Other Times, Other Worlds

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A suggestion on the problem of a true thinking — not simply calculating — machine. And a suggestion, too, that not even the ultimate thinking machine can answer the most fundamental of human questions!

Jane Kayden, the traces of dried tears on her pretty face, said, in a hopeless tone for the hundredth time, “But why does it have to be you, Joe?”

Joseph Kayden, Director of Automatic 81, paced back and forth through the room of their apartment that they called the Main Lounge. After they were married, when permission was given for Jane to live on the premises at Automatic 81, she had designed the apartment. Automatic 81 was in the Mesilla Valley, eighteen miles from Albuquerque.

The two opposite walls of the Main Lounge were of clear glass. One wall looked out across the valley. The other looked out across the vast production floor of Automatic 81, where the humming machine tools fabricated the portable tele sets. Automatic 81 was a nearly average government facility, with all unloading and sorting of incoming raw materials, all intraplant transportation of semi-fabricated and completed parts, all assembly and all inspection, all packing and labeling accomplished by the prehensile steel fingers of automatic equipment. Joe Kayden, lean and moody, was the director and only employee.

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