Not true, Oristano patiently corrected the joke-tellers. God decreed, whereas the Colligatarch merely suggested.

He finished scrolling the monitor and saw nothing else requiring his immediate attention. Oh, there was that business about fishing rights in the Aegean again. Those crazy Albanians! He supposed there had to be some people somewhere who wouldn’t have a thing to do with the Colligatarch.

No doubt the Albanians’ argument would be rejected once again, but its presence in his file irritated Oristano. Someone should have intercepted it at a lower level. He rerouted it to Burgess.

He brushed at the plain gray long-sleeved shirt he wore. There were four pockets in the shirt and six in the matching cotton slacks, and all of them were full. Oristano was a note-taker. Paper notes were an anachronism in an electronic world, but he cherished his few eccentricities.

He also wore two watches, one on each wrist. Except the one on his left arm was not a watch but a remote terminal tying him to his office and through it to Logic Central. The wisdom of the ages on one’s wrist, he mused, noting that the sharkskin band was in need of replacement. Wouldn’t it be amusing, he thought, if it broke as he was crossing the lake and it fell into the water, and some cruising fish swallowed the wisdom of the ages?

For forty-five more minutes life and the world proceeded normally. Then things began to go mad.

A faint buzz caught his attention as a red light winked to life above the keyboard. Oristano was standing across the room, as close to the holograph as he could get, luxuriating in the warm, simulated South Pacific sun. Muttering, he walked back to his chair and thumbed a button. The intricate keyboard served largely to accept lists and figures awkward to enter by chip or verbal command.

For now he would use the synthesizer. He always enjoyed talking to the Colligatarch. He’d programmed the current voice himself, taking into account millions of choices before settling on a polite male tenor. It was lightly accented, soothing, utterly unbelligerent. A visitor from France who was something of a cinema buff once told Oristano the voice reminded him of a long-dead English actor named Ronald Colman. Curious. Oristano had pulled one of the actor’s films and run it on an office monitor.

Yes, that was much like what the Colligatarch sounded like, except for a certain coldness no mechanically generated voice could completely eliminate.

“Good day, Colligatarch.”

“Good morning, Martin,” answered the machine.

“I saw the light on the console and heard your call. It's unusual for you to call me. Something wrong?”

“Yes, there is, Martin. I would have alerted you immediately on arriving, but I thought you would be more relaxed if you first had time to take care of the morning’s business. To take care of the routine before dealing with the out-of-the-ordinary.”

How like the machine, Oristano mused, to put whatever concerned it on hold so that a single human being could enjoy his morning coffee.

“Then there’s something out of the ordinary?”

“Yes. Sit down if you want to, Martin.”

Oristano didn’t really want to sit down. If it was possible that the trouble was minor, he would have liked to go and stand in front of the soothing holograph. But the machine’s message alarmed him. He took his seat and gazed expectantly into the twin video pickups.

“There is a danger,” the Colligatarch told him. Oristano was now confused as well as concerned. After all, the world was full of dangers. Earthquakes in China, volcanoes erupting in the highly active North American Pacific range, airplanes crashing in Brazil, and that interisland ferry capsizing off Hokkaido. Catastrophe was a daily occurrence, though there was less of it since the advent of the Colligatarch. There were no more famines, for example, and the incidence of death by automobile had fallen sharply on the autobahns of the world. But this sounded different.

“The danger,” said the Colligatarch, “is to myself.”

That made Oristano sit up and take notice. There was no change of inflection in the mechanical voice, nothing else to emphasize the graveness inherent in those few words. Such articifical verbal enhancements were not necessary. Oristano was instantly on alert.

It wasn’t the first time, of course. There were precedents—Phenaklions, flat-earthers, religious nuts, all anxious to substitute their personal superstitions for rule by knowledge. None had come any closer to the Authority complex than the top of the mountain, not even the African fanatics with their stolen plutonium bomb. Ironic, that incident. After somehow managing to slip by dozens of checkpoints and defense sensors, they’d all perished in a simple avalanche.

It took such an extraordinary threat to make the Colligatarch interrupt its regular schedule and that of the Chief Programmer. Oristano listened intently.

“The threat involves not only myself, but the future of the human race.” Such facility for understatement, Oristano mused. How calm and quiet it is. Just like me. But is it also equally uneasy in its guts?

“Details,” Oristano demanded. “Where does the threat come from?”

“I don’t know,” said the machine.

The initial pronouncement had Oristano upset. Now he was more than upset, he was shaken. In forty years of close association with the Colligatarch, from junior chipshifter to Chief of Operations, he couldn’t recall a single previous instance of the machine’s replying to a simple question with “I don’t know.”

He considered calling in a witness to confirm that he was actually hearing it. Had some prevarication programming somehow been slipped into his junction? If this was some kind of elaborate joke by one of his subordinates …

The machine could not read minds, but it could collate such factors as visual appearance, blood pressure, pupil dilation, and more and render a guess.

“This is not a practical joke, Martin. The threat I refer to is very real.”

“I accept that. All right, if you don’t know where the threat originates, then tell me the nature of the threat."

“I don’t know.”

Oristano tried again, a little desperate now. “How will the threat manifest itself?”

“I don’t know, Martin.” There was just a hint of sadness in the synthesized voice.

Oristano started to rise from the chair. “I think it’s time to call in the general staff.”

“No, Martin. Not yet.”

He hesitated, half in and half out of the chair. Thanks to regular workouts in the gym, daily swims, occasional frigid dips in Lake Lucerne, and good genes, he was in excellent physical condition. It was rare when he was conscious of his age. Now he was.

He forced himself to ease back into the chair. “You tell me there’s a threat to you and to the human race.”

“Yes,” said the Colligatarch.

“But you don’t know the nature of the threat, its origin, or how it will manifest itself?”

“That is true.”

“And you still think there’s no reason for me to call a staff meeting?”

“That is correct also. Have patience, Martin.”

“You must have some data on this threat, otherwise you cannot have concluded that there is a threat.”

“I’m sorry, Martin. I have no hard data to pass along to you at this point. I must ask, however, that you accept my evaluation. I intuit the threat.”

I intuit. Oristano sat and considered the machine’s words thoughtfully. There was no question that the Colligatarch possessed a consciousness, though its relationship to human consciousness was still a matter of considerable debate among theologians and philosophers as well as physicists and cyberneticists. When asked, the machine itself reacted ambiguously to the question, unable to produce anything more profound by way of reply than I intuit, therefore I am. While catchy, it was not an acceptable last word on the subject.

Certainly Oristano, who was intimately familiar with the kilometers of microcircuitry and molecular memories should know better than anyone else what the machine was capable of. But he hadn’t worried about it much. He was far more concerned with the machine’s morality. Of that he was confident.

He sat quietly until the initial impact of the machine’s words had faded and his heart had slowed. “Would I be right in assuming this danger is not imminent?”

“You would be. It is close, but we have time enough to cope.”

“How? How do you expect me to deal with a threat when you can’t identify its nature, source, or perpetrators?’ ’

“You humans and your obsession with time. Remember that when I speak of time, my frame of reference differs considerably from your own.”