Free The Star by Arthur C. Clarke Page B

scientific staff, for despite anything I may have said the General was not entirely a fool. He was intelligent enough to understand that, if the Project succeeded, there might be more ex-generals around than even the combined boards of management of American industry could comfortably absorb.
    ‘But let’s leave the General for a minute and have a look at the scientists. There were about fifty of them, as well as a couple of hundred technicians. They’d all been carefully screened by the F.B.I., so probably not more than half a dozen were active members of the Communist party. Though there was a lot of talk of sabotage later, for once in a while the comrades were completely innocent. Besides, what happened certainly wasn’t sabotage in any generally accepted meaning of the word….
    ‘The man who had really designed the computer was a quiet little mathematical genius who had been swept out of college into the Kentucky hills and the world of Security and Priorities before he’d really realised what had happened. He wasn’t called Dr Milquetoast, but he should have been and that’s what I’ll christen him.
    ‘To complete our cast of characters, I’d better say something about Karl. At this stage in the business, Karl was only half-built. Like all big computers, most of him consisted of vast banks of memory units which could receive and store information until it was needed. The creative part of Karl’s brain—the analysers and integrators—took this information and operated on it, to produce answers to the questions he was asked. Given all the relevant facts, Karl would produce the right answers. The problem, of course, was to see that Karl did have all the facts—he couldn’t be expected to get the right results from inaccurate or insufficient information.
    ‘It was Dr Milquetoast’s responsibility to design Karl’s brain. Yes, I know that’s a crudely anthropomorphic way of looking at it, but no one can deny that these big computers have personalities. It’s hard to put it more accurately without getting technical, so I’ll simply say that little Milquetoast had to create the extremely complex circuits that enabled Karl to think in the way he was supposed to do.
    ‘So here are our three protagonists—General Smith, pining for the days of Custer; Dr Milquetoast, lost in the fascinating scientific intricacies of his job; and Karl, fifty tons of electronic gear, not yet animated by the currents that would soon be coursing through him.
    ‘Soon—but not soon enough for General Smith. Let’s not be too hard on the General: someone had probably put the pressure on him, when it became obvious that the Project was falling behind schedule. He called Dr Milquetoast into his office.
    ‘The interview lasted more than thirty minutes, and the Doctor said less than thirty words. Most of the time the General was making pointed remarks about production times, deadlines and bottlenecks. He seemed to be under the impression that building Karl differed in no important particular from the assembly of the current model Ford: it was just a question of putting the bits together. Dr Milquetoast was not the sort of man to explain the error, even if the General had given him the opportunity. He left, smarting under a considerable sense of injustice.
    ‘A week later, it was obvious that the creation of Karl was falling still further behind schedule. Milquetoast was doing his best, and there was no one who could do better. Problems of a complexity totally beyond the General’s comprehension had to be met and mastered. They were mastered, but it took time, and time was in short supply.
    ‘At his first interview, the General had tried to be as nice as he could, and had succeeded in being merely rude. This time, he tried to be rude, with results that I leave to your imagination. He practically insinuated that Milquetoast and his colleagues, by falling behind their deadlines, were guilty of un-American inactivity.
    ‘From this