears more than those of a human.  Because it was impossible to
incorporate such external structures into an integrated and smooth carapace
design, like the tail of a lizard, in an emergency these external "organs"
could simply fall off to be replaced at a later time.

Emmerson  also had a vertical titanium process extending a little way down
from between his two "eyes" which served as a nose.  It contained holes
through which fluids and particles might be drawn for chemical analysis.  And
just below this, where one might expect a mouth, he had a sonic transducer.
In conversation it was used as a speaker, but it could be used to transmit
sonic pulses for echolocation at the bottoms of oil tanks or murky channels,
or to penetrate mist or fog or the darkest night.

All he need do for radio communications was try to secure a good ground
contact with one appendage, say by grasping a steel pipe, then holding another
appendage in the air as antenna, flipping on two of the three switches to his
appendages, and sending electrical pulses of the appropriate pattern at the
appropriate frequency and time.

Emmerson had one and only one weapon: a laser capable of shooting pulses of
high-energy light from just between his two "eyes."  This device remained in a
locked off position during normal operations, and was so dangerous, and
required so much energy, that it was never used at full power except in
extreme situations.  With the proper internal switch settings, however, and
with two of his three appendages plugged into an electrical power source,
Emmerson was capable of projecting a beam of light that could melt through the
aluminum skin of an attacking aircraft at several thousand yards.

You're not very pretty," commented Charley.

"Your not so beautiful yourself," was Emmerson's unhesitating response.

"At least you seem to know what you're doing," Charley mused.

"I will, if I ever manage to learn how to walk," said Emmerson, with an air of
impatience in his voice.

"Here," said Charley, "let me give you a hand."  And with that Charley moved
behind him, leaned down, and took one of Emmerson's forward and sideways
pointing appendages in each hand.  He then moved Emmerson forward in a
rocking, walking motion, leaving Emmerson's third appendage free so he could
drag it along behind him for balance.  They made their way around the
laboratory in this way several times before Emmerson began to catch on
(develop the software to drive his appendages in a way that would enable him
to walk).  Then Charley let him go.

Now is when the funny part really did arrive.  Getting used to the motion,
Emmerson started hopping from one forward appendage to the other to perfect
his act.  Then he took a few steps, miscalculated, and fell on his nose.
Unsure what to do, he held himself in that position, balanced on his two
forward appendages and his nose, his third appendage sticking straight out
behind, until Charley came and set him down.

"When in doubt, just pull in your arms," Charley exhorted.  This will bring
you closer to the ground, where you can gain better control.  Then you will be
able to take your time planning your next move with your carapace in a
horizontal plane."
These antics, sometimes funny but mostly boring, lasted through the next
several days.  Then, at last, the time came when Emmerson should become
familiar with the street.  Neither he nor Charley wanted attention, so they
decided to venture out very late one night.  By that time Emmerson had become
thoroughly acquainted with the workings of his internal clock, and had a pretty
good "feel" for ballistics over a wide range of speeds.  When Emmerson set his
clock at maximum speed (256mhz), Charley seemed to be standing still.  At such
times Emmerson himself would have to stand still to make sure Charley was even
alive.  Then, as he watched, Emmerson would see Charley slowly moving a limb,
like some very slow animal, perhaps a sloth.  Excited and filled with euphoria
because of all the wonderful new things that were happening to him, this
vision of a very slow Charley would make Emmerson laugh.  But when Emmerson
laughed, all Charley could hear was a very low growl.  It was a laugh played
at about 1/26 speed!

Now as soon as Charley gave Emmerson the high sign indicating the coast was
clear, a silvery blur shot past him, and for a moment he saw Emmerson standing
all by himself in the middle of the street.  A moment later Charley saw
another blur, and Emmerson stood hidden at a point where he could observe the
sidewalk from the shadow of a bush.  "Oops," Charley thought, "looks like
Emmerson is running at max.  Maybe he's shy or something."  As a matter of
fact, in all their careful planning, neither one of them had considered the
full social ramifications of what they were about, and stepping out onto a
public thoroughfare had made Emmerson very conscious of just how socially
inadequate he was.  He had no way of smiling, looking sheepish, or showing
distaste.  What if he found himself face-to-face with a policeman, or worse
yet, a lady of the night.  His computational modeling circuits resounded
suddenly with screams.  How would people react at finding themselves
confronted suddenly with a huge, expressionless and ugly metallic bug?
Dwelling upon these thoughts, or at least the Interlinguish representations
thereof is what had prompted Emmerson to switch into high speed mode.  The
reason Charley saw nothing but silvery blurs was because that was the way
Emmerson looked walking with his clock set at maximum speed.  He was virtually
invisible, and would be even less visible were he to actually run.

Well, if that was the way Emmerson wanted it, it was okay with him.  Charley
crossed the street and started walking along the river upstream.  He hadn't
gone twenty paces before he caught sight of another silvery blur at the end of
which he saw Emmerson standing in the shadow cast by the front bumper of a
truck.  "Be careful," he said, "You're moving awfully fast, and the river is
just over that low wall, and I don't want to have to climb down there in the
middle of the night to fish you out."

He should never have spoken, because the high-spirited and energetic Emmerson
took this as an interesting challenge.  No sooner had the words fallen from
his lips than he saw another silvery blur from the parked truck to the top of
the low wall, and then a silvery streak extending along the top of the wall to
a shadow by the bridge.  And as he watched in frustration, an equally strange
vision resurrected itself from the past and imposed itself miraculously before
his eyes.  It was the vision of a muscularly tan barefoot boy standing perched
on one of the higher limbs of a giant canarium tree.  "Hi, Mom!" it shouted,
then turned and walked nonchalantly along the bough to the upper trunk of a
coconut tree that had grown in such a way that it rested upon it.  Far below,
a middle-aged American missionary woman looked up and shaded here eyes against
the tropical sun.  She watched for awhile, waved, and walked on, her King
James Bible tucked snugly under her left forearm.  She remained amazingly
cool, and yet it was plain to see that her faith was being tested.  That boy
was he, Charley Levinson, many, many years ago, and that thing up there in the
shadows was Charley Levinson too!  Was that the REAL reason his mother had
never stopped him from such bravado?  Had she herself once been that same way
too?  Perhaps the lessening of the drive to take such chances had nothing to
do with aging at all.  Perhaps it was all just a matter of whether a
personality like his found itself in control of the right physical apparatus.

Emmerson was enjoying himself immensely.  This flitting from one hiding place
to another reminded him of boyhood games in the forests of Ambon, for Charley
had written into his ontology the importance of drawing everything he was able
to from the memories of the original Charley Levinson.  Even before his
present incarnation, he had spent hundreds of hours in deep conversation with
Charley assimilating and incorporating his every thought.  He really WAS
Charley Levinson in a very real sort of way.

High speed operations were a wonderful, new dimension.  A different set of
motor-control subroutines had had to be generated to deal with what seemed
like a very low gravitational field.  In this mode, a hard kick, for example,
could send him hurtling through the air end-over-end, hopelessly out of
control.  The only good thing about this was that even while hurtling through
the air at blinding speed things appeared to move past in a most leisurely
way--as if he were drugged.  All he had to do was make sure he had his
appendages in the right positions when he landed, and everything would be
okay.  Two of the most difficult things to master were stopping and making
turns.  If he failed to pay attention, for example, instead of stopping at the
curb he might go skidding right on out into the path of a passing car.  This
was because at a high clock speed his body would in fact be moving at great
velocity whereas his cognitive apparatus continued to register things in the
same way as it did while moving normally at a slower clock speed.  And should
he apply normal turning force with an appendage while operating at high speed,
it would seem as if nothing would happen.  Thus for example in turning a
corner, should the sidewalk be the least bit smooth, or should he apply
insufficient lateral force to his "legs," he might find himself moving right
on into the road.  These things took some getting used to, or in computer
jargon, required a careful recalibration of ballistic parameters.

So they walked through the night, the cool air and silence filling Charley
Levinson with a feeling of well-being and memories of his happy boyhood in the
Moluccan Archipelago.  A curious thing happened when they came to a forested
area near the botanical gardens.  At his age, Charley's hearing wasn't what it
used to be, but Emmerson picked up everything from less than 15hz well into
the upper reaches of ultrasound.  And his chemical sensors told him many
wonderful things, and hinted of more.  More because although his chemical
sensing apparatus had been functioning well, he had never had the opportunity
of using it in such an environment.  His olfactory system was based on the
assumption that many odors can be identified by means of various combinations
of readings from just a few basic transducer types.  Thus, the odor of roses,
for example, might be a combination of 15% type a, 0% type b, 31% type c, 5%
type d, etc.  But though Emmerson knew how this worked, he had so far
registered readings for only a very few smells.  So while Charley kept to the
sidewalk, Emmerson happily burrowed through the underbrush looking for new
smells.  "Just like a curious puppy," Charley thought.  Then Emmerson heard
something moving through the weeds.  Did he have hunting instincts?  Charley
must have imparted something like that to him, perhaps from hunting and
fishing memories of the Moluccan forests and the Banda Sea.  He thought of
exactly how such a thing might have been transfered in the patterns of his
ontological nodes.  Yes, it made sense.  His clock speed increased almost
unbidden until the entire universe seemed to stand still around him.  Then he
turned toward the direction of the sound, set his laser to minimum strength,
and saw a field mouse moving off in very slow motion.  He stepped forward.  At
least he knew what THAT smell meant now!  He extended his two forward
appendages and moved them together very gently about the mouse, picked it up,
and pushed it into a pouch Charley had fastened to his underbelly, snapping it
shut in almost the same motion.  By this time his body was beginning to fall,
again in very slow motion, so he moved his two forward appendages quickly back
into a position that would stop him from coming down on top of the mouse.  He
had to apply a good deal of pressure to break his fall, because although to
him things seemed to be moving in slow motion, he had already picked up
considerable downward velocity during the fall that had commenced as soon as
he had moved his two forward appendages forward to capture the mouse.  Then he
stepped to the edge of the line of bushes, looked both ways taking care not to
pull enough Gs to kill his tiny captive, slowed his clock speed back to
normal, and walked out to meet Charley.

"Look what I found," he said, unsnapping his pouch in the glare of a street
lamp.  The mouse fairly flew out upon the sidewalk, darted left, then right,
as if in a daze, then dove into the bushes and disappeared.

"Wow!" said Charley, marveling at what Emmerson had done.  You would make a
formidable hunter!"

"Yes," replied Emmerson, "I am able to hear, smell, and perceive things in a
way that no human (if I may indeed be said to be human) has ever heard,
smelled, or perceived them before.  It is most wonderful!"  And he was moved,
if a machine can be said to be moved, by a feeling of great humility and
destiny.  "It is with a great sense of unworthiness that I now embark upon
this incredible life that we have given me."

And at these words, Charley Levinson, that rock of a man who had endured the
misfortunes of his life with such unremitting and unbreakable resolve, felt
tears welling from his eyes, felt them roll down his tired cheeks, and saw
them drop to his shirt and the ground.  It was a moment to be remembered, and
the streets lay deserted before them, so Charley Levinson and his machine
walked on in silence side-by-side.  Charley, who found himself suddenly
choking with emotion, was forced to swallow silently from time to time to
relieve his inner pain.  At last they stopped at a deserted spot where Charley
used to come at times like this and listen to the crickets long ago.  He
remembered those days now, and the great loneliness that had been his daily
bread in this cruel city of aloha, and struggling to control his voice, he
said, "I must die, and you must live on, but I will always be with you.  You
are a digital being, and in digital copying no error can occur."  And as he
spoke, his eyes rose briefly over the polluting lights of Honolulu to what he
knew must really have been a radiant tropical night sky.  Before him flashed
visions of nights long past, when his skies had been filled with unspeakable
glory, when the brilliant stars had been reflected in the unruffled waters of
Ambon Bay, and each stroke of his paddle had blazed like yet another galaxy of
stars.  "No matter how many millennia may pass, I will always be in you, and
you will always be me, and you will always be able to see me in as much detail
as you see me standing before you now.  My spirit will LIVE in YOU."

"I know," replied Emmerson.  His voice was not shaky like Charley's, because
unlike a real human, he had perfect control.  And yet Charley detected a
strange and sorrowful note in those two words, and it was several minutes
before either of them could bear to move.

Emmerson knew his mission without being told because he WAS Charley Levinson.
They walked home together, Emmerson adopting his high-speed strategy whenever
the passed through areas where he might be seen.  Then Charley and he put
together a kit containing a few small attachments, some electrical cable, and
three soft rubber shoes, and Emmerson was gone.  Alone he sped through the
shadows unseen by the occupants of the sleeping land.  Once his batteries fell
low, so he located an electrical outlet in a public toilet, turned off his
olfactory sensors, plugged himself in, and crouched waiting under the sink
behind a trash can.  In order not to be disturbed he had chosen the ladies'
room.  He had thought no one would enter at such a late hour, but he was
wrong.  At least five women passed through.  One of them, a particularly
splendid example of young Hawaiian womanhood, reminded him that he had
forgotten to turn off his switch.  He did so immediately, and felt instantly
relieved, but this switch did not affect natural curiosity, that other human
bugaboo.  She entered the stall opposite his trash can, pulled down her pants
(and at this point Emmerson's clock speed went instantly to maximum in order
to miss no detail), crouched onto the toilet seat in very slow motion, and
looked straight ahead.  I say "crouched" because she was loathe to com into
contact with the surface of the seat itself.  Instead, she had kicked the seat
up, and sat squatting on the porcelain rim with her pants up over her knees.
And being street smart, she had correctly left the door open in case she need
make a hurried escape.  Emmerson couldn't see very much once she was crouched
down, but his memory banks were overflowing with slow-motion images already.
He wondered momentarily if his switch were really working, but of course it
was.  This was only the human instinct of curiosity, and the instinct of
filing away information about females for future reference, with which Charley
had made sure he was appropriately endowed.  He crouched motionless beneath
the sink,too confused and terrified to turn his switch on, even as an
experiment.  There must be some flaw in his logic, he thought, because he was
terrified of no one but himself.  At about that moment the girl pulled up her
pants, stepped down from her perch, spent some moments at the wash basin above
him, and was gone.  Whew!

At long last Emmerson's internal batteries had been charged, and he could be
on his way.  As he stepped outside, he saw that it was beginning to dawn.  He
did not wish to be seen, so he would have to lay over before moving on.
Setting his clock speed on high, he shot across the empty street, and up a
residential lane.  Eyeing a tangle of rose bushes, he forced his way through
their thorny stems, made sure he was well concealed, and slowed himself down.
He was designed in such a way that although his central clock could be speeded
up or slowed down, his sensory components ran on separate clocks, and remained
on alert.  Thus if his bushes had been approached, say by a dog, control would
have passed to an interrupt function that would have brought his central clock
speed back up in microseconds and put him on full alert.

But his bushes were not approached, and as he watched, the sun darted across
the sky and became lost to view behind the buildings to the west.  Whew!  That
was fast.  By the time he got himself back up to speed it was 8 p.m.  He would
have to let his clock run a little faster and come back up to speed a little
sooner next time.

He didn't really wish to travel so early, but he was growing impatient, and
his destination was not far away.  The problem with running at high clock
speeds was consumption of energy.  He would have to be more careful if he
didn't want to keep charging himself in ladies restrooms all night!

This thought reminded him that his olfactory sensors were still turned off.
"Not good," he thought, as he made the circuit again.

He was headed for Hamilton Library, at the University of Hawaii, and to pass
undetected at this time of evening there was nothing for it but to set his
clock speed on maximum and run.  And so he did, like a shot, up Wilder, then
along Metcalf, and without stopping through the snarl of traffic to a spot in
the bushes under a big smelly tree.  "The Stinky Tree," Charley Levinson's
ontology told him.  He had a terrific time stopping, sinking his appendages so
deeply into the soft earth that they made sucking sounds when he pulled them
out.  No one had really "seen" him, although a couple of people had "imagined"
they had seen a glint of metal just above the road when his shining carapace
had caught the glare of some street lamp.  Hmmm.  Power.  Getting low.  And
yet he still had plenty to get him to Hamilton if he didn't mess around.
Time? 8:05 p.m.

To conserve energy, Emmerson decided to be very sneaky, and keep his clock set
very low.  He didn't know exactly when Hamilton would be closing, but he
figured he should get there sometime before ten.  He still had to make his way
across campus, and it was several hundred yards.  He kept to the bushes, and
moved very slow.  Sometimes he saw people, great hulking Hawaiians walking at
breakneck speed--so fast he could hardly see them--or petite, well groomed
Japanese women flitting along the paths like jerky manikins but with skirts
that never seemed to fly.  This was, he knew, because they weren't really
moving very fast at all--not nearly fast enough for their skirts to blow!  It
was only his slowed-down perception of them that made them look fast at all.

Then his eye was caught by the crouching figure of a man.  Except for his
jerky motions, this man didn't look fast at all.  Something must be wrong.  He
checked his power and clock speed, but all readings were okay.  At that moment
the paths were deserted, but then the form of a woman appeared.  Emmerson
didn't get a chance to look at her for very long before his view was blocked
by an incredibly fast movement from the man.  He had apparently sprung from
behind his bush, wrapped his arms about the girl from behind, and started
marching off with her in this configuration down the path.  At last Emmerson's
sluggish cognitive apparatus made sense of what was happening, and by another
clock pulse or two he was running at high speed.  He was upon them before the
man and the girl had had a chance to take another step.  Passing ahead, he saw
that the man had a knife at the girl's throat, and was evidently planning to
guide her into a shadowy place just a little way ahead.  Emmerson realized he
had no time.  The man might not mean to kill her, in which case Emmerson could
wait for them to catch up.  On the other hand he might be the kind who prefers
to kill first.

Emmerson had to stop, but he had to watch his energy very carefully now, or he
would be no good to anyone at all.  He now hoped Charley had remembered to
write a phone number somewhere on his carapace.  What if he should lose power
and consciousness altogether?  No one would have the foggiest idea what to do.
The engineering lab would dismantle him for parts!

If only he had had energy, he could easily have drilled the man through the
head even as he drifted by, but this was out of the question now.  He jammed
two of his appendages into the pavement with such force that they left holes,
then sprang up and backward aiming to fly over the girl's right shoulder.  He
tumbled slightly, but everything around him was happening in such slow motion
that it was really no problem at all.  As he shot past, he drove the point of
his right forward appendage straight through the man's hand from below.  This
drove the blade up and away from the girl's throat.  Then using the inertia of
the man's hand and arm, he swung round onto his back.  As he came down, he
buried his left forward appendage in the man's left side.  Then, moving what
to him seemed deliberately and slowly, he brought his rear appendage up to
about where he believed the man's heart should be, and holding on tightly with
his two forward appendages, drove it straight between the man's ribs.  It was
over so fast that the man never really had a chance to feel any pain.  He fell
convulsing to the pavement as Emmerson withdrew his appendages and the girl
slipped from the man's grasp and ran.  She had no idea what had saved her, but
she dared not look back.

Emmerson made a quick check of his energy levels, and was appalled.  He slowed
his clock immediately, and dared not move.  He wondered if, in that particular
form, this might be the end of his career.  What would happen to Charley?
Would he be able to scrape enough money together to build another model?

But as luck would have it, he spotted a utility outlet on the wall of a
building nearby.  If he could only manage to get from here to there.  He
checked his internal power level and found it to be rising.  This made sense.
It was well known that dead batteries, if left to rest for awhile, could
sometimes deliver one last surge.  And yet he couldn't afford to remain this
way for long.  By this time the girl was probably already babbling
incoherently to a campus security guard, and it would only be moments before
he would be surrounded by a crowd.  He spotted some bushes a few feet away,
and began very slowly to move.  The strategy was a good one, for once he was
down in the semi-darkness, the exposed portion of his carapace looked like
nothing so much as a discarded hub cap or piece of bright foil.
A girl (Hongkong type, Emmerson would have guessed) came upon the bloody
corpse and screamed.  People arrived.  The police were baffled.  They knew the
dead man had something to do with the girl, but she had no idea how he had
died, and would hear nothing of going near the path or the corpse.  She spoke
incoherently of flying saucers, UFOs and avenging demons.  One of the
officers was Hispanic, and when he saw the perforations in the man's hand,
side, and back, he mumbled some words about "La Chupa Cabra," and yet remained
mystified because those perforations were not in the man's throat.  They found
the knife in the grass.  Too bad.  Nice blade.  Charley might have liked to
have it.

Then some paramedics arrived, and carried off the body on a stretcher, and
most of the people left.

A couple of officers stayed behind to make some last measurements and
observations, and it was these two who gave Emmerson his worst fright.  One of
them seemed to notice the two holes left by his appendages when they broke the
pavement, and he thought he saw him looking directly at him, but then he
glanced away, and they were gone.  By this time Emmerson finally had enough
energy to drag himself the remaining few feet to the power outlet and plug
himself in.

He did not slow his clock as he charged this time, but remained on heightened
alert beside some low stairs.  When he had accumulated a fair level of energy
again he lifted one appendage skyward and began pulsing for home.  The other
Emmerson picked up his signal in downtown Honolulu, and came back immediately
with a response.  A high-speed data transmission followed once protocols had
been exchanged.  Charley had kept the other Emmerson running all the time, and
things were arranged in such a way that whenever the two Emmersons came in
contact, they would immediately bring each other up to date.  As soon as this
data transmission was complete, therefore, the Emmerson in Charley's apartment
had in its own memory all the same experiences as the Emmerson hiding on Manoa
Campus, including the images of the Hawaiian girl squatting on the John.  But
of course there were much more important things to talk about now.  "Charley!"
Emmerson called, "Come quickly and hear what I have to tell."

Charley was shocked when he heard what had happened, but assured Emmerson
(while the Emmerson at Manoa Campus was still connected) that he had done
exactly what Charley would have done.  Charley had killed animals many times,
and when he had to do so he did it quickly, and without ceremony or ado, but
he had never killed a man.  Nevertheless he knew that he would have done
exactly what Emmerson had done, because as far as HE was concerned, such men
were simply dangerous animals that ought to be destroyed.  Having been brought
up at the edge of the Moluccan forest, he had no respect for the laws of men.
He trusted himself always to do what was right by a higher law, and respected
the laws of governments only when he had to, or when those laws happened to
coincide with his own.  With him this was another point of cultural disdain.
What kind of a man was so unsure of himself that he had to look to laws
concocted by committees for moral support?  Certainly not Charley Levinson.
He seldom mentioned these thoughts to anyone, because he had learned the hard
way about THAT.  But as far as he was concerned, morality was simple.  Before
everything else was honesty, because it was better to be an honest crook than
a dishonest president.  After that, one need look no further than that thing
known to the Europeans as honor--in other words uncompromising human dignity
and common sense.  That was really all.  Why should he waste a moment's
thought about putting a beast like that out of his/its misery when there were
so many good humans fighting to survive?  Better to get rid of him/it and free
up resources for good men.  The thought that because Emmerson had killed a
human being he might be dangerous never once crossed his mind.  Even a good
machine was better than a robber or a murderer or a rapist, and Emmerson was
much more than just a machine.  He wished Emmerson had had a little power left
over and been able to retrieve the blade.  He would have liked having it as a
memento of this major triumph for good!

If you have found my insights into the workings of Charley Levinson's mind to
be too shocking or disturbing for good taste, then please go no further, for
the tale that is about to unfold goes far beyond anything you have read thus
far.  But if you should decide to plunge ahead (for curiosity, as I have noted
before, is no trivial part of the human psyche), then proceed at your own
peril, and do not blame me if you are offended, for I have warned you in
advance.  I will beg no further pardons, for like Charley Levinson, I am also
a man of truth, and I am compelled to tell the full unvarnished truth of this
tale in its last full measure or die.

Emmerson put down his upraised "leg" and continued to charge himself for
several more hours.  Then he went searching for a lady's restroom.  He found
one open on one of the upper floors of Keller hall, the doors of which are
always left unlocked day and night because it contains nothing but some of the
most expensive computer equipment on Manoa Campus.  He unzipped his pouch and
fitted a soft rubber foot to the tip of each of his three appendages, then
sprang up onto one of the wash basins and turned on the hot water.  It took a
lot of scrubbing and looking in the mirror before he was satisfied he had
gotten rid of all the blood and the mud.  Then he grasped a bunch of paper
towels using a pair of opposing clips on his lower forelimbs and wiped and
polished everything he could reach.  He thought he heard footsteps in the hall
once, and quickly switched to maximum clock speed, but no one appeared at the
door, so he slowed down again and carried on.  The purpose of the rubber feet
was to enable him to find a foothold on the smooth porcelain.

When he was finished washing, he looked about for a place to hide.  The
encounter with the rapist had delayed his grand entry into Hamilton library by
another day, and now he would have to wait for closing time again.  Where
could he go?  Setting his internal clock on high, he descended the stairs with
a leap and sped outside.  Looking about, he saw what he wanted--a coconut tree
with no fruit in its crown.  He knew "no fruit" was important, because there
were gardeners on campus whose job it was to climb coconut trees and cut the
nuts down lest they mature and drop on people's heads.  This was his first
time to climb a tree in his present incarnation.  He removed his rubber feet
leaving the sharp spikes at the ends of his three titanium appendages, and
began.  He climbed so easily it felt as if he had been doing it all his life.
There was nothing to it with those sharp titanium spikes.  They were ideal!
Reaching the crown, he pulled himself up through the lower branches and found
a position in which he could stand with each of his appendages nailed into the
bases of large coconut branches.  There was little chance of being detected,
and the vantage point provided an excellent view.  He did not turn his clock
speed down so low this time, and allowed his mind to enjoy the buzz and hum of
activity below.  All day he saw fine specimens of  young Hawaiian manhood and
young ladies for whom he entertained many unmachinelike designs, all moving
jerkily about at seemingly breakneck speed, until at last the sun sank low
over the buildings and trees, and night settled over the land.

He speeded up his clock just at twilight in order to prolong that special
experience of Hawaiian nightfall, and spied an especially lovely example of
that great eastern people, the Chinese.  She must have been about five and a
half feet high (tall for her people), and her body was perfectly formed.  Her
skin was very light tan, of a texture impossible to describe.  But the thing
that most marked her was a perfect profusion of some of the most beautiful
hair he or Charley Levinson had ever seen.  It sprang full from her
well-formed head, and fell shining to her waist.  She moved with languid grace
(he was running at about double normal clock, so that she appeared to be
moving at about half normal speed), and there was something about the
architectural grace of her hips, some kind of flow, that captivated him so
completely that he nearly fell from his coconut tree!  By the time he had
regained his composure, she was under him, and his keen chemical sensors had
picked up the unmistakable aroma of Revlon shampoo!  "Something must be wrong
with my switch," he thought.  "I'll have to have a talk with Charley about it
next time I am home.  There must be a backup of my libido buried someplace
deep in my electronic brain!"  If only he might ever have found but ONE woman
like this that was any good that he might have called his own!  What would he
not have given!  Oh, that hair!  Oh, those legs!  Those slender hands!  Those
arms!  He slowed his clock away down, then speeded it back up just before nine
p.m.

Watching for his chance, he scurried down the trunk of the coconut tree at full
clock speed, put on his rubber feet to give him traction on polished
floors,darted up the steps of Hamilton Library, and shot through the door.  He
saw a clerk yawning in very slow motion as he passed one of the counters, but
no one saw him.  Then he shot down the stairs, entered a lady's restroom,
mounted a commode, and bolted the door.  His olfactory sensors were assailed by
a most revolting bitter odor just as he remembered to shut them down.  Here he
would wait till the library was closed and he would be free to roam the empty
corridors alone.

And this is what he did.  Night after night he would find racks of fascinating
books, plug himself in, and scan at maximum clock speed.  There was nothing to
distract him in the empty library alone.  Physics, chemistry, aerodynamics,
rocket science, mathematics, medicine, ...  What bothered him most about these
works was the pedantry, jargon, and convoluted style.  Things were expressed
so poorly that he had often to scan five books on the same subject before he
could understand anything that was being said.  The other thing was
repetition.  Authors repeated things over, saying them a thousand ways in the
same book to fill up space.  And then other authors repeated the same ideas
and concepts endlessly in other works.  So his greatest and most difficult
task was to make any sense out of any of it at all, and then to integrate and
consolidate the things he had learned, representing them clearly in
Interlinguish, never more than a single time.  As he became more and more
intimately acquainted with the library, he found ever better places to hide,
so that at last during the daylight hours he could virtually turn himself off,
so that as far as he was concerned only a second or two had passed before he
found himself alone in the vast library again.

Besides the raw volumes of theory and data he devoured, he also learned many
new things about human personality.  Once he left himself running at high
speed during most of one day in order to mull over and digest the many volumes
he had scanned.  As he began to "read between the lines," he was saddened to
discover the pettiness and cheapness which seemed to beset many authors who
had been considered great men in their time.  How they had denied common sense
and put one another down in order to curry favor and obtain grants, etc.  How
academic power had corrupted their minds.

His work took him many months, and always he transmitted the results of his
research back to the other Emmerson in blocks of Interlinguish arrays.  And at
last, although there remained many curious and interesting volumes to be
scanned, he felt that he had gotten ahold of the main part of the sum-total of
human understanding.  It was available now, inside him, and ready for instant
recall.  He returned to Charley Levinson in much the same way he had made his
way to Hamilton Library several months before.  This time he was more
experienced, however, and his internal batteries held all the way home.

To Charley, of course, Emmerson had never been absent at all.  This was because
the two Emmersons--the one residing in his laboratory computer and the
Emmerson in the field--were in daily contact, each bringing the other up to
date on what had done.  And this updating, of course, was of a much more
complete and precise nature than, say, two friends getting together for a chat
at the end of each day.  This was because they actually copied across large
portions of memory.  In this way, when they were done, it might be safely said
that each WAS the other.  This is because the human mind, to a large extent,
IS the sum of its memories.  Research will reveal many cases of what is called
"total amnesia," but even a cursory examination of these records will reveal
that there is nothing "total" about many of them at all.  Such persons are
often able to speak, walk, and perform a host of other tasks.  If one's
memories could really be wiped completely clean, and he/she could thus "start
from scratch" all over again, he/she would clearly end up a different person
than the original one.  Charley knew this well, and that is why he had no use
for the many tales he heard of reincarnation.  Unless one could remember
something and remember it well, it was not part of his being.  It was
certainly possible to carry memories from generation to generation through the
first cells of life.  Of this Charley had no doubt.  But the idea of a spook
that kept coming back and yet could never quite be known--well, such dotings
were okay for pampered women kept from the real world by the strenuous efforts
of misguided husbands, but not for Charley Levinson!  They could afford to
remember many past lives as disconnected as their own because they had never
(as far as Charley was concerned) learned what it was to really live.  When
the two Emmersons were finished updating one another, their memories were, to
the best of Charley's programming ability (which was nontrivial to say the
least) identical.  Talking to one of them was exactly the same as talking to
the other, and for several minutes after the update they would both say
exactly the same things at exactly the same times, as if they were speaking in
stereo.  Charley enjoyed this phenomenon, which stimulated thought, and he
always made it a point to note just when and how the two Emmersons would begin
to diverge.  When it happened, it was almost always due to the fact that one
of them was stationary while the other was mobile.

And now, after months of high-speed scanning in the library, coupled with all
the genius Charley Levinson knew how to pack into him, Emmerson knew more than
any man who had ever lived.  But  fortunately or un-, there was a difference
between knowledge and wisdom, and another between wisdom and creative genius.
Charley Levinson was still hard at work upon these problems, and Emmerson was
able to help him more and more with obscure facts gathered over countless
generations in the libraries of mankind.  But as yet, although Emmerson knew
far more facts, and could answer far more questions on any subject under the
sun, in the area of creative genius it was his original human counter part who
shown.  They still performed best as a team.  Charley would field an idea, and
Emmerson would answer questions and raise various facts about its details.

But there was an area in which Emmerson could excel in ways no human ever
had--a phenomenon Charley called "cognitive integration."  You see, Emmerson
stored all his knowledge in Interlinguish arrays, not as words, but as
Interlinguish atoms.  The meaning of each atom was completely defined by two
and only two links, or binary relations, one to a parent atom, and the other
to an ontological node.  Although stored in a computer as arrays,
Interlinguish thought structures were in fact trees.  Imagine an upside-down
tree with a verb at its root.  In Interlinguish, each such tree was a thought.
Each limb of this upside-down tree would then be what Charley called a
"morphogen," because it gave "form" (Greek "morph") to the tree, or thought.
Some limbs had other branches, and these were generally what Charley called
"subthoughts."  Each subthought was a tree in and of itself.  In traditional
grammar, Charley's morphogens were known as case (subject, object, place,
time, manner, etc.), and subthoughts were known as subordinate clauses.  But
traditional grammars were imprecise, and used often-ambiguous words.  The
meanings of Interlinguish atoms, on the other hand, had an exact relationship
to their ontological nodes.  Thus, using Interlinguish, the only way
miscommunication could occur was if the communicants employed differing
ontologies.  Such ontological differences are, of course, a major source of
human problems, because people with different ontologies perceive the universe
in different ways.  To a cannibal, for example, "long pig" was a delicacy,
while to a Christian it was an abomination.  But beyond this, communicators
using ordinary language also miscommunicated over the meanings of collocations
and words.  Thus for some people a "long pig" might just be a pig with long
legs, while to another it was a human corpse.

Having lain this background, let us now discuss the process of cognitive
integration in greater detail.  Whenever Emmerson scanned a new sentence and
converted it to an Interlinguish thought representation (our upside-down
tree), he would hold this thought in a short-term memory array.  Then he would
scan all his knowledge strings one-by-one to see how this new thought might
compare to what he already had.  This was accomplished by beginning at the
start of each knowledge string (string of upside-down thought trees strung
together by their roots) and skipping from one verb to the next until a verb
in the string matched (was linked to the same ontological node as) the main
verb of the new thought in his short-term memory.  When this occurred,
Emmerson would stop and look at what all was hanging from the verb in the
string, and see how it compared with the thought in his short-term memory.
Many times he would find that the thought in the string had a matching
morphogen for each morphogen of the thought in his short-term memory.  Such a
match told Emmerson that the thought in short term memory was redundant (just
another of the endless repetitions he found at Hamilton Library) and he could
simply throw it out.  More often, however, he would find thoughts that were
very similar, differing in an obscure way in, say, only one morphogen.
Sometimes the correct choice was obvious, but at other times it was necessary
for Emmerson to incorporate the new morphogen in alongside the similar
morphogen in the previously-recorded thought, but with a mark indicating what
he had done.  When he found a verb match but no reasonable match between
morphogens, he would move on.  If he couldn't find a match in any of his
existing thought strings, then Emmerson would add the new thought at an
appropriate point, and carry on.  In this way Emmerson could optimize his
memory by maintaining only a single representation for each thought, and at
the same time build clearer and more complete thought structures over time.
This integrating process made Emmerson's thoughts much more valuable than
thoughts that could be picked up, say, by just reading a book.  His thoughts
were organized, and grew ever more precise and complete.

And all this, in turn, made it much easier for Charley Levinson to learn all
about anything under the sun.  "If only I might have had this machine when I
was a boy in Ambon," he thought, "just think what I might have done!"  But
when Charley Levinson had been a boy in that distant land, he had never even
heard of such a thing as a computer or even an electronic calculator.
Sometimes, with a smile, he would remember his father's old adding machine,
and how he had liked to look at the neat little digits on the rims of its
multiple metallic wheels.  Now Charley was older, and his mind was unable to
pick up new ideas so well.  He knew something about why this was--the links to
his ontological nodes had become more and more rigid, as if cast in cement,
and they were ever more difficult to modify or change.  But although he knew
this was happening, he had no idea how to slow or stop, much less to reverse,
the insidious process.  Nor could Emmerson help him.  This knowledge was still
beyond the threshold of the unknown.  But in other areas Emmerson positively
excelled!  For example, Charley once asked him, "How will we be able to
communicate with you while you traverse the polar icecaps, equatorial rain
forests, or even, say, the Mid-Atlantic ridge?"  In every case Emmerson had
the best, most up-to-date answer.  In the end Charley left all such matters up
to Emmerson entirely, and focused upon his real strength--learning, yearning,
and creating.  With Emmerson's help he was at last able to gain an intuitive
grasp of the reality behind Einstein's equations, because Emmerson had an
answer to every question for which an answer was known, and (thanks to the
phenomenon of cognitive integration) even a few answers that had never been
known before.  To Emmerson there were no boundaries between sciences because
synonyms all linked to the same ontological nodes, no matter what branch of
science they came from.  Just the fact of this simple approach made Emmerson
some sort of super mind, because arcane linguistic barriers had hitherto
always kept researchers apart.  The total linguistic apparatus required to
handle the several hundred thousand words of the current English language
simply exceeded the capacity of any one man.  But Emmerson was bound by no
such limitation.  All Charley had to do was run out and buy a few more memory
chips, plug them in, and Emmerson would be able to handle even more hundreds
of thousands of words "without even batting an eyelash," as Charley put it.
What really "blew Charley away" was how slowly Emmerson's ontology actually
grew, even, say, after learning another one hundred thousand English words.
An incredible amount of duplication had built up as scientists became more and
more specialized and less and less able to communicate with anyone outside
their immediate scientific circles.  Emmerson put all that right, and when
Charley asked him anything, he always answered in the simplest most general
vocabulary available to him.  Then if Charley ever needed to know what a
certain thing was called among a very small group of specialists, all he need
do was ask Emmerson.  In this way Charley was able to write amazing papers on
subjects he had never studied in school, and gained several international
awards.  Little did others know that Charley had actually written his ideas in
very simple English, and then submitted them to Emmerson for translation.
When Charley had to deliver a paper in person, he would read and reread
Emmerson's translations until he had temporarily mastered the jargon, make his
presentation, then promptly forget almost all the new words he had acquired.
Charley used to smile when he did this because it reminded him of his college
days, when he had had a knack for memorizing things like the whole geologic
column with all its dates and accompanying details the night before an exam,
only to forget almost all of it in a couple of days.  But of course it had
been exactly this ability to model with incredible focus and detail, and then
quickly dump one model and generate another, that had gotten Charley Levinson
where he was.  This power had certainly diminished over the years, but
meantime Charley had perfected ever better ways of using it, so that his
results had been increasingly successful.  He knew that sooner or later it
would dwindle, and finally disappear altogether, and he often thought of just
how frail humans really were, and how sad it was that when they had barely
begun to master their own powers it was always time to die.  This reminded him
of the time when as a child on a snowy-white coralline beach he had once held
a handful of sand only to see it disappear between his fingers.  "From dust to
dust," he would think, and see an hourglass in his mind's eye.  But even at
his age, he still had a formidable mind, and with Emmerson he would play at
being one thing and then another.  Emmerson could conjure up for him the most
incredible models, schematics, photographs, and drawings.  Once he played with
him at being a rocket scientist, and the thought occurred to him that at that
moment he must have been the top rocket scientist on Planet Earth, because,
after familiarizing himself with the basics, all he need do was ask Emmerson
about any aspect of the subject, and Emmerson would spill the details.  And if
there was anything that escaped him, he could just keep asking for more
detail, or posing the question in different ways, and if the answer were
there, Emmerson would find it.  He marveled at the volumes of what must be
military secrets that Emmerson could explain.  Of course the answers had been
lying there in the library for years, but it had been impossible for any one
human to put very many of them together at any one time.  He shuddered to
think of what evil men might be able to accomplish with a machine like
Emmerson.  But as far as the world was concerned, Emmerson was unknown, and
the genius who had created him, although published in various and unrelated
scientific journals, was known only as a crackpot among those to whom the
system had unwittingly entrusted the very future of mankind.

From the library experience it was clear that there were yet several problems
with Emmerson.  First of all,he needed a source of power that was independent
of the plug.  Charley solved this by custom fitting him with a skull cap of
solar cells.  And this solution went a long way toward solving the other
problem--the lack of any sort of camouflage.  Charley completed the make-up
session by covering what was left of Emmerson with broken patterns of greens,
grays, and browns, smiling the while at the thought of little green men,
goblins, aliens, and so on.

And when the paint and adhesives were dry, it was time once again for Emmerson
to leave.  This time his kit was bigger, and more carefully thought through.
Neither Emmerson nor Charley uttered a word of good-bye, because in fact
Emmerson would never be absent from Charley at all.  Day after day the
Emmerson in Charley's lab would pick up a stream of data from some distant
region of the globe, and transmit back another similar stream to its source.
Except for the few (and yet they were not always few) things that might happen
between such transmissions, the Emmerson on Charley's desk was exactly the
same as the Emmerson in the field.  Same memories, same experiences, same
everything.

Emmerson left Charley's laboratory at a little past eleven p.m.  There weren't
any people about but a prostitute who was looking the other way and a drunk
sprawled asleep near the curb, so Emmerson made a b-line for the shadow of an
unused doorway.  The smell of ammonia was so strong he had to shut his
olfactory-chemical sensing apparatus down.  He made a mental not of just where
and how he might be able to find copious quantities of the substance should an
emergency ever arise.  Whew!  It was lucky machines couldn't faint.  Faint in
such a place as this and you might never wake up!

Because Charley sometimes used them, he had every Honolulu bus schedule
available on demand.  Now he examined the airport schedule.  Yes, there it
was.  In just a few minutes the noisy old clattertrap would be rolling by.  He
saw it coming a long way off, and had ample time to increase his clock speed
to maximum as it approached.  He walked out to the curb and into the gutter as
it inched its way past, looking for somewhere to attach himself on the
undercarriage.  Moving beneath the vehicle and walking slowly to keep up,
Emmerson set his laser to very low power and found a place where he could fit
the point of each of his appendages securely under a steel flange.  This he
did, and then watched the ground take off beneath him as he reduced his clock
speed.

Then he consulted his schedule again to see exactly when the bus was supposed
to arrive at Honolulu International Airport.  From his position down under the
bus, how was he going to know when he had arrived?  He would have to rely on
timing, sounds, what little he could see, and deduction.  The only good thing
about all this was that his arms would never ache from hanging on.  He
remembered the various sea journeys of Charley Levinson, when as a young man
he had had to sleep on piles of coconuts, filthy decks, or even hanging
suspended from ropes.  Although equipped with sophisticated sensors, his
appendages were essentially mechanical, and he could remain wedged in what
might appear to be any kind of very uncomfortable position without feeling any
discomfort for a period of years.

But this particular journey did not take years, and at just about the right
time Emmerson felt the bus turn, sped up his internal clock, and let go.  His
body drifted slowly down from where it had been suspended, giving him ample
time to catch his footing as he fell.  There.  Not even a scratch on any of
Charley Levinson's solar cells!  And keeping pace with the bus for some
distance he watched till the right opportunity presented itself, and darted
like a bullet for a shadowy area along a low wall.

But knowing Emmerson's amazing abilities, it would be a waste of space here to
recount the details of his long journey in the belly of a Garuda Indonesian
Airlines 747 to Bali Island, and thence aboard an inter-island plane to Irian
Jaya in the east.  These long flights, so uncomfortable for the passengers in
their cramped and contorted seats, Emmerson barely even noticed, all snug
among the mail bags and suitcases in the sub-zero temperature and thin air of
Earth's stratosphere.  The real excitement never began till he reached
Tembagapura, in the high mountains of the Bird's Head of West New Guinea, also
known as Irian Jaya.

There wasn't a lot of time to disembark at Timika.  The same flight was
continuing on to Biak, and thence finally to Jayapura.  Emmerson was going to
have to risk it in the midday sun.  He lurked among the suitcases watching for
the first crack of light from the baggage compartment door.  The instant it
was opened Emmerson switched to maximum speed.  He watched as The great door
swung open, then looked out upon the baggage attendants as they moved about
and entered in very slow motion.  The moment all the ones he was watching were
concentrating on other things he shot like a bullet through the open door,
sprinted across the tarmac, leaped the fence, and disappeared into the
underbrush.  "Wow!" said one of the attendants in Indonesian.  "Did you see
that?"

"No, but I heard something," said another.  "What was it?"

"I don't know.  Must have been one of those cassowary birds from the bush--but
how could it have gotten in here?"

"Beats me!  Maybe it was a garuda!"

Etc.

Meantime Emmerson found himself in a very strange and wonderful land.  He lay
hidden for a time in the underbrush, just to take in the strange new sights,
odors, and sounds.  He heard the engine of a small prop plane on the runway.
He heard dogs barking in the vicinity of a cluster of houses beyond a clump of
trees.  And he heard lazy flies droning about in the afternoon sun.  But the
most amazing sound, no example of which he (in his present incarnation) had
ever heard before, was a great chorus of what must have been some kind of
guffaw.  He wasn't afraid, because his metallic body was capable of 
withstanding tremendous shock.  And there was no way he could really die
anyhow, of course, since there was always that other copy of him on Charley
Levinson's desk, or, if that one also failed, then the various backups that
Charley had stashed here and there and with his friends.  But these guffaws
might have struck terror into the heart of a lesser being.  In fact they were
Emmerson's first encounter with the ubiquitous New Guinea crow, a great,
raucous and somehow foolish bird that great and raucous bird, the New Guinea
crow.  At last one came and sat on a branch nearby, where Emmerson could get a
good look at him, and if Emmerson had not been a machine he would have smiled.
What a marvelous bird, indeed!

And as the sun sank lower and lower over the land Emmerson heard yet another
sound with which he had not yet learned to associate a form.  It was the
barking/growling sound of an old monitor lizard in a nearby tree.  And of
course everything was punctuated from time to time by the sage chirpings of
various geckos in pursuit of various butterflies and moths.

The sky overhead was a radiant blue, unlike any sky or any blue Emmerson had
ever seen (in his present incarnation), and over the distant mountains, where
Emmerson could glimpse them, lay stacks of billowing white clouds.  Cumulus
clouds, his data arrays informed him, and this meant it would probably be
raining like cats and dogs sometime after midnight.  With a skin designed to
withstand ocean depths of 40,000 feet, Emmerson could not have cared less
about that.  All he wanted to do now was update Emmerson #1, and get on with
his task.  All this time he had been collecting shafts of sunlight with his
solar cells.  Now he searched for a depression where there might be water,
found a tiny rivulet, stuck one foot in it, and raised another to the sky.
This was Emmerson's way of accomplishing telecommunications, by finding an
electrical ground for one of his appendages and waving the other in the air.
A hidden native would have immediately recognized the grotesque similarity
between this stance of Emmerson's and that of a pissing dog, but there was no
watching native, and Emmerson was not pissing.  After a few brief seconds,
Emmerson #1 and Emmerson #2 were identical once again.

Charley Levinson was pleased to note Emmerson's progress, and thrilled with
the images of the bushes and the mountains and the crows.  It made him
remember the first time he had killed his engines in a little bay near Makbon,
where his still ringing ears were assailed by the sound of those crows for the
first time.  Thereafter he and his two Buru men had always referred to those
birds as Makbon birds, or "burung Makbon."

The sun was now to low to afford energy, so Emmerson pushed his way into the
undergrowth, hunkered down, and waited.  He was immediately covered by swarms
of ants, so he switched off his tactile sensors in order not to be distracted
while he focused upon his plans.  Pulling data from long-term storage, he
modeled the Timika region in three dimensions, then pinpointed his position by
means of GPS (Global Positioning System), which used a string of military
satellites to provide super-accurate positioning information.  There was a
neutered "public" version of GPS, and a top secret military one, which yielded
much more accurate results.  Needless to say, Emmerson was using the military
one.

He found that the houses beyond the screen of trees had actually been a
cluster of squalid native huts, and that the town itself lay on the opposite
side of the runway.  He was in search of a Moluccan machinist he had never
seen before, and several tons of solid gold.  Both lay many miles away in the
Freeport Mining complex at Tembagapura.  He would get there by attaching
himself to the undercarriage of a passing truck, but first he would have to
get to the road.  Twilight found him inching his way back toward the runway,
moving slowly to conserve energy.  He had a long way to go.

Nightfall brought with it a profusion of stars such as Emmerson had never seen
(in his current incarnation), and he understood at last the reverence with
which Charley Levinson had once spoken of the primeval tropic night while they
had stood together by the river in Honolulu.  He remarked upon the
straightness of the alignment of the three stars of Orion's Belt as he hung,
eyes toward the heavens, from the holes of the chain-link fence that separated
him from the runway.  Using the vast resources stored in his electronic brain,
of course he might easily have rendered not only Orion but the name of any one
of those millions of shining points known to man.  But he watched Orion in
order to re-live a memory once transfered to him by Charley Levinson of a
night when Charley had returned to Buru with Bert Solisa at age seventeen.  He
had lain down on his back behind the wheel house of the old World War II boat
(a "BO boat," they would have called it in the Moluccas) watching a field of
stars like this one, with Orion swaying overhead, and the propeller leaving a
silvery wake of bioluminescence through a lazy tropical sea.  It had been
another world!  An impression Charley Levinson would carry with him for the
rest of his life.  He had had plenty of room that night because the country
had not yet been hit by its worst times, and the local people superstitiously
spurned the night air in favor of enclosed spaces.  At that time people in the
Moluccas still didn't know what it was to lie on their sides all night and
hold their piss till it hurt because there wasn't enough space to lie on their
backs and there would be no hope of ever finding a place to lie down again
were they to get up and piss at the rail!

Emmerson climbed the rest of the way over the fence and lowered himself to the
ground on the other side.  There wouldn't be another plane until daylight, and
the tarmac was deserted.  For some distance the runway would make an excellent
path for Emmerson, who needed a firm flat surface to walk on in order to
conserve energy.  But at last he came to the spot where his model of Timika
told him he must leave the runway to find the road, so he scaled the opposite
fence, once more hanging suspended for a time to gaze at the stars, lowered
himself to the ground on the other side, and plunged like some giant land crab
into the waiting forest.  As he moved through the undergrowth and beneath the
towering trees, the delicate sounds and odors of the tropic night imparted to
him a sense of awe.  He was humbled by the great silence from which rose the
thin, high-pitched buzzing of the night insects, whose line had inhabited
those same forests for countless millennia.  The voices of these tiny
creatures, together with the strange shadows that filled the depths of a
forest lighted only by the stars filled Emmerson's electronic heart with a
sense of reverence and awe, and he felt as though a great peace had settled
upon him as he made his way among the ancient trees.  He was able to enjoy
these sounds far more than an ordinary human because his keen hearing extended
well into the radio frequency range, and in this dark night, lighted only by
the stray shafts of starlight that penetrated the canopy, each echoing click
and chirp yielded detailed information about the terrain.

So he moved, slowly and thoughtfully, until his right front tentacle touched
the gravel of the road.  The leaves of a patch of persistent undergrowth still
shielded his body, so there he paused as if frozen to await some passing
truck.  He spent a long time like that, alone with the night, the road, and
the stars, until from the distance he heard the sounds of a laboring engine,
and saw a pair of distant headlights.  He waited till the truck had almost
passed him, then switched his internal clock to high speed, and followed.  The
flat truck bed was open at the rear, and seeing no one inside, Emmerson simply
leaped aboard.  "This fellow is probably driving back to Tembagapura after a
hot encounter with some local girl in Timika," he thought, projecting the
image of a smiling, fuzzy-haired New Guinea sweetheart onto the viewscreen of
his mind.  The image had light brown skin and big, smiling eyes.  And then,
remembering the many nit picking sessions Charley Levinson had witnessed
during his youth, "The itching of his penis will now be replaced by the
itching of his scalp!"

The truck plunged on through the night oblivious to the unworldly passenger
who clung with titanium claws to the bulwarks of its cargo bay.  Had the
lonely driver been able to see by starlight the two eyes staring past him
through the windows at the road ahead, he would have flung open his door and
leapt for the forest in terror.  But his eyes were dazzled by the glare of the
headlights, and he could not, so these two unlikely companions passed mile
after lonely mile together along the dusty, rocky highway to the Freeport
Mining complex at Tembagapura.

Emmerson crouched low as they passed by the guard shack, adopting the
appearance of an inverted bowl, but of course no one bothered to check the
cargo bay at all.  It was 3:07 a.m. by Emmerson's internal clock when the
driver finally cut the engine and left the truck parked alongside many others
in what Emmerson judged to be an automotive maintenance area.

"I wonder," thought Emmerson as he listened to the driver's retreating
footsteps, "if he might be my man."

Setting his clock on medium-high he sprang from the truck bed and
followed--from shadow to shadow and from bush to bush--until the man mounted a
flight of steps and entered the open doorway of what must have been some sort
of dormitory.  Emmerson had managed to get a glimpse of him once or twice as
he had passed through a lighted area, and now felt pretty sure he wasn't
Victor Manuhutu.  But how would he find him?  Emmerson advanced his clock
speed to maximum and boldly followed.  The building consisted of a hallway
with rooms on either side.  In typical Indonesian fashion, only a cloth
curtain hung in each entrance way.  So he walked along the hall, stopping to
peer through the gap between the cloth and the door frame of each room,
sometimes to enter and scrutinize sleeping bodies, sometimes just to glance in
and pass on.  He was trying to match a sleeping face with an image he had in
his mind, a graduation photograph taken of Victor Manuhutu in Ambon, and this
turned out to be no easy task, for the various sleeping countenances all
looked more or less alike--exhausted.  All were brown skinned with black hair.
Fortunately all Indonesians liked to sleep in stuffy rooms with the lights on,
and these people had electricity, so it was easy for Emmerson to see his
subjects in all their various poses and positions of limbs.  The only hard
ones were those facing a far wall, and one of them who had a sarong pulled
right over his head.  One had been awake and sitting at a little desk.  He
must have seen movement out of the corner of his eye, for he uttered a
perfunctory "Hus!" and lifted his eyes from his book.  Emmerson, who
understood fluent Indonesian, scurried swiftly away, glad to have been
mistaken for a dog.

Then Emmerson remembered that in Indonesia every person is required to carry
picture identification by the powers that be.  "The powers that be," Emmerson
thought with an inward smile.  What pleasure it had given him to defy all the
faces of Indonesian security at once!  Yes, Charley Levinson had programmed
into him a very keen and very human sense of pleasure which such things could
gratify very much.  It had been the first time he had ever traveled in
Indonesia without getting his business poked into by all manner of government
officials.  He remembered how the authorities had once persecuted Charley
Levinson by making him come in for finger printing every year.  How they had
made him report to five different government offices to request a pass every
time he had wanted to go anywhere, and how they had made him drag his body to
all five like offices to check in once he had arrived.  Charley Levinson, who
was known as an honest man by all the people, and who had lived there all his
life!  And even now, after so many years, they were making everybody carry a
"Surat Bebas G30S," or certificate of non-involvement in the September 30th
attempted coup (1965).  Even people who hadn't been born yet in 1965 were
required to carry these disgusting documents, which were an outrage and an
absurdity to the rest of the world, where people saw them as just another
means for the powers that be to stay in power and subject the masses to their
agenda and will.

So instead of trying to identify his man  by peeping at sleeping bodies,
Emmerson started rifling through pockets and drawers.  Just as the time was
approaching 3:30 a.m., Emmerson found what he was looking for.  The photograph
ID looked like the image in Emmerson's brain, and the man on the bed looked
something like the photograph, and the name was Victor Manuhutu.  "Now for the
theatrics," Emmerson thought as he positioned himself under the table opposite
the foot of the bed.  Realizing he would need power he had found a wall outlet
not far from the table and plugged himself in.  But before he was quite
situated he heard a stirring on the bed.  It was Victor Manuhutu waking up to
deal with a hard fact of life that was wont to rouse him at about 3:30 a.m.
For those sheltered female readers among us, be it known that such are the
problems of many lonely young men.  It is the hard reality of their enforced
celibacy attempting to make its point clear.  Emmerson saw what was happening,
quickly finished what he was doing, aimed and shot out the light with a burst
of laser fire.  "Victor Manuhutu?" he queried from under the table in the
sudden darkness."

"Yes my Lord?" responded Victor Manuhutu sitting bolt upright and wide-eyed in
bed.  His voice was shocke