Read Ebook: Machine of Klamugra by Lang Allen Kim Mayan Earl Illustrator

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Ebook has 93 lines and 9606 words, and 2 pages

Captain Barnaby nodded, as though the reiteration of the probability of his early demise troubled him less than the philosophical question he'd stumbled across. "Still, as my subordinate officer has said, there's a factor which you seem to have omitted. In the terminology of terrestrial psychometering, this quantity is called--what did you say it was, Lieutenant Kim?"

"The 'finagle factor,' sir."

"Really?" Rhinklav'n asked, the light of scientific inquiry in his eyes. "I thought I'd taken all the variables of Earthling physiology and psychology into consideration when I set up the plans for the trial. What are the mathematics of this 'finagle factor'?"

Captain Barnaby put one foot up on a connecting shaft, as though he were in the Denver Dive, discussing the relative merits of two video dancers. "As you've doubtless noticed in your extensive study of the Terrestrial mind, Sir Honored First Technician of the Machine, we of Earth place almost equal value on a man's intelligence and on his financial standing as criteria of his worth."

"Yes," Rhinklav'n mused, "I noticed your preoccupation with both intelligence and with the individual's possession of Western Credits."

"As I said," Captain Barnaby continued, "there exists a precise formula, developed by the...."

"Yes; their laboratories developed the mathematics of the finagle factor. Briefly, it is this: the square root of the product of Intelligence Quotient over one hundred times the number of credits the individual has outstanding. Or, written algebraically:" Barnaby knelt down and traced in the sand with his gloved index finger:

"Quite a simple equation, easily represented on the Machine," Rhinklav'n observed. He called a subordinate technician to his side and spoke to him in the clicking polysyllables of the Martian language. Turning again to Captain Barnaby, he asked, "And what are the values of 'IQ' and 'Money in the Bank' for you and Lieutenant Kim?"

"Our combined IQs total about 243. How many credits do you own, Lieutenant Kim?"

"Hell, sir; I've got more debts than credits."

"Figure up your debts then, Lieutenant."

Kim raised his right gauntlet, drew a pad of paper and a pencil from a pocket at the back of his hand, and scribbled rapidly. "If we get out of this, Captain, I'll owe about 1046 credits. Subtracting pay due for the last semi-annual period, I owe 437 credits."

"And I have debts totaling 600 credits," Captain Barnaby said thoughtfully. He turned to Rhinklav'n. "The debts of myself and Lieutenant Kim, Sir Honored First Technician of the Machine, total 1037 Western Credits. Being debt, that's a negative number, of course."

"Of course, Captain," Rhinklav'n agreed. "The Machine can handle any sort of number, even a negative number. You noticed that your social value to Mars was easily represented as a minus-number." Rhinklav'n talked rapidly to his assistant and handed him the values of the finagle factor, rewritten in Martian ideographs. He faced Captain Barnaby again. "It will take us about an hour to enter this new factor into the Machine," he said. "You'll not mind waiting?"

"No, not at all," Barnaby murmured. He and Kim leaned against the inside wall of the amphitheater, watching the Martian technicians hurry about; they removed gears and replaced them with gears of another ratio; they connected a stage consisting of eccentric cams strung on shafts; and they installed a mass of machinery at the sixth stage, where the operation of extracting square root was to take place. Kim, comparing the heavy gears and levers of the Machine with the compact tubes of his electronic astrogator, remarked, "It's like using a trip hammer to crack a walnut."

One of the tourists, judging from his height a young male, threw a small parcel toward Kim. The lieutenant picked it up and unwrapped it. The stench of Martian garlic became unbearable as Kim stared at the unidentifiable tidbit of meat the Martian had thrown him; the air-pump on his shoulder drew the redolence into his helmet in such quantities that Kim's eyes burned. He gestured to show that, while his every instinct demanded that he eat the delicious morsel, he couldn't take his helmet off to do so. With an elaborate pantomiming of sorrow, Kim pitched the gift back up to the Martian boy.

A few adjustments later the technicians filed up from the Machine pit. Rhinklav'n walked over to the two EXTS officers. "If you gentlemen will accompany me, we'll begin the trial at once."

Kim and Barnaby walked together up the steps that led from the Machine, then turned and looked down at the dozens of stages of complex machinery, into which memory and intelligence of a sort had been built. Rhinklav'n pointed toward the fifth and sixth stages. "It is there that the combined finagle factors of you men will be calculated. The fifth stage is quite simple; it will perform the necessary division and multiplication. The sixth stage will extract the square root of the product derived by the fifth. The next six stages of machinery contain the variables of terrestrial behavior, which I and my colleagues calculated from Earth texts. The other stages on the field, fifty-three of them, will collate the results of the calculations of the first twelve stages with our legal code and determine punishment. The final product will appear at the sixty-seventh stage, represented as the speed of rotation of a single shaft. The revolutions-per-time-interval are decoded by a simple formula to determine the punishment to be levied upon you. Doubtless, it will be some unpleasant form of death."

Kim muttered that he wished that Martians had a bit more tact.

Rhinklav'n waved a hairy arm toward his assistant who had remained below in the Machine pit; and that Martian ran to the power house to start the mercury-turbine engine that ran the Machine. With a whistling that set the thin atmosphere trembling for miles around, the turbine began to turn.

"They're seeing how long we can be expected to live, now," Captain Barnaby commented.

That problem fled through a mass of gears and cams; and the partial solution, the sum of the two earthling's life expectancies divided by that of the priest Klaggchallak, ran across a shaft to the third stage, which would determine the old priest's value to the society of Mars. On into the fourth stage the problem flowed, to combine all previous factors with the earthlings' social value to Mars, a negative number.

In a few moments the problem had progressed to the fifth stage of the Machine, where the first steps of the 'finagle factor' were solved. The product, a negative number as could be seen by the reversed rotation of the main shaft, bowed into the sixth stage, which was to extract square root.

The turbine howled protest as it was forced to overcome the inertia of the sixth stage; but a governor at the input stage held the shaft-speed constant. The seventh stage, all ready for the problem when it should appear from the sixth, held all the computations of the first four stages in its smoothly-turning entrails. The initial portion of the sixth stage began to move slowly.

There was a sudden, grating noise as the feed-in gear of the fifth stage came in contact with a solution gear of the sixth which refused to move. The whine of the mercury-turbine engine was shaking the ground beneath the two officers' feet now.

As the Martian technicians and picnickers looked on in amazement, the shaft between the fifth stage and the sixth began to twist like a stick of moist putty. The sixth stage strained and shuddered, then followed the twisting shaft over, tearing its moorings from the ground and smashing upside-down. The seventh stage entered into the chaos, ripping out anchors of steel-in-concrete and slamming onto its side. In a moment all the machines in the bowl were muttering and straining against the earth. Rhinklav'n ran to the stairway that led down into the pit. In the adobe powerhouse the mercury engine was whirling at twenty times its optimum rate, tearing the atmosphere with the sound of its screaming power. There was the rattle of shrapnel exploding within the walls of the powerhouse as the turbine threw off the restrainment of its governor. The whole field within the bowl was a mass of twitching clockwork, shaken by the final stormings of the suicidal turbine. Bars of shining steel twisted and snapped, gear teeth flew singing through the thin air. The final chain of stages tore itself loose from anchoring and crashed to its side. There was a final roar of defiance from the turbine, and the powerhouse walls dissolved before an out-rushing blast of superheated mercury. Kim and Barnaby threw themselves to the ground as the din increased for a moment, and the Martian sightseers sought refuge behind nearby buildings. Suddenly, the Machine was silent, except for the tinkle of scraps of metal falling to the cement.

"Looks as though we were too much for judge, jury, and D.A.," Kim murmured into his radiophone. Barnaby nodded, then cautiously climbed to his feet.

Rhinklav'n climbed back up the stairway to the brink of the amphitheater-become-junkyard. He shoved his way through the questioning crowd of Martian sightseers without a word. "Looks like he's going to cry," Lieutenant Kim commented into his radiophone. True, Rhinklav'n's nose-flaps were hanging limply down below his chin, a sure sign of great emotion in a Martian.

Rhinklav'n faced Captain Barnaby wordlessly for a moment. "You may leave now," he said at last. The Martian turned his back on the captain to look down again on the wreck that had been his beloved Machine.

The two EXTS officers wandered about Klamugra, the cynosure of all Martian eyes, though no one tried to stop them or ask them questions. Lieutenant Kim finally spotted a radio tower jutting up above the red adobe buildings. Hurrying in the direction of the tower, Kim and Barnaby found the Klamugra headquarters of the Extraterrestrial Service.

Colonel Montgomery jumped to his feet as they came in, a look of bald disbelief on his face. "Man, I'm glad to see you two! I was about to storm out like a knight in shiny armor and save you from the Marties." He waved his hand toward the helmet and rifle lying on his typewriter table--"If I'd gotten there too late, I'd have ruptured interplanetary friendship for sure!"--and indicated a decanter on his desk. "Have some: that's Edinbourgh scotch, not Los Angeles moon-dew. Tell me why I happen to be talking to you now instead of making up a couple of packages for your next-of-kin."

"We wrecked their damn Machine," Kim said happily, dropping his helmet and gauntlets to the floor and measuring out several fingers of the colonel's scotch into his ration can.

"To be a bit more accurate," Captain Barnaby corrected, "we drove the Machine insane." He poured himself a stiff shot of scotch and downed it with appreciation.

"Our personalities are so complex that the Machine blew up all over the landscape when it tried to understand them," Kim said. He dragged a chair out from behind the typewriter table and sat down, carefully balancing the ration can.

"It's rather as though we should set our electronic astrogator to work on a problem with three variables in five dimensions, rather than in four," Captain Barnaby explained. "As you told us, the Machine was a mechanical-analogus calculator. It can multiply, divide, add, square and cube, and extract roots. It performs these operations by coding numbers into mechanical relationships."

"Just a big adding machine," Kim commented irreverently.

"And our 'finagle factor' was too much for a mechanical system." Captain Barnaby briefly explained to the colonel how he and Kim had induced Rhinklav'n to add their invented factor to the Machine's setup. "You see, the finagle factor resolved itself into the square root of a negative number. An electronic calculator, like our astrogator, could extract the root of a minus-number: 'imaginary' numbers of this sort are implicit in its circuit. The Martian Machine out there couldn't do this though. Since there is no mechanical analogue for an imaginary number, the Machine tried to extract the square root of our finagle factor in the same manner in which it would attempt to extract the root of a real number."

Kim drained, his ration can neatly and remarked, "The Machine couldn't do what it had to. All the power of the turbine was thrown into the root extracting system, which wouldn't revolve. So the Machine went nuts, pardon me, sir, and blew its top. Wrecked the power source and all sixty-seven stages. With the square root of minus one, we busted up a Machine half a million years old."

"What now?" Colonel Montgomery asked, rhetorically.

Captain Barnaby studied the bottom of his ration can a moment. "Well, sir, Rhinklav'n was more puzzled, than angered. He wanted to judge humans not out of malice, but from a genuine scientific curiosity. He wanted to see how the Machine would act with an alien problem. His Machine is too badly broken-up ever to repair. He'll have to find another method of judging criminals, first of all. Martian society is founded on strict law."

"Just a moment." The colonel got up from his desk and went down the hall to a door marked "Judge Advocate General's Department, EXTS." He returned with a heavy book, bound between khaki-board covers. "We'll give this book to Rhinklav'n, and you gentlemen may return to the Denver Joint."

"Dive, sir," Kim corrected.

"Yes, Lieutenant." Colonel Montgomery handed the big book to Captain Barnaby. "Take this to Rhinklav'n before you leave, Captain."

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