Graveyard of Dreams | Page 9

word of
it. A couple of times, I even caught myself starting to believe it."
Conn stopped short. His father stopped beside him and stood looking at him.
"Why didn't you tell them the truth?" Rodney Maxwell asked.
The question angered Conn. It was what he had been asking himself.
"Why didn't I just grab a couple of pistols off the table and shoot the lot of them?" he
retorted. "It would have killed them quicker and wouldn't have hurt as much."
His father took the cigar from his mouth and inspected the tip of it. "The truth must be
pretty bad then. There is no Brain. Is that it, son?"
"There never was one. I'm not saying that only because I know it would be impossible to
build such a computer. I'm telling you what the one man in the Galaxy who ought to
know told me--the man who commanded the Third Force during the War."
"Foxx Travis! I didn't know he was still alive. You actually talked to him?"
"Yes. He's on Luna, keeping himself alive at low gravity. It took me a couple of years,
and I was afraid he'd die before I got to him, but I finally managed to see him."
"What did he tell you?"
"That no such thing as the Brain ever existed." They started walking again, more slowly,
toward the far edge of the terrace, with the sky red and orange in front of them. "The
story was all through the Third Force, but it was just one of those wild tales that get
started, nobody knows how, among troops. The High Command never denied or even
discouraged it. It helped morale, and letting it leak to the enemy was good psychological
warfare."
"Klem Zareff says that everybody in the Alliance army heard of the Brain," his father
said. "That was why he came here in the first place." He puffed thoughtfully on his cigar.
"You said a computer like the Brain would be an impossibility. Why? Wouldn't it be just
another computer, only a lot bigger and a lot smarter?"
"Dad, computermen don't like to hear computers called smart," Conn said. "They aren't.
The people who build them are smart; a computer only knows what's fed to it. They can
hold more information in their banks than a man can in his memory, they can combine it
faster, they don't get tired or absent-minded. But they can't imagine, they can't create, and
they can't do anything a human brain can't."

"You know, I'd wondered about just that," said his father. "And none of the histories of
the War even as much as mentioned the Brain. And I couldn't see why, after the War,
they didn't build dozens of them to handle all these Galactic political and economic
problems that nobody seems able to solve. A thing like the Brain wouldn't only be useful
for war; the people here aren't trying to find it for war purposes."
"You didn't mention any of these doubts to the others, did you?"
"They were just doubts. You knew for sure, and you couldn't tell them."
"I'd come home intending to--tell them there was no Brain, tell them to stop wasting their
time hunting for it and start trying to figure out the answers themselves. But I couldn't.
They don't believe in the Brain as a tool, to use; it's a machine god that they can bring all
their troubles to. You can't take a thing like that away from people without giving them
something better."
"I noticed you suggested building a spaceship and agreed with the professor about
building a computer. What was your idea? To take their minds off hunting for the Brain
and keep them busy?"
Conn shook his head. "I'm serious about the ship--ships. You and Colonel Zareff gave me
that idea."
His father looked at him in surprise. "I never said a word in there, and Klem didn't even
once mention--"
"Not in Kurt's office; before we went up from the docks. There was Klem, moaning about
a good year for melons as though it were a plague, and you selling arms and ammunition
by the ton. Why, on Terra or Baldur or Uller, a glass of our brandy brings more than
these freighter-captains give us for a cask, and what do you think a colonist on Agramma,
or Sekht, or Hachiman, who has to fight for his life against savages and wild animals,
would pay for one of those rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition?"
His father objected. "We can't base the whole economy of a planet on brandy. Only about
ten per cent of the arable land on Poictesme will grow wine-melons. And if we start
exporting Federation salvage the way you talk of, we'll be selling pieces instead