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Authors: James P. Hogan
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your own way. Who’s stopping you?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m not. There are plenty of places you could set up a shack and try it the way people used to. You’d soon be knocking to come back in out of the rain, though. Then you’d see why they gave it up to go our way and why the old days changed into what we’ve got now.”
Laura leaned forward to rest her elbows on the table and fixed him with a steely glare.
“You’re twisting everything I’m saying again,” she accused him. “I never said anything about wanting to tear down civilization. I’m a big girl now and grew up in Detroit and came to the big city ten years ago and I happen to love it. I don’t want to see it torn down. That’s my whole point. You want to put machines in charge of running it and I say it won’t work. Why not keep them in their place and leave things the way they are? That way we know it works.”
Dyer sat back and shook his head in a way that said he wasn’t buying.
“You could have said that at any point in history,” he replied. “When you start thinking like that, that’s when you stagnate. Gotta keep moving.”
“Why? Why do I have to keep moving if I’m satisfied out where I happen to be? Why can’t I just stay and enjoy it?”
Dyer reflected on the question for a few seconds.
“Because everybody else will keep moving anyway,” he said at last. “When you find you’ve been left behind, you don’t feel so satisfied anymore. That’s when you remember how you got to where you are.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Dyer arrived at Sigmund Hoestler’s office a few minutes before 2 p.m. He was shown straight in and to his mild surprise found that Vincent Lewis, the Dean of the Faculty, was there too. Hoestler, a big man with sagging fleshy cheeks and a shock of uncontrollable wiry hair, motioned Dyer into an empty chair next to where Lewis was sitting, and leaned forward to come straight to the point.
“I’m afraid we have some very serious problems that are going to affect you directly, Ray,” he said in his usual throaty voice. “It looks as if we may be forced to close down your unit.”
Dyer was halfway through the process of sinking back into a characteristically relaxed posture. The bombshell made him sit up again as if the chair had suddenly acquired a few kilovolts. He knew that Hoestler was a man of few words, but even so, the bluntness of the statement had caught him totally unprepared. He had barely begun opening his mouth to frame a question when Hoestler spoke again.
“I only found out about it myself this morning. Vince was in Washington over the weekend with the Secretary for CIM and some of his people. So don’t get the idea that it’s just petty local politics or anything like that. Vince, you could probably tell Ray about it better than I could.”
Dyer turned expectantly toward Lewis, his features contorted into a frown of disbelief. Communications And Information Management was a comparatively new executive department of state, formed eighteen years previously in 2010. Originally it had been instituted in response to the need for a single authority to assume overall responsibility for operation of the integrated data communications and computing network that emerged when the military systems were declassified and merged into the already integrated commercial-industrial-scientific complex to form the EARTHCOM net. When HESPER nodes were later incorporated to transform EARTHCOM into the Totally Integrated Teleprocessing and Acquisition Network, TITAN, the Department of CIM automatically became the administrative authority for the NORAM Sector of the global system. As Hoestler had in effect said, the Department of CIM didn’t mess around with interdepartmental university politics.
Lewis was impossibly tall and impossibly thin. He sat splayed in his chair at all angles like a marionette whose limbs had come out of joint everywhere, leaving him held together only by his clothes. When
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m not. There are plenty of places you could set up a shack and try it the way people used to. You’d soon be knocking to come back in out of the rain, though. Then you’d see why they gave it up to go our way and why the old days changed into what we’ve got now.”
Laura leaned forward to rest her elbows on the table and fixed him with a steely glare.
“You’re twisting everything I’m saying again,” she accused him. “I never said anything about wanting to tear down civilization. I’m a big girl now and grew up in Detroit and came to the big city ten years ago and I happen to love it. I don’t want to see it torn down. That’s my whole point. You want to put machines in charge of running it and I say it won’t work. Why not keep them in their place and leave things the way they are? That way we know it works.”
Dyer sat back and shook his head in a way that said he wasn’t buying.
“You could have said that at any point in history,” he replied. “When you start thinking like that, that’s when you stagnate. Gotta keep moving.”
“Why? Why do I have to keep moving if I’m satisfied out where I happen to be? Why can’t I just stay and enjoy it?”
Dyer reflected on the question for a few seconds.
“Because everybody else will keep moving anyway,” he said at last. “When you find you’ve been left behind, you don’t feel so satisfied anymore. That’s when you remember how you got to where you are.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Dyer arrived at Sigmund Hoestler’s office a few minutes before 2 p.m. He was shown straight in and to his mild surprise found that Vincent Lewis, the Dean of the Faculty, was there too. Hoestler, a big man with sagging fleshy cheeks and a shock of uncontrollable wiry hair, motioned Dyer into an empty chair next to where Lewis was sitting, and leaned forward to come straight to the point.
“I’m afraid we have some very serious problems that are going to affect you directly, Ray,” he said in his usual throaty voice. “It looks as if we may be forced to close down your unit.”
Dyer was halfway through the process of sinking back into a characteristically relaxed posture. The bombshell made him sit up again as if the chair had suddenly acquired a few kilovolts. He knew that Hoestler was a man of few words, but even so, the bluntness of the statement had caught him totally unprepared. He had barely begun opening his mouth to frame a question when Hoestler spoke again.
“I only found out about it myself this morning. Vince was in Washington over the weekend with the Secretary for CIM and some of his people. So don’t get the idea that it’s just petty local politics or anything like that. Vince, you could probably tell Ray about it better than I could.”
Dyer turned expectantly toward Lewis, his features contorted into a frown of disbelief. Communications And Information Management was a comparatively new executive department of state, formed eighteen years previously in 2010. Originally it had been instituted in response to the need for a single authority to assume overall responsibility for operation of the integrated data communications and computing network that emerged when the military systems were declassified and merged into the already integrated commercial-industrial-scientific complex to form the EARTHCOM net. When HESPER nodes were later incorporated to transform EARTHCOM into the Totally Integrated Teleprocessing and Acquisition Network, TITAN, the Department of CIM automatically became the administrative authority for the NORAM Sector of the global system. As Hoestler had in effect said, the Department of CIM didn’t mess around with interdepartmental university politics.
Lewis was impossibly tall and impossibly thin. He sat splayed in his chair at all angles like a marionette whose limbs had come out of joint everywhere, leaving him held together only by his clothes. When
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