The Robert Sheckley Megapack. Robert Sheckley
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one of the policemen insisted.
“They sure will. I read the test results. They can smell him out before he commits a crime. And when they reach him, they give him a powerful shock or something. It’ll stop him.”
“You closing up Homicide, Captain?” Celtrics asked.
“Nope,” the captain said. “I’m leaving a skeleton crew in until we see how these birds do.”
“Hah,” Celtrics said. “Skeleton crew. That’s funny.”
“Sure,” the captain said. “Anyhow, I’m going to leave some men on. It seems the birds don’t stop all murders.”
“Why not?”
“Some murderers don’t have these brain waves,” the captain answered, trying to remember what the newspaper article had said. “Or their glands don’t work or something.”
“Which ones don’t they stop?” Celtrics asked, with professional curiosity.
“I don’t know. But I hear they got the damned things fixed so they’re going to stop all of them soon.”
“How they working that?”
“They learn. The watchbirds, I mean. Just like people.”
“You kidding me?”
“Nope.”
“Well,” Celtrics said, “I think I’ll just keep old Betsy oiled, just in case. You can’t trust these scientists.”
“Right.”
“Birds!” Celtrics scoffed.
* * * *
Over the town, the watchbird soared in a long, lazy curve. Its aluminum hide glistened in the morning sun, and dots of light danced on its stiff wings. Silently it flew.
Silently, but with all senses functioning. Built-in kinesthetics told the watchbird where it was, and held it in a long search curve. Its eyes and ears operated as one unit, searching, seeking.
And then something happened! The watchbird’s electronically fast reflexes picked up the edge of a sensation. A correlation center tested it, matching it with electrical and chemical data in its memory files. A relay tripped.
Down the watchbird spiraled, coming in on the increasingly strong sensation. It smelled the outpouring of certain glands, tasted a deviant brain wave.
Fully alerted and armed, it spun and banked in the bright morning sunlight.
Dinelli was so intent he didn’t see the watchbird coming. He had his gun poised, and his eyes pleaded with the big grocer.
“Don’t come no closer.”
“You lousy little punk,” the grocer said, and took another step forward. “Rob me? I’ll break every bone in your puny body.”
The grocer, too stupid or too courageous to understand the threat of the gun, advanced on the little thief.
“All right,” Dinelli said, in a thorough state of panic. “All right, sucker, take—”
A bolt of electricity knocked him on his back. The gun went off, smashing a breakfast food display.
“What in hell?” the grocer asked, staring at the stunned thief. And then he saw a flash of silver wings. “Well, I’m really damned. Those watchbirds work!”
He stared until, the wings disappeared in the sky. Then he telephoned the police.
The watchbird returned to his search curve. His thinking center correlated the new facts he had learned about murder. Several of these he hadn’t known before.
This new information was simultaneously flashed to all the other watchbirds and their information was flashed back to him.
New information, methods, definitions were constantly passing between them.
* * * *
Now that the watchbirds were rolling off the assembly line in a steady stream, Gelsen allowed himself to relax. A loud contented hum filled his plant. Orders were being filled on time, with top priorities given to the biggest cities in his area, and working down to the smallest towns.
“All smooth, Chief,” Macintyre said, coming in the door. He had just completed a routine inspection.
“Fine. Have a seat.”
The big engineer sat down and lighted a cigarette.
“We’ve been working on this for some time,” Gelsen said, when he couldn’t think of anything else.
“We sure have,” Macintyre agreed. He leaned back and inhaled deeply. He had been one of the consulting engineers on the original watchbird. That was six years back. He had been working for Gelsen ever since, and the men had become good friends.
“The thing I wanted to ask you was this—” Gelsen paused. He couldn’t think how to phrase what he wanted. Instead he asked, “What do you think of the watchbirds, Mac?”
“Who, me?” The engineer grinned nervously. He had been eating, drinking and sleeping watchbird ever since its inception. He had never found it necessary to have an attitude. “Why, I think it’s great.”
“I don’t mean that,” Gelsen said. He realized that what he wanted was to have someone understand his point of view. “I mean do you figure there might be some danger in machine thinking?”
“I don’t think so, Chief. Why do you ask?”
“Look, I’m no scientist or engineer. I’ve just handled cost and production and let you boys worry about how. But as a layman, watchbird is starting to frighten me.”
“No reason for that.”
“I don’t like the idea of the learning circuits.”
“But why not?” Then Macintyre grinned again. “I know. You’re like a lot of people, Chief—afraid your machines are going to wake up and say, ‘What are we doing here? Let’s go out and rule the world.’ Is that it?”
“Maybe something like that,” Gelsen admitted.
“No chance of it,” Macintyre said. “The watchbirds are complex, I’ll admit, but an M.I.T. calculator is a whole lot more complex. And it hasn’t got consciousness.”
“No. But the watchbirds can learn.”
“Sure. So can all the new calculators. Do you think they’ll team up with the watchbirds?”
* * * *
Gelsen felt annoyed at Macintyre, and even more annoyed at himself for being ridiculous. “It’s a fact that the watchbirds can put their learning into action. No one is monitoring them.”
“So that’s the trouble,” Macintyre said.
“I’ve been thinking of getting out of watchbird.” Gelsen hadn’t realized it until that moment.
“Look, Chief,” Macintyre said. “Will you take an engineer’s word on this?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“The watchbirds are no more dangerous than an automobile, an IBM calculator or a thermometer. They have no more consciousness or volition than those things. The watchbirds are built to respond to certain stimuli, and to carry out certain operations when they receive that stimuli.”
“And the learning circuits?”
“You have to have those,” Macintyre said patiently, as though explaining the whole thing to a ten-year-old. “The purpose of the watchbird is to frustrate all murder-attempts, right? Well, only certain murderers give out these stimuli. In order to stop all of them, the watchbird has to search out new definitions of murder and correlate them with what it already knows.”
“I