They had brought a bottle with them, and their only concern at the moment was to relax in the company of each other and the bottle. They had no intention, originally, of disturbing it. Unattended, idling, sorting data with contented lazy clickings, Multivac, too, had earned its vacation and the boys appreciated that. Seven days had not sufficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov finally managed to escape from the public functions, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of looking for them, in the deserted underground chambers, where portions of the mighty buried body of Multivac showed. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.
All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.īut slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share in the glory that was Multivac's.įor decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth's poor resources could not support the ships. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. So Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could.
It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough. Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.
As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face - miles and miles of face - of that giant computer. The question came about as a result of a five-dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:Īlexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light.
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