The crux of all this display was an Ethical Decision Machine which Goldwasser built to give a working demonstration. He called it Delphic I. It was a large grey steel console with a teleprinter keyboard and a series of dials. If you typed a moral dilemma on the keyboard a red light came on, a dial indicated the depth, breadth, and intensity of the moral processes taking place within, measured respectively in pauls, calvins, and moses, and the teleprinter element typed the machine’s solution.

One could, for instance, ask it: ‘Should a man value the beautiful above the good?’

The machine might reply: ‘That which is truly beautiful must also be good: that which is truly good must also be beautiful.’

To which Goldwasser had set it to add: ‘Your Majesty.’

On the last night before the dress rehearsal, Goldwasser worked late in the new wing on his own, improving a graph here, settling the white rats for the night there. Just as he was turning off the lights to leave, his eye fell on the grey excellence of Delphic I, and he went over to it and contemplated it profoundly. In many ways it seemed to him to be a much more solid and satisfying achievement than his sad struggles with the murder poll and the paralysed girl in his own department. He smiled at it, and stroked it, and thought for a strange moment it had purred in response. He sat down in front of the keyboard, and gazed at it dreamily with his head between his hands, until the image of the keyboard in his right eye and the image of it in his left eye floated gently apart from one another, and left him contemplating the void of thought between. His hand drifted absently down to the keys, and with one finger he picked out the question: ‘What is the good life?’

He let the two images drift apart again. And then, in each image, he seemed to see a key depressed. He sat up with a start. The machine had typed:

%

%? What sort of ethical advice was this? He stared at it. He had not set the machine to start handing out cryptic comments like %. As he stared more letters followed.

NP CO?MENR

A strange cold tide washed through his veins, NP CO?MENR was positively delphic. Besides, the machine had not added ‘Your Majesty.’ Goldwasser felt like Dr. Frankenstein. His creature had got away from him.

Again the machine wrote.

NO CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCMMMMMM

Goldwasser began to get over his first numb shock. Clearly, some sort of human or sub-human agency was at work. Some sort of spirit had got into the machine. He stretched out his hands, which were now starting to shake with the reaction, and typed unevenly on the sensitive keys:

WHO THERE?

There was a pause. Then the machine replied:

NNO CCCCOMMMMMMENNT

Goldwasser gazed at the words, trying to take them in. The machine started again of its own accord: