The Turing Option

Shelly shook her head. “No need — Dick T. did that already. It is on the fringe of San Diego Miramar. There is a chance that their peripheral radar records would not be kept this long — but as you said about computer memory. Until it fills up no one seems to notice. The programs now never erase memory drastically. Instead, when a memory or data bank is nearly full the lowest-priority data is overwritten. So there is always a chance that some of the old stuff is retained.”

Ben arrived forty minutes later; Brian let him in. “I think we may have found it, Ben. A way for the truck to get out of the valley inside that vital hour. Come look.”

They ran the graphics again for him, all of them wrapped in silence while the possibilities were explored on the screen. Ben slammed his fist into his palm when they were done, jumped up and paced the room. “Yes, of course. This could certainly be the way that was done. The truck left here and went to that spot to meet the copter — which probably didn’t even land. Shackles would have been mounted on the truck to fit the lifting gear. Drive up, click on — and lift off. Then a flight through these passes and out of the valley to a remote landing site on the other side of the mountains. Someplace where they wouldn’t be seen — but close enough to a road of some kind that would lead them to a highway. Which means that instead of moving at road speed the truck would be doing a hundred forty miles an hour and they would be long gone from the search well before the roadblocks went down. Trundling along the freeway with thousands of other trucks. The ice-cold trail has suddenly warmed up.”

“What do you do next?” Brian asked.

“There can’t be too many places to set down so we should be able to find the one they used. Then we do two things — and both at the same time. The police will search along the entire area under the flight path, finger-search any possible landing sites. They will look for marks, tracks, witnesses who may have seen or heard something that night. They will search for any kind of evidence at all that this is what really happened. I’ll supervise that myself.”

“But this is a careful bunch of crooks. Surely, they would hide all the evidence, cover all the tracks.”

“I don’t think there’d be much chance of that. We’re talking desert here, not well-developed real estate, and it’s very fragile ecology. Even a scratch on the desert floor can take several decades to disappear. While that’s being done, the FBI will be going through the building company records and those of the copter rental firm. Now that we know where to look — and if we are correct — we will be able to find signs, find a trail, and find something. Let me out, Brian.”

“You betcha. Going to keep us informed — ?”

“The instant we uncover anything at all your phone is going to ring. Both your phones.” He patted the computer terminal. “You’re a great dick, Dick Tracy.”

“I’ll leave the program running,” Shelly said when Brian had locked Ben out and had returned. “It has taken us this far — but it probably can’t go any further until we have some new input. You said earlier you had some work you wanted me to do with you today.”

“I did, but it can wait. I am really going to have trouble concentrating until Ben calls back. What I can do is show you the basic setup that we will be assembling. I have most of the AI body here, but it’s as brainless as a Second Lieutenant.”

“Brian! Where on earth did you pick up a phrase like that?”

“Oh, television I guess. Come along.” He turned quickly away so she would not see his face redden. He was going to have to be a bit more careful with his new G.I. expressions. In the excitement of the moment he had completely forgotten that Shelly was an Air Force officer. They went into Brian’s lab.

“My goodness — what’s that?” she said, pointing to the strange object standing on the workbench. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“It’s easy to understand why. There can’t be more than a half dozen in existence. The latest advance in microtechnology.”

“Looks more like a tree pulled out of the ground — roots and all.” It was a good description. The upper part really did resemble a bifurcated tree trunk with its two multiply jointed metal stalks, each about a foot long, sticking up into the air. Each stalk was tipped with a metal globe that looked very much like a Christmas tree ornament. The two lower stalks were far different. They each divided in two — and each half split in two again. Almost endlessly because with each division the branches became smaller until they were as thin as broom straws.

“Metal brooms?” Shelly asked.

“They do look like that, in a way, but it is something far more complex than that. This is the body that our AI will use. But I’m not too concerned about the AI’s physical shape now. Robot technology is pretty modular, almost a matter of taking parts off the shelf. Even computer components are modular.”

“Then software is your main concern.”