“Ye gods,” said Hammell. “It looks like that first time we tried to do something, and they had a revolution going before the day was over.”
Roberts said, “The want-generator hasn’t been on overnight, has it?”
Morrissey shook his head. “We couldn’t even have started to figure out what to do. We left it turned off.”
“Then we don’t have that to worry about, at least. Let’s follow one of these avenues toward the center of the city.”
The scene shifted, up one of the long avenues, to show, at first, scattered gangs of men moving forward out in the open, then men moving single file next to the buildings, then men sprinting across intersections to file through narrow lanes through the trash-filled parks, to emerge opposite the center of the next block, cross the street at a run and disappear through doorways guarded by armed men who stayed flat against the wall and peered warily toward the nearest intersection.
As the scene shifted still farther forward, the alternating checkerboard pattern of buildings and garbage-dump-filled parks was suddenly interrupted. Two-thirds of the way down the next block, the buildings were smashed to rubble, and the dumps were burnt black. A tangled confusion of barbed wire and tetrahedral clusters of razor-sharp needle-pointed blades was shrouded in a foamy mass of solidified translucent bubbles, through which could be dimly seen the glitter of other, finer wires, of narrow sharp-edged metal strips, and the looming shapes of dark spheres, ovoids, and platelike objects, suggestive of explosive mines.
In the street bordering this barrier, armored turrets mounting four guns apiece, in two opposite pairs, were thrust up out of manhole-like openings in the street. Mobile guns were clustered at the corners of the parks. In the avenues farther back long, low, many-wheeled devices waited.
With growing amazement, Roberts, Hammell, and Morrissey watched as they shifted the scene, and the length of this barrier became clear. It stretched on far across the city from west to east, then swung far to the south, then finally west again, with massively fortified squares at the corner.
Hammell said in astonishment, “Two-thirds of the city is outside that barrier.”
“At least,” said Roberts. As the scene changed, they could see, at the high windows of the smashed buildings outside the barrier, triple lightning-bolt banners hung out. In the dumps, pipes torn out of buildings were thrust deep in the heaps of garbage, with triple lightning-bolt flags flying from them. Along the edges of the barrier itself, there were flashes of occasional explosions as small parties of men tried to force their way through. Then, apparently, some new command was given. Along the whole length of the enormous barrier, the attempt to break through gradually died out.
* * *
After a lengthy silence, Hammell said, “Trying to make something out of this place is like trying to build a house out of hand grenades.”
Morrissey nodded. “It was easy to see what they needed before: They were too sunk in the backwash of all the slums they’d been taken from before they were put here. But what do they need now?”
Roberts stared off into the distance.
Hammell shook his head. “Where do we even start? Last time, we had an inert mass to work with. This time, we’ve got something that explodes from one crisis to the next. How did this mess ever come about anyway? I thought we’d improved things—not set up a powder keg!”
Roberts, who at least had been sleeping at night, began to dimly see a possible cause of the trouble.
After a moment, he said tentatively, “Every time we’ve used the want-generator, except at very low power on just the three of us, there’s been an inertia. Once started, the effect seems to go on, even though we turn off the want-generator itself. We’ve accepted this as a fact, but we haven’t tried to find any mechanism to explain it. What if each individual has, in effect, a slight want-generator capacity himself? Suppose that once his desire is aroused, it energizes a field, similar to an electric field around a wire. This hypothetical desire-field, once energized, would create, in effect, a force tending to maintain the desire, because any lessening of the desire would cause a flow of energy from the collapsing field to reinforce the desire. The result would be an inertia of the desire, once created.”
Morrissey blinked. “In that case, there should be induction effects. Once a strong desire is created, it will tend to induce a corresponding desire in others, and there will be something similar to attraction and repulsion, based on these interacting desire-fields.”
There was a moment’s silence as they thought it over, then Roberts said, “To begin with, to all intents and purposes, these people were desireless, or rather, their desires were comparatively few, simple, and predictable. It follows that there would be comparatively few of the interacting desire-fields. What we apparently did was to set up more of these interacting fields.”
Hammell said, “Of course, this is just a theory.”
“Sure,” said Roberts. “But are you under the impression that we were operating without a theory before? We had a theory. The theory was that the city, and the people in it, were passive subjects for the operation of the want-generator. Granted that when the effect was concentrated on just the three of us, here, it seemed to work that way. But then, the city is much larger, the effect is more widespread and there are far more of what you might call ‘natural want-generator units’ in the city. Well, we’ve been acting on the theory that the want-generator operated on a passive object, and the passive object is now running away with the experiment. It looks like time to reconsider the theory.”
Hammell thought it over. “You figure we’ve set up these ‘desire-fields’ with the want-generator, and now they’re in operation, whether we run the want-generator or not?”
“How else do you explain what’s going on? It’s exactly as if such fields were in operation. If so, where do they come from?”
“But look, remember how we hit the whole city with ‘desire for achievement?’ And how then we discovered that their idea of achievement was to ‘kill mechs’? And to stop that, we had to give them a stiff jolt of ‘desire to give up’? Then there was an uncontrollable panic, and we gave them a shot of ‘desire to fight’ to break the panic? That incidentally started a mess of fist fights, and we had to use ‘desire to sleep’ to end that? Remember?”
“Yes,” said Roberts. “I wouldn’t be likely to forget that.”
“Well, if ‘desire to give up’ knocked out ‘desire for achievement,’ and if ‘desire to fight’ knocked out ‘desire to give up,’ and so on, these hypothetical fields have all been discharged except the last one, which, as I remember, was ‘desire to think.’ Where’s the problem? Where did this mess come from?”
“It depends on what you mean when you say the desires were ‘knocked out,’ ” said Roberts. “Maybe ‘desire to fight’ eliminates ‘desire to give up.’ They’re directly opposed to each other. But how does ‘desire to think’ eliminate ‘desire for achievement’? And how do either of them eliminate the ‘desire to kill mechs’ which these people had to start with?”
Hammell was silent for a moment, then his eyes narrowed in thought. “Yes, I see. One desire may just be set aside for a while, as when you tune a receiver to pick up one signal instead of another.”
Roberts nodded. “And it seems to me that we’ve added quite a few signals to those that can be picked up in that city. ‘Desire to achieve’ seems to be operating, and in practice it’s still interpreted the same way: ‘Kill mechs.’ This affects ‘desire to learn,’ which is interpreted as ‘desire to learn how to kill mechs.’ And then, ‘desire to work’ seems to be in operation, since, for instance, the improvised tools and weapons take work. But that desire manifests as ‘desire to work at killing mechs.’ And it’s obvious that for all this to happen so fast, ‘desire to think’ must have been operating, no doubt in the form of ‘desire to think how to kill mechs.’ Every desire we’ve added has apparently been brought to serve that one dominating desire that they had before we started, namely, ‘Kill the lousy mechs.’ Thanks to that, they’ve got a fair chance to blow up the planetary computer and smash every machine that serves it.”
“Yes,” said Hammell. “And once they succeed in that, there’ll be mass starvation here, because the computer and a few technicians run the mechanized farms through roboid machinery. Once they destroy the computer they land right back in a bare subsistence, dog-eat-dog setup.”
“Speaking of technicians,” said Roberts, frowning, “have you noticed these different kinds of specialized machines that weren’t here before? Did that computer program itself to make them. Or—”