His tone and manner changed magically, and he darted across the room to put his arm around Lyla’s bare shoulders. She had hunched forward with her face in her hands and was sobbing.
“I’m sorry!” she forced out between snuffles. “I just couldn’t help it.”
“Now don’t you think of apologizing!” Conroy straightleaving one lean hand on Lyla’s nape. “You’re showing the only decent human reaction out of all of us. It is something to weep over, what we’re doing to ourbut I’ve forgotten how. I got so frustrated I let mybe pushed aside. I can’t even claim vicarious credit for trying to stop it-even Jim Reedeth there, whom I regarded as one of my best students, went right along with the crowd the moment he got the chance. Flamen’s spent his working We persuading his audience that the people who get to the top can be exposed at any moas venial, deceitful, corrupt; even Pedro Diablo, for whom there’s a smidgin of excuse, can’t deny that he’s devoted his talent to setting human beings against each other. And it looks as though Madison has responded so well to Mogshack’s treatment that he’s no more capof tears than a machine is.”
“That’s not entirely surprising,” Madison said, stirring from his long-time rigidity.
“What?” Conroy blinked at him.
“I’m taking a calculated risk in making the following admission.” Madison rose to his feet in a single smooth movement. “However, computation indicates that this is a nexus at which the intromission of additional data is likely to generate consequences that are intrinsically inand the alternatives have been exhausted without leading me to conclude that a superior outcome can be attained without intervention. A further operative factor is that partial data have already been inadverintroduced into the situation owing to ingestion of a preparation of psycho-coca and parabufotenine, the synergistic effect of this substance on a male human metabolism already circulating a critical dose of Narnot having been previously recorded.”
Conroy glanced around the room. Flamen was staring in utter bewilderment, and so was Diablo; Reedeth had tensed, as though expecting to be attacked, and his lips were forming silent words, perhaps indicating regret at his own willingness to believe that Madison was infit for discharge from the Ginsberg. Only Lyla seemed to have some insight into whatever might be happening. She had lowered her palms from her tear-wet cheeks and was gazing at Madison in wonder.
“That’s how you talked at Mikki Baxendale’s,” she whispered. “That’s the same tone of voice!”
“Madison?” Conroy said uncertainly.
“A pseudonym,” Madison said. “You are in fact speakto Robert Gottschalk-”
“Christ!” Flamen breathed. “So you’re the new mysman I’ve been hearing-”
“And the reason I am incapable of displaying such an emotional response as the shedding of tears is that I was not programmed to react in that fashion.”
“But just a second!” Flamen was clawing at his beard, apparently not having heard the last remark. “Robert Gottschalk can’t have been shut away in the Ginsberg for the past however many months, because the grapesaid he was-”
“The name “Robert’ was selected with the intention of misleading the public,” Madison/Gottschalk said, once more overriding Flamen’s interruption. “If you feel it more appropriate, you are at liberty to address me by the undisguised form Robot Gottschalk, because I am in fact a machine.”
“I see,” nodded the man from Inorganic Brain Manuwho had been on an unofficial retainer for the Gottschalks for the best part of a decade and was in a position to notify them of the very newest developments in data-processing equipment. “Yes, I think that can be done. Designing the key circuitry, though-that’s going to present one or two problems.”
“So long as this thing maximizes our sales,” Anthony Gottschalk said expansively, “I don’t give a damn.”
“You want that as a built-in command?”
“Of course!”
There was a pause. The man from IBM decided during it that there was no point in explaining that giving so complex a computer such a blanket command was roughthe mechanical counterpart of obsession in the human brain. The conversation was being recorded and in the event of a later lawsuit could always be adduced in evidence for the defendants.