Suddenly he screeched the mouse to a halt. The entrance to the mouse hole was barred by a tiny door bristling with solid-looking padlocks.
“Hey, that’s cheating!” Clifford roared indignantly. “You can’t do that!”
“Who says?” Aggie laughed. “There’s no rules that say I can’t.”
“Christ!” Clifford accelerated the mouse away as the cat pounced on the spot it had just vacated. He ran it round behind the cat, who immediately began turning after it. For an agonizing second he stared helplessly searching for a way out, and then, seized by sudden inspiration, he created a second mouse hole in the baseboard and promptly shot the mouse through it.
“That’s not fair!” Aggie shrieked. “You can’t change the house!”
“There’s no rule that says I can’t,” Clifford threw back. “I win.”
“Like hell. That was a tie.”
They were still laughing as they removed the skull-harnesses and shut off the operator station to finish the day.
“You know, Aggie,” he said, shaking his head. “This really is an incredible machine. I’d never have dreamed this kind of thing could work.”
“It’s primitive yet,” she replied. “I think all kinds of applications that even we can’t imagine will grow out of this some day. . . .” She gestured vaguely in the direction of the screen. “For example, I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole new art form developed from little things like that. Why hire actors to try and interpret what’s in the scriptwriter’s mind if you can get straight into his mind?” She shrugged and looked sideways at Clifford. “See the kind of thing I mean?”
“Make movies out of peoples’ heads?” He gaped at her.
“Why not?” she said simply.
Why not? Somewhere, he remembered, he had heard that said before.
* * *
The final thing they showed him in Baltimore was the way in which the BIAC could function as a communications intermediary between man and man. Two or more human operators interacting simultaneously with the machine were able to exchange thought patterns among themselves in a way that was uncanny, using the computer as a common translator and message exchange. Even more remarkable was the fact that there was no particular reason why these operators had to be in close proximity to one another, and a number of experiments of this kind had been conducted in which the machine in Baltimore was linked to another BIAC, owned by the Air Force and located in California, thus coupling operators three thousand miles apart. Clifford found this the most astounding thing he had seen since coming to Baltimore. He thought about it all the way back to Boston.
* * *
Clifford returned to Sudbury to find that installation of the Institute’s own BIAC was well under way and that construction of the Mark II had commenced. The latter operation would require more time to complete, however, and as an intermediate measure to gain some preliminary experience in using BIAC techniques to interpret k-functions, the new computer was connected on-line to the Mark I prototype.
He slowly learned to steer his way through the masses of data to ferret out and manipulate the space-like solutions of the equations and to project them as visual displays. To his astonishment he found that he could “move” his vantage point at will throughout the body of Earth and about its surface. The resolving power of the Mark I was still poor, preventing him from distinguishing much in the way of meaningful detail, but he did succeed in producing recognizable images of some prominent geographic features such as mountain ranges, continental margins, and ocean trenches. He managed to obtain some surface views of the Moon too, in which the ghostly outlines of the larger craters and ring-walled plains could just about be discerned. It was somewhat like viewing the transmission from a remote-TV space probe that could be moved instantly from place to place—a tantalizing foretaste of what might be possible with Mark II.
* * *
One evening, while they were out for a few drinks at their favorite bar in Marlboro, Clifford was describing his experiences in Baltimore to Aub and Morelli. Aub had at last reached the point of being able to leave the immediate work on Mark II in the hands of the rest of the team and had made arrangements to go on a BIAC training course himself, starting the following week. Naturally, he was interested to learn about what the Navy had in store for him.