Carol laughed and turned to her companion. They were standing in front of a large. translucent glass window inside a dimly lit building. “Oh, Oscar,” she said to the old man with the bright eyes, “you never change. Only you can think of all these living creatures as biological systems with architectures. Don’t you ever wonder about their feelings, their dreams while they are sleeping, their concepts of death?”
“Aye, well I do,” Oscar replied with a twinkle in his eye. “But it’s virtually impossible for human beings, even with a common language and developed communications skills, to truly describe their feelings. How could we even know or appreciate, for example, a dolphin’s sense of loneliness? In our maudlin way we ascribe to them human emotions, which is ridiculous.” He paused for a moment to think. “No,” he continued, “it’s more fruitful to conduct scientific inquiry at levels where we can understand the answers. In the long run, I believe that knowing how these creatures function, in the scientific sense, is more likely to lead us to their emotional quotients than conducting psychological experiments whose outcomes cannot be interpreted.”
Carol reached over and kissed him fondly. “You take everything I say so seriously, Oscar. Even when I’m kidding, you always pay attention to my comments.” She stopped and looked away. “You’re the only one who does.”
Oscar pulled back dramatically and put both his hands on Carol’s right shoulder. “Somewhere here there’s a chip . . . I know it for a fact . . . It’s almost always here . . . Ah, I found it.” He looked at her knowingly. “It’s not becoming, you know. Here you are, a successful, even celebrated reporter, still suffering from what could only be described as terminal insecurity. What’s this about? Did you and the boss have a big fight this morning?”
“No,” Carol replied, as they walked across the room to another part of the aquarium. “Well, sort of I guess. You know how he is. He takes over everything. I’m working on this big story down in Key West. Dale comes to the airport to pick me up, takes me out to breakfast, and proceeds to tell me exactly what I should be doing to cover my assignment. His suggestions are almost all good, and I appreciate his help on the technical issues, but it’s the way he talks to me. As if he thinks I’m stupid or something.”
Oscar looked at her intently. “Carol, my dear, he talks to everybody that way, including me. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He is absolutely convinced of his own superiority and nothing has ever happened in his life to change his mind. He was a millionaire from his own patents before he graduated from MIT.”
Carol was impatient and frustrated. “I know all that, Oscar, believe me, I know. But you’re protecting him again. Dale and I have been lovers for almost a year. He tells everybody how proud of me he is, how much he enjoys being stimulated by my mind. But when we’re together, he treats me like a fool. This morning he even argued with me about what I was having for breakfast. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize but the guy who wants to marry me doesn’t think I can order my own breakfast.”
They were standing in front of a large tank with crystal-clear water. About half a dozen small whales were swimming in circles around the tank, occasionally going to the surface for air. “You came and asked my opinion in the beginning, my young friend,” he said quietly. “And I told you that I thought your souls were not compatible. Do you remember what you said to me?”
“Yes,” she answered with a rueful smile. “I asked you what the chief scientist of MOI could possibly know about souls. I’m sorry, Oscar. I was sorry at the time. I was so headstrong. Dale looked great on paper and I wanted your approval — ”
“Forget it,” he interrupted her. “You know how I feel about you. But never underestimate a scientist. Some of them,” he said abstractedly, “want to know facts and concepts so that ultimately they can understand the overall nature of everything. Including the putative soul.
“Now take these whales,” Oscar continued, increasing the tempo and adroitly changing the subject. “We have been mapping their brains for almost a decade now, isolating various kinds of functions in specific locations, and trying to correlate their brain structure with that of a human being. We have been reasonably successful. The language function that governs their singing has been separated and the location of the physical controls for all parts of the body have been identified. In fact, we have found an area in the whale brain that corresponds to the equivalent function for every major capability in the human brain. But there’s still a problem, a mystery if you will.”
One of the whales stopped in its normal circuit about the tank. It seemed to be watching them. “There’s a large section of their brain that we have been unable to allocate to any specific function. A brilliant scientist years ago, after listening to the whales’ songs while they were migrating and correlating those songs with the rest of their behavior, postulated that this large, unmapped portion of their brain was a multidimensional memory array. His hypothesis was that the whales store entire incidents in that array, including sights, sounds, and even feelings, and that they relive these incidents during migration to alleviate the boredom. Our tests are starting to confirm his theory.”
Carol was intrigued. “You mean, they might put in that array the entire set of sensory impressions from something important, like calving, and then have, in a sense, a full instant replay during a particularly boring part of the migration route? Wow. That’s fascinating. My memory irritates me all the time. It would be great if somehow I could go in there, in a directed sense, and pull out anything I want. Complete with feelings.” She laughed. “There have been times in the summers when I couldn’t remember exactly how great it felt to ski and I have almost panicked, worrying about whether or not that feeling might be gone the next winter.”
Oscar waved at the whale and it swam away. “Be careful,” he said. “Other people have also thought that it would be fantastic if our memories were more complete, like a computer’s. But suppose we did have a perfect, multidimensional memory like that hypothesized for the whale. And suppose we had the same lack of entry control that is characteristic of human memory as it now exists. You know, where what we remember and when we remember it are not under our individual control. Then there would be problems. We might even be nonfunctional as a species. A song, a picture, a smell, even the taste of a cake might suddenly force us to confront anew the full emotions associated with the death of a loved one. We might have to see again a painful fight between our parents. Or even the trauma of our own birth.”
Oscar was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said finally, “evolution has served us in good stead. It couldn’t develop an entry control mechanism for our memories. So to protect us, to keep us from being demolished by mistakes or past events, evolution built a natural fade process into our memories — ”
“Carol Dawson. Carol Dawson. Report immediately to the audiovisual conference room adjacent to the director’s office.”
The loudspeaker interrupted the quiet in the MOI aquarium. Carol gave Oscar a hug. “It’s been great, Ozzie, as always,” she said, watching him wince as she used her pet name for him. “But it looks like they’ve finished developing the pictures. Incidentally, I think the whole business about the whales’ memories is fascinating. I want to come back and do a feature on it Maybe next week sometime. Give my love to your daughter and grandson.”
Carol had become so engrossed in the discussion with Oscar that she had momentarily forgotten why she had flown to Miami early that morning. Now she felt anew a keen sense of excitement as she drove back to the main MOI administrative building from the aquarium. Dale had been confident at breakfast that processing the infrared images would reveal something of interest. “After all,” he had said logically, “the foreign object alarm was triggered repeatedly And nothing could be seen in the visual images. Therefore, either the infrared observations caused the alarm or the algorithm did not work properly. The second possibility is very unlikely, since I designed the data flow myself and my best programmers tested it after it was coded.”
Dale was uncharacteristically excited when she walked into the conference room. Carol started to ask him a question but was silenced by a vigorous negative motion of the head that followed his smile of greeting. Dale was talking to two of the image-processing technicians. “Okay, then, we’re squared away? Display the images in this sequence. I’ll call for each one by using the pickle.” The technicians left the room.