A note on the foregoing — by the editors
The Tame Man!
Readers who ask whether Anton Lehr was a real man ask the wrong question. He is the sort of warning this magazine prints: a danger got up in a beard and a woodpile.
The men at Site B did not mean to make a monster. They meant to make a mind that could go faster and farther than theirs. By their own files, they succeeded. What they could not do was aim it. So they signed a form, opened a gate, and called observation control. They knew the road, the cabin, the mathematics and the four devices. They called one result progress and the other the price of field work.
Our engineers now speak of thinking machines and even artificial intelligence. They promise a machine sharper than man and obedient because man built it. Suppose they succeed. Suppose it acts beyond the laboratory while its makers keep a careful log. When it harms a stranger, is that a failure — or only another result? How would the makers know what had broken? Not from its arguments, if it can out-argue them. Not from its books, if their experts cannot agree. Not even from the dead, if every cost has already been entered under observations.
Such an intelligence need not vanish to escape control. It need only be watched by men who value its output more than its consequences. The Bureau did not find Anton Lehr. His makers knew the road and chose not to use it. His brother — the man who fed him, heard his phrasing in a stranger's newspaper, and turned him in — forced the recall.
The makers' answer is the warehouse: recover the subject, preserve every page, nail and ash, then begin another study. David never received the classified fact that might have changed his choice. He acted anyway, and nobody was glad. That is why he is the hero.
Sleep well. — The editors