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to the proposal of allowing outside observers to spend a few days a week in their laboratories. Laura was selected as an ideal candidate for the job, having learned all the tricks of asking the right questions and ferreting out the answers during her three years with Zeegram. Furthermore she had written scripts herself for her previous employer and knew exactly the kinds of things that writers would be looking for.
    Her assignments included certain groups in IBM’s molecular circuit research facility in upstate New York and the International Space Administration’s orbital construction design center on Long Island as well as a list of departments at CUNY. At around the time that Zeegram was making approaches to their prospective hosts, Professor Vincent Lewis, Dean of the Faculty of Information Processing Sciences at CUNY, was engaged in a fund-raising battle with the Mayor’s Department and the Mayor just happened to have strong connections with a consortium of media companies which included Zeegram. Lewis thus turned out to be very approachable and cooperative indeed, and wasted no time in directing his senior staff members to “have a look round and see if you can come up with something that might interest them.” Professor Edward Richter, who ran the Shannon School of Systems Programming, singled out Dr. Sigmund Hoestler, head of the Department of Self-Adaptive Programming, to pass the buck on to and Hoestler threw it at the HESPER Unit. Thus it eventually came to rest on the desk marked Dr. Raymond E. Dyer.
    Dyer thought that in principle the whole thing was probably a good idea. After all, anything that contributed toward improving the general level of awareness of why people like himself existed couldn’t be a bad thing. He had been prepared to devote a generous portion of his time to whomever Zeegram ended up sending and in fact had quite looked forward to the exercise as promising something different. But when it turned out to be hours of patiently attempting to explain why the notion of living organisms evolving from inorganic matter was not absurd because teapots didn’t sprout legs and walk, or why believing in invisible psychic emanations and in equally invisible quarks was not the same thing, enough rapidly became enough. He bitched repeatedly to Hoestler; Hoestler respectfully drew Richter’s attention to the matter a couple of times; Richter mentioned it to Lewis once over lunch; Lewis didn’t want to know. So Dyer was stuck for the duration.
    When Dyer caught up with her, Laura was standing with Ron in front of a row of electronics racks and cubicles, staring down into what at first sight looked like a large, shallow, tabletop fishtank that measured about two feet square and was somewhere just under a foot in depth. One pair of opposite sides were of glass while the other two were formed by arrays of miniature laser tubes and optical control equipment, all connected by a mess of electrical cables and flexible tubes to a confusion of technology that filled the space underneath. Chris was sitting at a console in front of one of the tank’s see-through sides, thoughtfully contemplating the rows of hieroglyphics glowing on one of its display screens.
    “What we’re doing is programming a learning computer to build up its own generalized conceptual framework with experience,” Ron was saying. “The idea is to get it to be able to recognize and apply reasonable constraints when it attempts to develop a problem-solving strategy. That make sense?” Laura frowned and shook her head reproachfully.
    “Sorry, Ron, I don’t speak computerese. You’ll have to put that into English.”
    “It means we’re finding out how to give machines common sense,” Dyer supplied, moving forward to join them. “When a baby’s born, it doesn’t know anything about the basic properties of the universe that it finds itself in or the other objects that exist there along with it. What it does have is a basic programming