ITJII SPECIAL EDITION: JAPAN 2000

\\_ >* X onnnji VOL. 7 NO. 9 JUNE 1985 EDITOR IN CHIEF & DESIGN DIHECTOR: BOB GUCCIONE PRESIDENT: KATHY KEETON

EDITOR: GURNEY WILLIAMS III GRAPHICS DIRECTOR FRA'-JK DEVINO MANAGING EDITOR: PAUL HILTS

CONTENTS PAGE FIRST WORD Opinion Hisako Matsubara 6 OMNIBUS Contributors 10 COMMUNICATIONS Correspondence 12 FORUM Dialogue 14 EARTH Environment David Roe 18 LIFE Biomedicine Marcia Rockwood 24 SPACE- Comment James Kittield 28 BODY Health Kathleen McAulirfe 30 MtND Behavior Doug Garr 34 SCULPTURE The Arts Cree McCree 38 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Computers Peter J. Ognibene 40 CONTINUUM Data Bank 43

U-'.-l i ZED DREAM DWELLING Article Tim Onosko 52 THE MIND LIKE A STRANGE Fiction Tom Maddox BALLOON 60 ROBOTIC SOUL Article Douglas Colligan 66 THE BRAIN' RACE Article Phoebe Hoban 72 EXPO '85 Pictorial Doug Garr 80 THE MAN WHO Fiction Edward Bryant 90 ALWAYS WANTED TO TRAVEL ERWIN CHARGAFF Interview Anthony Liversidge 98 ANTIMATTER UFOs, etc. 107 STARS Astronomy Joel Davis 126 BREAKTHROUGHS Technology Henry Wouk 140 COMPETITION Oxymorons Scot Morris 142 METEORIC SUCCESS Phenomena Ken Cooper 148 GAMES Diversions Scot Morris 152 LAST WORD Humor Al Goldstein 154

This month's cover is a detail OMNI,

l KM!" ..-5&£,i :; from a fisherman's festival je [taid „ ,. i.. at Ns«- i;.n ,i ii i .in: ,., .. ; ,n „ , - i;gsh::,=:: Fx--.js-nt.ii N,i 1.11-=-: /....j ,., O-f,,:-: Vf. ,.= :.;;- , coat from the Shirahama : :( lh s&; by Omni P ^ 3 -ssorvss-. :sl. Sl2i .186 S1ijm OVi.-,'l :-: -.- Maritime Museum. The kimono, sfii; i-ss-cWk Or,- f& A by M(-ie(i.;h-3jiiJS r! - Cor; si: sj.r.iMi.ed i.-c U.-i A C=j:ui-;!.l J S "Snii^ Japan's eleganl.national Dis:ribjied m :hs U K tiyCOMAG T dress, illustrates the country's reverence for tradition. lidental. Sijbscr plk.™ :.JS AFO-J?- ;.n= 55 The turtle and the 12.50 in U.S.. AFO, (. iss|..i)f: 1-.51V1-247 1- crane signify and ada ;i.t.'-=j 1 B00-532-1272. ic-.v.h The publisher tl sc's it long lite and prosperity. A OMNI ; .".!' ,:;:. . ni" 'i ir, As a rtisuil. Japan was n a m-,.ich better

Goi'iic , si. ; ,.;, cathedrae ot Eoiope and gazed pesi'len to dee wJ'n wi . >' i /! i i ," i ! .;: : i finally came. Under mier-se ore; ure

archltecluro ir: . - ii '..' ': built ine thirteenm century, !i . i i,' ii'ii, ; ' m creates a powerful, even dizzying, impres- in the mja-tBOOs Japan was i'mafy forced

' sion. While fhese hoc or worship today to a symbolize Ine high point, of Middle Ages progress. Bu: eve:; n acquiescing. Japar;. civilization, fh'eyalsc reflect the mosi bscauseof Js uiiioue social Structure sophisticated technology of their time: in and cultural fab-o. was oetter prepared to : tects accept she encroachmeri o nduslry Irian learned to measure the jhickriess of the any of Js European com empcaries were: pillars, Ihe curvature of the siipportlng arcs, In Europe, as in the United States, an., and the weight o{ the roof. And they were agrarian structure prevailed unit the -Indus-

immensely proud of the=r accomp ishmenls. ioal Age. Ckies of 1 mlillor people came Today, however, when architects and into being Only ;n the wai;e of Jus revolution.

1 r engineers ' span Phage. ; oye bays, erect Tnis explosive, chaotic growth caused a"''; y

'- skyscrapers of glass- and steel, or. stretch stratiflcaiion of class that undermined' . ;;

' ilberoptic cables across oceans, their the agrarian sooloty. Life became a harsh ;

: :: peers arc ess wi; nc to accept inese works nightmare loi ho i n :.-.: .e-e

ill ! :..,.'. , |! „ | :Cpji forced to subsist in major circs :--.: an

merely shrug their shoulders' and sav. abidmo aversion lo technology resutfed. This.'.-: ' 'That's : justtecnno.oqy." implying thai culture : 'Mi' on! nui i. ihi; ..:... The Japanese, however nao no.sucn '"' In ihe West. It s commonly oelieved that unpleasant exoerlences, Their transition to

: ; technology ecu cuiiure rupres-jrv a contra- a riev; presented ni . diction in terms. Traditionalists say Ideological break with the past The -ao'

'

Technology i itic: or i I . : red swell, beco WORD creates a spiritual void: technology destroys anc the human analogue " in Japan, no sucn within an ordered nistericsr Irame^.;.-- : ByHisakb MStsubara Stigma exists, those who wish ic reverse insteac of reackng wiih aisdair '.-?-.

1 modem developments are unable tcgalii emoraced these changes wl:.n wonce :;

: . 4A fantasy has any sorl d consrltuency arm

: •'>: arisen that Japan's - s-'-qi- :h s reason, overwhe^mine Japanese conscousness, '!radit:cna tr-:.

1 1

ir 1 majority of Japanese are om- technology. odei i value ; c : future holds Their -interest In progress has a strong in such harmony.

; no limits, and 200Q historical precsden' The.eahy formation o Technology then, hue become an Integ-'a ' large urban centers In Japan and the part of "he culture. Fh .iiir .:. m i lias become a. '. wilo w-"!'cn the . : . case Japanese learned new iplentisfs and eng.-ne i , ; with: . year glossed a . : urban mores provide important insight. hey give arl s , id ci nun. / GOO 1 .'.' Inr; rosy veneer. ^ yoaf-olb cedar Buddhist temple bu Ii

Japan was already a world power 400 so Ingeniously thai !; carv.vith stare a' yea's ago. R;ch in rare rneiais, Japan eauhouaKes and :ypi;oons. Is fio yr-o^ 1 was called the Lane o Sivnr by greedy cherished than low .( ;>\ ora

.explorers, wi the> eyes over slxleenih- skyscraper consfn.;cl' :-d over i

century maps In 1600 the flew o! silver I lie not want lo crea;o mc Impression

; ii ; th lap i'i t i ..: eti oxea oM'ne ei i mat oblivious \o 10c Chris'ian wo iecr treasures taken by Spanish ships from the life'Buf.ho'maite:' how hea;ed newspaper :

pil aged ruins of the Aztecs and Incas eriil The European colonial powers were unsuc- al edge that--"

cessful in controlling the land : of silver. can be delected in tne Wesi. ho; -.n ueoau And as the Japanese perceived that their there exists a spirit of conciliation. Neither

1 .. ' r , , i'".:, ! ., i .: ; 3: futurists nor Iradmonaiists seeK lo a enale J-'oy ciosec their harbors, armed tfiei- each other. coosllines. and withdrew to; more ihan 200 Because of this I'ifelleciuai envixcment years—from 1639 to 1653 from 'he she Japanese can handle leounological intruding - gaze of the wodc at large. Jit mas i ii o.nall Jaoa; n;

Rut 'menially lightly veiled behind a strength owes miuoh to lis oast And each

thick I cover of bamboo screens, ;ife stirred, year when return to Japan, I am amazed in spite 0- its reheat from the world s d;pio- by the euphor a lhat enve'oos Japan's mate orde; Japan remained a very rien modem world. Fhe lairu l:arbors no great nation [he population. surpassed 30 million, hidden rears The reverse seems ;o have and this throng oi humanity was packed occurred, Most .Japanese are rattier oosisLc :; :''!' . l.h: .: :..;. about life at the turn of "he century. A know": today as Tokyo, accommodated more fantasy has. in 'aor. a-sen that the future million '!!.: .' than 1 :. "' : people before New-York hold;, ; I ;:: even existed. rosy veneer: QP As early as 200 yea's berorc- Western Hi 33 indusi! iailzaron. the Japanese were accus- zcaaim.erj novefsr, ;s inn auttior n! Cranea ,:..: tomed oniyto no; the problems of.u'Oan D'.ivk :;...,; ;' life bul also .vitality lo the of the big city : : :..;.... -;: ,-.. The ii: - : . :

: ".(;;. people adapted well lo urban demands, ..i. ! -Veil. NTRIBUTOR^ Dnnruii

Matthew Perry entered wrapped in red tape," writer Commodore says Phoebe experts I spoke to seemed so confident Edo Bay on the steamship Susque- Hoban. But her story "The Brain Race" they could succeed." hanna in the summer of 1853. His (page 72} suggests that in at least one area But in one arena, at least, that success is mission: to sign a commercial treaty with the the Japanese are moving with dispatch already here. In the Breakthroughs column Japanese, jolting the figurehead emperor into the future. They have identified artificial ("Shopping by Robot," page 140), writer and his medieval nation into the present, intelligence as the most important ingredi- Henry Wouk describes a totally automated apparently against their will. But though the ent for global economic supremacy. Their Japanese store, where smart machines Japanese at first resisted change, they goal, to develop fifth-generation computers manage everything from the stockroom to ultimately embraced modernization, ingest- that simulate the process of human the checkout counter. Robot personnel, ing 200 years of Western thought in less thought, has set the agenda for the rest of Wouk notes, even slice, wrap, and price the than half a century. Although innovations the world. But Hoban .adds, "Despite their cold cuts in the deli. from transistors to tape recorders continued pragmatic approach, the Japanese have an And families shopping in these futuristic to originate in the West, it was the incredibly childlike quality in their fascina- markets may eventually be living nearby, Japanese who developed them beyond tion with gadgets." in another Japanese innovation. In "Digitized the inventors' wildest expectations. Today Once Japan's fifth-generation brains are Dream Dwelling" (page 52), writer Tim writer Japanese Hisako Matsubara notes in complete, they will drive a team of robots, Onosko describes the new field ol computer- First Word (page 6), "Those who wish to possibly the most daring machines ever aided home design. A computer generates reverse modern developments are unable built. senior editor Omni Douglas Colligan a detailed printout of the prospective buyer's to gain any sort of constituency." journeyed to Tokyo, visiting four major dream house, and in less than a month In describing this technological bent, the laboratories and a dozen scientists in search the owner has moved into a factory- Japanese have often used the expression of these new-age drones. And in his report constructed, customized home. wakon yosai—Japanese spirit, foreign "Robotic Soul" (page 66), he reveals that Computers figure in this month's fiction ways; Japan can adopt techniques from the current research may result in the as well. In "The Mind Like a Strange Balloon" others, yet retain an identity uniquely its world's first hazard robots, smart machines (page 60), by Tom Maddox, a computer own. And that ability, as stated in Mind ("Pro- that go where most people fear to tread; consultant investigates a troubled sofar Tech Psychology," page 34), is rooted in into the radioactive interior of a nuclear- station. In the process, he comes to know a Japanese philosophy itself. The Japanese power plant; down to the uncharted ocean fellow scientist and an unusual biological hold that all things are interrelated, explains floor; into burning buildings; up to the computer, This is the first story by Maddox writer Doug Garr. If the future is irrevocably rings of Saturn and the craters of the moon. to appear in any publication. tied to the past, then there is a desire to The Japanese have funded the program Omni also congratulates regular accommodate the innovative and new. with $88 million over an eight-year period, contributor Richard Wolkomir, whose Story Because of the protocols of the past and Colligan notes, and their goal is clear. "Quark City" (February 1984) recently the Japanese penchant for formality, "They plan to build the ultimate robot—an received the prestigious Westinghouse- American journalists must make some - intelligent, autonomous, mobile machine- AAAS award for outstanding science cultural adjustments. "When researching something we here in the West have been reporting. The award was presented by the the article and interviewing the Japanese, I trying to for decades," do he says. "What American Association for the Advancement often felt as if I were dealing with origami was amazing to me is that most of the of Science on May 28.DO 10 OMNI I

^~J B. M i "J 1 HTEF CDnnnnunjicATiariJS

Three Mile Island Update Navigational Error

Once again the citizens ol the Three Mile I enjoy your publication and the various

Island area are justified for distrusting odd subjects lhal it covers from time to

the nuclear industry. time. But I have a complain! about "Demon Douglas H. Bedell stated that there was Sea," by Phoebe Hoban [Antimatter, no evidence of melted fuel in the damaged February 1985]. Hoban claims that in this reactor [Forum, March 1985], but several area, "Magnetic and true north are aligned,

months after Bedell wrote his letter the making it impossible for a compass to Department of Energy revealed that 10 to distinguish between them." 20 tons of uranium fuel did indeed melt, A magnetic compass tells only magnetic

some of it twice. The director of the Three north, and if you are after true north, you Mile Island Unit 2 reactor was quoted have to take a few sightings of the sun

by the Harrisburg Patriot as saying, "It's or stars. There is a line running through the

hard for me to imagine that the damage magnetic pole and true pole, and I think could be much worse." you will find nothing remarkable about any

In 1980 the Rogovin commission's report of the places it passes through. on the nuclear accident esiimated that The Demon Sea may well have something when cooling water was restored, we may to tell us, but please save your space for have been only 30 minutes away from the truly mysterious. There is plenty of that! the so-called China syndrome. Bill Rudersdorf

Furthermore, in February 1984, Metro- Houston politan Edison pleaded guilty to one count, and no contest to six counts, of falsifying Mission to Mars reactor-cool an: water- eaK 'a;es six months Regarding James E. Oberg's "Racing the before the accident. And in November Soviets to Mars" [March 1985]: Doesn't

1984, a federal judge convicted a former anyone else find it infantile that only an us- senior plant supervisor of cheating on against-lhem, life-is-a-big-football-game operator- qualification exams, making him mentality can get anything done in this

the first person to be prosecuted tor criminal world? Millions live at the edge of starvation, offenses at a nuclear facility. and both the United States and the Soviet We feel that the national news media Union must have their own programs to often ignore what's going on here at Three reach Mars?

Mile Island, and we thank Omni for continu- I suggest thai the effort to reach Mars be ing to focus attention on this issue. made an international effort, funded by

Scott Portzline and Lisa Caruso . the demilitarization of East and West Harrisburg, PA Germany, with the headquarters and future

launching sites to. be built on the border Smart Thinking between those two countries.

Hurray for logic and Dr. Edward de Bono! I could get excited about that.

While reading his interview [March 1985], I Paul Rosner felt a strong kinship with De Bono and his Richmond, VA ideas on effective thinking.

When I was a child, my father always Caption Correction taught me to think effectively and to make A photo caption in "Kindling Courage" my solutions as uncomplicated as possible. {April 1985, page 46) incorrectly identified He said that for every pound of intellect, firewalker Ted Buffington as John Buffing- you need seven pounds of common sense. ton, and John Passanante as Ted Passa-

' i have always remembered this, and when nante. Although both men were on Anthony

a problem or obstacle arises, I use this Robbins's staff when the picture was taken, effective thinking process. Thank you tor they have not worked with Robbins for bringing De Bono to my attention. more than a year, and any implication that Frances Panico DiPilla they are currently associated with Robbins New York was unintended. DO Beauty is more than bone deep, thanks to Toshiba.

Toshiba electronics now draw complete vascular systems without disturbing the patient.

You can get X-rays of vascular systems by memory. injecting a contrast medium... but then, X-ray again with a contrast medium and you also get pictures of the bones. the computer displays clear vascular Toshiba technology gets rid of the bones. images by subtracting the bones, which X-ray once without a contrast medium and allows easier diagnosis of vascular record the bone images in the computer's disorders. Miracles like this come from Toshiba electronics technology, where everything we produce makes life a little better. Which is what electronics is all about. At Toshiba, electronics come to life. DGnALRJJOBOGRAPHYSreTEM DiGIFORMER TOSHIBAIn Touch with Tomorrow DIALOGUE FDRUfUl

: Omni welcomes specuittiion, theories, Therefore. I hose of us who focus on the was nncouiagod lo see I ha: Kathleen commentary, dissent, and questions irom beneficial effects o: electromagnetic radia- McAuliffe courageously revealed some of readers in this open forum. We invite you tion in the clinic must prove scientifically the hidden research on the effects of to use this column So voice your hopes that each new apo teat ion is justified by its low-intensity, oscillatory magnetic fields.

about the future and to contribute to the safety and effectiveness. I believe that power utilities have some kind ot informal dialogue that provokes C. Andrew L. Bassetf, M.D. control over what American journalists thought and general-::-, oughs. Emeritus Professor of Orthopedic Surgery publish about them, especially il the infor- Please note that we cannot return submis- Columbia University mation could affect a pending lawsuit

sions and that the opinions expressed here New York against that utility. I feel that my research are not necessarily those oi the magazine. on the effect of extremely weak fields "The Mind Fields" was an excellent synopsis (comparable lo those emitted by power Mind Fields Revisited ol some ol the exciting work going on in lines) on living organisms was never

:

I read Kathleen McAi_.»i fe's article "The the field of bioeleclromagnelics. published in this country because utility

Mind Fields" [February 1985] with interest . The potentially useful applications of companies pressured the editors of every and some concern. Her comprehensive electromagnetic fields, however, are U.S. journal in my field of study. report showed that electromagnetic fields counterbalanced by evidence of hazards My work has appeared in the Swiss can alter the function of certain biological of even greater potential. Power- International Journal of Biometeorology, systems, ana i: callee for a better under- transmission lines and communications and my findings are well-known in Europe standing of the discipline o' electrobiology. technology have changed the earth's but not in the United States, Far more emphasis was given to electromagnetic envi reamer:: more in the Because the Swiss government has unproved claims aboul the dangers of this last few decades than at any lime in the always been aware of the public's right to form of energy, however, than to its geologic past. In the spectrum of human new information and of the importance benefits. Based on a paragraph-by- disease, we are already seeing changes thai ol public safety, it now runs most ol its power paragraph count, the negative aspects can best be explained on this basis. lines underground. Research into electro- outweigh the positive ones by a margin of Unfortunately, both government and magnetic fields may yet yield great benefit to nearly five lo one. industry have denied the existence of this all mankind.

The- most serious shortcoming of the problem, suppressed scientific debate, Daniel N.. Russell article was its tendency to lump together all and spread misinformation. Tampa manner of eleclromagneiic phenomena. By publishing this factual article, Omni

This leaves the reader with the impression has performed a service of inestimable From 1967 to 1968 I worked for the Defense that video dispiay tormina's, power lines, value to the American public. Intelligence Agency and was stationed in and microwaves may he harmiul simply RobertO. Becker. M.D. the U.S. embassy in Moscow. From my

because they have something to do with Professor of Orthopedic Surgery office window I could see something pointed

the electromagnetic specfrum. That's Upsfate Medical Center at our building. Whenever I asked what it

il. like saying, "Because arsenic is a drug and Syracuse. NY was, I was always told lo ignore a poison, all drugs are poisonous." Several years after leaving Ihe service, I

In 1962 I coauthored a proposal Congratulations to Kathleen McAuliffe for read thai the Soviets had been beaming advocating exogenous [outside the body] her article "The Mind Fields," For the first microwaves at our embassy. Your article and endogenous {inside the body] use time, a major magazine has called the implies thai the State jcpartment had known of electrical and magnetic fields toconlrol public's attention to the magnitude of the about it for some time—perhaps they cell function in bone remodeling and repair. problems associated with exiiomoy low wanted to learn from the situation while

Since then, an uphill battle has been frequency magnetic fields. For more than a blaming any ill effects on the Russians. I waged to lay a sound scientific foundation for decade, our network of scientists has recognize that experiments are needed for this new therapeutic approach. Neverthe- taken a deep interest in this problem, which the advancement of mankind, but I think less, since 1972 more than 40,000 patients has yet to be appropriately addressed by the "volunteers" shou o at leasl know what with ununited fractures have been safely anyofiicial world organization. they're in for.

treated with pulsed electromagnetic fields. . We admire Omnl's courage in publishing I don't smoke and haven't shown any

This breakthrough may be in jeopardy, this, information in such an understandable signs of cancer, but 1 do feel as if a sword

1 however, unless we dismiss our unreason and well-researched manner. is hanging over my head. I can empathize able fears of'this technology. Dr. Andrew Michrowski with the Vietnam vets suing Ihe govern- Undoubtedly some types of nonionizing President ment over agent orange. electromagnetic radiation can cause Planetary Association for Clean Energy Sam Warren harmful effects under specific conditions. Ottawa, Ont. San DiegoDO 14 OMNI DYNAMOS AND VIRGIN! EARTH By David Roe

note: In 1976, three years became the foundation for 100 years of from Editors' George Roe's centra I -station dynamo after the first Arab oil crisis, physi- steady and profitable growth in the public- in the first place. cist Amory Lovins used the term utility industry. And as that growth contin- Like the old idea, the new one was only a soft energy to describe conservation ued, the public developed unquestioning different way of looking at what was already and renewable resouicos tike solar collec- trust in utility executives. there. And as with the original, the essence tors and windmills. He also showed that contrary The notion, that utilities might of the new idea was a commercial insight: the potential for such technology was be completely capable of missing their own how a huge business could be built where far larger than anyone thought had In best interests, got its start in a small, no business had existed before. response, the energy establishment said linoleum-floored office across the hall from The father of this idea was Zach Willey, a soft energy was too small, too expensive, the boys' shower room in what used to brilliant economist with wild hair, obvious and too unreliable to make much difference be a fraternity house in Berkeley. There two physical strength, and a presence so in practice. And that attitude might have men, nearly as young as George Roe intense that it borders on fierceness. In 1975 prevailed if not for the efforts of a team had been, stariea worw-oq Together in late Zach came back to the United States from of young environmentalists who tackled the 1975. Neither one was a businessman, a project in the Middle East and started "hard" energy policies of the Pacific Gas and neither one was seeking to make a work as a full-time environmentalist, joining and Electric Company (PG&E), the largest fortune lor himself. The two were profes- Thomas J. Graff in the West Coast office utility in the United States. In the excerpt sional environmentalists, and their salaries of the Environmental Defense Fund. At that follows, environmental lawyer David Roe came from a national, nonprofit organiza- thirty-one, two years Zach's senior. Tom was describes the struggle. tion. Nevertheless, their ambition was on a already a veteran in the professional In 1879, a lew months before Edison scale with George Roe's ambition. It was environmental movement. His experience invented the incandescent bulb, great- large my enough that the old fraternity walls, had convinced him that power plants grandfather started what seems to have saturated with hundreds of late-night were going to be an enormous source of been the world's first central electricity undergraduate notions on how to save the future environmental problems. Tom did not company, using a dynamo he was stuck world, would have mocked them if they know what any specific utility was planning with as collateral- on a bad debt. He was had spoken aloud. The two young men had to build, but he had read rhapsodic projec- twenty-seven, wore a mustache, and. like in mind as radical a rearrangement of tions of a string of 90 nuclear plants dotted many people in San Francisco after the society's investments as the one resulting along the California coast, one every ten gold rush, found it hard not to think visionary miles from Oregon to Mexico, by the year thoughts about the city's future. Nor was 2000. Some versions also included a he wrong, The one-lamp California Electric handful of giant coal plants for the balance. Light Company found investors and The question was what to do about it. customers with the same faith, grew. The usual tack of environmentalists was adapted to new equipment, outdid and to argue that new power plants would absorbed competitors when they appeared, not be needed if the country would shift to and merged its way into what became a policy of lower growth. To many people the largest utility in the United States, the on both sides of the argument, low growth Pacific Gas and Electric Company. and soft energy were seen as matters of The insight that made my great-grand- almost religious principle. But by the time he father's fortune— and then many others'— arrived at the environmental defense fund, was not a technological breakthrough of Zach Willey was already thinking about any kind. Dynamos that made electricity had a different approach, already been invented and so had electric Zach's approach accepted all of the arc lamps. But although it was new and principles that the electricity industry exciting, the dynamo was thought of only preached tor itself. Utilities should grow at as a kind of appliance, like a hot-water whatever rate would match the growth heater, to be installed at any gold mine or of customer demand; they should build what grand hotel that wanted electric light. No was cheapest and most reliable to meet one before had thought of the stuff coming that demand; they should use their own out of the dynamo—the electric current— investment dollars, without government help; as a commodity in its own right, a product and they should be allowed to charge that could be made in one central place customers accordingly. Zach's approach and then sold to the general public. Once was conventional to a fault. If it had any that centralized system took hold, though, it ideology at all, it was the ordinary ideology ' .

of capitalist industry, reinforced by traditional he mimicked eil.-ier suffer rg or sleep. The conservation, which seomeu *o mean

principles of state regulation for public third indispensable presence was the something different every time it appeared

: utilities. Zach s rnply !hcuyh that those PUC statf lawyer, Elinore Morgan, who in his '.cslimohy, but. never to mean a hardheaded principles, based on that enjoyed trying to sma.l holes in poke Robert reduction in energy use. If I insisted on that traditional ideology, might not lead to giant Ohlbach's studied demeanor. particular meaning of the word, he finally power plants. They might lead instead to The three principals seemed to treat the conceded near the end of the day, then his the very things that the utility industry hearing process as a set of slow-moving testimony had nothing to do with conserva- was vigorously trying to tend off. cal sthenics, which ran for six hours a day, tion whatsoever At four o'clock he was No utility on the verge of committing a four days a week, interrupted by frequent excused, and he hurried out of the room with billion dollars to a single-unit nuclear-power recesses. The wind of momentous'change Ohlbach following anxiously. plant had ever looked to see how much that had carried me through nights ot Senior vice president Shackelford was electricity that money would produce preparation did not seem to be stirring more poised and better protected; but luck if spent on the things that Amory Lovins anything inside the hearing room—at least again provided me with a chance to and other soft-minded environmentalists not yet. dramatize the difference between what would soon talking Utilities be about. thought Unexpectedly, we got help fromtwo of PG&E claimed as its policy and how it was of those things as symbols of a threat to PG&E's highest-ranking officers. Barton W. actually conducting its business.

the established order. In a way, so did most Shackelford was in charge of electricity Morgan, the first to cross-examine of the people who favored them. Zach expansion for PG&E. He was the man who Shackelford, pointed out that electricity Willey thought of them as opportunities for turned forecasts into hardware. PG&E's does not have to be generated in a plant investment. He saw them the way George coming dependence on nuclear power was that does nothing else; it can also be Roe saw the dynamo. Zach's argument effectively Shacke fo'c s decision. John generated in tandem with industrial would not mention the environment at all. W. Sproul was his counterpart for the side processes, more or less as a by-product of The Pacific Gas and Electric Company of PG&E thai su.o.o'ied natural gas. what is already going on. The process is was under vague orders to do its best When the two men arrived in the hearing called cogeneratior. Iv'orgar had brought for energy conservation, orders handed up the fact that PG&E had been studying down by the Cafifornia Public Utilities cogeneration for a long time. Commission (PUC). Tom and Zach decided When my turn came, it was easy to go to enter a PUC case to make those orders over the various potential cogeneration'

stick. And during the preliminaries, while projects that appeared on PG&E's own lists, ^While searching searching through a windowless room full ask Shackelford to cull the ones he had of documents at PG&E headquarters in through a windowless room any reason to think would not work, and then

downtown San Francisco, they lound the get him to add up the remaining total. It full of documents one piece of paper they needed to drama- came to 3,150 megawatts, the equivalent tize their point. in downtown San Francisco, of three nuclear-power plants. PG&E

I "When saw it, I knew immediately what they found planned to invest .n ten coal- and nuclear- it was," Zach remembers. "It was just one oower plants during ".he next decade: the one piece of paper page, but it was a dynamite page." but the company's computer-printed The little one-page scratch sheet, deep they needed construction plans, sitting in a manila folder in a pile of computer-generated chaff, on the tab-e in front of mo. showed no to dramatize their points showed that PG&E was planning to build intention of investing m any cogeneration at ten new nuclear- and coal-power plants in all during that period, the next 18 years at the cost of Wide I was coss-examining, Zach and $13,102,935,000—without committing a a twenty-two-yea r -olc computer program- single dollar to conservation. Since that was mer named Dan Kirshner were busy money that would have to come out ot room to testify, the normally n/umpy Coffey producing a historic analysis, laying oVit for everyone's electricity bills, EDF was entitled suddenly roused himself to the role of the first time the way in which a public to ask whether those ten plants were really solicitous host, concerned tor the conve- utility could mee: its growth needs—and the most economical way to develop new nience and dignity of honored guests. The make its profit—without relying on either

power. When I at the Environ- showed up deference to rank surprised me, and I new nuclear or new coal plants. mental Defense Fund a few months later I worried that the opportunity tor cross- The 125-page analysis, nicknamed the inherited the case. examination would be even narrower than I "greenie' because- oi it:: green cover, expected. had But on the afternoon that I was Zach's masterpiece. In one dense The incarnation of PG&E in the hearing was scheduled to question Sproul, Examiner appendix, cover ng six different alternative- room was Robert Ohlbach, a calm, trim, Coffey did not come back from lunch. energy sources, Zach had assembled pipe-smoking lawyer in his forties who Unexpectedly—and for the only time in the what PG&E's several planning departments invariably wore a charcoal- gray, three-piece entire case— an emergency had called had seemed unable to find. Here, the suit from Brooks Brothers. His manner him away. A'tiearing examiner named John appendix said in effect, are the exact perfectly fit his clothes. To adversaries of Gillanders sat in instead. opportunities this company should be all kinds gentlemanly, he was reasonable, Examiner Gillanders. I quickly discovered, looking at. it was a surprisingly mundane patient. and The impression he created, was not nearly as impressed with rank. list: specific pieces o- efficiency hardware, that was the great utN ly accepted attacks And Sprout's testimony was not otherwise like attic insulation and less wasteful air as part of its public duty, and it was impressive. He had sworn that PG&E conditioners; specific cogeneration oppor- always willing to explain itself to each new was pursuing. every conservation option tunities; generators driven by geothermal misguided critic, though it for the be that was cost-effective, but as I pressed him steam; solar collectors; and a modest hundredth time and with apologies to the under oath about the meaning of PG&E's number of windrril.'s. Nothing technologically hearing examiner, who had seen this'all conservation pofoy. he retreated step fancy or experimental— nothing futuristic. before-. The hearing examiner was a former by step, Decisions were not actually made For any serious evaluation of currently engineer named Carol Coffey, who was that way; cost calculations were not really available growth options, these were the approaching retirement without having the basis; conservation might not be chosen, starting point. affection developed any for his role of judicial even if it were cheaper than new supply. And then, the greenie said, here is what umpire. Ho sen led grudgingly on the Despite several tries, he also could not a serious financal evaluation would find. bench each morning, and during the day come up with a coherent definition of Compared side by side with PG&E :s plan of 20 OMNI CON I l-JIJLO OM PAGE 138 TIBETAN CURE

By Marcia Rockwood

~ olden cinquefoil, red saunders, lion, carrying the anc onl beian formula panaceas made from jewels and precious licorice root, and ginger lily are just with him. in the Sixties, the family contracted metals— are the most highly revered' of (our of 22 herbs used to make with a Swiss businessman B to form Padma. all medicines. Even the Chinese came to what well the world's oldest may be remedy Inc., a corporation dedicated to researching believe in the power of "precious pills" after tor cardiovascular problems. Tibetan and marketing foe formula. Recently. they invaded Tibet in the Fifties. The monks were gathering and mixing the Vladmir Badmajew, Jr., said he disagreed Chinese government at first ordered soldiers formula, known as Padma 28, as early as with the company's marketing techniques. to destroy all Tibetan medical texts and the fifteenth century. Today Eastern doctors He has come up with his own name for institutions. The devastation was nearly

are using it to treat immunological disor- the formula—Badahan—and plans to completed when the skills of Tibetan doctors ders as well as heart disease. But Padma conduct his own negotiations with the FDA. treating Chinese officials drew so much 28 is important for another reason. It is But controversy over how to market attention that the policy was reversed. The one of the first ancient Tibetan medicines Padma (or Badahan) masks a greater surviving texts were rescued. When the to be taken seriously by Western doctors. problem. The basic notions underlying the Medical Center at Dharmsala. India (Tibet's IKS, The the Swiss counterpart of the Tibetan healing arts are at odds with nation in exile), announced recently U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), medical practice here. Western doctors through the Tibet News that it had has clinically tested and approved Padma specialize in treating specific complaints; succeeded in making "precious medicines" 28, but the government there has balked Tibetans are far more concerned with outside Tibet for the first time, it also at making it eligible for insurance coverage. restoring balance to the whole system. If reported that 90 percent of one of those In the United States, where the remedy the symptom rather than the disease is medicines still being prepared in Tibet has been sold as a food supplement, the corrected, the Tantras (Tibetan Buddhist was being sent directly to China for use by FDA has filed a complaint questioning texts) predict that the "illness will linger like officials of the Chinese regime, the toxicity of three of Padma's compounds; tire burning under ash." Though Padma is not in the same exalted camphor, monkshood, and chinaberry. Tibetan practitioners also believe that league as the "precious pills," the medical Monkshood, the contends, is partic- FDA one primary cause can underlie several texts do credit it with healing disorders ularly suspect. The agency describes it clinically different diseases. Treatment as wide ranging as bronchial asthma and as a "rapid poison, causing convulsions, often involves administering remedies made heart disease. Research now under way paralysis of circulation, and death." from Padma's jewels and metals. "Precious pills"— suggests that the ancient texts may be right. supporters argue that the levels of monks- That research began in the late Seven- hood are too minute to pose a danger. ties, when D. F Hurlimann, a vascular But Dr. Vladmir Badmajew, Jr., a pathologist specialist in Lucerne, Switzerland, used at Downstate Medical Center, in New York Padma to \

he says. "Now I to prove want with solid A follow-up survey of 220 patients research that Padma is excellent drug." an conducted over five years produced similar, The family is, in fact, Badmajew respon- findings, leading Hurlimann to conclude sible for bringing Padma 28 from Tibet that Padma 28 "promotes the formation of to the West. The in legacy began Mongolia new blood vessels that bypass occluded in the nineteenth century. It was then that [blocked] arteries." one of the ancestors, Alexander Badmajew, Hurlimann's research, along with other was educated in Tibetan medicine by Swiss laboratory experiments, created lamas at the Aga monastery. Alexander great demand for Padma 28 during the late moved to Saint Petersburg (now Leningrad) Seventies, and it soon began outselling in 1865 and established first the Tibetan traditional pharmaceutical drugs. At the 1983 herbal pharmacy in the West. After his death, International Conference on Tibetan his brother Peter carried his - on work and Medicine, in Venice, Italy, research reports appointed was court physician to the czar. on Padma from other countries helped A generation later, Peter's nephew Vladmir support Hurlimann's findings. lied to Poland during the Bolshevik Revolu- Professor J. Wojcizki, head of clinical 24 OMNI CONTINUED ON PAGE 144 1 . '

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By James Kitfield

The (and is tortured and arid, and instead of waiting for others to interpret and data essential to pest control. trie satellite scans it with an then relay the information. If such interna- "In a year when the locusts are bad, a unblinking eye, sweeping up whole tional relief organizations as the FAO can large amount of crops are destroyed, countries in its gaze. At the ground stations present irrefutable proof of impending and many lives are affected," says ESA's far below, critical information on the land's disaster, countries with bountiful harvests Lenhart. "You know, some of those seven surface radiation and the rate of water will on be less likely to take a wait-and-see plagues are still very active in Africa." evaporation appears in the form of digital attitude that can (and has) cost tens of Satellite maps on the wall of the ESA readouts. From these are produced a thousands of lives. operations center in West Germany clearly of sorts, map on which the contours of a "That's what we see as a major role of identify an eighth plague to add to Africa's familiar continent, Africa, are swathed Meteosat imagery in the future. It should list of woes: desertification. The encroaching in broad strokes of red spotted with yellow enable us to alert the world with undeniable sands of the Sahara are moving steadily and of specks blue. The red represents evidence of developing drought in Africa southward, while lakes in the region Africa's heat; the blue, a sparse cloud and thus to coordinate relief measures are beginning to shrink. In Mauretania, for cover. Yellow signifies the areas that are in advance," says Dr. John Howard, chief of instance, the desert has swallowed SO plagued drought. the by Only human FAO's remote-sensing center in Rome. percent of the country's grazing land in the suffering goes undetected. 'And for the time being, we know at least last 20 years. This advanced weather satellite, called that Meteosat is monitoring every part "We in the West are not blameless," Meteosat, can relay a barrage of information of the continent for major environmental Lenhart says. "Some of our shortsighted about Africa's climatic conditions at half- hazards." attempts to help have actually aggravated hour intervals—far more often than the In addition to drought, Africa periodically the problem. For instance, we can tell polar-orbiting Landsat weather satellite. Not suffers from swarms of marauding desert the villagers how to pump groundwater, but only does such minute allow experts data locusts, which travel as far as 100 miles without long-term training in livestock to predict drought and other natural disas- in a single night, eating everything in their management, that may just lead to ters more accurately, but with the help of path. Because the satellite can identify overgrazing, which eventually means even Meteosat images taken during the rainy the warm, humid soil conditions that more desertification." season, scientists can even forecast the size are favorable to locust breeding, FAO No one believes that advancements in of the following year's harvest. This critical field teams already consider Meteosat technology alone are enough to avert information is then passed along to the a catastrophe on the scale of Africa's current appropriate agencies. famine. Arbitrary borders now crisscross "We're trying to give relief organizations the continent, and border guards block an early and objective measure of the migration from a land burdened by twice situation," says Dr. K. G. Lenhart, the of the population it can sustain. Primitive European Space Agency (ESA), which farming techniques abuse the soil, and launched Meteosat in 1981 "In the past, government officials hide their heads in local sources of information on rainfall and the ubiquitous sand. other data have not always been objective. If the nightmarish famine has awakened Sometimes the figures were falsified or both African leaders and the rest of the withheld for political reasons, and sometimes world to the terrible price of neglect, they simply were wrong." however, then Meteosat and the technology Meteosat orbits the earth at a fixed point it represents can become powerful allies 23,000 miles above the equator and the in the search for long-term solutions. continent of Africa. From that geostationary SPACE/TIME position — exactly 0" latitude and 0° longi- tude—the satellite can trace cloud-cover June 1, 12 noon EDT. Voyager 1 is formations and wind direction, and gather 2.095,063,224 miles from Earth and other data on regions as far north as 2,170,849,615 miles.from the sun. Voyager Scandinavia. More recently, however, its 2 is 1,499,732,272 miles from Earth, focus has shifted southward. 1,593,867,481 miles from the sun, and Within the last year and a half, the United 187,782,284 miles from Uranus,

Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization .. June 12, Discovery shuttle launch is slated. (FAO) became a primary user station June 14, 12 noon EDT. Pioneer 10 is for Meteosat. That means the organization 3.410,823,980 miles from Earth and receives data directly from the satellite 1 salellite's-eye view of patched Africa. 3,319,306,400 miles from the sun.OQ 28 OMNI a

;tone smasher BDDM By Kathleen McAuliffe

camera zooms in on boulders high-voltage, The low-current electricity pulsing systems in the early Eighties, the technology strewn across a large pink tunnel. through the fluid surrounding the stone. finally came of age. American doctors Suddenly the cavern explodes Usually the first to crumble are the softer soon adapted the apparatus for blasting in a burst of light. Solid masses fragment into lumps that tend to block the bile duct. kidney stones. But surprisingly, no American a kaleidoscopic image. Two more Hashes The nuggets of cholesterol found inside the doctors had thought to apply the technique of lightning crackle through the chamber. By gallbladder can be as tough to crack as to gallstone victims. the final frame, only rubble remains. real stones. It often lakes several jolts of "Putting these patients under the scalpel Theexploding boulders are actually the electricity to complete the demolition. may not always be the best method," says gallstones of an eighty-one-year-old When the debris is powdery. Gocho uses Larry Doll, vice president of strategic Japanese-man—one of seven patients in a hoselike attachment on the choledocho- planning at Pentax, a leading manufacturer the world to undergo a novel procedure scope to flush saline solution through of choledochoscopes. "But it's a tried- known as a choledochoscopy lithotripsy. the gallbladder. To remove larger fragments, and-proven approach. So few doctors in Pioneered by Dr. Koji Gocho. of the St. he has another choledochoscope attach- this country want to bother with a procedure Marianna University School of Medicine, in ment known as a basket forceps—a long as yet unapproved by the Food and Drug Kawasaki, Japan, the technique uses a retrieval tool with claws that contract. Administration, that could open them up shock wave to destroy these painful deposits The choledochoscope. with its fiberoptic to potential legal problems." the same way that a soprano's voice viewing system and accessory tools, is By comparison, Japan is an ideal testing shatters glass. Only brittle structures Ihe key to the procedure's success. As far ground. Medical malpractice suits are collapse under the force of the shock wave; back as 1960, scientisls in the Soviet almost unheard of, and Japanese patients the gallbladder and surrounding tissues Union employed a prototype in a pioneering are much more willing to undergo experi- remain undamaged because of their effort to shatter stones obstructing the mental treatments. Owing to dietary factors, rubbery flexibility. urinary tract. This approach, however, was the Far East also has a high incidence of Those most likely to benefit from this new doomed because the choledochoscopes gallstone problems. Finally, the Japanese are method are the elderly, the most common of that era were still too bulky to snake into living longer than ever. Before the average victims of gallstones. For this group, the smaller ducts and tubes of the body. life span began to climb, doctors would not choledochoscopy appears to be less risky With the marriage of streamlined chole- even bother performing gallbladder than conventional surgery. Just a local dochoscopes to fiberoptic guidance surgery on people over sixty. Physicians anesthetic is required, and the recuperation assumed someone that age did not have time in the hospital is shortened to a few long to live. days. "This compares very favorably," As another alternative to surgery, some Gocho says, "with the one- lo two-week doctors have tried injecting compounds recovery period normally required after into the gallbladder to dissolve the stones. gallstone surgery." But some cholesterol stones with hard Before administering the shock wave, outer shells have proved highly resistant to Gocho must first penetrate the gallbladder, chemical breakdown. Gocho himself a small, pear-shaped organ that stores initially attempted to crunch the stones with bile from the liver. With the patient seated long forceps that he inserted through a before an X-ray machine, he inserts a channel in the choledochoscope. This wire through a small incision in the chest. strategy, too, proved inefficient, Gocho guides the wire to the common Gocho is confident that the shock-wave bile duct leading to the gallbladder. He then technique will catch on. Already, he injects a chemical into the duct, forcing it reports, doctors from Taiwan, Hong Kong, to dilate to accept a larger, snakelike and other parts of Southeast Asia are apparatus known as a choledochoscope. coming to Japan to learn how to perform

This hollow tool is only five millimeters in . the procedure. The treatment also has diameter, yet it's wide enough to accom- the advantage of being economical. modate fiberoptic both bundles for looking Including hospital stay, a choledochoscopic inside the body and a thin, wire-tipped lithotripsy comes to about $4,500— electrode called a lithotriptor. With his eye savings on the estimated £6,000 price tag on the choledochoscope's viewer, Gocho . for gallstone surgery and follow-up care. moves the electrode toward the gallstones. At a time of soaring medical costs, this may the When electrode is close to the target, go a long way toward shattering this he presses fool a switch that sends a jolt of that shatters galtstor. country's opposition to the treatment. DO 30 OMNI PRO-TECH PSYCHOLOGY nniruD By Doug Garr

Everyone knows of Japan's affinity eye view of the streets of Tokyo. As long as have lived with spa; ai adversity. They've

for high technology. With 100,000 I pedaled at a certain rate, the video had to squeeze into small quarters and robots working its on production stayed on. When I slipped below that speed, accommodate themselves to living in • lines, it is a world leader in the use of the picture faded. a country where even the terrain restricts automatons. It is well-known that consumer The other screen was connected to a living space. electronics are the country's ubiquitous camera trained on the exercycle. At one "We are surrounded by the sea. We have. export, .but not until you go there do you point I looked up and saw the image of an many mountains. And our living area is realize their infatuation how widespread with exhausted writer pedaling away. I later very limited. Whatever we can do to make technology is. realized that I had been seduced by it comfortable and convenienl to live in

During my first visit to Japan, I was gadgetry myself. In a matter of a few these places, we do it." explains Reikichi struck the by number of things confirming minutes. I had gone from being a mildly Shirane, president of NTT Science Founda- my suspicion that this is a nation of gadget interested spectator to a part of the tion and the man in charge of organizing nuts. How else could you describe a technology. the Japan National Pavilion for Expo '85. "So culture whose traditional loods—such as " The Japanese psyche cetmitely has we surround ourselves with technology." sushi—are prepared by robots, where some indefinable ingredient that allows its ' "The Japanese don't approach technol- scotch is served by computerized barten- populace to adapt to, even embrace, its ogy with the same suspicion we do," adds ders, and even the lowliest rice shop has rapidly changing society. As one of its American psychologist Fred Rothman. automatic sliding doors? writers and scholars, Shichihei Yamamoto, "They respect it, but they don't fear it. And

I felt the seductiveness of this technology points out; "When they are convinced their attitude is to fit in with technology while myself waiting for a business that a foreign technology is more functional, rather than to manipulate it." Rothman, an appointment in downtown Tokyo, In one the Japanese have no second thoughts associate professor of psychology at building I came across a display of machines about adopting it and/or making modifica- Tufts University, was one of the authors of a that included an electronic exercycle that tions." Why is this? How did the pro-tech paper entitled "The Psychology of Control could monitor the rider's pulse rate, bicycling attitude begin? in America and Japan," published in speed, and distance traveled. As an One theory stems from the fact that American Psychologist. The paper's thesis added feature, the bike had two television Japan is a small country with a large is that while we have greater regard for screens. One depicted a video of a rider's- population. For centuries the Japanese an attitude called primary control, our Par Eastern counterparts have a greater interest in using what is called secondary control. Primary control involves gaining rewards by changing existing realities; secondary control is based on getting satisfaction by accommodating oneself to reality. Primary control is more overtly aggressive: secondary control, more subtle and much more circumspect. The psychology ol control colors just about every important aspect of behavior

in both cultures. It may explain why American workers demonstrate or strike when they have a gripe (a primary-control move), whereas dissatisfied Japanese workers

prefer to embarrass the r superiors into remedial action by working much harder-— a secondary-control approach. Given

this, it is no wonder, then, that the Japanese may view us as being pushy, frantic, and surly, while we may think of them as being slow and indecisive. As we have learned, the Japanese are extraordinary negotiators, in part because of

the way they approach life. Bradford is thai indefinable .',';«; lots What so^eming Japanese embrace n I* technologies with such ease? Brown, the executive director of Nihon

34 OMNI CONTINUED ON PAGE 150 — '

Denver Mint, the Bank of England, to prepare for an expression need- maybe, but the message is: "Stay on the Tower of London and my piggy bank. ing strong emphasis: I'll marry you your toes; it's coming at you." — you'll rob Topkapi with me. Notice there is no comma if [ Apostrophe ' ] before and in the series. This is com- Parentheses help you pause big headache is with to quietly to drop in some chatty The pos- How punctuate mon style nowadays, but some pub- sessive nouns. If the noun is sin- lishers use a comma there, too. information not vital to yout story gular, add 's: 1 Hated Betty's tango. 5. Use a comma to separate Despite Betty's (faring spirit ("I love By Russell Baker If the noun is plural, simply independent clauses that are joined robbing ^our piggy bank, " she often add an apostrophe after the s: role It prefer, said), she terrible dancer the of body language. helps system you be warned: by a conjunction like and, but , for, was a Those are the girls' coats. readers hear you the way you want punctuation marks cannot save or. nor, because or so: I shall return The same applies for singular to be heard. a sentence that is badly put the crown jewels, for they are too nouns ending in s, like Dickens: together. If you have to struggle "Gee, Dad, have I got to learn heavy to wear. over commas, semicolons and This is Dickens's best book. all them rules?" 6. Use a comma to set And in plural: This is the dashes, you've probably built a sen- off" a mildly parenthetical Don't let the rules scare you. For Dickenses' cottage. tence that's never going to fly, no word grouping that isn't they aren't hard and fast. Think of The possessive pronouns matter how you tinker with it. essential to the sen- / them as guidelines. hers and its have no Throw it away and build a new one tence: Girls, who have Am I saying, "Go ahead and apostrophe. to a simpler design. The better always interested me, punctuate as you please"? Abso- If you write it's, your sentence, the easier it is to usually differ from boys. lutely not. Use your own common you are saying it is. punctuate. Do not use com- sense, remembering that you can't Choosing the right tool mas if the word Keep cool (mt-nwnoriLiI Il.if't; iisLvl Ruiwii Baker, uiraiii 0/ expect readers to work to decipher grouping is essential 1 ;(.' '|i. (fir ] ii.'.'Ci i !> 'm , ; . .iciii:; < .tin! 30 punctuation You know about what you're trying to say. There are main 1 r ji.t /?.!.' 'ji).' . his cs.vufs in r-'-'iL' , it?ii;< ( (in' kit'st to the sentence's ending a sentence There are two basic systems marks, but you'll need fewer than a uifefion in b< «>k funn rsjdkJ T/u- KVv.-iii; .,,' Girls who dozen for most writing. meaning: with a period (.)ora Miss Yasfcgll and Otfur Pipe i>aiin.s ). in/u/p y,m of punctuation: interest me know how make better oj [timauw.oi:. one the printed I can't show in this question mark (?). Do me oi 1. The loose or open system, you small S! (fh'ik to tango. Miiltil'L' it. Sure, you can also end which tries to capture the way space how they all work, so I'll 7. Use a comma in primed {up. Shtm> bew&krmem wilha witn an exc l amat j n point body language punctuates talk. stick to the ten most important When you write, you make a direct address: Yburmajest>,i"esn ' mmar v and even then can only hit high- (!), but must you? Usually it 2. tight, structural i sound in the readers head. It can The closed r« »i please hand over the crown. Quotation marks L J lights. For more details, check your j mt makes you sound breathless be a dull mumble— that's why so system, which hews closely to the 8. And between proper names These tell the tcader you're and silly. Make your writing gener- sentence's grammatical structure. dictionary or a good grammar. much government prose makes you Director and titles: Montague Sneed, reciting the exact words someone ate its own excitement. Filling the Most writers use a little of Comma sleepy — or it can be a joyful noise, [ , ] Scotland Yard, was assigned the case. of said or wrote: Berry said, "I cant paper with ! ! ! ! won't make up for less a sly whisper, a throb of passion. both. In any case, we use much This is the most widely used 9. And to separate elements of tango." Or: "I cant tango," Betty said. what your writing has failed to do. Listen to a voice trembling in punctuation than they used 200 or mark of all. Us also the toughest geographical address: Director Sneed Notice the comma comes Too many exclamation points a haunted room: even 50 years ago. (Glance into and most controversial. I've seen comes from Chicago, Illinois, and now before the quote marks in the first make me think the writer is talking "And the silken, sad, uncertain Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall aging editors almost come to blows lives in London, England. example, but comes inside them in about the panic in his own head. rustling of each purple curtain of the Roman Empire," first pub- over the comma. If you can handle Generally speaking, use a com- the second. Not logical? Never Don't sound panicky. End with lished in 1776, for an it without sweating, will thrilled me — filled me with fan- _ the others ma where you'd pause briefly in mind. Do it that way anyhow. a period. I am serious. period. ..." example of the A tastic terrors never felt before be easy. Here's my policy: speech. For a long pause or com- " Understand? t stxuctutal Colon [:] That's Edgar Allan Poe, a Use a comma after a long pletion of thought, use a period. Well . . . sometimes a question master. Few or us can make paper introductory phrase or clause; After with A colon is a tip-off to get ready If you confuse the comma mark is okay. stealing the crown jewels the speak as vividly as Poe could, but from the period, you'll get a run-on sen- for what's next: a list, a long quota- beginners will write better Tower of London, 1 went home for tea. article even tence: The Bank of England is located tion ot an explanation. This once they start listening to the 2. It is riddled with colons. Too many, the introduc- in London, I rushed right over to rob it. sound their writing makes. tory material is Semicolon [ ; ] One of the most important short, forget the is vital than ever. there more sophisticated mark Today, the printed word more Now tools for making paper speak in the A comma: After read better, write better and than the comma, the semicolon is more need than ever for all of us to your own voice is punctuation. theft I went home communicate better. separates two main clauses, but it When speaking aloud, you for tea. offers series in the hope that, even keeps those two thoughts more International Paper this punctuate constantly — with 3. use it if But small way, can help. tightly linked than a period can: J in a we body language. Your listener the sentence would to share this article and all the others in the series steal crown jewels; she steals hearts. If you'd like hears commas, dashes, ques- be confusing with- with others — students, employees, family — we'll gladly send you points, — and tion marks, exclamation out it, like this: Dash [ ] reprints. So far we've sent out over 20P00JD00 in response to re- quotation marks as you shout, The day before I'd Parentheses [ ( ) ] quests from people everywhere. Write: "Power of the Printed Word," whisper, pause, wave your amis, robbed the sparingly. The Bank of Warning! Use International Paper Company, Dept. I3X, PO. Box 954, Madison roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow. England. dash Parentheses whis- SHOUTS. Square Station, New York, NY 10010. am* international mptR comikny In writing, punctuation plays 4. Use a com- per. Shouttoo often, people stop separate listening; whisper too much, peo- 1 ma to INTERNATIONAL PAPER COMPANY ,-if /X\ ".Viv root i, !,.- niiiit .« 'ilia f't- viiir ttioh, (on

(.if /.iiirk(iki(!(JM .: in a of you. Jul' use 0/ am Iwijt vm hiau.1 elements pie become suspicious \£/ We believe in the power of the printed word.

1 more sultJ. iiiuh reitilitbk sentence." series: I robbed the The dash creates a dramatic pause — " "

:ULPTURE THE ARTS By Cree McCree

get it straight once and for all: bowl. A wand Bring mendicant that has Nahamkin Let's Eduard whoso gallery in New Tony Price is not dying of cancer as survived the holocaust, it is entitled I York City has exhibited Price's work. "In all a result of radiation exposure. for Plutonium. Price's hurts. humor art—even if it shows pain, suffering, Thai the rumors persist is, however, under- He leads me into the garden. Atomic oppression—you see the desire to live, to standable. As our first nuclear sculptor, Kachina — a nuclear scarecrow with enjoy. In Tony's art there is a very clear he enters the bowels "of the beast to create outstretched arms and a disarming grin message. 'Be careful, think about what you're his art from ihe discards of destruction. stands watch. Atomic Bells, a series of doing, don't forget your humanity— or it At home in Santa Fe, Price greets me in shell casings of various sizes and musical could be the last supper for everyone.' yellow T-shirt emblazoned with red letters tones, lies dismantled among the Be careful. We know what that means for across Ihe chest: caution: radioactive sagebrush. A postapocalyptic conference us as a species, but what does it mean material. Two decades in northern of New metallic diplomats entitled The Last to Price personally? "Supposedly, the stuff Mexico, the juncture of mountain and desert, SALT Talks is perhaps Price's most ambitious is checked with a Geiger counter every have weathered this former New York work to date. Nearby, Mayan Bambringer— day in the scrap yards," Price answers. "The City boy into the landscape; even the clutter a suspended set. of huge aluminum nuts official word is that it's either contaminated behind his adobe house looks at first sight sings in resonant harmony in the midst of and destroyed or it's not contaminated. But like the typical New Mexico family junkyard. ripening cornstalks, forcing on us the I had some pieces in a New Mexico But this is no ordinary conglomeration of paradox Price deals with every day: "What museum, and alter Three Mile Island they dead appliances, automobile skeletons, the and scientists are building is, in a way, as. checked them all. Atomic Queen turned beer cans. Indeed, this is precision-tooled pure an art as can be seen. are They out to be hot. So now I take my own Geiger nuclear scrap, engineered by the Los giving matter new and exciting form, counter to Los Alamos.

Alamos Scientific Labs, birthplace of the reconstructing it into something that can I tell Price about the rumors of his Greal American Bomb. even endow death with beauty. These imminent death from cancer It is news to Price first visited Los Alamos in 1965 and atomic scientists are probably all Atlanteans, him. "Is that what they're saying? Well, was amazed lo discover a high-tech come back to do it again. Only this time, maybe it's more romantic to have a dying nuclear flea market offering bargains on they will probably send us to the darkest artist." He laughs. "Dead art. Live money. everything from busted computers and depths of the universe." That's what makes dead art alive—when bubble chambers to bomb parts and "I'm an art dealer, not a politician,' people buy it." Now, however, Price's work is detonators. He soon joined the ranks of beginning to be recognized and acknowl- local scrap dealers and weekend tinkerers edged. The exposure (nonradioactive) at these public salvage "I sales. started is allowing Price to bring his message more going through the mad scientists' garbage," effectively to the world. "It's my way of he says, "trying to or assuage rationalize turning their weapons into plowshares." he my fears about what they are doing. It was explains, "their atomic bombs into bridges an act of catharsis, an attempt to exorcise of awareness." He would like to take The the devil we are.all living with. But it's Last SALT Talks—self-contained on a flatbed strange. Sometimes I race up there and truck—on a tour of the United States and find exactly what I looking for, if am as they then abroad in a traveling nuclear circus. are machining sculptures for me." — I asked Price what he would do about Bemoaning rising costs "copper used nuclear arms if he were in charge. "That's to be twenty cents a pound; now it's more simple," he grins. "I'd take over a Taiwan than a dollar" — Price guides me into the baseball-glove factory and make bomb-size living room. the walls On hang a series of catcher's mitts for everyone. Then we masks: some playful, some beautiful, could all sit around and pound our mitts." others as sinister untimely death. as Like Turning serious again, he speaks of what, to the primitive masks that inspired they them, him, is the heart of the matter: "The only run the gamut of experience. human But solution is to realize that we're Earthlings. instead of carved wood, feathers, and The horror is that humans think they're beads, they are constructed of brass, alone in the universe, which is a very aluminum, copper, stainless steel— all egocentric point of view. If we truly became varieties of'Los Alamos detritus. Below the Earthlings, then we could be contacted by masks are nuclear counterparts of Hopi other intelligent species to share kachinas. One of them, a fanciful creature knowledge. But that will never happen, until with a tail, dragon holds out a beggar's Price: art sculpted from nuke junk. we put our bombs away. "00 3S OMNI COMPUTERIZING CADAVER! ARTIFICIAL IRJTELLIEERJCE

By Peter J.

hand and foream. his area o' spccial'^alion. men—one so detailed that it could be It was a challenge that set him thinking taken apart, viewed from any angle, and mmv to car and compuier owners. It not only about his specialty but about the reassembled by students working not also sums up a major problem facing greater problem of cducalir-g students in the laboratory but at a computer terminal. medical educators Simply put, there are to understand the human body. "Anatomists Teaming up with UCLA computer expert nol enough limbs and organs available have been thinking about anatomy in J. Michael Kabo, Meals took an arm for medical and nursing students to sludy. essentially the same way for two thousand severed from a cadaver and froze it in a An innovative projecl at the University years."says Meals. Instead of building blockof ice. Using a butcher's band saw, of California a! Los Angeles (UCLA) may upon small increments of knowledge, they the two men spent an entire Saturday change all that. If it succeeds, as seems begin by taking apart an animal or human slicing the spec men at oreoise, three-milli- likely, students will be able to do with a cadaver. Meals calls this approach meter intervals. When they finished, the and vicleod what computer sk they now do "conceptually backward. It is completely arm had been reduced to 176 wafer- with surgical steel. Indeed, they will do the reverse of the way we learn." thin cross sections. even more. Not only will they dissect the That observation is a lament familiar to One hundred sixty of the slices, from limbs and organs of the body; they will put freshman medical students, and at the mid-bicep through fingertips, were thawed, them back together. outset Meals had nothing new to offer. Then, photographed, and enlarged to poster With this technology, says Dr. Roy A. like millions of Americans, he got a look size (20 by 30 inches'! I mag ne a satellite Meals, orthopedic an surgeon on the faculty at the fascinating i—ages computers could photograph ol a cluster of islands in a of UCLAs medical school, a student can create on the movie screen in such epics sea of red: That's approximately what each "start with very simply one or two bones, as Iron and Star Wars. "I realized," he says, cross section looked like. There were three muscles, and two nerves. That may "that computer graphics would be a way large contours for bones, smaller ones for be the lesson for the first day. . . . Ultimately, to get a representation of [anatomical] blood vessels, and the tiniest (one millimeter the technology may go all the way to structures, viewed from different angles." in diameter) for some of the nerves. surgical simulations." Meals wanted something more than The next step was turning the photo- Several years Meals ago, was asked to animated drawings. Indeed, he wanted graphs into computerized data. Kabo first make a videotape of the of the nothing less anatomy than an actual human speci- tried an optical scanner but found it could

not distinguish the subtle gradations in color that.delineated nerves from fat. So he and Meals took telt-tip pens and outlined each contour in ink- no small feat, .consid- ering there were roughly 7,000 contours over the 160 photographs. Then the photos were laid, one by one, on a Tektronix 4956 digitizing tablet (3 by 4 feet), and each contour was traced with a hand-held, electromagnetic "puck." The data from the tablet were entered on a Tektronix 4051 microcomputer and subsequently downloaded into a DEC PDP 11/44

minicomputer. It took one ot Kabo's assist- ants three full weeks to accomplish that

task. "It all bo- is down to geometry and trigonometry," Kabo says. "Basically you're taking a three-dimensional picture and

squashing it down onto a flat screen." It may sound simple, but the job was tough, As sections thawed, for example, some of them slipped and had to be painstakingly realigned, using photos of the frozen sections as guides. To make the internal anatomy of each

Termina! lunci: stored :r cicdrcriic inemory. dissected, i. o.< ;6j-se;:!bie:i instadiv slice connect to those on either side of it, 40 OMNI CONHNUFD ON PAGE 136 caruTinjuunn

"HE IMPOSTOR PHENOMENON

am an impostor. Al my first job, on a daily paper in upstate New through inventions, hit records, advanced degrees, or other ex- victims of the York, I worked for a frantic city editor who pounded out scath- traordinary accomplishments, she notes, syndrome ing, incoherent editorials on his Underwood Model T. He was live in fear of the day their "ruse" is uncovered. Moreover, those suffer with success. I driven, it seemed, by a row of ancestors that loomed from the susceptible to the syndrome more each new wall above his head. Most prominent were the still-mourned lather, The master actor Richard Burton, for instance, described him- a frustrated poei-turned-shoe-salesman; and a beloved great-un- self as a poor boy from a Welsh mining town, undeserving of his cle, a wild-haired Russian scribe who had dreamed ot crossing Fame. And one ol Harvey's patients, a well-known magazine writer, the border to Poland and the literary world beyond. They glared felt like a fraud because of her father's- unyielding advice: "Don't down vengefully, directing editorial policy irom on high. Laboring even try to write unless you can do it like Joyce;" first defined in 1978, psy- in the dusty city room day after day, I was assailed by these icons. The impostor phenomenon was when

I Glance Imes discovered the over- I was an impostor, Ihey screamed. How dare presume to-be a chologists Pauline and Suzanne clin- writer when they and their progeny had tailed. And even it I did whelming insecurity of female A students. Fascinated by this eventually have some small measure of success, what would it ical work, Harvey set out to quantify the results. Still a graduate mean when weighed against the work of masters like Shakespeare student who felt like something of an impostor herself, she learned and Proust? that the phenomenon was most prominent in those just starting a In those days, often enough, my stones were muddled, miy "lan- new field of endeavor. the guage obscure. But it was because spirits hounded me. Once I She also divided the afflicted into several types, including entered the wider literary world, where writers were polished and workaholic, who relates his success to excessive work; the charmer, personality; profound, I told myself. I too would learn clarity and precision, and who feels he has climbed up the ladder because of wonderful stories would flow. the chameleon, who believes he has succeeded because he's thinker, Roaming from job to job over Ihe years, I did indeed learn to adopted the views of a superior: and the magical who report a story accurately and clearly, molding sentence after sen- relates success to the desperate anxiety that precedes it. "Some clerical mispro- tence with patina and form. Today I sit behind the desk of a national of Ihese people, even attribute success to errors or magazine, recasting Ihe tortuous prase of other writers, people no grammed computers," she says, "to anything except their own doubt haunted by ghosts of their own. inherent intellect or ability" Hirschfeld (who is also 1 of to But I still feel like an impostor. still hear the poet and the scribe The cause the disorder? According insisting that none ot my accomplishments are real. writing a book on the subject), the phenomenon often has a dif- According So psychologist Madeline Hirschfeld. ol Lynbrook, New ferent derivalion in men and women. Men, she notes, are afflicted might traumatize them York, I am not alone. I suifer from a common malaise known as the by the age-old Oedipus complex—success impostor phenomenon—the belief that I've merely tricked others with the guilt of overpowering, even murdering, Dad. Women, on into thinking I'm intelligent and skilled. A study conducted by psy- the other hand, are haunted by a. social notion— dare to succeed chologist Gail Matthews, ot Dominican College of San Rafael, in. and you're not a woman at all. California, reveals that the phenomenon strikes successful profes- Can such a deep-rooted disturbance be cured? Of course, sionals, from judges and lawyers to physicians, police officers, Harvey says. "Most people suffering from the phenomenon find and priests. And University of Pennsylvania Medical School psy- the feeling so natural they don't even perceive it as a problem that chologist Joan Harvey (author of If I'm So Successful, Why Do I can be treaied. But once you're aware of your feelings and their Feel Like a Fake: The Impostor Phenomenon, published recently derivalion, you can benefit from therapy that tells you you're okay." by St. Martin's Press) has learned that two of every five successful Maybe so. But writers, after all, are in a special category. The

people suffer from the syndrome, while 70 percenl of all high poet and scribe said it best: Don't get too cocky. There's always achievers have at some point felt like frauds. Despite break- Shakespeare and Proust.—PAMELA WEINTRAUB "

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conclude that "homely men scientists had to use the en- X rays for one quarter billionth | can take heart." ergy from a preliminary of a second. i Earlier, Not all good things come i, laser to lire up the X-ray laser, other Livermore the attractive, and the which took the ultimate form scientists made a far more to j benefits seem mostly limited of a thin metal film. At the powerful X-ray laser atan to the sexual marketplace, Lawrence Liver more National even shorter wavelength. But For example, attractive males Laboratory, in Livermore. that was in a supersecret (but not attractive females) California, a team headed by experiment, part of the were more likely to have had Dennis L. Matthews used Reagan administration's star- sexual relations as teenag- power from a huge laser, built wars program, in which the ers. The least attractive men, for fusion experiments, that driving energy came from a however, had the most edu- sprawled over a gymnasium- nuclear explosion— not cation and the best academic size room. For half a billionth exactly laboratory technology.

achievement, and their of a second, it delivered A laboratory-scale X-ray occupational status was nearly 5 trillion watts of invisi- laser excites scientists who - higher. ble light, at wavelengths hope to do such previously For women, attractiveness about 30 times longer than impossible things as taking

in high school was not re- the 155-angstrom X-ray-laser X-ray holograms that would BEING UGLY lated to future education, oc- wavelength. record instantaneously cupation, or personal in- All that power was focused and in great detail what is There beautiful come. Attractive women did onto a strip of metal film happening in a living cell may be a | side to being ugly, conclude better only through marrying one third of an inch long and —Jeff Hecht two North Carolina psycholo- husbands who had high one hundredth of an inch gists— if you're a man. -Marcello Truzzi wide. Almost instantaneously, "No affectation of peculiarity

1 Folklore and science attest ft vaporized the metal, a can conceal a common- "Language exists only on the layer fewhundred at- place mind." to the benefits of beauly. j just a surtace of thick onto plastic —W. Somerset Maugham Psychologists confirm that our conscious- | oms coaled physically attractive people ness. The great human only about one sixtieth the I are perceived as having struggles are played out in thickness of audiocassette "Man is a tool-using animal. more desirable personalities, silence and in the inability to tape. The result was a small, Without tools he is nothing. happier marriages, better express oneself." hot-metal plasma that emit- With tools he is all." jobs, and more satisfying lives —-Franz Xavier Kroetz ted a few hundred watts of —Thomas Carlyle overall. Studies show teachers "You never know when you're give attractive children better making a memory," grades. Attractive women —Richie Lee Jones are more likely to marry sooner and to marry hus- "The seed must Qet rotten bands of higher status. And before it germinates. attractive candidates (of —Ashanti proverb either sex) for managerial positions tend to be rated X-RAY LASER higher than unattractive candidates. After more than two dec- Now an ugly side to beauty ades of trying, scientists

is surfacing. J. Richard have created an X-ray laser Udry and Bruce K. Eckland. for laboratory use. They hope of the University of North it will cast new light on the Carolina, recently examined structures of living cells and the rewards of beauty for nonliving materials. men and women. Analyzing Exceptionally high power data from a national sample is needed to make an Lawrence Llvermore's gigantic Novelle laser was used to for a 15-year period, they X-ray laser work. In fact, stimulate a liny piece of metal film to emit X-ray-laser light. 11 OMNI "

BRAIN ELECTRODES brain being worked on, 'it is FOR DIETERS similar to going to the dentist," Brawn says'. Surgeons may one day The appetite-switch elec- implant electrodes in the trode would be connected brains of fat people to turn off via wires running under their appetites. the skin to a pacemakerlike By stimulating the part of device implanted beneath the hypothalamus that is the collar-bone. The patient associated with satiety, ex- would either control the

plains University of Chicago device, or it could be neurosurgeon Frederick D. programmed lo send Brown, this "appetite switch" signals fo the electrode at would produce a feeling of particular intervals. fullness to quell any longing "We may find that this can for food. be used to help severe We know that chimpanzees share many of our social customs: "It's for someone who anorexics, top," notes Brown. now it seems they also have simitar blood proteins. not is just a little overweight." "Theoretically, we should MAN'S CLOSEST organelles that convert oxy- Brown emphasizes. "It is in- be able to stimulate the ap- COUSIN gen to energy in the cell's tended for the morbidly petite with the same tech- " interior—and in the mito- obese, people who are one nique. — Sherry Baker Primatologists have long chondrial DNA of the chim- hundred percent above ideal debated the identity ol man's panzee. weight" "Democratic nations care little been, but closest animal relative. Is it Lowen stein himself pro- Brown has completed a tor what has ot the gorilla, with its monogamy vided what he considers the series of successful experi- they are haunted by visions and honeymoons, or is it clincher. Using a technique ments using the appetite- what may be." the tool-using, war-making known as radioimmunoassay, suppressing device on dogs, —Alexis de Tocquevilie chimpanzee? Well, it now he targeted two blood pro- and he is currently seeking seems that the debate has teins found in all three spe- permission to begin placing "A man may build himself a radioactive in humans. throne of bayonets, but been all but decided in favor ! cies with identical the electrodes evi- antibodies, then score Brown points out that he cannot sit on it." of the chimp, and the \ kept dence has nothing to do with as the antibodies bound similar electrodes are .being —William Ralph Inge similarities in social behavior. to molecules of the blood used to dull areas of the According to Jerold Low- proteins. In the end, the brain in patients. suffering enstein, a professor of medi- proteins in chimps and hu- from severe, intractable pain. cine at the University of mans cleaved to more of the He claims this operation is California at San Francisco, antibodies than did those far less dangerous than there are at least three new of the gorilla. intestinal bypasses and other indications that humans Does this prove that man surgery performed today and chimps share the closest and chimp are the closest of to help the grossly over- branches on the primate primate cousins? "You have weight. "The scalp, doesn't family tree. One is based on results from three different become fat, no matter what a the work of Yale primatolo- lines of evidence," Lowenstein person weighs. So you don't gists Charles Sibley and Jon says. "It's like what the Red have to cut through layers Ahlquist, who found that Queen said to Alice in Won- of fat as you do in intestinal don't the DNA in the nucleus of derland: 'What I tell you surgery. And you have chimp cells would combine three times is true.' the problems of healing more readily with the DNA —Bill Lawren that are associated with that." of man than with that of Another plus for the proce-

"/ it almost pain- . : in is that is the gorilla. A' Japanese study , received my degree dure showed a similar affinity calcium anthropology— less. Only local anesthetics between DMA lound in hu- the study of milkmen." and a sedative are required. man mitochondria—tiny 'Steven Wright "If you forget that it's your CDfUTinJUURJl

hair growth. "We're actually What Powell is primarily miles from home, looking for interested in the biological concerned with, aside from nuts and berries, and occa- mechanisms responsible for the reproductive rates and sionally, says Collins, "they hair growth," Johoda ex- the territorial limits of his just roam around looking for plains. "Looking at the DP bears, is measuring the suc- someplace to be." The two cellular system is the way to cess or one of the country's men estimate the current

study those biological mech- more ambitious bear-conser- population is 2.000 to 2,500, vation programs, which "It's stable or down a Johoda does see two now covers some 800,000 bit," says Powell, perhaps potential applications of DP acres of sanctuary land because some of the older cells in the treatment of where hunting is expressly and presumably wiser North baldness. "Eventually, a tech- forbidden. Carolina bears seem to know nique to transplant human What annoys him are that safety lies within the DP cells could be devel- reports, largely from victim- boundaries of their sanctu- oped," he says. 'And more ized beekeepers and angry aries. While neither man

important, a specific 'hair- apple and corn farmers, is convinced bears are that growth factor' might be iso- that the state's bear popula- smart, Powell admits he's

lated from the DP cells." tion must be flourishing if seen bears crass highways HAIR-GROWTH — Eric Mishara the beasts have begun spill- to get back inside a refuge, TRANSPLANT ing out of their sanctuaries and Collins allows that some "I must impale myself on in search of food. Not so. says of the 500-pound animals A lype of cell thai stimu- reality." the zoologist. seem to understand that

lates hair growth has been —Wallace Stevens "Because the acorn crop "once they cross that line, transplanted successfully into has been spotty tor the they know they're home laboratory animals. BEAR SANCTUARY last two years, the bears free."— George Nobbe Researchers Roy Oliver, move around a lot and they're Colin Johoda, and Kenneth A dearth of acorns over seen by more people than "I've often said that my rats ot the Home, department the last two years, in addition when their food is more- have taught me much more ol biological sciences, at the to increased poaching inside abundant," he says. "When than I've taught them." University of Dundee, in 25 sanctuaries designed to they move out of their pro- —S. F. Skinner Scotland, performed the new protect North Carolina's once tected areas, they can be technique. "I just want to ubiquitous black-bear popu- killed legally during hunting "Never strike a dog! Never, stress," Johoda says, "that lation, has caused some season." never, never!" this isn't any wonder cure for problems tor zoologists like Legal kills don't bother —Ivan Pavlov baldness." Roger A. Powell. Powell. Illegal ones do. and The three researchers The North Carolina State he blames more than half the implanted dermal papilla (DP) University professor special- 20 recent deaths in the cells— skin cells known to izes in bears Irom the moun- huge Pisgah sanctuary on play a crucial role in control- tainous western part of the poachers who use dogs ling hair growth — into the state, as distinct from those to tree fleeing bears. Getting essentially dead hair follicles that prefer life in the swampy, a radio collar back through of rats and mice. The DP coastal lowlands. the mail or finding one dis- cells actually stimulated the Since 1981 he has scrab- carded in a mountain stream m inactive hair follicles to grow bled through the oaks is a sure sign of poaching, j and

hair, the researchers re- rhododendrons of the Pisgah he says, which is now a ported in the scientific journal National Forest, hauling bigger problem than unavoid- Nature. quiescent hibernating bears able bear-car collisions. In the latest phase of their out of hollow trees and Powell and John Collins, of work, human DP cells have murky caves, hoping they the state Wildlife Manage- been grown in test-tube don't wake up before he can ment Division, acknowledge culture, a first step in the attach radio telemetry collars that it's difficultto take an study of the molecular proc- that help him learn more accurate bear census. The esses that affect human about them. animals often wander ten 46 OMNI "

SEA-LION LIFEGUARDS program so people won't be afraid of them," Ford notes,

Laguna Laguna Beach chief life- Beach, Calitornia, may one guard Bruce Baird warns of day share their duties with other hurdles the sea-lion

special helpers —sea lions program may face: "I think the trained to rescue drowning American Society for the victims and tow tired swim- Prevention of Crueity to Ani- mers to shore. mals will object to animals "Sea lions are powerful being used to do city work. swimmers that can advance And there's expense in- one hundred yards at volved. These animals eat a

speeds up to twenty-five lot of fish. I do think that miles per hour. So they can on a limited basis, like in reach someone in trouble recovering a body, they may faster than any human can," be helpful."

explains Bill Ford, executive Ford remains optimistic officer of the Friends of the that sea lions will someday KIDS ON THE room .testimony. Neisser Sea Lion Marine Mammal make excellent lifeguards. WITNESS STAND showed a videotape of a Center (an organization that "In addition to saving lives, basketball game to children rescues sea mammals found this program will help people

Young children, it is widely and adults. Because first- injured or ill along the Or- understand that these are believed, can't distinguish grade children in the study ange County coast). unique, intelligent animals that actual memory from fantasy: were so disinterested in Ford points out that the are legitimate residents of j so jurors often discredit ! the game, 75 percent of them highly intelligent animals have the sea. They need to be ap- their testimony. But children ': were later able to recall seeing been trained in the past by preciated, rather than beaten can actually recall things, with a particular female spectator the US Navy for such recov- and tortured by humans, accuracy, recent research who had been carrying an ery operations as finding which is unfortunately what suggests, and sometimes umbrella, although only bodies and retrieving lost happens to many of them they make better witnesses 20 percent of the adults in equipment. Unlil now. how- now."— Sherry Baker than adults do. the.study had noticed the ever, sea lions have never

The ability to identity a woman, been used to rescue people "If an ass goes traveling, he'll suspect's face, tor example, "Children. can be very in danger of drowning. But not come home a horse. is one area in which children accurate about concrete ac- in a recently launched pilot —Thomas Fuller may exceed adults. Six- tions or details that captured program, two 18-month- year-olds in psychologist Gail their attention," Goodman old sea lions are being trained Goodman's study, at the says. "The key is knowing to do just that. University of Denver, were 95 how to interview therrr," she Already accustomed to percent accurate at picking adds, "because leading verbal commands and the out the photograph of a questions can distort a child's touch of humans, the crea- man they had met briefly memory.". tures will soon be fitted with several days earlier. Adults, But children, as witnesses, harnesses and tethers and on the other hand, were do have a very serious flaw, taught to carry buoys to only 74 percent accurate. Neisser suggests. "They a person simulating a drown-

And one study, by psychol- just don't understand the im- ing victim. If the sea lions ogist Ulric Neisser, at Emory portance of their own testi- prove to be successful

University, in Atlanta, illus- mony—the fact that it might rescuers, extensive use of trates how young children send the wrong guy to jail." the animals as lifeguards' will some limes focus on seem- —Eric Mishara have to be postponed for ingly irrelevant details over- ai least one year. "Before the looked by adults, details "Never wear more than three animals can be put on that could nonetheless form colors at a time." beaches, we will need an the basis of important court- —Maude Adams intense public-education "

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found, tended to blame their Recently a group of re- fragments are goingto be of ballooning on starchy foods searchers at Texas Tech some concern." Bailey un- served in dormitory cafete- University's Institute for Di- derstates. rias. "Many students believe saster Research set out A recent demonstration they eat more when [hey to systematically study the staged for contractors and- live in dorms." she says. But damaging effects of tornado- vendors of building materials her survey made short work borne flying debris. With leil the audience duly im- of that excuse. Many stu- the help of engineering pro- pressed. "I think," Bailey says, dents, she found, continued fessors James McDonald "that they were a little sur- to put on the pounds even and Milton Smith, graduate prised by the fragility of after they had moved off student James R. Bailey the concrete block." Bailey COLLEGE campus. designed a 20-foot air can- hopes ultimately to convince Privately, Harvey seems to non, nicknamed Wallbuster, to contractors to use the only feel ihafemotional factors, simulate the "unguided- material lhat stood up to which were not considered in missile" effect oi a tornado. Wallbuster's onslaught: a her study, may be at the Bailey used the cannon to concrete block in which the bottom of the freshman ten. fire 12-foot two-by-fours at hollow portons had been

"College is. a big change," a variety of buildinglike filled with concrete and rein- FAT FRESHMEN she says, "and that probably targets. Even at relatively low forced with steel.

is a factor Of course, " she speeds (50 to 55 miles per — Bill Lawren Parents, be advised. When adds, "it may be that weight hour), the two-by-'ours easily your kids go off to college gain is part of a normal pierced walls and doors "Pretty young girls don't for the first lime, they'll be growlh pattern for that made of wood. At 120 miles marry poor old men. bringing home more than just age."—Bill Lawren per hour, the missile went —Jimmy Cannon a load of laundry and a ail the way through a wall smart attitude, if survey a by "I predict that exact repro- made of concrete block, "Things talked about most nutritionist Jean Harvey is duction through cloning shattering the material and exist least." any indication, the founts of will not become popular. Too sending jagged fragments of —Arthur Schnitzler knowledge must be dispen- many people already find concrete flying around their sing chocolate milk shakes. :: difficult to live with them- basement lab like so much "Afraid of death? One should " The average freshman, selves. " shrapnel. "If you're an occu- be afraid of life, not death. Harvey reports, celebrates —Jeana Dixon panl of a building, those —Marlene Dietrich lhat firs! year's independence by gaining as many as nine "All the rivers run into the sea, pounds. yet the sea is not full." Harvey, a former graduate —Ecclesiastes student in nutrition at Penn- sylvania State University, TORNADO CANNON surveyed 1,000 students at random, sending them ques- Nearly every spring, packs tionnaires on weight gain, of tornadoes howl up the exercise, and eating habits. Mississippi River Valley leav- She found lhat the weight ing behind a swath of human

gain known as the "freshman misery in the form of flat- ten" is not necessarily con- tened buildings and injured fined to freshmen: Students people. Most of that destruc- gained an average of 7.3 tion is caused by the torna- pounds during their sopho- does' 200-mile-per-hour more year, followed by winds, which can pick up average gains of 7.8 and 6.5 ordinarily harmless pieces of pounds, respectively, as wood and brick and turn juniors and seniors. them into deadly, wall-shat- ' Texas Tech researchers examine the damage wreaked by h. . „. Most students. Harvey tering missiles. fours fired into a brick wall by a 20-foot cannon (foreground, left). ' —

SUGARLESS CAVITIES end up with something that favors the growth of a Ever wonder why you're bacteria that causes cavities." getting so many cavities? Keyes stresses the impor-

Maybe it's the sugarless gum tance of rinsing your mouth you're chewing. That's right with water or brushing your sugarless gum. teelh after eating or drinking Doctors have recently something that contains discovered that such sugar- sucrose. "That's what the less products as gum and streptococci are using to at- candy contain substances tack the teeth and cause that may be doing you more decay."—PninaG. Hirsch harm than good. Known as natural sugars, these sub- "II you give me six lines stances, called sorbitol and written by the most honest

mannitol, are present in man, I will find something in many "sugarless" products them to hang him."' on the market today. —Cardinal Richelieu NATURAL CHILDBIRTH last lc: months and even Sorbitol and mannitol help AND IMPOTENCE years. Marriages have termi- to increase the population "The best measure of a man's nated as a result." of Streptococcus mutans, the honesty isn't his income- Witnessing natural child- Janus documented more bacteria in the mouth re- tax return. It's the zero ad- birth can make men impotent. than 400 cases of men sponsible for causing cavities. justment on his bathroom That's the conclusion of who witnessed natural child- "S. mutans use sorbitol and scale." psychologist Sam Janus, birth. He says that nearly mannitol as nutrients, which —Arthur C. Clarke clinical professor of psychia- 30 percent of the men devel- help these bacteria. prolifer- try at New York Medical oped postchild birth impo- ate." says microbiologist "I dreamed I was the presi- College. tence, which he first discov- and dentist Paul Keyes. "The dent of these United States. I

"There is a great deal of ered among his own bacteria then continue to dreamed that I was young pressure on today's woman to patients. reproduce in the mouth, mul- and smart and it was not a " give birth naturally, without Some of the impotent men, tiplying rapidly." waste. painkilling drugs," says Janus observes, turn to These bacteria remain —Lou Reed Janus. "And the husband is prostitutes as a means of harmless until you eat some- expected lo coach her becoming sexually aroused. thing thai contains ordinary through the delivery." "They have no problem sugar, or sucrose. Then " But watching birth can making love with the prosti- the S. mutans, now in .great traumatize the husband, tute." he says, "although they numbers, combine with Janusclaims. citing three can't wilh the wife. the sucrose to cause tooth major reasons: His wife may "Natural childbirth," he decay. appear "extremely unattrac- concludes, "isn't for everyone. A pioneer of preventive tive" to him during childbirth; Women shouldn't leel they dentistry and founder of the the sight of all the blood- have to go through it, and International Dental Health may "freak him out"; and men shouldn't feel that they're Foundation, Dr. Keyes ex- sometimes the husband feels cowards or that they're plains that the mouth contains guilty for causing his wife abandoning their wives il they several kinds of bacteria, so much pain. don't participate." but the ones considered "The guilt-hdden husband — Eric Mishara harmful to the teeth are S. doesn't want to hurt his mutans. wife by impregnating/her "Why is it that we rejoice at a "They are tenacious and again," Janus says, "and un- wedding and cry at a fu- adherent bugs," says Keyes. pleasant memories of the neral? It is because we are "They have. the mechanism " childbirth persist—all of which not the person involved. to attach and stick to teeth in cause impotence that can —Mark Twain every niche and crack. You "

coruTiruuurm

SCIENCE-FICTION 4. An artificial world that QUIZ NO. 1 circles its parent star, built by long-vanished engineers

Science -fiction stories who used all the material of roam the universe and allow that solar system's original the reader to visit strange planets for their construction. and wonderful imaginary 5. A cold, snowbound worlds. How many of the planet whose androgynous planets described below can natives have the capability of you identify with their correct becoming either male or names, the names of the female at the peak of their novels in which they appear, sexual cycles.—Ben Bova and the names of the authors of those novels? (The an- UinQ 9~| swers are given at the end of y Bjnsjn Aq 'sseuyjerj p the story.) puBHttoiBia 'ue-mag-c 1. A desert world inhabited uoaim^jjbi Aq 'pijom by giant sand worms and -duty 'p|Jom6u!y ouj_ ^ hardy Fremen, important to jp '}n6

RESURRECTION AT produced by the organism the Empire because it is -auuoA 3-in>| Aq '8A.y ssnou THE BRITISH MUSEUM during its dehydration phase, the only source of the spice -jaiqBneis 'aJ0pewejiej]_ '£ interacts chemically with melange. Aoaiisv ceesi

They could have called it fats in cell membranes so as 2. The capital of the crum- Aq 'uoijBpunoj 'joiubji 'g the Miracle of Ihe British to prevent the deadly cell bling Galactic Empire, this jjaqjsH ijuey Museum. Two rotifers— small damage that would normally planet is covered from pole to Aq 'aunQ ui 's^eny "L invertebrates related to the occur during "rehydration." pole by a single, world-gir- SyaMSMV worm family—had been lying So far, Crowe has been dling city. in " a sample of moss for 123 able to use trehalose to com- 3. A distant world of kindly '77s pleasant to observe years, motionless and en- pletely preserve the protec- but inquisitive aliens who how tree the present Age is tirely without water. Museum tive membrane that surrounds , kidnap time-tripping Billy Pil- in laying taxes on the next. staff assumed the animals biological cells. The next grim. —Jonathan Swift were dead. But when some- step, now under way, is to try one inadvertently sprinkled to preserve whole, intact water on the moss, the rotifers cells by injecting them with came back to life, stirring the compound. But the and wriggling in a convincing real payoff may lie further paradigm of resurrection. down the line. Noting that or- Now, some 35 years later, gans frozen for eventual a zoologist at the University use in transplant operations of California at Davis has sometimes undergo cellular unlocked the secret of the damage when thawed, Crowe rotifers' ability to survive thinks that trehalose could without water. According to potentially provide "a way to John Crowe, not only worms freeze or even freeze-dry but some bacteria, fungi, an intact human organ" with- and plant seeds are able to out causing irreparable go through cycles of deathlike damage to the organ itself. dehydration and rejuvenation —Bill Lawren by converting up to 20 per- cent of their body weight "In television, how the head into a compound called tre- moves is more important halose, a chemical relative of than what's inside it." This is an easy one: A recent movie was set in this desert blood sugar. The trehalose, —Ron Powers world inhabited by hardy Fremen and giant sand worms. 50 OMNI By tapping on the keyboard, you can add a room or raise the roof DREAM DWELLING BYTIMONOSKO

a construction lirm's office on the Inoutskirts of Tokyo a couple sit next to a young man at a computer keyboard. He is a house salesman working for Sekisui Heim, a company that mass-produces houses the way Toyota builds cars. They are prospective home buyers, ready to start their house tour. It begins once the salesman types in a brief command on the terminal. The screen glows with a CAD (computer- aided-design) drawing of his company's standard model home. It is made of the latest material—as strong as concrete but only a fraction of the weight. And this model comes with a computerized monitoring system The woman wants a larger bedroom. A few taps on the keyboard and the house disappears and is replaced by one with the larger bedroom. The man says he would prefer a pitched roof instead of the standard flat one. And a short time later the roof disappears and a new one is in its place. The customers have been giving some thought to having a second bedroom. Where would it go in this house, and how much would it cost? The computer summons another room from ils memory and attaches it to its video house. At the bottom of the screen the machine has been keeping a running tally of all costs. When the new figure for the added room shows up, the man and woman decide it is a little I

bMisawa believes that family violence is influenced by design and color. Red and pink make people restless.^

more than they can afford. The house is a bare concrete slab, there's a modest erased, and its predecessor with the but attractive two-story house. larger bedroom and redesigned roof ap- Thousands of Japanese have already pears in its place. ordered these new-tech, prefabricated The salesman asks more questions and homes. By the year 2000 these same types the answers into the machine. When homes, designed by computers and built he finishes he presses a button, and the by robots in Japan, may be as common printer next to him runs off a house port- along the sidewalks of US, towns as Toy- folio: three-dimensional drawings of the otas and Datsuns are on our streets. house viewed from eight different per- In modern Japan, the word and the spectives; detailed floor and foundation concept of prefabu (for "prefabricated plans; a construction schedule; and, of houses") has become something of a ral- course, an estimate. Without laying ar- lying cry for bringing new technology to chitect's pen to paper or hammering a the art and craft of home building. But nail, the couple has designed and built mass-producing homes is not a new an entire house inside the computer. concept. Quick-built structures began W.-'m The house order, with modifications, springing up in the Forties in the United goes out to a regional factory. There it is States. Today about two thirds of new processed and sent down to the factory American homes costing less than floor. The equivalent of a completed $50,000 are prefabs. Mass production r\ - house in the form of 11 room-size com- has long been seen as a solution to the . -> ponents—windows, doors, and plumb- challenge of accommodating a bur- ing installed —comes off the production geoning population at low cost. line only a few hours later. Finding space to live has always been Within a few days, a convoy. of six flatbed trucks pulls up to the building site. Previous page (top): structures in Japan's Eight men climb out and start peeling the prefab revolution; (bottom) showroom where blue tarpaulins from the boxy house a home buyer can design bis own; (right) components. A crane operator moves his video blueprint superimposed over a room. machine into position and starts lifting the This page (right): Every three minutes. Se- house pieces into place. By two o'clock kisui Heim welders produce a subttoor; that afternoon, where there had been only (above) it takes 44 minutes to make a house. a problem in Japan, where 119 million peo- architectural journal Zo. A young architect feet long, 8 feet wide, and 9 feet high. The ple are jammed into an area about the size named Katsuhiko Oono outlined the ideas average house is made of 11 of these units. of California. The overcrowding has been for a high-quality house assembled from Once the frame leaves the robot welders, good for the prefab business: The two larg- standard box-shaped 'modules that could be it begins its journey through the plant, where est Japanese builders average approxi- built in a factory. Part came from the cap- 400 human workers constantly refer to the mately 24,000 houses per year, almost twice sule-hotel designs of architect Kisho Kuro- design plan and the list of materials needed the production rate of Ihe United Slates' kawa. In 1971 the first 260 such unit houses for each room. They also install the plastic largest home manufacturer. And one out oi were buiit by Sekisui Heim. a division of the plumbing pipe and" electrical wiring inside every ten new homes constructed in Japan chemical conglomerate Sekisui. Ihe walls. Once in place, the wires and pipe is prefabricated. To visil a house factory is to step-into the connections will be hooked up to other wall In the early Sixties the Japanese were twenty-first century. Heim's facility on the units. Finally the entire house (made in the quick to see the advantage of the prelabu. edge of Tokyo is one of six, each of which standard white color) will be connected to The first manufactured homes were mostly serves a 100-kilometer radius. In the facto- power, water, and sewage lines. the wood-frame designs common in this ry's office, a team of women processes The factory also produces the outside country. But by the early Seventies a new house orders arriving from Heim's network panels of the house. Some are made of kind of prefab appeared on the scene. Called of 1,000 salespeople. Silting at data termi- painted steel and aluminum; others, of a ma- the "unit house," it was constructed with a nals, they go over the plans for each house terial called Synselite, a special mixture of steel frame instead of wood and depended and from these, draw up a master list of every concrete and reinforcing fibers. In all, about on concrete and metal in its wails and ceil- item that will be needed from Heim's mas- 85 percent of the house is completed at the ings. It was strong. And in less lhan a day it sive inventory factory. A Heim production line can turn out could be mass-produced, in room-size seg- Outside, one part of the factory yard looks the equivalent of a complete house in just 44 ments, on an assembly line. Once manufac- like a hardware salesman's nightmare. Stored minutes. tured, the rooms could be delivered to the there is an inventory of house parts—win- Hideaki Nishijima is a registered architect owner's land and erected as a house in a dows, doors, cabinets, interior wall panels, and Heim's engineering manager at the matter of hours. electrical fixtures —30,000 different items in plant. A cheerful man who wears a hard hat Helm's houses, for example, go up in ap- all. And Heim makes every one, from soap and the company jacket instead of the ar- proximately five hours, although the skeletal dishes to staircases. There are even entire chitect's tweedy sport coat, he supervises structure isn't immediately ready for occu- bathrooms constructed of a single piece of the dispatching of the completed unit house pancy. Finishing and plumbing can take up plastic, ready to be dropped into place in kits from the factory. Nishijima scrutinizes to ten days, but government red tape some Heim house. each house that comes off the production needed to clear the house for habitation can The manufacturing process begins with line and has a personal interest in the prod- poslpone moving day for a couple of months sizing and cutting the steel beams used for uct. He lives in a Heim house. after (he delivery from the factory. .each unit's frame. At this stage, robots do "It was made one morning in this factory," Part of the inspiration for the unit house most of the work. In just a few minutes they he says with a smile, "several years ago." came from a 1967 paper published in the weld 'together a steel frame as large as 18 Prefabricated homes have a lot to offer the Japanese home buyer. One of the selling

points of prefab modulars is that they are much more spacious than traditional Japa- nese homes. Their exterior designs are new to Japan as well. Heim houses have a boxy but attractive look. They come with a wide choice of ex- teriors. One model, the Avante, has a sharply angled roofline and a graph-checked exte-

rior. The Heim Skyward, a new model, is the

first three-story unit house. It is ideal for cramped city neighborhoods. The Parfait, the company's best seller, is flat roofed. Computers allow buyers to personalize their homes at prefab prices. Electronic hardware and software are destined to play a bigger part inside future Japanese homes as well. Sensors and con- trols can be installed with ease when the

house is manufactured. Heim already offers a central computer called the Heim Keeper

as an option for its houses. The Keeper monitors everything from heat control and energy use to the level of water

in the bathtub. Working from a small five- button console built into the wall, a home- owner on the way out the door for the week- end presses one button with the emblem of

a masked face on it to activate a burglar alarm. An owl-faced button sets the house on an automatic-lighting cycle, turning lights

off and on to make it appear occupied. To save on energy, the homeowner turns the heat down until about half an hour before he arrives back home on Sunday night. And because he won't need hoi water until Sun- day night, he shuts down his hot-water heater until then. A small illurnirHi^ci floor plan above features of a house. Today on the edge of (he believes, for instance, in reincarnation the control shows where all the controls are Tokyo's Ginza shopping district is Kuroka- and thinks that he was a builder in another '& activated. The whole process takes about wa Capsule Mansion, a bizarre structure of life), Misawa is a business legend with a rep- three minutes. A more advanced version of large concrete units stacked one atop an- utation, for being a shrewd entrepreneur and the Keeper, in the planning stages, will let other like" a pile of children's blocks. The one of Japan's most creative executives. the homeowner do telebanking and control capsule rooms are reasonably priced ac- His salespeople routinely use videos and such automated accessories as motorized commodations for corporate executives portable computers to sell homes. ("A TV window shutters. making overnight trips to the metropolis. image," he claims, "assures three hundred Unit houses are profitable items for some Measuring seven by three and one half by thirty times as much information delivery as major corporations in Japan, but they have three and one half feet, the smaller capsules verbal conversation.") And a mammoth not yet taken the country by storm. One rea- are a little too cramped for larger-framed computer system is central to his goal of son, suggests Toyo Ito, an independent ar- Westerners. But they are nicely appointed, building a "knowledge base" for his com- chitect, is that Japanese home buyers are reminiscent of the plush interior of a railway pany. In the course of the year, employees too conservative. Another is that these berth. The style and ingenuity of Kurokawa's enter into it information on the success/fail- houses don't offer enough innovation to lure designs are important contributions to the ure rate of ideas and projects they have been buyers from going with the more traditional new housing movement. By building in es- working on. style o! homes. sential fixtures and appliances, Kurokawa As part of one experiment, he grouped Ito himself has been experimenting with uses every inch of space. Even the windows managers into teams according to age. He futuristic design touches that incorporate are unique: Each capsule has a single large then had them feed the results of their work some unusual elements— hatchbacks, sun- porthole with a circular shade that folds like into a computer and will use the data to judge roofs, and other car parts. In his homes, win- a Japanese fan. their innovation and productivity. Eventually, dows positioned high on a wall, for instance, Using these ideas in mass-producing Misawa says, the collective knowledge and can be rolled up and down with a crank han- homes for the twenty-first century requires experience of everyone who works for him dle. Sunroofs, he's found, make perfect small the resources of a large corporation and the will be stored in the computer. skylights. And they don't leak when it rains. willingness to make a commitment to years Misawa likes to think of industrial progress Ito is so impressed with the designs that have of research and innovation without quick in terms of epochs. The Fifties was the era come from the Japanese auto industry that profits. Perhaps the most dramatic commit- of heavy industry and the Iron Age, he says. he has suggested that carmakers like Nis- ment has been made by Chiyoji Misawa, the The Sixties saw the emergence of the plas- san and Toyota should build houses. forty-seven-year-old president and founder tics and electronics industries. The Seven- Japan is already famous (or one innova- of Misawa Homes. ties and Eighties are what he labels the Oil tion in shelter, a concept called the living The son of a successful lumber dealer, Age, when the assembly industries, partic- capsule. At Expo 70 in Osaka, architect Misawa founded his company in 1967. To- ularly the automotive industry, made tre-

Kisho Kurokawa exhibited a prototype ot his day it is second only to Sekisui Heim in the mendous progress. The technologies of all

"business capsule," an ultracompact room number of prefab homes it builds in Japan. these eras musf be integrated in house that incorporated practically all the basic A philosophical and somewhat mystical man building, Misawa believes.

As industry moves toward the Nineties it will enter what he calls the Age of the Earth. Accordingly he feels thai the materials of the future are silicon, extracted from common sand; and ceramics, from sand and clay.

Given that, it is no surprise that his company is already building and selling the world's first ceramic house: the New Ceramic Home. It is a unit-house design—made of steel- frame boxes—but the exterior is molded from a remarkable building material called PALC (precastable autoclaved lightweight ceramics). PALC is made from common earth components (silica and limestone) dug out of the hillside behind the Misawa factory,

where it is produced. The material is mixed

in a large pressure cooker, and air is pumped

into the mixture. Later it is molded into panels. PALC is as durable as concrete but weighs

somewhat less. If is not combustible and can withstand temperatures of 12Q0T without

being scorched. It will not decay or warp. It's soundproof, has excellent insulation prop- erties, is durable enough to withstand an

earthquake (an important consideration in

Japan), and it's cheap. The company seer": roughly $30 million to develop PALC (about $6 million of which came from government grants), but the re- turn has been considerable. Misawa says that the cost of raw materials and transpor- tation for his homes has been cut to one for- tieth the cost of conventional housing. Misawa also looks to the earth substance

silicon to fulfill another dream of his, the zero- energy house. This building will be shingled with amorphous silicon solar cells capable CONiirv-EDONPAQEflS —

FICTION

Why is the Brobdingnagian brain on Athena Station suffering a slowdown?

THE MIND LIKE A STRANGE BALLOOIU

BYTOMMADDOX

Nature abhors a vacuum. plastic sofa, mismatched chairs. 1 couldn't drag her oft to live in it Me, too, I guess. I tried to "You like here?" the woods. She's got things to

fill it in my usual ways. "It's all right, Toshi." Not quite do. Anyway, that's over, Toshi.

Drank too much beer, a lie. Though in Palo Alto I'd had How can I help you?" cooked elaborate Mexican din- the usual company-sponsored "We've got problems with an ners, walked aimlessly in the condo, it hadn't felt like mine. Not Aieph-Nought IA," he said. In- dripping woods under slate- just the apartment, the work I'd telligent Assistants are just gray Oregon skies. done and life I'd lived — none of computers in the last fane, but

And of course, I watched it had seemed to belong to me. they have such sweet moves television: old movies seen in Tawdry as it was, this place did. so responsive to human touch, worn prints, music videos with "You making any money?" they don't seem to be com- strutting rock stars, baseball "Some . . . enough." Thai was puters at all. games inching to conclusion true. A few high-priced consul- There were only two Aleph- across bright-green fields. tations with Control Data, a Noughts in existence, and one Ghost images, ghost voices week spent lecturing for the In- was buried deep beneath the pulled by my dish antenna Irom ternational Telecommunica- National Security Agency com- the satellite-thick sky. The void tions Union in Zurich— I'd done plex in Fort Meade. Maryland,

remained: I had a talent grow- all right financially. With the sucking up the daily gigabytes

ing slack from disuse; I had an money I'd saved while at Sen- of intelligence and decidedly empty space in my bed. Trax, I had more than enough. off-limits to me. The other was The image in my living room "Cheryl says hello," he said. working for ICOG, the Interna- was real enough, though. Toshi "MIT made her a nice offer, so tional Construction Orbital

Ito had come calling to offer me it looks like Stanford has to give Group, managing construction a job. "How are you, Jerry?" he her tenure or lose her." of a solar-energy grid. It hung said. He shook the water off his "Next time you see her, give in geostationary orbit several raincoat and draped it over a her my congratulations.'' hundred kilometers above the chair, then looked around at the "Don't you miss her?" equator, at Athena Station. "01 pine veneer on the walls, green course I do, but so what? ICOG's system had to be the PAINTINGS BY BOB VENOSA —

^Athena Station spun gracefully amid a mad clutter of wire and frame. The Aleph system managed everything.^

one he was talking about because I thought they were mentally ill,

I had blown my chance to work with but didn't have time for them any- ihe government. When SenTrax way. I was too busy learning delivered the first Aleph system to Aleph's characteristic patterns, NSA, I was one of those chosen lo those complex internal rhythms spend a few months at Fort Meade that, like a foreign language, you helping install, configure, and begin to lorget when you're away Iroubleshoot their new toy, but NSA from them, I was listening for dis- hadn't liked my background, par- sonances or sprung rhythms ticularly my left-wing connections anything to indicate what might be from graduate school at Berkeley. wrong, but all I got was the usual So the agency had wanted to give dense flow of information. me the full security treatment—six From the vast number crunch- months of interview and investiga- ing any computer can handle to the

tion. I told to forget it. them When decision processes that only an IA

SenTrax I insisted, told Ihem the can touch, Aleph appeared to be same thing. functioning normally.

Cheryl said 1 was looking for a But several times—and often for confrontation, I a way out; maybe an hour or more, which, to a ma- was. At any rate, Toshi had been chine whose unit of time is the my section head, and he carried nanosecond, is an infinity—the the message up the corporate lad- system slowed. It was as if stunned, der. He (ought hard for my right to confused. Calculations queues say no, but the most he accom- formed, vital-decisions processes plished was preserving what you virtually halted. Suddenly, normal might call my good name. I could flow would resume. Aleph would still use SenTrax as reference, a and have to play catch-up for a while,

I wasn't on anyone's blacklist, as but it was built for that game, so far as I could tell, routine functioning of Athena Sta- "So ICOG's got problems with tion wasn't seriously impaired. the Aleph are they?" system. What In short, the situation was some- 'At most times, nothing. At oth- what troublesome. What was ers, it's slow, muddled." His dark causing the anomalies? What hair gleamed in the lamplight, and he was everything, from the routine flow of supplies would happen when the system was under pale beneath his light-yellow skin. to the trickiest cost-and-iime decisions. full load at all times?

can't it, "We have Jerry. It's not even car- Should it drop the millions it of balls was jug- I could understand why Alice's KEs twit- rying a full load yet, it the and has IA team gling, SenTrax would fall along with them. tered during these slowdowns like priests running around like mad hens. No apparent ICOG's vendor contract with SenTrax un- who had just heard about the archbishop's reason — diagnostics programs nominal doubtedly called for heavy penalties, up lo illegitimate child. across the board." and including default, so ICOG's lawyers Like them, like the diagnostics programs,

"So you want me to see what i can find. Is would nail the SenTrax to courthouse wall. I had no'answers. I did, however, have a Alice Vance still running the show?" For the next two weeks my home was the guess. Such all-purpose lAs as Aleph do a "Yes. She concurs that we should bring Ops Room. Workstations were scattered lot of their own programming—it's part of you in. You helped design it, Jerry." around the forty-meter hemisphere, paths what makes them easy to work with—and in

"So I did. SenTrax How does feel about between them marked by glowing red the process they sometimes tie themselves involving me?" beads. Around the room's circumference up in strange ways to their subsystems, with 'They were not eager, but they now agree." were racks of metal globes that bounced soft unfortunate results. So I was rifling the black

There was a story there, I was sure. Moment white light off the walls. boxes that on my data windows represented of haragei between us, visceral communi- The sound most usually heard was a soft subsystems, hoping to find inside one of cation the Japanese prefer I to mere words. murmur of voices from Alice Vance's group them a little, squatting, fork-tongued de- could picture him quietly, unaggressively but of knowledge engineers. mon—an ugly little thing with a long tongue, persistently pushing until they agreed. The KEs are acolytes of the system. They nasty breath, and a repellent sense of hu- "I can't promise much, Toshi, but I'll give occasionally receive an epiphany in the form mor. Turing's Demon I called it—a being " it a try. What 7 does one pack for high orbit of a bright hologram, which springs into conjured out of the unfathomable complex- 'As little as possible, Jerry. Travel light." being over the consoles they manipulate. To ity and speed of IA systems. them the. current systems problems were Given this idea, nothing more than an in- Athena Station spun gracefully amid a mad something on the order of original sin, so they tuition, I was ready to go out and watch Aleph clutter of wire and- frame. The nest of con- approached diffidently me with sugges- at work. I intended to observe groups that centric rings was the station itself; the chaos tions, hypotheses, or just good wishes. They asked the system for a lot of processing around it, the staging area for the orbital en- were looking to me to explain the ways of power and whose software was home ergy grid. The Aleph system managed Aleph lo man. cooked— the weird spots, places out on the 62 OMNI —

edge of R&D. I run had a quick sorting pro- "One of Alice's wizards, are you?" away. "You are about five ten," she said. "Hair gram to find them. "Hardly. Just a freelance troubleshooter. light , the color of straw, complexion . . though Biops/I-Sight was on the station's outer rim. Could you tell me in general what you are now flushed. You are wearing a red-striped It featured blank white walls, cluttered work- doing?" shirt that does not suit you, your pants need benches, and a row of data consoles. She explained they were growing bio- pressing, and your shoes are worn. Every- Twenty-first century still life as opposed to computers, which were ultimately intended thing you are wearing is well made, expen- the new millenium of the Gothic Ops Room. to be implants—replacements for de- sive. In short, you look like what you are: a A young woman in blue jeans and a stroyed retinal tissue or optic nerves. Athena successful, intellectual gamesman, one who T-shirt, fairly obvious postdoc material, got Station was ideal for their work as they can alford an air of neglect. You probably up from the station where she and an even needed zero gravity for the biolab, the Aleph have luck with women— many find that sort younger Japanese man were working, and system for their vision-simulation program. of thing appealing." said hello. The retina, however, was such an active "What sort of thing?" Something had gone

I told her I wanted to see the boss. She processor of data, and the optic nerves were off the rails here. went through one of two doors unmarked so dense—a million or so fibers in each "The shabby gentility. It's unimportant. We and came back in a few minutes to tell me one— that they were having problems with call this the CAV program: computer-as- Doctor Heywood could see me now. the sheer weight and complexity of infor- sisted vision. It is fairly accurate but requires Diana Heywood was small, slender, in her mation transfer. "Still, we have accom- inordinate amounts of hardware. Look

. early thirties. close-cut, She had dark hair plished something," she said. "Rather the around you." She pointed to small cameras streaked with gray, and when she turned to Frankenstein stage but very interesting. Let ringing the room. "Using l-Sight software, the face me, her eyes were hidden behind large, me show you." Aleph system combines views, approxi- gold-rimmed glasses with a burst of dark She reached to the back of her neck with mates perspective, and corrects color hue at smoke the center of each lens, like the the same gesture a woman uses to let her and intensity. The images lack resolution expanding cloud from an explosion. Her hair down and pulled off two rectangular comparable to the eye's, and the field of view features were sculpted in fine bone, her neck strips of flesh. "Plastic flesh. Fastened with is somewhat narrow. Still, I assure you, it is was long and slender, carved from ivory. She VF-velcro." She picked up two cables at- better than nothing . . . much better." was wearing a silky blouse the color of a ripe tached to the console beside her. "Yes. I suppose it is." peach, and black jeans. "Come here," she said. "Do you see?" "In any case, that is our current stage of

"What can I do for you?" she said. She Embedded in her multiplex neck were two development. I am afraid that it will be im- moved slowly from behind the desk, her fin- light-fiber junctions. possible for you to monitor our ongoing work gers barely touching the surface. She took off her glasses turned her and at present. We are far too busy. I would think Her image seemed still and sharp before face toward me. Her eyes were brown and your concern would be with the Aleph sys- me, and I got a sudden, involuntary spasm vacant, unfocused. She was blind. tem itself."

of desire. . She reached behind her, in a cable each "It is, but I need to see things from the "I need to observe your employment of hand, and snapped them home. She walked other end, the user's perspective. I wouldn't the Aleph-Nought system," toward me and stopped less than a foot be any bother. Strictly an observer, looking for anomalies in subsystems involvement." Jargon surfaced to mask my confusion.

"No, not now. And I am afraid that is all the

time I can give you."

Confused and routed, I left. Part of it was the aggressive freak show, part her unex- plained hostility, but there was more. She had reached out with invisible hands and taken a clutch of nerves, not just the sensory ones, but cells deep inside the brain, the ones that when they fire, make you crazy.

Help the handicapped, I thought tali in love with the blind.

I returned to the Ops Room. Alice Vance, director of IA Systems, was sitting with To- shi. She was fifty or so, pear-shaped, and had hair the color of old grease. We had worked together in Palo Alto, back when Aleph was just a gleam in the SenTrax eye, and we got along well. "Why didn't you warn me about Diana

Heywood?" I said. "She gave me a very hard

time . . . took away my guns and ran me out of town." "How very phallic of her," Alice said. She tapped in a hold command, and the four data windows she had been working with faded from the screen. "Can you not work with other subsys- tems?" Toshi said. "Biological operations are somewhat marginal."

"No. I'm doing what you pay me for, follow- ing my highly trained intuition no matter

where it leads." A couple of the KEs stood "Slop complaining, Munshaw. You knew you'd be working nearby, listening. I saw them unconsciously with a computer when we hired you." nodding their heads in agreement— I was the sharp young priest sent out by the Vati-

CONTINUEOOM PAGE 112 Ikeda is beaming. Rouot One is Kiioh working beautifully. The four legs of the silvery mechanical spider move in a slow, syncopated walk, lifting and setting down its round, flat feet. A hiss and loud pop accompany each step as the rubber-padded pseudopods break free from the suction. White, plastic arteries woven through the aluminum framework oi its body carry the compressed air that powers the device. As Ikeda shouts out Ihe robot's vital statistics over the whir of the air compressor, the machine continues walking, shuddering slightly as it jerks one set oi feet free and glides forward. By the time Ikeda finishes talking, Robot One has walked halfway up the wall. The wall walker is a big attraction at the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory (MEL), where Ikeda works. The robot wears out one set of footpads each month performing for guests. Ikedas efforts represent just a small part of Japan's push to give birth to a new automaton, the third-generation robot.

First- generation drones work by rote, dumbly repeating the same motions over and over; the second-generation automatons have crude sensing abilities but are stationary. Third-generation robots, with their humanlike sensors and agile hands and arms, will be able to step out in the world and move with almost the same ease as the rest of us do. To help stir interest in the next wave of robots, Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry fMITI) has allocated 20

billion yen (about $88 million) for an eight- year research program. It's no coincidence that both this program and the famed fifth- gene ration computer project will be completed in 1991. Right now electronic umbilical cords tether robots to massive

ROBOTIC 80UL BY DOUGLAS COLLIGAN

The Japanese have created a race of droids to be fire fighters, frogmen^and figure painters wall-size computers. Researchers hope that Out of this technology will come the first out of the fifth-generation computer quest "hazard" robots Roboticists will send these will come a more compact and portable soul third-generation machines where few men for their third-generation machine. would choose to go; into the radioactive in- Participating in Japan's ambitious robot- terior of a nuclear reactor, down to the dan- ics projects are more than 20 corporations. gerous terrain of the ocean floor, or to res- They're joined by researchers at various To- cue htimans trapped in a burning building. kyo universities, and roboticists at the MEL The wall-walking spider is being custom- and the Elect rotechnical Laboratories, both designed for rescue work. In this office, Ikeda in Tsukuba Science City. Tsukuba is the re- shows artist's renderings of future wall walk- search center 37 miles northeast of Tokyo, a ers on the job. In one picture, a spidery robot sprawling complex ot uniformly bland red- crawls up the side of a burning skyscraper. brick buildings where scientists draw blue- -It's carrying a lifeline to a group of anxious prints for future technology. people peering through a broken window. On one unseasonably warm fall after- The Tokyo Fire Department Research noon, a very serious, shirt-sleeved Noboru Center actually tried to build such a ma- Enomoto, staff specialist for development chine. It was a small suction crawler about programs, outlined Mill's goals under the the size of a breadbox. The suction held it Advanced Robot Technology Project. First against the surface of the building. But every will come the research conducted by spe- time it came to a ledge or some obstacle on cialized laboratories on the bits and pieces the building's surface, it got stuck or fell. of the supermachine: its manipulators, the Someday Ikeda may be able to dispatch droid versions of hands; senses, like vision an army of hazard robots, each boasting a and touch; and locomotion. The labs will also specific skill, Building renovators have ap- explore how to operate the machine by re- proached him about enlisting his wall walker mote control. Once engineers perfect the in- to work on the crumbling facades of struc- dividual components, they will then begin to tures. It is a dangerous and labor-intensive pull all the parts together. job because workers must rig up elaborate

Previous page. A robot at Expo '85 sketches rr.ociei a .; likeness. This paae Kato's

WABOT I (above, leii) can ilex its hips, walk

Sideways; (above, right) WABOT It's computer-controlled brain reads sheet music Next page: Ryuichi's mechanical crab (top) and centipede (center, right);

WABOT I in action (center, left); Kaneko's six-legger (bottom, left) can step over blocks scattered in its path. systems of scaffolding before repairing a Honma built small robot arms that moved the machine. With a metallic rustle the ten- building. The robot could even help main- gracefully. The secret was a peculiar sub- tacles uncurl and coil themselves around a tain the vast fleets of ships employed in a stance called shape memory alloy (SMA). head of cabbage, then a bunch of bananas, seafaring nation like Japan. Ikeda envisions Researchers at the U.S. Naval Ordnance and finally a piece of porcelain. The hand some future version of Robot One skittering Laboratory developed SMA, or biometal, as lifts each item and releases itwithout leaving down the ship's steel sides to scrape off bar- it's known in Japan, more than three dec- a mark. Unlike the standard steel claw, the

nacles and rust. ades ago. Until recently, people considered device moves with^erpenline flexibility. Hi- Before a robot can perform any of these it nothing more than a useless by-product of rose turns off the videotape. jobs, however, researchers must solve research. But engineers some are beginning to "Next I wanted (o try the gripper on some- basic problems. For example, they must give take advantage of of one the metal's unique thing live. So I caught a cat. At first it sat the machine a decent pair of characteristics: its eyes. Matsu- No matter how shape is there quietly. But when we approached it with

shita (known in this country as Panasonic) changed, when warmed slightly it will it ." return the gripper, ran away. So . . He presses has come up with one lype of robotic vision to its original lines. the play button. The TV screen shows a small it's '85 demonstrating at the Expo techno- Honma's little biometal arms gave Hilachi boy standing next to the coiled metal fin- fair at Tsukuba. On display is a camera con- scientists the inspiration to try the alloy in gers. "That's my three-year-old son," Hirose nected to a robotic arm. The camera studies larger models. Instead of bulky and noisy says. A voice off-camera shouts "Banzai," for a face aboul 20 seconds. The computer electric motors clenching and unclenching and the boy raises his arms straight in the simplifies the image by ignoring the tones the fingers, Hitachi uses 12 strands of SMA air. The metal tentacles slither around his and concentrating on the lines di- wires and then connected to springs. When a small waist. He smiles as though it tickles. A few rects the robotic arm to draw a black-and- charge of electricity courses through the seconds later, the tentacles withdraw.

white sketch of what it sees. wires, The result is an they heat up and shrink. This gives Hirose's gripper still needs refining. He impressionistic rendering of objects. the fingers a smooth, humanlike molion. must devise a way, for example, to vary the But the world of three-dimensional things Switching on the current causes the hand to gripper's grip. Practical applications are still requires eyes that can discern greater de- close; turning it off makes the fingers open. far in the future, but Hirose awaits the day tail, it's complicated for a machine to rec- when he can miniaturize the graceful hand ognize even simple such a 3-D object as a and install it at the end of a gastroscope so cylinder. viewed When directly from above, it can perform stomach surgery. the object might appear to be a circle; from No matter how dexterous a machine is, the side, more of at a rectangle. So the Elec- unless it can move, its uses will be limited.

the it As program gets smarter will be able scraping off the Hirose and his colleagues in robot re- to construct 3-D video reproductions of the vessel's barnacles and rust^ search realized years ago that nature offers different objects the range finder sees. "The the best example. The ideal way to move is computer-aided-design [CAD] model is then to walk. So roboticists in the United States stored in the program. It becomes part of an and in Japan have been trying for years to image dictionary," Shirai explains. 'And by slip a set of tegs—two, four, or six—under- matching objects with a CAD model we can neath their machines.

teach the robot to figure out the object's ori- Unfortunately, the "I hand moves a little too studied the snake. I studied the spider." entation." Shirai will begin trying out the sys- sluggishly to be practical. Because the wires the soft-spoken robot. cisl explains in fluent tem seriously in about two years. Right now, take while a to cool, the hand cannot loosen English. 'And I was inspired by the walking he's in the early stages of acquiring data to its grip readily. There may be other prob- of the spider." On the concrete floor sat a build up the system's dictionary. lems, according to Kobayashi. For example, large mechanical spider, a quadruped It won't be enough for these robots to see because scientists have never used SMA walking machine measuring about three feet the world. They must interact with it—turn- components this way before, no one knows from leg to leg. Not only did the robot, called ing valves and retrieving fallen tools. The how long they will last. Titan III, look like the real thing, but during a third-generation machines will need hands Several hand researchers are looking to demonstration, it crossed the room with the that can operate with at least quasi-human the animal kingdom for inspiration. At the To- slow, delicate gait of a daddy longlegs. dexterity. Most robot little grippers are more kyo Institute of Technology, small, dapper Titan III moves at the rate of about four than two flat metal fingers that operate like Shigeo Hirose has made a name for himself feel per minute, which is faster than the spi- motorized vises. Their movements are spas- by building a- menagerie of machines that dery wall walker. It can raise its body two tic. picking So up anything other than sim- ingeniously mimic the movement of certain feet in the air or set itself down on the floor, ple, flai-sided objects is difficult. animals. His cybernetic elephant trunk, for gather its legs up around it, and use the four The electronics giant, Hitachi Limited, has instance, moves as sinuously as the real wheels on the underside of its body to roll to been working on possible solutions to the thing. A snake robot slithers. its destination. hand problem. In fall of the 1984, Satomi Ko- "Let me show you my latest project," he Hirose's mechanical spider also has a tal- bayashi, director of Hitachi's mechanical says mysteriously and pops a cassette into ent other robot builders wish their devices engineering research laboratory, unveiled a a videocassette machine. "From my studies had: The ability to climb up- and downstairs. three-fingered robot gripperthat of I moves with snakelike robots, developed a new kind And it does this without seeing. the ease of a human hand. During one dem- of gripper." A metal stalk protrudes from the The machine relies on a system of touch onstration, its three digits— thumb, a forefin- left of the screen. At the end of it, where the sensors. Eight metal whiskers of special ger, middle. finger and —closed in around a robot equivalent of a thumb and two fingers memory alloy jut from the edges of each of bail in a slow But smooth movement. would normally appear, three steel octopus- the spider's footpads. One advantage to the The idea for the Hitachi hand like came from tentacles curl backward. alloy is that if the machine accidentally steps a design of Dal Honma, a teacher at Wa- The film shows thegripper in action. A hu- on a wire, the wire will not be permanently seda University, in Tokyo. As a student, man hand places different.objects in front of bent out of shape.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 118 X ,

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' i out in force this [l,unn, i,ir6, i,ir7,d,ir8J] morning, marching to work. Soon all Tokyo's i will bustle with people working a six-day week. This Spartan, workaholic society just can't slow down.

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, ( ' (05582) r8 ' 633_oha r a_ka k i za k i _sh i long relied on its technological for survival, she explains. And they

tificial intelligence, will ultimatety PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN R.WOLFF 47b realize an idealistic society, the Greeks needed slaves, Fuchi says. Our version of the slave would be the computer.^

make them number one in (he world. stead of driving youseh, you'd just tell the spring — sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-gener- Scientists have recognized the potential computer where to go. And to pass time on ation computers—will make most of Ihe of artificial intelligence for decades. They ar- that journey, you might sit back for a con- professional and personal decisions cur- gued that if machines could only ape human versation—with your machine. rently eating up our time. Freed from the intelligence, they could perform the time- Thinking of a merger'' The computer would drudgery of logical, deductive thought, we'll consuming thinking processes we now slave tell you who to merge with, when, and how have time to indulge our humanity—time for over. Equipped with computers that deci- much money to spend on the deal. Want to a novel, a painting, a philosophical essay.

pher visual images, communicate in collo- deal with a bill collector or' solve your drug But if Spartan Japan is to usher in this new- quial language, reason, and even learn from problem? Your computer, deeply attuned to age Athens it must have a master plan. And experience, the human race would have ac- the facts of your life, infinitely sensitive, and toward that end, the Ministry of International cess to additional mental muscle. That mus- aware of every option, would tell you how to Trade and Industry (MITI) appointed a com- cle would give credence to our decisions proceed. Want to write to a friend? Jusl dic- mittee of planners. Formed in the late Sev-

and, perhaps more important, free us to do tate your message to the computer, and your enties, it included a group nicknamed the the things we do best. As Kazuhiro Fuchi friend would get the note in seconds. Illinois Mafia— Kazuhiro Fuchi, Tohru Moto- (pictured on page 72 and below), the out- Later, while negotiating the merger with Oka, and Hideo Aiso—old college buddies spoken leader of Japan's artificial-intelli- some businessmen—tycoons Irom Hun- from the University of Illinois, famed for its gence project, says, "The kind of logic at the gary—your office machine would translate computer-science department. heart of the new computers is not new but the dealings word for word. Should these Fuchi and his colleagues were intimately ancient, similar to the logic developed by the negotiators refer to technical involvements aware of the impressive legacy of previous

Greeks. If you think about ancient Greek so- you hadn't reckoned on, take a minute io generations. The first electronic computers. ciety in Athens, they devoted themselves to consult your machine. With the ability to dial built in the Fifties, were room-size structures art, sports, philosophy, and politics. To re- into data banks containing every bit of ex- that depended on the warmth of vacuum

alize this idealistic society, they needed a pert knowledge ever amassed, it would give tubes. The invention of the transistor in the large number of slaves. In our vision of an you access to the details of medicine, geol- late Forties made smaller, faster, cheaper idealistic society, these slaves would be re- ogy, computer design, cosmology, den- (and cooler) computers possible, and the placed by computers and robots." tistry, and more. second generation was born. Then, in the These computer "slaves," McCorduck Indeed, the computers of the fifth gener- early Sixties, semiconductor chips, each notes, will be as easy to use as the tele- ation will run factories, manage offices, per- containing hundreds of tiny transistors in phone, as ubiquitous as electricity, as en- form surgery, diagnose diseases, and even the form of integrated circuits, gave rise to compassing as 2001 's legendary Hal. And design new software and hardware for new, the third generation. And by the Seventies, they should alter human existence as pro- ever more intelligent machines. These off- the amount of information that could be foundly as did the control of fire, stored on a chip had increased yet the emergence of speech, or the again. Now thousands of inte-

agricultural revolution. grated circuits could fit on a sin- Those witnessing the birth of this gle very large scale integrated

new age may find it impossible to (VLSI) chip, resulting in superfast predict all the ramifications. But a fourth-generation machines. few things on the horizon seem Each generation held more in- clear. By sometime in the next cen- formation in less space; each tury, almost everyone in high-tech worked an order of magnitude nations like the United States and faster than the technology thai had will Japan have intelligent ma- preceded it. If the Japanese were chines working in the home, the of- to build a fifth generation, they fice, and the family car. Your per- would have to multiply the speed sonal Hal might first wake you up and reduce the size of computers with an original song or phrase, once more. perhaps even reading your brain Moreover, the new generation waves and gearing its output to would have to be based on new your particular mood. It would re- principles. Today's computers, mind you of impending appoint- though more powerful than ever, ments in clear, colloquial English. basically just crunch numbers. And then, monitoring your exact They follow a set of sequential in- physical and chemical constitu- structions to solve a problem, lo- tion, might provide a specially for- .. || eating all information in a literal, tified breakfast and clothes de- |||||| siep-by-step way. The new com- signed for the day at hand. puters, on the other hand, would llllll Before leaving home you could have |||||j to process information the activate your robot maid and a §|l||| way humans do — manipulating dozen appliances with the simple |||||P ideas rather than numbers, re- sound of your voice. Then you fg|ll|i membering by association or cat- might summon your car. But in- llKl? egory rather than by running down 74 OMNI ' —

long list, a and coming up with solutions tense, with a prolific, lisrcely potent mind, mandate was clear: to conduct a crash rather than simply regurgitating statistical Fuchi was considered a maverick in con- course in artificial intelligence, engineering data. The old computer architecture would formist Japan. the nuts and bolts for mass-producing fifth- to in favor have be abandoned ot one that According to one legend, he was just a generation computers in a decade. more closely approximated the functioning young man in his twenties when, furious at The first phase of the project, Fuchi ex- human mind. the way things were going at his laboratory. plains, was aimed at laying the groundwork The Japanese panel knew that some ar- he stormed oj! -ji-;:J stayed away for a month. for the new computers, which would have to tificial intelligence machines had already He came back only after his supervisor handle vasi amounts of knowledge and data. been put to commercial use. By using a set begged him to return. And some 20 years Those computers, he knew, would combine of rules lo draw logical conclusions from facts later he remained deeply committed to the myriad complex parts, And the first com- stored in a database, a digital geologist grand gesture, the brazen intellectual leap. ponent he and his team of samurai scientists called has PROSPECTOR been highly suc- When he drew his cadre of youthful talent set out to design —the relational database cessful in pinpointing the location of rich from Japan's top government labs and com- machine—was the basis for all that would mineral lodes. And a medical expert system puter companies (including Hitachi, Nippon follow in the years lo come. called MYCIN diagnoses such blood dis- Electric Company, Mitsubishi, Sharp, and The relational database machine, Fuchi eases as meningitis. But these custom-made Toshiba), he mel with strong resistance. Re- explains, is essentially a vast memory bank systems are basically one of a kind, cruits leaving each the corporate fold were told of pertinent knowledge. It includes thou- laboriously built for an sands of objects and individual user. the characteristics 'Jial The Japanese sug- define them. And It gested taking these contains the relation- primitive, one-of-a- ship between one ob- kind things and mass- ject and the next. producing them. If For instance, a typ- was analogous to tak- ical object in tie da- ing a horseless car- tabase might be the riage and churning sparrow. The memory out Datsunsinonefell would hold about swoop. 1.000 bits, or charac- To meet this goal, ters, of data about the the Japanese govern- sparrow, including its ment allotted $450 size, weight, color, million over a ten-year diet, range, breeding period to develop patterns, and migra- what they called tory routes. Another knowledge informa- object in the data- tion processing sys- base might be the tems (KIPS). KIPS Jap- bird, also defined by anese officials said, about 1,000 bits of would begin to ap- data. Implicit in the proach human pow- memory would be the ers of reason and connection between thought at speeds the two objects times ten greater (han sparrows are a type of the fourth-generation bird. The database computers of today. would present the ob- And in October 198.1, Our powerful FM stereo has no wires, so there's nothing to jects, their definitions, in trip up. It's a gesture unchar- you collapsible and lightweight, so you can put it on and and the connectors in acteristic of the Japa- head anywhere. And once you hear the wT™ct,*ahTomo™» symbolic form. These nese, .they held an in- RP-2030's great sound, you'll undoubtedly TOSHIBA symbols would con- ternational conference become very attached to it ' 1^1" t^^Lt^!*™" im, 70 stitute units that could to announce their am- be processed as effi- bitions to the world. ciently as the numeri- That conference, cal data in current though, was just the computers. first departure from business as usual. In or- they might not move up the ladder with their Fuchi and his team finished the database der to direct the Fifth Generation Systems contemporar es when they relurned. machine, in mid-1983, but thai was merely Project at its new headquarters, the Institute Bui those willing to follow Fuchi were re- the beginning, just a storage area for (he in- for Generation New Computer Technology warded with a freedom unheard of in noto- tricate relationships between thousands of (ICOT), Fuchi left his job at the electrochem- riously structured Japan. They were put to objects. The machine was a long way from ical laboratory. (Nobody in Japan resigns work in casual, open areas reminiscent of thinking. So before the year was up, Fuchi's from a job.) U.S. university labs. Resembling some of the team set out to develop another system. Then he defied tradition again: in- early He MIT hackers, these serious young men Called the sequential inference processor, il sisted that none of his 40 researchers be with rolled-up sleeves stared intently at was designed to take the knowledge and older than thirty-five. wanted young re- "We computer screens, stopping only occasion- use it to solve problems. searchers because they are quick, flexible, ally flip to through a comic book or sip a soda. Conventional computers process all data and eager to learn," explains Fuchi. "This is Some labored' to the hum of several com- mathematically— adding, subtracting, mul- a ten- to twenty-year project, and it will reach puter mainframes in the basement of a sky- tiplying, or dividing —to come up with ihe maturity they-do," as scraper. Others worked 21 flights up, over answer But the inference processor of the It could inspire anyone these young men the bay. where Commodore Perry first fifth generation literally processes bits of to the technical feats daring that would mean dropped anchor more than a century be- knowledge, using logic to analyze a partic- success, it was Fuchi. Energetic and in- fore. But no matter what the altitude, their ular situation. Says McCorduck, "At present 76 OMNI include the highly subtle arts we speak of computer capabilities in terms ysis. It will also syntactic, pragmatic anal- of millions of arithmetic operalions per sec- of semantic, and and ond. But Japanese planners want their ma- ysis, which detect shifting nuances chines to handle millions of logical infer- themes in language. for to make ences per second (LIPS). Each logical It's no easy feat machines in the Fif- inference equals one step in a syllogistic, or sense of human sentences. Back designers once tried to de- if/then, sequence of reasoning." ties, computer mechanical translator. They entered For instance, she notes, i! the memory says sign a "The spirit, is willing, that a sparrow is a bird and that birds can the English sentence but the flesh is weak" and asked for a trans- fly, then the sequential inference processor back into Eng- would be able to deduce, in a single step, lation into Russian and then computer responded, "The vodka that sparrows can fly. It would also handle lish. The is the meat is rotten." Even work- the exceptions to that rule. It would know, for strong, but machines instance, that although ostriches and kiwis aday utterances can bedevil lacking the common experiences thai hu- are birds, they cannot fly. And it would know for granted. Writer Morton Hunt that although the dodo is not only flightless mans take in recalls the fragment of a conversation he held but also extinct, it still has a valid place airport restaurant. "I'd like the knowledge base as a bird. with a waiter in an catch," he I plane to To help his machine perform such oper- the duck, but have a waiter "Better or- ations, Fuchi has decided recently to bor- said. And the responded, sir." The daunting task row a computer language invented in France der something else, is teaching a ma- and polished in England. Known as for computer designers most adult humans PROLOG, for programming in logic, this lan- chine to recognize what the restaurant inter- guage can currently process 1 million logi- know instantly: that time. As Marvin cal inferences per second. change was mostly about of this country's artificial-intelli- In order to approximate human thought, Minsky, one pioneers, observed, it's easy to of course, a machine would have to function gence once machines do what humans find hard, far more rapidly. While today's computers make what hu- generally have just a single processor, Fuchi but difficult to make machines do and his team are currently trying to build mans find easy. com- machines with several processors working Eventually, McCorduck contends, will understand continuous human in landem. The hope, says Fuchi, is that the puters with 95 percent accuracy. They will future computer will have as many as 1 mil- speech process images, forming the "eyes" of lion parallel processors, each one working also function in novel situations. on a small part of the problem at hand. The 'robots that must three years from now, will result would be a sort of "electronic nerve The result, about ' of And if all goes net" that approaches the complexity of the be a series prototypes. Japanese should brain. Using a form of the language according to schedule, the systems PROLOG, these parallel processing com- be ready to market some of these puters would eventually be able to perform as soon as 1991. systems, Fuchi contends, will pave at the extraordinary rate of 1 billion LIPS. Those itself. to Omni Parallel processors would be further aided the way for the future Speaking containing by computer chips built from novel mate- recently in his little-used office— luxurious leather sofa, and rials. Indeed, the Japanese say they have bare bookcases, a outlined already been experimenting with gallium ar- an empty, executive-size desk— he senide, which can transmit electronic sig- his far-reaching quest. forecast the future nals far more rapidly than the silicon chips "Sociologists often where technology will fit in. used in computers today. without asking scientists, the other hand, But even after the first parallel processors Engineers and on without consid- are complete. ICOT will need years to reach usually work on technology ering future societies will require." But its goal, From now through 1988. the group what is avoiding those pitfalls with a tech- will strive to make all subsystems function ICOT nological preemptive strike. "We are not together smoothly. And it will continue to ex- future periment with important applications of the simply setting up a goal for the distant present," he says. technology. The first experimental knowl- and then going back to the laying the technological ground- edge systems to be built, say the Japanese, "We are for'a new social era, the Age of Infor- will be a proofreading system, with a data- work" is to emerge. base of words and sentences; and a system mation, which aboul 'Artificial intelligence to help produce circuit diagrams, with a da- Adds McCorduck, minding its busi- tabase of the circuit specifications. Later, the was moving along, own mostly fringe science. No one thought team will emphasize such areas of expertise ness, a to turn a . a nice way as medical diagnosis, equipment repair, and of it as much more than software design. buck for a few little companies. Nobody transform society. Perhaps most important, Fuchi and his thought of. it as a way to Japanese along and moved team will have to make inroads in the area Then the came of "intelligent interfacing." In other words, it to center stage." of the computer de- their machines must understand and reply Eric Manning, head of Waterloo, to generally unsophisticated human users, partment at Ontario's University he perceiving spoken or written questions;' then agrees. "The fifth-generation project," political that has set communicating answers in pictures or words. says, "is a brilliant move ot the world." According to McCorduck, research here the agenda for the rest ' thrust into sudden race for com- will cover speech-wave and phonetic anal- Indeed, a CONTINUED ON PAGE 124 TSUKUBA'S EXPO SALUTES THE WORLD'S BEST HIGH TECH IN A RAZZMATAZZ FAIR OF THE FUTURE BY DOUG GARR ^P Jl A robot that plays requests on Jft^-f" an organ; a single tomato plant *Y I that will yield 12.000 toma- toes; a giant television set I* ^V about 130 feet wide and 80 "^_ feet tall. These are all part of J Expo 85—Japan's six-monlh - salute to modern science and I technology, at Tsukuba City. § § Qrganizedundertheiheme X W of Science and Technology '85 r Man at Home. Expo {spelled out in Japanese

1 characters on the previous page and al left) has on dis- play the best and biggest ol high tech-

nology and offers a fair that is as unique

as it is expansive. The first thing a visitor to this showplace notices is the array ol spectacular architecture. For instance, a flowing, abstract sculpture symbolizing Mount Tsukuba forms the roof of the Ibar- aki Pavilion (on pages 80 and 81 workers

are shown scaling it), sponsored by the host prefecture of Expo "85. Other imagi- native structures include the Minolta- sponsored Inlinium (above), touted as the worlds largest planetarium: Mitsui's Water Theater, which takes visitors on a spec- tacular voyage through a circular water-

fall {right, center); the IBM Pavilion (far right, center); and the Fuyo Theater (top

right), where all the entertainers are ro-

bots. Putting its technology on a monu- mental scale, Sony chose an open Meld

to display its Jumbotron, the world's larg- iiai television set (bottom right). And in- side the Electric Power Pavilion sits a mas- sive mock-up of a nuclear reactor (left).

The inset photos on page 87 snow an over- f view ol the exposition fiefr,; viewed irom the ^ p%j world's i.sliesi Ferris wheel; shiny lasers on . top o! the Theme building (right), and Cos- mo Hoshirmaru, the lair's mascot (bottom). P? T^l " —

^C %l The choice of Tsu- ing most of the world's power. TK*-t' kuba as tne sile for In the Gas Pavilion (left), con- /T 1 Ihe expo is particu- centric circular facades sym- * larly appropriate bolize Ihe amorphous physical

•y\P since the city itself is qualities of gas. Inside a multi- r jm "^Z. an experiment in liv- projection "Gasarama" theater, ' f ing. The Japanese films depict various interna- - government built tional cuisines prepared using 1 - Tsukuba only a few gas cooking. || years ago in an ef- The Electric Power Pavilion, /^ fort to relieve indus- whose tower (above) is illumi- trial congestion in nated at night by laser beams, metropolitan Tokyo includes a fantasy tour that dra- and provide an al- matically demonstrates sources ternative living area of natural energy. Inspired by for the burgeoning population. Jonathan Swift's novel Gulli- They hoped the international ver's Travels, ihe tour sends the exposition would call attention Electrogulliver— a probe vehi- lo their "test-iube city. cle filled with passengers

In addition, since Tsukuba is through an array of natural en- a model tor cities of the future, ergy sources, from a hot vol- it seemed an apt site for an ex- canic magma chamber to the position devoted to encourag- center of the sun. where simu- ing the "creation and develop- lated nuclear-fusion reactions ment of new ways of living." produce a crackling lighl show. Those "new ways" include More than 80,000 people harnessing alternative forms of passed through Ihe fair's en- energy and conserving the lim- tranceways (lop) on opening ited fossil fuels already provid- day last March. The J ^£ *| are expecting some 20 million TEJ*" people, including a million for- r\ 1 eigners, to visit Expo '85 be-

fore it concludes its six-month

» *^^» run in September. r-,y^ The Japanese want Expo "**^P^ '85 to be more than just edu- ^. cational. They want it to bring »*- a* I - out the beauty and pleasure *fr M W inherent in modern technol- /V ogy. Toward this goal exhibits the fair incorporate an array , at of special eltects. Many rely

• on unusual combinations of light and color, from the Jap- anese Theme Pavilion's lasers piercing the night sky (upper left) to the shimmer- ing, iridescent human figure (center, far left) that's part of an exhibit explaining how computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans reveal the human interior. Light is an important aesthetic element in other settings: in the skewed photo of a display of color monitors (below, left); in the National Pavilion (center, left), where afairgoer is silhouetted against the back- ground of a liquid crystal display; and in the jewellike clusterof solar ceils (above). This exhibit illustrates how fiberoptic s can be used to transmit light over long dis- tances below the ocean floor. But the most alluring showplace at the expo may be the Sumitomo Pavilion (fac- ing page). The building is a high-tech ex- ercise in illusion. Its mirrored facade is angled so that a cubic structure over the entrance appears to be floating in space. At night the building appears other- worldly, a spectacular effect enhanced by a reflecting pool situated near the front. Ultimately, the expo has a dual pur- pose: to give nations a chance to share their visions of the future and to show that technology can be fun.DQ —

is influenced by room design and color scattered number of prefabs in such far-flung red and pink tend to make people restless. places as Iceland, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Misawa believes that babies will become re- and at a scientific base in Antarctica. But he

tarded and die if deprived of sound for even is currently seeking a company in the United of generating up to three kilowatts of elec- a week and that people who live in houses States to bring his brand of housing tech- tricity. The cost of doing this has already where the temperature fluctuates drastically nology there. dropped dramatically, from $200,000 per from room to room are more prone to strokes. There is a touch of irony in this since some house in the late Seventies to less than Finally, he holds that intelligent people are of the inspiration for these new Japanese $20,000 today. Over the next decade or so raised in buildings with high ceilings. (The houses came from the United States. Both Sekisui sin- he expects to see it fall lo a tenlh of its cur- last notion might explain Misawa's ctiiice of Misawa and architects at Heim rent cost. To give maximum exposure to the headquarters: Tokyo's gleaming new NS gle out Frank Lloyd Wright as one of the great sun (and to give its inhabitant a better view), building has a 30-siory atrium.) In all, Misa- innovators in house design. ("Wright was the Misawa plans to have his zero-energy house wa says, his company is looking at 20 pos- last to leave ideas in his houses," says Misa- rotate. He thinks he will have a commercial sible medical links between the house and wa.) And many design elements used in the model of the house ready in about seven or those who live in it. unit home made their debut in the Thirties eight years. Of late, Misawa also likes to talk about with Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house. His philosophy about the interaction of the growing tomatoes. They and other vegeta- Even today some American home-design house and its inhabitants is equally original. bles can be grown without soil— hydropon- talent is making itself felt in Japan. Bill Miller Based on his own studies and those of doc- ically— in the home, he points out. They can is a Seattle architect whose company, Shel- tors employed by the Misawa Homes Insti- offer sustenance or an additional $200 per ter Research, has created plans for Misawa, tute of Research, his company's think tank, year to a retired couple. He argues that home as well as for National House (a subsidiary Misawa has come up with a body of theories enterprises like vegetable growing are cru- of Matsushita/Panasonic) and Nippon on how a building and its occupants should cial to the economy and to a person's sense Homes. One Matsushita design Miller de- interact, and he has grouped them together of self-worth. To this end, some of his home veloped with colleague Jack Dangermond, under a concept he calls tamilization. models are designed to accommodate a a Redlands, California, researcher, was ihe

It rooftop so- He has enough ideas to fill a book (and in small business on the ground floor. His com- energy-producing house. uses fact has done two on the subject). Among pany even has a school of interior decorat- lar cells, solar collectors, and advanced bat- them: Children on the first floor of a multi- ing, the Misawa Home School of Interiors, tery technology and a biomass system to story building demonstrate better personal for housewives who want to learn how to run generate methane for heat and light. growth than those on the upper floors (be- their own part-time businesses. In his nine years of working wilh Japanese cause the first-floor children have more ready As he moves toward becoming the top housing innovators. Miller has found that his access fo the outdoors and more easily ac- house builder in his own country, he contin- own ideas of design and architecture have quire "community adaptability"). Family vi- ues looking to t< .e future. One place where evolved to a new level. "If a design for a olence, which in Japan means violence his visionary gaze is fixed is the United house or any product is perfect, its physical committed by children against their parents, States. His company has already erected a form nearly disappears. What is left is total facilitation." To explain, he offers an analogy:

"if a fountain pen is well designed, there will be a clear path between the mind and the

ideas written on paper. If it's poorly de-

signed, itbecomesadistraction. If itis a per-

fect design, it becomes an inspiration. I would like to design houses with this in mind." Miller has great respect for Misawa and would like to see him and other Japanese companies build here. He concedes that Americans may not yet be ready for those innovative homes and, further, that Ameri- can buyers may not fully appreciate the quality and attention to detail. But he and

Dangermond are convinced that it will be only a matter of time before some of our homes as well as cars will be made, or at least designed, in Japan. As- for Misawa's strong opinions on what the home of the future should be like and

how its inhabitants should live in it: "What

Misawa is doing might be called social en-

gineering," Miller admits, "but isn't it good for society to consider the positive and neg- ative effects of the home? Many of us have grown up in molds that we subconsciously don't like. Worse, we don't even know we are in a mold.

"I would hope we could produce houses with the same excellence in ideas," he con- tinues. "But in the end, I'm afraid we may wake up and find out what the Japanese did to us in autos is happening with houses. And when the American people see that a qual- ity-conscious organization has built a home

that supports life, they will conclude, 'This is

what we want to live in.' "DO FICTION The fried egg fell flai edge oi the letter, pu

the edge of the page f r

MotheMelmac piate. Little flecks

the official government lery. Al hadn't broken.

frombehir,^,.., TRAVEL sorry. Here, let me get It off PAINTING BY JEAN — .

— why's a creature from outer space traveling with the spatula " And she reached past ble and stood. He crumpled the Teacher- him with the greasy utensil just as he moved Astronaut Program rejection letter and said, with a two-bit country carnival and being displayed in freak his arm a few inches the wrong way. "I've got to go to work, Mom. I'm glad John's a show?" in barker shrugged. His face was florid, "Mom!" His extraordinarily fine tenor rose coming by. I haven't talked to him too long." The shirt just fine. sweating. "I found the critter after his saucer into a wail. "It's Friday! I've got classes and He craned his neck. "The looks crashed. Not of a ship—more like a a field trip today. This is my last clean shirt." I'll see you after school." much bigger "So then wear a sweater," said his mother "Don't forget your lunch," his mother said. bird cage. I salvaged some of the eventually." sensibly. pieces —work 'em into the show lay in wiped his brow. "Anyhow, the critter was "It's too hot, Mom. It's Indian summer." It was a hot, hot afternoon, and dust He

It felt, Harry noted as all stove up. I nursed it back to health, fig- "I'll give it the spot-remover treatment. a pall over everything.

it well its weight with the Don't move an inch." She bustled ofi toward he stepped out of the yellow bus, like the ured might as pull the laundry room. heart and height of summer. show." Harry sighed and turned back to the "Can we play the games?" a student said, Harry smiled skeptically. "Something like government hasn't just smeared letter with the nasa letterhead. He pointing to the dingy line of concessions. this, I'm surprised the the rides. walked in and confiscated it." reread it for something like the hundredth Harry shook his head. 'Just observe the action of gravity "Them sumbitches would, too, if they just time since it had arrived the day before: You're here to affronted. "Never Dear Mr. Carmody: and centripetal force. I want you to consider knew." The barker looked gonna, We regret to inform you that you the tilt-a-whirl and the octopus and all the told the feds— or any other cops. Not

it, I high- have not been chosen in the prelimi- rest as problems in mass and vectors. Your neither. Might consider if had some nary round of qualifying applications paper'll be due in a week. Have a ball." powered mouthpiece to safeguard my rights

I have the for the Space Shuttle Teacher-Astro- "Oh, boy, Mr. Carmody," said the student and the critter's, too. But don't

naut Program, We at the National sarcastically. cash, so I won't. We just gonna go along on Aeronautics and Space Administra- Harry at the head, the group approached the cheap from town to town." He caught tion are sorry that the volume of ap- the canvas midway. "I don't believe it," he Harry's eye. "Makin' do." plications 'Just for the sake of debate," said Harry,

"if really something from a crashed All of a sudden, Harry couldn't focus on you've got spaceship, can you justify keeping an the crisp typescript. I dreamed it all, he how intelligent being caged up?" thought. Every night I dreamed what it would "Ain't intelligent," said the barker, nod- like. I to in same bed in be went sleep the monster *The ding. 'Ain't said a word, whole time I got it. the same mom in the same house, and I us the dreamed of going up there where the stars was superlative. At first, as Figure it's like one of them apes and in- Reds sent up in the Fifties. Exotic but still are constant, t dreamed of darkness and Harry entered the — dumber than a tree." finite distance. I dreamed mid- "Harry, what's wrong?" said his mother. darkened tent, he could see Harry's gaze wandered beyond the way, where he saw his students scattering "Are you crying?" very little. The various thrill rides. "How much to He shook his head stubbornly. "It's the toward the shafts of afternoon light in?" said. cleaning fluid." I'm thirty-seven years old, he go he thought. I'm a mediocre physics teacher at dazzled his eyes. "Sign ain't changed. Still half a sawbuck. critter, gotta eat." a Podunk high school. I've got no place to Me and the we Then he saw the monster.^ barker go and no way to get there. Harry reached lor his wallet as the brown. Mrs. Carmody daubed at his shoulder. grinned. What teeth he had left were With her other hand, she gently brushed "You won't see nothin' in your life like this." Harry's cheek. What the hell, Harry thought, taking out the For five bucks, it had better be a "I know that you dream," she said. "You'll money. rubber monster. get what you want. You're still young." said, pausing and shaking his head. "There good His students seemed to think he had both haven't been freak shows in years." monsler was superlative. At first, as feet and half the rest of his body in the grave. But here it was. The" faded, worn banner The pleni- Harry entered the darkened tent, he could If he wanted, he could take early retirement read: the world's most astonishing of afternoon light, in only five years. That was depressing. tude of the grotesque and bizarre. An ob- see very little. The shafts "Sure, Mom," he said resignedly. viously much newer sign read: see the in- entering through holes in the canvas and His mother rubbed with vigorous strokes, credible ufo critter ... $5. swimming with golden dust motes, dazzled the then inspected the spot critically. "It's com- A silent barker, oddly sinister in his striped his eyes. Then, as his vision adjusted to ing. Oh, by the way, Johnny's coming by for jacket and straw skimmer, lounged beside dimness, he actually did see the monster. It supper tonight." the entrance. He seemed to be observing slumped against the interior corner of a screen-fronted crate set on its side. John Wessel Carmody III. Harry's older the approaching group but not overly con- wooden brother and only sibling. Ace lawyer and star cerned with the prospect of customers. Scattered straw contrasted with the crea-

child of his mother's progeny. The success A student-said, "I bet it's just a rubber ture's fine, dark fur. Harry approached the of the family. monster." cage. The creature's eyelids snapped open. lemurlike "Terrific. Has he bought a new airplane he "Probably," said Harry. "I think a real ex- It had enormous, eyes, and they wants to show us? Or just a new condo?" traterrestrial would be in the Smithsonian by were golden, shining as they fixed on the "Now, Harry, Johnny's worked very hard now." He gestured toward the whirling, spin- watching man. for what he's got," ning, rolling rides. "You guys go do your re- Is it mechanical? Harry wondered. The

I'll from him, never failing to meet his As if I haven't, Harry thought. I've worked search. I think investigate' the invasion eyes tracked hard, and I've got nothing. He shook away outer space." own stare as he walked along the crate to

what he realized was acute self-pity and He noted the star field painted as a back- gain a better view. And then the creature. . sighed. What he had was another school day, drop for the ufo critter banner. Not bad, he opened up. It unfolded limbs smoothly, ex- one in a seemingly infinite series. He had a thought. Good job of depicting the Andro- posing prehensile analogs for arms and legs teachers' meeting, five classes, and a field meda galaxy. with far too many joints. trip to the traveling carnival that had staked "Wanna go in?" said the barker now that It's no fake, Harry thought. The barker effects. down its canvas enclosures in the dusty open Harry was in range. "Y'ain't never gonna see couldn't afford such sophisticated field south of City Park. nothin' like the exotic UFO critter." He kept on staring as the creature fluidly ap- Harry pushed his chair back from the ta- "Begging your pardon," said Harry, "but proached the screen at the front of the cage. 92 OMNI IVs so beautiful, he thought, as a furred ter—the thought keeps bursting through the after that, he thought, I'll make good use of in crest rose up along the ridge of the crea- surface of your conscious mind. I can help the bolt cutters hanging my workroom. face ture's skull. As best Harry could estimate, the you. But in return, you must grant me aid. The expression on the creature's creature was perhaps five feet high, with the "To free you," Harry said. curved into what looked to Harry like a smile. four limbs a length disproportionate to the To free me. The creature's fingers flexed; torso. The nap of the fur was a soft, lustrous the squares of steel mesh started to deform, Corned beef and cabbage. The pungent brown. You're beautiful, Harry thought, metal groaning slightly. odor held no nostalgia for Harry. If he never Thank you, said the creature. Harry stood Harry involuntarily stepped back. "And to smelled the dish again, that would be just fine. to himself that there would be perfectly still. There was no sound from the recover the remains of your spacecraft?" He noted absolutely cage. The voice was in his head. Yet what Ah, Mr. Magruder's "flying saucer."" The no corned beef and cabbage— he "heard" was as sonorous and distinct as tone was amused. I'm afraid my captor mis- none! —in the Andromeda galaxy. older a finely wrought bell. interpreted the wreckage. There is no "You're looking good, Harry," said his "You can speak," said Harry. spaceship. To restore my means of trans- brother between bites of cabbage. "Can't be singing again? That Yes. Harry thought he detected an amused port, I will need to improvise a beam gen- the job. You doing your intonation. erator modulator. I can do this, but I shall always seemed to cheer you up." Harry remembered what the barker had need to earn money to buy the more expen- His mother beamed hopefully. his head. "Mot in a long time. said about the creature's lack of communi- sive components. I think you can help me. Harry shook — cation. "Don't you speak to others?" "I don't have all that much in my account," I keep trying to make time, but " He ges- Only to you. said Harry. tured noncommittally with his fork, "Prepar- "But why not to other humans?" Wo need. We shall earn what is neces- ing lesson plans and grading quizzes take disen- of time." Before now, I bad nothing to say to anyone sary. It settled back on its haunches, up most my Harry. who saw me. Its tone was wry. gaging impossibly jointed fingers from the "That school's a dead end, You've "And now you're talking to me?' Harry said steel mesh. heard me say it before, and I'll say it again," the incredulously. "Why?" The creature raised its "But how?" His brother John carefully extracted end upper limbs, fingers curling through the Trust me. of his expensive silk tie from the vegetables of his plate. squares of steel mesh. For the first time, Harry Harry stared back at the golden lemur stacked at the edge noted the chains, the thin-gauge but strong- eyes. For whatever reason, he did trust the "Believe me, Johnny, I know." Harry hesi- looking links. creature. Or was it just the magnitude of the tated. "I'm working on a way out." extended him, "Yes?" His brother looked interested. It's / see into you, Harry. Already I know more dream that was being to about you than you would like to believe. 'And you will take me with you?" probably, Harry thought, because he hasn't anything like Forgive the intrusion, but it is necessary. Trust me. heard me say a peep about "What do you want of me?" said Harry, He nodded slowly. this in twenty years. already having a pretty good idea. You will get me out of here tonight? "Harry? You're leaving home?" His mother We each have dreams, Harry. We both "Trust me," said Harry. He grinned sud- sounded stricken.

"That's not what I meant. Honest, Mom." want the same thing. I know about the let- denly. "I'll talk to my brother tonight," And He turned to John. "Uh, business plans. Let me talk to you later." He tried to sound sig- nificant without alerting or alarming his mother. "After supper." And so they talked after the empty cherry- UNITED SCHIZOPHRENICS cobbler bowls had been cleared, while Mrs. Carmody puttered cheerfully in the kitchen. Harry tried to explain about the freak show ANNUAL CON^£Hl}9^> and the alien and the deal. After John Wes- sel Carmody III stopped laughing, he looked at Harry appraisingly. "You've never gone off the deep end be-

fore, brother. Lord knows, I always thought you should. Just once." "Everything I've told you is true," said Harry. His brother shrugged. Harry saw landmark court decisions starting to shine

in his brother's eyes. 'An alien, eh?" said John. "This would be a whole new wrinkle in immigration law." And they talked some more. Finally Harry

said. "I know you're good. I've heard there's

no one better. If you're convinced I'm telling

the truth about the alien, can you get it

sprung and keep it sprung?" "Trust me," said his brother.

Harry never needed the bolt cutters. A writ of habeas corpus was just the be-

ginning, And whether it was judges, prose-

cutors, or cops, John Wessel Carmody III knew his business and his people. Mr. Ma- gruder, the keeper of the freak show, found himself booked into a holding cell on kid- napping charges. Harry found himself in a temporary cus-

todial role in charge of the well-being of one "

golden-eyed, beautifully exotic extraterres- Harry stood still just a moment, minutely real name. The croaiurj i";-.d assured Harry

trial visitor. adjusting the lormal black tie at his throat. that it didn't have a designation easily trans- "But get what you're going lo gel done His crisply formal evening jacket seemed to latable to any familiar tongue. But what alien quickly," his brother told him. "I'm good, to blaze in the spotlight. and human had cobbled up, thought Harry, au- As the alien's mental "voice" I Harry out over the expectant sounded good. be sure, but I just don't know how long can looked all keep all the plates spinning and all the balls dience. His mother was out there. So was his spoke inside Ihe heads of present, Harry - airborne." brother. For all he knew, Mr. Magruder, who stepped lo the c-c:g<:: o ;he stage, deferring Harry and the alien consulted in a rented had recently been released from jail in ex- lo Ihe star of the evening.

room in a Holiday Inn.- 'Johnny's keeping the change for a private assurance of noninter- And that was the beginning.

government.at bay," Harry said. "I don't know ference, was out there, too. Harry was pretty how long that can last. You said you had sure none of his students were in attend- Close lo the end, the two of them—alien some sort of plan." ance at this stellar occasion. and human— stood watching Ihe pulsing The alien looked up from across the table At tirst his voice was too soft as he spoke sphere of radiant energy emanaling from the spidery latticework. where it was devouring a meal of chocolate into the microphone. Then he started again, transport generator's 'bars, a bowl of tuna, and half a dozen pack- stronger, "Lacics and geni.emen of the In- "It didn't take nearly so long as I'd feared," ets of book matches. ternational Astrophysics Association," Harry said Harry, aimo:-;: marveling at the ease with

It's 3 simple plan, Harry. I've made up a said, "it is with considerable feeling that my which the project had been consummaied. in. quickly tun- list: The Tonight Show, the National Enquirer, colleague and I thank you for this opportu- The money had rolled been Rolling Stone magazine, the NASA Public In- nity lo make a truly historic public scientific neled by Harry's brother into laundered ac- formation Office, and so on. Do you under- debut." The applause nterupted and over- counts, and promptly applied to acquiring

stand my strategy? whelmed him. When it abated finally, he said, electronic components. Harry nodded, at first slowly, then vigor- "I will wait no longer to introduce you to the Its done. The alien motioned toward the in ously. "I think so." being you've heard so much about already, glowing device. There is no use delaying. to The alien smiled its sweet smile. I would the emissary to Earth from the third planet of I wish to go home. Is it still your wish ac- like to start -our campaign with an event for an unnamed — at least in our own star company me? a sympathetic, nonprofit organization. guides—sun on the edge of the Andromeda— "Yes," But Harry hesitated. And he knew "Fine by me," said Harry. galaxy. Ladies and gentlemen " And he he had to ask: "How do I know you won't put You will need some new clothes. The alien paused dramatically, sweeping his arms out me into some sort of freak show?" alien Trust me. told Harry precisely what it wanted. as the curtains behind him rose. "The one, The seemed amused. the only—Ladru cal'Eban!" The applause His last three and a half decades flashed The spotlights were as white and bright was thunderous as the follow-spot picked before Harry's mind's eye. "I trust you." It all as Harry had always imagined them. They out the dais with the alien perched on top, finally came down to lhat. picked out the man on the vast stage, throw- the lar traveler prepared to share marvels And when Ihe time came shortly there- ing cyclopean shadows up against the se- with Ihe earthly audience. after to walk hand in hand with the alien into quined curtains. Naturally Ladru cal'Eban wasn'l the alien's the radiation field of the transport generator, Harry's good-byes to his family long since,

said, he still waved in Ihe distant direction ol his mother. Then he turned toward his future, in the direction from which ihe alien assured him there could be no return.

There were spotlights, after a fashion, and there were something like curtains. There was a stage, at least a raised platform so that all present could handily see— or oth- erwise apprehend—the performer. The alien (who certainly was no longer that— not here) surveyed the expectantly waiting audience of varied beings. You have all heard about the arrival. The call spread in corvergeni noples through ihe

audience. Here he/shelil is, the distant voy- ager from a tar sun. Apprehend now, please, Harry Carmody, the performer from the greater beyond! Those present spoke, hooted, oozed, buzzed, or flashed their -ecognilion as the curtain-analogs rolled partially up and away,

revealing the" first majestic rank of the eve- ning moons.

Harry stood still for a moment, surveying the audience. He straightened his bow tie, adjusted the lapels of his spiffy evening. jacket. Then, as the music rose up behind him, he grinned, breathed deeply, threw his arms wide, and began to sing his own ar- rangement: "Shine—on. shine on, Martian moons, up in Ihe sky He had his dream indeed. Harry was a happy man.DG \

A founding father of the new biology fires off a fusillade against the sacred cows of modern science and suggests that some researchers might be too smart to win the Nobel prize IRJTERV/IEUU

one realized il at Ihe time, but it was a pivotal encounter Today Chargaff has his followers. Bui most colleagues have Chargaff, Ihe world's written off grumbling curmudgeon from whom fortune moin science. In 1952, Erwin one o! him as a great experts on DNA. met with two researchers in the has withheld its blessing. Chargafl. by most standards of success Cavendish Laboratories, in Cambridge, England. The boisterous among the scientific elite, has something to be bitter about: His- James Watson and Francis Crick pul Chargalf off balance. Much torians generally typify him as the man who narrowly missed mak- to the forty-eighl-year-old biochemist's scorn, Ihe younger Watson ing that most prestigious discovery of Ihe twentieth cenfury. He and Crick dared aspire to discern the structure oi the DNA mole- has come io personify the ultimate scientific odd man out. And this cule—which Chargaff himself had confirmed as the key to hered- gives him a unique perspective on the whole scientific enterprise

ity. They intended to do this, Chargaff later wrote, "unencumbered For in fact, the only direct, confirmed evidence backing the dis- by any knowledge of Ihe chemistry involved." covery of DNAs double helix was Chargaffs contribution. Yet his Despite Chargatf's impression of their ignorance, Watson and substantial achievements remain relatively unknown. Crick triumphed the following year. The double helix—the genetic Newly arrived in New York from Vienna in 1935. Chargaff joined

structure at the core of every cell's nucleus—was revealed. It was Columbia University's biochemistry deparlment. His research one of the most celebrated achievements in science and the key covered a wide range, from coagulation of the blood, to lipids,

to the glittering prizes of genetic engineering. Ironically, it was sugars, lipoproteins, and radioactive tracers. He turned to DNA in biochemist Chargaff who. during ihal meeting, provided the duo 1944, following the great geneticist Oswald Avery's hallmark dis- with the most crucial piece of their jigsaw. covery suggesting that ONA was the substance governing hered-

PHOTOGRAPH BY GILLES LARRAIN ' "

ity in bacteria. Few be ieveri Avery then. Most "he wasn'f alone in tn-s. Many people thought suspected thai imputes in his samples had the whole idea was nonsense. produced false results. But in his autobiog- Chargaff's reputation for bitterness over

raphy, Heraclitean Fire, Chargaff wrote, "I saw the aifair has also been magnified by his before me in dark contours the beginning of critical view of scientific progress and of a new grammar of biology." modern life. A founder of molecular biology. Aided by a new technology, paper chro- he is nevertheless ekibious about the matography, Chargalf studied the chemis- achievements of gene; e engineering and the try of nucleic acids ana achieved a momen- goals of science. In fact, since adolescence. tous result that backed up Avery's assertion. Chargaff's sharp-edged skepticism has cut He disproved the reigning hypothesis that a broad swath across the modern world. He DNA was a monotonous string of genetic was born in 1905, in Czernowilz. a university components, one after the olher, and showed town in the Austro-Hungarian empire. His fa- that DNA's comoositon varied richly from one ther was a banker; his childhood, idyllic, But species to another. Yet within one species, the First World War brought the Russian army the DNA composition was fixed and unified. to Czernowitz. The family moved to Vienna, The unique specificity of the mysterious where, as the war festered, survival de-

molecule was indeed the blueprint of life. pended on wild, carrots and stale bread. In Analyzing DNA from hens to herrings, he 1920 inflation vaporized the family's remain- methodically estimated how much of each ing balances. Chargaff's £15,000 trust fund of the four nucleotides—the fundamental bought a single tram ticket. units ol DNA—were present in the molecule. An exceptional scholar in classics at his Through an obscuring fog of rough meas- Vienna high school, Chargaff won a fellow- urement, he glimpsed an extraordinary fact. ship to the university, and- in 1928, he re-

The' four nucleosides ,-:; ways paired off: Ad- ceived his degree in chemisfry. The newly enine is complementary to thymine; and minted Hen Doktor came by ocean liner in ml've never guanine to cytosine. That is to say, in all DNA 1928 for his first taste of America. Unfortu- the ratios of these nucleotides were exactly nately, officials suspicious of his papers I had a TV. don't one to one. locked him up on Ellis Island. Authorities in This observation of complementarity, later Washington want to know interceded and sprung him. but called Chargaff s ratios, was essential to the Chargaff seems never to have recovered from Mr. Sagan if solution of DNA's structure. In hindsight, the much affection for a country that he de- complementary pairing of the nucleotides scribes as "younger than most there are of Vienna's powerfully suggested that a DNA molecule toilets." After two years at Yale he left for Eu- intelligent worlds in couid break into two parts. Only comple- rope, vowing never to return. The rise of the mentary bases could form bonds and line Nazis brought him here four years later, the universe. up in place in a new DNA strand. This com- however, to settle into the biochemistry de- plementary replication was the key to the partment at Columbia University, where he Only when I travel gene's ability to clone when a cell divides. eventually became chairman, do I switch Chargaff, however, failed to discern this un- After the double helix. Chargaff continued derlying structural pattern. Whether he to work on DNA. In 1955 he coedited three on the TV to fill my should have done so has been debated by weighty reference tomes on nucleic acids; ccnoissejis aci?:iii-f:c batteries with o' c scovery. and of his 340-odd papers, most written af- Francis Crick claims he saw immediately terward were on the chemistry of DNA. hatred and disgust.^ the signticance of the complementarity. Crick In 1975 he retired from Columbia to quar- recalls that larnous 1952 encounter as one ters at Roosevelt Hospital and turned from where Chargaff disdained the twosome, and scientific research to full-blown fulmination: they in turn were patronizing; "We were say- His five books range from aphorisms to a ing, 'What have you nucleic-acid boys come fiery collection of essays. Last year he re- up with, anyway?' He told us. The one-to- ceived a top German literary prize for the

one ratios.' When I heard that." Crick re- book of aphorisms, and he is often asked to

members, "I went through the ceiling." address doomsday conferences in Europe When Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wiikins with such titles as "The Love of Catastrophe" were given the 1962 Nobel prize for the for- or "The 'Dream of Reason Produces Mon- mulation of the double helix, many felt that sters." According to Horace Judson, in The Chargaff had been unjustly passed over. This Eighth Day ol Creation, —Chargaff remains a view was reflecte'd in prizes by the French, superb critic of science "humane, histori- Dutch, and Ger-ian acaue-m es of science, cal, informed, opinionated, nasty, and funny."

and in 1975, Chargaff received the United Interviewed by Anthony Liversidge in the States National Medal of Science. scientist's office and his book-walled apart- Many suppose Chargaff never really for- ment high above Central Park, in New York gave the interlopers or himself. He wrote a City, the pipe-smoking Chargaff, chubby sarcastic review of The Double Helix, for Sci- cheeked and with a blithe, leprechaun grin, ence magazine, saying that Watson's book turned out to be less gloomy and more tun "brought out the degradation of present-day than his reputation would suggest. science to a spectator sport." Chargaff seemed, loo. to let himself off the hook by Omni: This month we turn our attention to downplaying the discovery. In 1958 he spoke Japan, a highly technological, economically en DNA at a- major conference in Vienna. successful society. To what do you attribute Crick was present and remembers being its recent rise?

disappointed that Chargalf said too little Chargaff; Japan is, of course, a country a the structure, about "Mind you," Crick adds, foreigner cannot fathom, even if he is born —

there. It is the most hermetically closed in living, housing, and dress. Their houses now lives ninety-nine percent from findings country, mainly owing to its language, which form the ideal Corbusier never reached. They that were really achieved under the old style

in itself is layered so that different classes are machines for living. I am highly im- of observance in the tentative way.

use almost different grammars. The real Ja- pressed by everything Japanese that does I don't think the double helix would be for-

pan is not something one can see easily. not have to do with Western civilization. Even mulated today if it had not already been. It

When I was there twenty-seven years ago, their morality is exemplary, or used lo be. remains to be seen whether science as it is they seemed- to offer the only alternative to Omni: Why have you turned to writing books? now practiced will aver produce really rev-

the mess we were into. But in the meantime Chargaff: The main reason is that there has olutionary findings, not just ones that are

they have gotten into the same mess them- been a very momentous change in the face made to look like breakthroughs. There is a

selves. Looking at their scientists—and I did of the biological sciences, with which I am form of public relations involved today: The

have many Japanese working in my lab not in agreement. The science I see is no more money you spend, the more results you

later— I saw they are very well trained in a longer science, as I said. It is technology. must get. Genetic c-nginoonng companies

severely competitive system. Getting into Science is now the fabrication of findings will probably not go bankrupt, though they

Tokyo University now is probably more dif- about nature for money. II has become the haven't found anything useful— it's a tax ficult than getting into Moscow University. industrial production of knowledge. Before shelter for wealthy firms to write off profits. There is no comparison with anything here, Sputnik, science was a desperate search for Omni: Don't you think that molecular biology but the old reproach that they are imitative the truth we all knew was very far away will produce a brave new world?

' is still true. with no easy ways to it. Science then was Chargaff: Yes, yes, they will create a monkey Now our science is going to meet theirs. like a pilgrimage to a distant, promised land. with the intelligence of Mr. Reagan. They will

We are now also more technological than This has changed completely. Out of a hun- do all kinds of things, but this is not really anything else. And on that ground they may dred younger scientists, not one or two really major. Messing about with genes sounds

well beat us. They are much more diligent know what they are doing, except as cogs very nice to the stock market, but I am afraid

than we are and can go us one better on the in the wheels of a huge machine, which is we are losing moral control. It is unfashion-

technological level. I have yet to meel a Jap- kept turning by public funds. able for a scientist to speak of ethics, but

anese hippie. What I see are eager beavers now we are getting nearer to delving into the

of the purest water. human gene poof. It will start first wilh cor- Omni: Just like the ones that occupy much recting inheritable diseases—who can be of science here, you mean? against that? But soon we'll be patenting hu- Chargaff: Perhaps more beaverish and more man embryos. Human beings should be un-

real breakthroughs? Omni: It sounds as if you don't like the sheer of the last Chargaff: So far I haven't seen anything, but size of modern scientific endeavor.

they may well do it. You see, we in the West . examples of excellent Chargaff: When science was small, no one now are also engaged in tremendous team- looked at ledgers, and research wasn't done science, it didn't work, with fifteen or twenty people working by long-distance telephone calls. A country together on a project. That, probably, the cost any money. It was done that could afford an opera house could build Japanese can do even better. Because they between a laboratory. Breakthroughs were not an- are in a way an antlike society, they will prob- nounced. Biochemistry was like Egyptology. teatime and dinner.^ ably overtake us. I don't think, though, they A few devoted people lived on small sala- have established any novel principles, even ries and were asked to teach the young. Then

of the type, say, of the genetic code. I see claims got louder, budgets much bigger, and them picking up more data by diligence and pretensions and promises enormous. When

hard work and making bigger tables and I became chairman of the chemistry de-

more complete curves than we do. But the Omni: But don'l scientists need research partment, it had become a guestion of obli- Japanese are not really trained to use the technology? gations, tenures, salaries, meeting the

imagination. I am not even sure that they Chargaff: When science was an intellectual budget. Finally science went public and be-

would understand what I mean by imagina- search for truth, it got along with very little came a share-distributing agency. tion. These are societies that have been un- machinery. Now in a science laboratory you Omni: How can knowledge be a bad thing?

changed essentially for a thousand years or see nuclear magnetic resonance, gas chro- Chargaff: If you have it, you use it: It's un- more. They took over from the Chinese and matographs, and lancy spectroscopes that avoidable. The tirst savage that picked up a

went them one better. I think, though, that produce curves of a quality no one needs. stone undoubtedly threw it. But how much the Chinese will probably turn out to have When tools are more expensive lhan brains, do we need? Between Julius Caesar and

more imagination. they take over. You see, I am full of scorn. An Napoleon the traveling time between Rome Omni: Is the Japanese advance temporary? answer is no better than the question. A nit- and Paris barely changed. How come Eras-

Chargaff: Not temporary. I would say they fill wit will not ask nature to reveal its mysteries, mus of Rotterdam didn't care if it took him

the niche now open to them very well. They but what it reveals lo him he will call a mys- seven days to get to Basel? Now 747s are may very well construct a supercomputer tery of nature revealed. This sleight of hand too slow. There is a human speed to every-

faster than we do, continuously fabricates knowledge on the thing, and I am sure we have overstepped it Omni: But you say their success in compel- assembly line. tremendously. Most people are unable to di-

ing with us now has as much to do with our Omni: Isn't high-powered equipment vital to gest or understand what is happening, decline as their advance? finding the cause of cancer or of AIDS? Omni: We should put new discoveries aside?

Chargaff: Yes. Nobel prizes are not a good Chargaff: I don't know if it is. Interviews with Chargaff: There should be a long incubation

indicator, but even so, I think there is maybe the French and American teams who both, between discovery and the first timid appli-

one physicist in Japan who has a Nobel, and it seems, isolated the AIDS virus last year, cation. From the first observations of electric

he did some work at Columbia. Of course, -indicate research is no longer a quest for current, it took almost two hundred years for

this is Ireacherous, because it is also a truth or to aid the poor victims but a position electricity finally to be used. It took seven

question ol pubjic relations, and few Swedes fight for Stockholm. If you visited France, years from the discovery of uranium splitting

speak Japanese. So it may not mean much-. you'd probably find a poorly equipped lab- to Hiroshima. I could have waited a century

Omni: What about Japan as a civilization? oratory with a few bright people in it. I doubt for the development of atomic energy. I could

Chargaff: In the old days theirs wasa first- it was high technology that produced their wait even longer for the microprocessor to class culture, which was far superior to ours findings. The technology of science even replace the last employed human beingsl

104 OMNI CONTINUED ON PAGE 12S Gekkeikan. The Sake ofthe Samurai.

In the time of the Shogun, there lived a special breed of men—half noble, half warrior. Their code was honor. Their name was Samurai. The Samurai

demanded the best of everything, and it was the Samurai who raised the making of

Sake to a fine art. In the year of the Shogun 1637, Gekkeikan Sake was created.

Gekkeikan was a Sake so fine, it became the Sake of the Samurai. Their custom was to

warm it ... sip it .. . savor it . The enjoyment of Gekkeikan was a time of relaxation, reflection, repose.

Today, America is discovering the pleasures of Sake. Whether you choose to enjoy Sake warm in the traditional manner—or over ice in the modern manner—make your choice Gekkeikan, the Sake of the Samurai.

Gekkeikan Sake

The largest selling brand in the world. Since 1637.

Another quality product from The Sidney Frank Importing Company, N.Y. • The Japan Flying Saucer Association hopes to foster * universal peace

Ktnichi At Arai: Our activities -en- nized jBpB couraged others, in- UFO research group, cluding a very curious the Japan Flying Sau- group called CBA, for

-i.'C/) Asso- Cosmic Brotherhood

:.k Association. I i in T955 - manages group of believers

j -" t i claimed b ra : v and museum. that he had contacted "- '-!' -. - aliens- He eventually

. if mle< : m; i» collected large sums UFO books and arti- of money from n facts in (he world Arai bers and then d was interviewed for peared That kind of Omni by Un group was grc Hawan groups like David Swift Omnr How did you Omni- How did you oms inter- react to the apparent ested in UFOs? lack of interest?

147 UFOs Arai: i vowed to reach appeared over Wash- the public, so in 1973

l arranged a sympo- sium. The media at-

even! was reported i tended, and, encour- newspapers through- UFD UPDATE aged by my success, d been a I began lo publish a

' radar specialist in the Air Force, and I knew about the me- new magazine called UFOs and Space. In I979 I opened

chanics and capabilities of airplanes. The flying objects re- I the extensive library and museum you see here. ported in the newspaper were different irom any known Omnr. How many Japanese have an interest in UFOs today 7

1 ; I I hundred 1 lanes, so knew there must be aliens riding those Arai": estimate that one thousand peoplt objects. In 1955, during ihe Korean War, I told myself that if terested in UFOs, and among those, ten thousand are seri- we knew for sure that the aliens were watching us. we would ous Our magazine has a circulation of thirty thousand

- no longer fight Therefore I decided to see if I could prove Omni: Which UFO casesshould the public know more thai the aliens were real. Arai. Unfortunately, there are few interesting eases

Omni: You thought, then, you could create peace i One of my favorites occurred in France around 195*3

Arai: Yes. With the help of aliens that's what l hoped to do, several people reported seeing a UFO anr i Omni- Was that when you started your association7 Omni: Japanese citizens have a wonderful

Arai: That was the starting point By 1956 we had taken our facility. Can you describe what they might fi first major step In a declaration ot universal peace Aral: We have about a thousand books Omni: Who were Ihe members of your group? percent of them in Japanese. We have

Aral: Believers, skeptics, and agnostics It didn't matter The graphs, photographs of alleged alie is common denominators were curiosity and a respect for Ihe sketches of flying saucers But as of now, we kee: general methods of science. seum open only two days a month. If too many peop

Omni: Were you the only UFO group in Japan at that time? ored here. It would burden Ihe capacity of the room :

'' irn: e :i y

-, ,. ,,;„ ...:r i .

For generations Ih hamlet otJixian, toe in the swamps of n Manchuria, wasealle "Village ot tools." Isolated irom hypothyroidism., including neighboring villages -yes thick "cursed'' town was the home tongues and of hundreds of deformed people, many severely re- tarded or deaf and mule Birth defects were so frequent, in fa.ct. thai any pregnane v was met with dread.

Atfirst. villagers ]

that their misfortune : traced to the "evil ey£ The townspeople are raising Ihey destroyed a large stone their own crops, says Li monkey that had been gaz- Jianqun a ing down aline town for built a nood decades When lhai plant ana . ||.-:' work, 30 members of the ; ,| Red Guard descended on while the the village determined to i e being trained lead the people out of the ' dark ages. But within a year —Sherry Baker the soldiers developed goiters and fled 7/ rs often tragic to see-how Just recently, however the blatantly a man to secret ol the "curse" was - fives of revealed A team headed by loiallv Li Jianqun, chairman of the endemic-disease depart- ment at Heilongjiang's Jia- i.id ho'A musi Medical Institute arrived hs continually teeds it and --.. study the problem i- and found that ihe local —Car! Jung ,

Vatenzuela does n' I re- member the exact dale, but she ihmks she became pregnant when she was Iwenty-iive years old "She is a woman of limited financial resources, and she felt Juarez, Mexico, docl tine, so she never visited cessfully ireated tn< doctors to see what hap- ailment causing her vomiting pened," Saldana explains^ In iact, she feels so well that her physicians have decided to leave the fetus In place, allowing Valenzuela 'man had been car- to spend the rest of her er womb for close life pregnant, in a sense. 1922 a thirteei to 61 years. "Valenzuela is quite old,"

A young woman is walking Romanian named Eleonora Daniel Garcia Saldana. Saldana says, "and I don't down the slreet when a ghost Zugun was reputedly bitten director of the hospital, want to put her through

II '!! .! IM=i viciously and repeatedly I II 111 estimates that the fetus was an operation when the fetus only sinks its sharp teeth Into her an invisible assailant The about seven months old | which now weighs flesh. Sound like a scene shaken girl was taken io the when it died. "The woman two pounds] doesn'i seem to from a Stephen King novel? National Laboratory ot was lucky that no infection cause any problems at Maybe so. Bui according Psychical Research, in Eng- developed," he noles. 'Ap- all. —Sherry Baker to one student of the super- land, why i ie fetus underwent natural, a handful of unfor- stunned researchers watched some kind of natur "Enough mistakes could lead

;' tunate young women down as she was attacked again it was so long a people under tension to " through history have been the Andin1953ClaritaWla- can tell exactly how revolt, victims of just such savage nueva, eighteen, supposedly of when it happened?" —.Alfred Kidder II struggled against a attacks. ; "The biting ghost is the geist In a busy Philippine most terrifying form of pol- police station. An exorcist was tergeist activity." says Martin summoned to her re i Riecardo, founder of the Riecardo says, but not before Ghost Research Socieiy and her body was cover; author of Vampires Unearthed a mass of bloody r (Garland Publishing. $19). "These cases are extremely 'Being afflicted with wounds rare." Riecardo sav from an unknown, unseen ly nothing for any- sourcB," headds "is one to woi | ble experience" ave con- Riecardo, who claims he tact with poltergeists, biting has "fully documented" a half or otherwise, contact the dozen "biting poltergeist" Ghosf Research SOi - cases, says the earliest 205. Oak Lawi known attacks occurred in 60454 —Eric MiShara 1761 In that year, Riecardo

". notes, a local pharmacist . . We think, as we in Bristol. England, reported the last moments ot the the sudden, inexplicable clock, and our outlook today appearance of 20 sets of has a panic quality (hat is " savage bites along the arms the enemy of thought ot Molly Giles, thirteen, and —Max Lerner "

well in an untold num- of evidence Nessie GOt- as as decisions. ateseltemr. umns. The request, spurred ber of romantic Jayj Jacobs, of the id that someone had by Gallup poll results that But Federation of As- . rwing be- American i with the famous water "Hipper" photo- -iine from trologers Nelwork. sees disclaimer cam s (one is shown at CSICOP's ken by Robert Hmes. ligation paign as "paranoid." astrology Academy ol Applied of Claims of the Paranormal. "Astronomy and to competi- r ne photos, Astrology is clearly a don't need be harged, had been deliei system, we have no tive," he says 'Astronomy is it doesn't chad" and not merely problems with thai," says glorious enough thai pull astrology down juter enhanced, ''as Roger 8. Culver, author ot The have to claimed Gemini Syndrome A Scien- to pull itself up. They're facets of the same Rhes however, disagrees tific Evaluation o! Astrology different call it a phenomenon. Cynicism "I never retouched anything, "But please don't anywhere." and Razdan and Kielar science The evidence simply doesn't get you analysis ;od about how the isnot there and The final may newspa- researchers have given il a have eome from the themselves Sixty pa- ^dds. fair shot. Adds astronomer pers Anorew Fraknoi, 'A whole pers printed CSICOP'S letter, series of scientific tests in the and two— the Charleston, have - Illinois, Times Courier and the RiKki Razdan and Alan last decade Delaware, are backed by MIT that astrology simply does Wilmington, News Kielar had long been lasci- , charges to the way its propo- Journal—have agreed nated by evidence of a giant, professor Harold Edge-don, not work disclaimer. nents i run the serpentine monster inhabit- an authority on sonar and have that Frakno :- "Most of the papers ing the depths ol Scotland's underwater photography, surgeon-general approach . wrote back said they didn't Loch Ness Electronic engi- among otl by pointing out think the disclaimer was neers with a specialty In But Razdan and Kielar lo horoscopes

i says CSICOP stand firm Razdan, "We that astrology is a multimil- necessary," sonar tracking, the young Says j director information ! lion-dollar industry worldwide public- relations felt that if any two people believe that the men 1 offices Andrea Szalanski. "They run could prove the existence we uncovered has helped to and that CSICOP air have received reports of as- their horoscope on the com- i "iter once and for clear the about how were taken and trological signs being used ics page and think that : these photos ; de they in medicine employment says it all So in the summer' used."— Daniel Cohen practices, and jury selection —Casey McCabe they arrived in Scotland, placing an elaborate array ol ed thai sperm till a state-of-the-art equipment ' insanity throughout the loch But - i despite their high hopes, in —Herman Melwtle seven weeks not a trace of Nessie could be found. Suspicious of evidence that had come before, the two young researchers traveled The following astrological back to the Stales to begin a- forecasts should be read thorough investigation Soon tor entertainment value only. they charged that many Such predictions have no of the so-called Nessie pho- reliable basis in scientific tographs and scnographs were gas bubbles, floating Last November newspa- debtie, even schools of fish pers across the country

eii most scathing received a letter requesting criticism was directed at the that this disclaimer run 110 OMNI .

see those programs at work." gravity is one novel factor, interface with the

"I'll explain that you have no choice . . Aleph system another. Between the two, STRANGE BALLOON that you're just doing your job and so forth. there is the possibility of evolutionary She'll catch on." emergence—a species genetically identi- can to diagnose spiritual malaise and so "What do you mean?" cal io its earthbound members but capable could demand total cooperation. 'Just kid- "She doesn't have any choice either," To- of grossly different behaviors." floated in its watching ding, Toshi, but seriously, I need to see what shi said. A hamster cage,

they're doing." That night (day and night are what you me—perhaps it thought I was the new brain its "Nonetheless, Jerry," he said, "we would make (hem, of course, on Athena) I cadged surgeon. The entire top of head had been not wish to interfere with Doctor Heywood's liquor rations from two of Alices Bright Young shaved back to pink skin, and a small area

if I reveal fine tracery project." Things. I got mildly drunk and wondered had been cut away to the

"I'll talk to her," Alice said. "You've got to had done the right thing in taking this job. of blood vessels across the top of the brain.

understand, Jerry, she's a special case." "Where are the microelectrodes?" I said.

"I can see that." The next morning Alice promised to open "They are in place ... too small to see,

' "Let me tell you about her, "she said. "MIT, negotiations to get me into the l-Sight Lab, however."

it their brains Caltech, Stanford." and 1 had a look at one of the other projects. "Doesn't bother them to have Biops/Life Studies the station's like that?" The hamster now ig- "Holy, holy, holy," I said. The main line to bordered on exposed

high-tech success. weightless center. They were running a nored me; it had a sunflower seed clutched "But with a difference, Jerry. She had just strange combo of old-fashioned behavior- between its paws, and its cheek pouches

finished her dissertation at Caltech — it was ism— observing rats in zero-g mazes, that were bulging. in biochemistry—took a vacation in San sort of thing—and experimental interface "I don't know. That is the least of their

Francisco, and was attacked in Golden Gate technology. Rals, guinea pigs, and ham- problems, I should think." Park. The man got a handful of plastic cards sters had their skulls permanently sawed A few hours spent at one of Doctor Chin's and a little money. She got multiple de- open and microelectrodes embedded in terminals convinced me that Biops/Life pressed skull fractures and blindness —se- their brains to connect them to Aleph. Studies had little tor me. vere bilateral trauma of both optic nerves." Doctor Chin, a large-boned Chinese in a The ASPCA might like a shot at Doctor jumpsuit, the animal with high-speed router, but that was 'jesus," I said. white led me around Chin a

"Three years later she was in Stanford labs. At times we scuffed through- the corri- another issue. half Medical School. It's no coincidence that she's dors on magnetic-soled shoes; at other times Back at the Ops Room about a dozen in this line of work, you know." we clung to straps or anchored ourselves of the KEs were hard at work. "I am the Aleph

I I said to as I "I wondered about that." with Velcro pads— I found the whole expe- and the omega," one passed.

"She's obsessed, Jerry. She wants her rience difficult and vaguely nauseating. "We doubt that she got the reference. I spent most eyes back." are looking for radical changes in organ- of the day sorting through other ICOG proj- Electric, Tel- ' said. "Zero ects. Nippon NT&T, I radon. ITT AT&T "Fine, and I wish her luck. But need to isrrwenvironment htc he

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letra, Siemens AG, CIT Alcatel, McDonnell- Eyes behind smoke, cables gone, she sat We walked through passageways thick Douglas, Boeing, Hughes Aerospace at her desk. "Do you take drugs?" she said. with acronyms, abbreviations, and corpo-

ICOG's member groups formed a seem- "Not as much as I used to. What have you rate logos. I thumbed my nose at the Sen- ingly infinite matrix of multinationals, utilities, got in mind?" Trax sunburst. She strolled with head erect and state-owned monopolies, each with a "Psilo-d." Nothing halfway. I said, "The and features composed. We passed through different level of commitment to ICOG, most Russian roulette of drug experiences." a radial tube and into a living-quarters ring. ready to cut and run at the first sign of seri- 'Aleph can take blood samples and ad- It was quiet there„the walls were bare steel, ous trouble. The individual balance sheet minister the proper doses. Are you willing?" and the spin gravity had lessened. She ruled, not the project. That's why macroen- "I suppose. I don't understand why, though stopped me with her arm in front of her door. gineering ventures like this one were always . . . why you want to do this." Inside we kicked off our slippers and went held together by such a slim thread, "Because things are very strange, and we into the main room.

I punched up a decisions-flow hologram. don't have time." Walls of Wedgewood blue tapered to a Above my head a tracery of lights sprang "Time for what?" flecked eggshell ceiling. A cream carpet into being, shot through with the billions of "For this, Jerry ... the usual reticence, covered the padded floor. A futon rolled 'scintillations representing the path of LIPS, embarrassment. Getting to know each other. against the wall, a few low tables in black logical inferences per second, through the Do you want me?" Very nice-blind eyes lacquer, and a console were the only furni- system. I keyed for Biops/I-Sight, where ac- looking through me. Maybe she used wave- ture. A touch -sculpture, visually formless, cording to the real- gray and volcanic, sat time display, not much in the middle of the was happening—rou- room, and a multitude tine employment of the IT DOESN'T PAY of ferns and vines CAV system. hung from the ceiling. Alice called in from TO RUSH INTO MARRIAGE. She unrolled the fu- her living quarters. ton, and we sat. Each "I've convinced her," Angelica, meet juniper. of us had a small vial she said. "But she Angelica is a delicate herb of clear liquid, the didn't give in grace- from Belgium, juniper doses Aleph had de- fully, so good luck to ' is a feistv little berry termined were safe. " you. Come up with from the Alps. "Shall we?" she said. something, Jerry, To- Destiny decrees that "Cheers." shi's getting awfully the two shall be married Psilo-d moves on morose. He just looks in the recipe for Beefeater" Gin. you slowly but with at you with those soul- But we don't bring them all the way to pressure. Things be- ful eyes, and he's London just to throw them together and hope for gin to acquire an inner driving me crazy." the best. illumination, people a

I told her I would do They (along with other rare botanicals) are visible aura. There is a painstakingly blended, what I could. scrupulously measured, sense of immanence, distilled. I looked at the light meticulously of an unnameable paths over my head, And then, these ceremonies completed, emergence. Emotions the life processes of they are allowed to rest before they are bottled. build in waves the giant Aleph sys- To meld together slowly, smoothly and easily. eventually all will be tem. Those were the Such wisdom, it would seem, belongs in any lost in an oceanic slim threads holding manual on how to succeed in marriage. presence. ICOG together. But that was some time away for us yet.

The next week I was She reached out and a constant presence touched my face, and at Biops/I-Sight. Diana bare nerve endings Heywood seemed in- GIN received her. clined to run me off to BEEFEATER* The lust and love I of England.' their biolabs, where in The Crown Jewel had felt for her flamed, zero gravity they were but I was incapable laminating sheets of of moving because protein for the bio- every word or gesture computer and tailor- imed so powerful I ing clumps of E. coli for chemical interface lengths outside the visible spectrum. "Yes," could not make it. One hand touching my with Aleph. All very interesting but nothing I said, "I d6." face, she unbuttoned her blouse—the same for me there. "See? I've embarrassed you. We need a silky peach one she had been wearing when

Back in the rooms on the outer rim very corrosive, an acid bath to wash all this away." I first saw her. Her hands ran over me. Then

little was happening, despite her claims of "That's drastic. Wot complaining, mind you, I reached out to undress her, and she did urgent work. I became convinced that she just pointing it out." the same for me. Kneeling, we faced each

Was hiding something, but I couldn't imag- "I know . . . and maybe it's a mistake. But other—touching, tapping, caressing, taking

I I ine what. decided to brace her with the ac- can't be passive, I can't be patient, not in hold.

II cusation and see what happened. was time this, not in anything. Understand that. And I We coupled so quickly, there was no time for me to show some progress or move on. want you, too." She keyed in a close and tor anything but a bright sexual flare.

So one night I called her, she was working secure command and said, "Let's go. The Still we pushed our bodies together, striv- in her office, twin tan cables snaking out of computer will close everything down after ing to melt flesh into flesh.

her neck. "When are you going to show me we leave." I reached for her arm, thinking Sparks of silver and gold showered from what's going on?" [ said. she might need help once we got outside, her hair, the room lights strobed with our

"I suppose you won't just go away, will you? but she said, "Don't bother, Jerry. I know the pulses, and calm faces — bearded, with an-

I was wondering how long you would wait. way, and everybody knows me. No one will gular profiles — appeared in fresco sur- Why don't you come on over?" run into me." rounding the room, watching, nodding to a . . . .

I I slow beat that I could not hear. quick," could feel my muscles loosening, that thing showed you, with cameras, is just

Cupping her breast, I laughed. I could feel energy level dropping to zero. Through a a trick compared to the other, to-seeing with inside my skull the arcing of circuits gone cloud I saw her press the other tube to her my own eyes. Aleph gives me eyes." She from their usual pattern. Vines stretched own neck. whispered to me, her lips inches away, her across the ceiling, twisted about one an- Huddled naked together, we slept. breath coming in hot pulses I could feel on other in helices, drenched us in green radi- my spine. "But it is so difficult to see, so

. ance that filled the room. Two days later I came into her office. I had complex, that Aleph has to divert, delay .

it It "It grows like a tree," I said, among other staggered through the previous day's work steal the time for me. And has to lie. seems things—Edenic babble she understood and still punch-drunk with liredness. Now I was to want to." responded to in kind; lalling of infants struck humming with a high, anxious buzz; eyes I could feel the tension in both of us, rip- with the light. The room was vast, filled with still subject to shape changings and odd pling against each other. labyrinths of brilliance and caves of dark- flickers of the light, thoughts strung together 'That's impossible," I said. "It doesn't want ness, and we would lose each other inside like the beadwork of a mad child, and at the anything. It can't." them. Then we would come together, sexual luminous center of it all, her. But I couldn't "Something happened. It can. From the

m'arathoners running in tandem, pushed on just go in and say, "Do you love me or was it first time I tried the program, I felt peculiar by the strong, impersonal force of life itself. the drug?" things happening. That strangeness grew .

Time passed unmeasured. I felt her beside She came around the desk to meet me. it flowered. When Aleph and I are con- me. The vaster hallucinations had gone, She was wearing a dress patterned in dark nected like thai, we become intertwined in though objects still shimmered with uncer- blue that billowed as she walked. Her skin ways that are hard to explain. We share tain outline, their colors sliding across wave- was scrubbed, pale, translucent. something, we influence each other. It's not lengths and glistening like deep-painted, 'Are you all right?" I said. one way. polished metal. She sat on the front edge of her desk and "Neurons, nerve fibers in the brain, don't

When I closed my eyes, cartoon figures reached for me. I got a rush of desire that go one way. They loop back on themselves,

in gay red outline bicycled across the inner seemed to have been waiting, latent some- they cross-connect . . . it's a mad snarl, slow,

lids, waving happily. I was buzzing with en- where in the finer structures of my skull in faulty, confused. Nothing like your beautiful ergy that cut through tiredness and forced readiness for the proper touch. light diagrams. I think . . . through me, Aleph me to sit up. I laid her across the desk. Underneath her has learned how to think, how to want, per-

lie. "How are you?" I said. dress, she wore nothing. Nails locked into haps how to

"Tired. Want to get some sleep?" the back of my neck, eyes invisible behind "If I close my eyes and relax, I receive Sensations, vac- "I think so." I got her purse. Inside were colored glass, she drew me into her. So messages. synesthesias— two flat-ended metal tubes, stingers: pres- quickly we moved—waves of need passing uum that smells like ether . . . from inside, it surized, one-shot injectors filled with a tran- between us, amplified, climbing. "Now," she rises up through my heart, that smell. And ." quilizer. I gave them to her, and she felt along said. "Now . the sound of starlight, far-off sirens . , . sat- the underpart of my jaw, then pushed a tube And a few minutes later: "No, don't move. ellites chattering, they have songs, but I feel

I tell I tell . . like of blowing against me." against my neck. 'Jesus," I said, "that's have to you what could nol you them grains sand

I was listening for madness. I couldn't help myself. There were Alice's KEs back in the Ops Room, going through their rituals, to re- mind me. What any of them would give for this connection.

But I heard no craziness from her— nor gassffB©cas ow ib&vs any bent metaphysics, spilled religion. Just a report coming in from distant places.

As if one of Doctor Chin's lab animals had speech, not just the mute, involuntary lan- guage of body chemistry and the electrical

action of the brain. As if it had put itself on the operating table voluntarily, and now out of the nude, trepanned skull, a human voice was speaking. "Pure emotions, "she said. "No context for them at all. Not things Aleph feels, just things

it sends. Panic, fear one time, just one time. Elation, sadness, anger, longing. And once

a chain of orgasms. Can I tell you that? Do you think I'm a monster''"

"No," I said. "No."

"Sometimes I do. But you have to under-

stand, I have no choice, no choice at all," She reached to the console beside us, took the two cables lying there, and snapped them to her neck. She dropped her glasses

to the floor, and in that first instant I could see her eyes come to life— quick contrac- tion of the irises, sudden clutch of muscles as they tried to focus— before she shut her eyes against the harsh light. "Oh, oh God," she said, and moved be- neath me, hips slapping harshly, bucking

uncontrolled. I held to her, in her. She thrust my head back, nails again sunk into the base of my brain, and opened her eyes. Her gaze was clear ai lead. She may have been right. Epochal dis- small, plain conference rourr lhal featured a Before we left her office she showed me covery is a fine thing, especially in retro- viewport on one side. Close in, a tug glided

: what Aleph was doing. On one data window, spect and when you don : have to pay for it. by, a snarl of crates, pallets, and rude as- Ihe lie—an orderly flow of decisions, the But right now ICOG was playing animal semblages, the pilot's head clearly visible, careful, complex structures I had seen in trainer to a bunch of mean and various upside down, as he passed by. holographic splendor in the Ops Boom—the beasts, and they had to be fed. "I believe my work is finished," I said. "Un-

Ihree-dimensional mandalas upon which the If she told them, would they allow her to fortunately I am unable to specity the exact KEs meditated. On another window, the ac- pursue her research, or would they just fire nature of the problems affecting perfor- tuality—stupid subroutines forced to mas- her? Who, if anyone, would be willing to pay mance of the Aleph-Nought system. It re- querade as IA systems, queues building un- the tab on a new Aleph system? And would mains unclear that such problems in fact ex- til Aleph could return to them; meanwhile, they welcome her as director of the new ist. The periodic slowdowns may be a result the greater part of the system was engaged project? And there was Aleph itself. What of inherent system;., vice, artifacts of the sys- in processing Diana's sight. did it, in whatever peculiar fashion, want? tems architecture." Set speeches for the

The longer this went on, Ihe more diificult Imponderables. memo tape. "I have prepared a menu of rec- in logic. it was for Aleph to handle— the end result But for the present she was riding the ommended changes subsystems was the slowdown. storm, going ... I don't know where ... her They may effect optimum decision capacity Sitting in her quarters, we drank hot tea, own will and intelligence guiding, small in the total operational domain." Good, bu- something that smelted o1 jasmine and spice. enough comfort in a large gale, but perhaps reaucratic, hand -wash i.-ig gibberish, to be

"It's quite a juggling act," I said. "But I don't enough to steer by, enough to work the force supported by a set of plausible fictions, cos- know how long 'Aleph can keep it up. Be- of the dense-vectored wind. metic subtleties that Alice and the KEs would sides, what does that matter? Take this to have to institute to find out whether they had

all. Toshi and Alice, to the ICOG Board. You From that point on I stayed away from any effect at

it, shouldn't be hnjing this. Tell them it needs to Biops/I-Sight "Nothing there," I told Alice and Alice was puzzled. "Is that Jerry? It's be pursued in the right way— not with you Toshi. "I don't tnnk there's anything happen- not much."

If working in isolation, stealing their system, but ing with the subsystems. If you want, I'll help "I'm sorry, Alice. I've done what I could. with all the resources you want. They'll have you work with the logistics programs." Lay- you're not satisfied, you ought to get some- to buy it." ing a trail away. one else," "Will they?" But alter walking like automatons through The rest of ihe meeting was brief. Toshi corridor "You' "Don't you think they'll have to? They'll see the empty working days, Diana and I would stopped me in the afterward. the importance." meet in her rooms to sail the currents of our seem troubled," he said. 'Also reticent. I want

"Why? What's in it for Siemens or Bechtel own storm. There was no steerage there, jusi to assure you that even complex problems or Nippon Electric? Think about it, Jerry. I've a careening trip across the landscape that can most often be worked out to mutual sat- jeopardized all their projects, the orbital en- hung far below. isfaction." He let that statement lie— his at-

it I into the circle of ergy grid, maybe ICOG itself. God knows Finally 1 could avoid no longer. called tempt to bring me charmed what I've done to Aleph." a meeting with Toshi and Alice. We used a ringi seido, the process of joint consultation that is the soul of Japanese decision mak-

ing. II was a nice. gesture but meaningless.

I just wasn't feeling Japanese.

I went to my compartment, where she was waiting. Her skin was ho! to the touch. A last time, in seeming slow motion, we came to- gether. She had just begun her period, and with her blood we traced scarlet ara- besques across the sheets, across our

thighs. Standing in the shower stall, I started

to wash the blood away, but I didn't.

The tug fell from high orbit. ICOG had ar- ranged a rendezvous below with a military

shuttle. I touched ne small crusts at the back of my neck, where her nails had punctured

me, where she had clasped me. She still did. The transfer came, and my pallet was shifted into the shuttle's cargo bay. Delta wings tolded back, the shuttle entered the upper atmosphere somewhere over Hawaii, White ash from the tear-off thermal shielding flew past the viewport amid coruscations of red fire. Thin air played high-pitched ca- cophonies on the hull.

I loved her; I told her that. And I said,

"You're not a monster; don't ever think it. Do what you must."

Leaving her with a platitude. . . I didn't tell . her that nature abhors a vacuum, that every-

where she wasn't, was full of pain.

Flash of white light in the mind's eye. pic- ture of a door opening, of something aston-

ishing, its shape unclear, passing through. "Evolutionary emergence," Doctor Chin had

said, but 1 doubted he would find it. He wasn't looking in the right places. OO spring. Within two years he hopes to build a creations that vaguely resemble frogs and ROBOTIC SOUL machine with a more "spidery" walk—faster crabs. But when they are switched on, they and. more adaptable. The robot will also see become Erector sets with souls, delicate CONTINUED FROM PAGE 70 and touch. In five years software could be creatures that step or swim in a realistic

To walk upstairs [he robot slides its foot advanced enough to produce the prototype fashion. Ryuichi and his machine animals are along the face of the step until it finds the of a mobile construction robot. "It could climb famous in Japan, but more important, they edge. Next, the spider glides the foot for- off the back of a truck at a construction site are studied carefully for their ingenious de- ward and sets it down. A second or two later and walk to work," Hirose says. sign. None is yet the size of a full-fledged another foot rises and follows the same rit- Hirose chose to make a spider with just robot. But when you watch a machine walk- ual. During the climbing process a special four legs because "when you try to control ing with the cautious, high-stepping gait of

program keeps the machine's body parallel the hexapod, there are so many possibili- a stork, it does not take a great leap of imag- to the ground, enabling it to maintain its ties —and problems," Another roboticist, ination to visualize some future device wad- equilibrium throughout its stride. Makoto Kaneko, has been too intrigued by ing through a radioactive pond in the base- His machine demonstrates some creative the hexapod's possibilities to be put off by ment of some leaky nuclear reactor, in search solutions to long-standing design problems. the problems. On his laboratory floor in Tsu- of the defective plumbing. His sensor feet are simpler than an elabo- kuba is a small, six-legged machine about Back at Tsukuba, Kunikatsu Takase, a ro- rate vision system. Seeing eats up a great the size of a wire-haired terrier. Kaneko en- boticist in his twenties, talks about a critical

deal of computer memory. Touching does dowed it with a height sensor that lets the problem in designing a third-generation

not. And there is a similar problem with the device step over blocks scattered in its path. droid: making it intelligent enough to deal legs. Although they are more adaptable than He said that before long his six-legger will with the messy realities of the world. Today wheels, they use more energy. To minimize be walking upstairs, a feat a hexapod ma- an autonomous robot takes hours to travel a

energy use, leg movement is carefully pro- chine has yet to accomplish. The machine simple obstacle course, and that is with the grammed so that only one leg at a lime is is young. Kaneko's first walking machine, help of a huge "mother" mainframe com- drawing power. which had only four legs, was built in mid- puter. Takase is designing a robot that will

Just recently he replaced the aluminum 1982. This latest creation, the Mark III, ar- interact with a human brain instead of a legs of the spider with ones made out of car- rived in the summer of 1984. computer. "We would like to combine robot- bon fiber (a light but strong amalgam of There's an enduring fascination for legged ics and tele operation," Takase says, "to make epoxy glue and graphite). Lighter legs per- machines among the Japanese. They have a machine easy to operate." mit the same engines to propel the robot even elevated some walkers to the status of Teleoperation is a concept that falls some- faster. But solving one problem has raised art objects. Last year, a local gallery fea- where between remote control and the au-

another. The legs are now too fast for the tured a show of little mechanical droids, the tonomous machine. It amounts to giving a computer to control them. So Hirose is ad- creations of an energetic and imaginative in- human a set of intelligent tools he can op- justing the program. ventor-engineer named Tomiya Ryuichi. At erate from a distance. Using simple com- Hirose already has plans for Titan's off- first glance the droids look like Erector set mands, a human could direct a robotic hand

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I've never s»en anyone put more, power i in a sinqie line to carry a beaker of toxic chemicals. The hu- man would worry about where to put the beaker, and the intelligent hand would take care of details like keeping the beaker ver-

tical to avoid spilling its lethal contents.

Some of the robot research in Japan is beginning to. pay off. Researchers at the MEL have a robot orderly, an intelligent pallet that

can lift a patient gently out of bed and carry

him or her to the X-ray or operating room. It should be in use in hospitals within two years. (Robot nurses that can feed, shave, and perform other tasks for quadriplegics are al- ready in use at the Veterans Administration Medical Center, in Palo Alto, California.) Re- search is continuing on a movable, sensor- laden, intelligent chair that handicapped people could use on their jobs. And not far from Takase's iab, senior research scientist Susumu Tachi works on a robot guide dog, a compact, intelligent three-wheeled rolling robot that can lead a blind person around.

Using ultrasonic sensors, it con detect ob- stacles, warn of dangers, and even "read"

its way along a course whose route is stored in its magnetic cartridge. With each passing year, Japan's need for

all types of robots is increasing. The aver- age age of the Japanese population has been slowly inching upward. Those who once worked in dangerous industries, like mining, are getting older, and they are not being replaced by as many younger peo- ple. The reason, in part, is that the education level in Japan is extremely h gh. Literacy ap- proaches 100 percent. The government en- courages people to seek work in the tertiary industries— dealing with services instead of

manufacturing, for example. And in Japan, as everywhere else in the modern world, la- bor costs continue to climb. Using machines instead of people in car and electronics

plants lowers the costs; it would do the same on an expensive project such as mining the AFTER WE USE A BARREL for aging Jack seafioor or maintaining nuclear-power plants. , Finally, Japan has made a large commit- Daniel's, our employees can use it for just about ment to technologies like nuclear power. Twenty-one plants are online, seven under anything. construction, and three additional plants are expected by the end of this century. With the specter of something like Three Mile Island Mr. Bobby Owen (that's him up above) has taken looming over the industry, the government wants to depend on more than good luck to one and turned it into a mailbox. And other deal with nuclear-power a emergency or employees into everything even the tedious and dangerous job of make them from bar- cleaning out a nuclear-power plant. becue grills to living room When will the risk takers appear? Enomo- to of MITI declined to speculate. In 1991 the chairs. They do have government will evaluate progress on the ^m\ third-generation machine and decide about hundreds of uses, rhese future plans. But Hitachi's robot expert, Sa- iomi Kobayashi, predicts we will see early old barrels. But after a versions of nuclear-power-plant robots, ro- bot wheelchairs, and undersea-mining ma- sip ofJack Daniel's, we { WHISKEY J chines by the mid-Nineties. By the begin- ning of the twenty-first century, self-sufficient believe, you'll know the robot fire fighters and robots that can build structures in zero g and perform rescue most important use of all. missions in space will be a reality, In fact, one legged machine has already made its debut in the real world: Standing in the waters CHARCOAL MELLOWED DROP BY DROP of Tokyo Bay is a 72-ton. four-legged rubble- leveling robot used lo roll boulders into of WABOT 1. He keeps it in a small research Both WABOT 1 and 2 appear in the Jap- position as part of a seawall-construction building on the Waseda campus. anese National Pavilion at Expo '85, and project. With this robot in place, 50 human The door opens onto a jumble of elec- both, Kato points out, are in the section that divers are spared the risks of underwater- tronic gear: computer keyboards; thick ca- stresses human themes. He hopes that by construction work. bles strewn across the floor and. dangling exhibiting his machines in the humanitarian None of these droids will look like their hu- from the ceiling; tail, gray metal consoles sector, he can demonstrate what a marvel- man counterparts. The human body is the studded with switches and buttons. Barely ous creation the human body is. WABOT 1, most difficult form to duplicate, and only one visible through the gloom at the far end of he says with a touch of paternal pride, has person in Japan has even attempted to build the room is a cluster of bright lights. an l.Q. equivalent to that of a one-and-a-half- a realistic mechanical man. Professor Ichiro Beyond all the equipment is a scene with year-old child. WABOT 2 is a little bit smarter, Kato, dean of engineering at Waseda Uni- a touch of the surreal. A photographer and maybe at a five -year- old's level. versity, in Tokyo, has been trying to produce his assistants gather around a Yamaha or- Kato's robots are more than just show- a cybernetic copy of the human for 20 years. gan, and there, sitting ramrod straight at the pieces. His robotic hand, with its fingertip Long ago Kato decided that despite the for- keyboard, is the massive torso of a robot. sensors, may become an automated breast- midable challenge, he would follow certain Its body is as broad as a fullback's. Yards cancer sensor, one that would detect lumps ideals. "The robot has to look like us. And it of wires and cables droop from its arms and and give an exact readout of their size and has to have intelligence," he declares sim- arch out from its back. Its head is a white location. Work on the walking machine has ply. "Those are my main themes." box of a TV camera, aimed at sheet music produced an artificial leg with a small, built-

Although his distinguished air and pin- on the stand in front of it. Curled expectantly in electric motor that moves more realisti- striped suit make him look more like a banker over the keyboard are two metal hands, five cally— it has foot and ankle action—than than a scientist, Kato is known as the father fingers each. Two spindly carbon-fiber legs standard prostheses. A microcomputer worn of robotics in Japan. Out of his laboratory descend beneath the keyboard to feet rest- on the belt uses an electrode taped to the have come some of the most daring and ing on the organ pedals. leg to read "walk" signals from leg muscles imaginative machines ever produced. Years of work and $1.2 million have gone and to direct the movement. Two amputees

Eleven years ago, for example, he accom- into designing and assembling this ma- are currently trying it out. plished what few believed possible. He built chine. As a piece of engineering it's a mas- When will WABOT 1 join WABOT 2? Much a machine called WABOT 1 (a combination terpiece. The computer-controlled machine depends on the speed at which new break- of Waseda and robot) that can walk on two can read the notes from the sheet music and throughs come. Twenty years of work on the legs. Weighing 300 pounds, the machine can direct the feet to play different tunes. On the ultimate robot has taught Kato what an awe- flex its metal hips, knees, ankles, and foot day it was unveiled for the press, it played a some undertaking it is to duplicate the hu- joints as it moves. It can walk a straight line, pop tune called "Garasu-no Ringo" ('Apple man form. The quest will most likely occupy turn around, even step sideways. In the fall of Glass"). The press debut, explains Kato, him for the rest of his career. "The robot is a of 1984, Kato debuted his latest creation, was simply to let the public know how far the systems-engineering problem." he says. "But WABOT 2, which will someday form the top technology had gone. the human is a microcosmic wonder."DO

122 OMNI ligence, have paid tribute to the Japanese and DARPA, is going to turn around and

for firing the first shot. really whomp them. The other scenario is that BRAIN But perhaps the best measure o! ICOT's the United States will do all the basic re- CONTINUED FROM PAGE 77 impact can be seen in the response of the search, only io have the Japanese turn puter supremacy, such American industrial Japanese themselves. Only three years ago, around and commercialize it." giants as IBM, Motorola, and Inlet have be- companies shuddered every time one of their Bui according to McCorduck, we're all fifth-gener- gun to sponsor artificial-intelligence pro- star employees joined Fuchi and his "blue likely to come out ahead. Once ubiquitous, grams at a number of leading universities. sky" group. But today, those same compa- ation technology has become The Defense Advanced Research Projects nies vie to send ICOT their besl blood, young she says, intelligent computers will fade into the micro- Agency (DARPA), based in Arlington. Vir- men who will return to share the gold. the woodwork, transparent as in today's audio and ginia, is spending $644 million over the next The ICOT project is no longer considered processors embedded machines, she two years on fifth- gene rati on and super- "the extremely flaky, off-the-wall imaginings video equipment. These computer technology. Their hope: to design of fevered academic minds," says the Uni- adds, will provide a decision- and planning- ever more potent weapons and surveillance versity of Waterloo's Eric Manning, who re- suppori system, giving people "a huge over the of events. devices to become increasingly skilled in the cently visited a number of Japanese cor- amount of control outcome scenar- logistics of war. And some 20 major U.S. porations. These companies are now keenly Using computers to create what-if computer companies—from Honeywell to aware that progress made at ICOT can ios, people will be able to figure out optimal Rockwell—have formed an Austin, Texas- sharpen their competitive edge. And it's ways of conducting their own lives." based consortium called the Microelectron- pretty clear that the current activity at ICOT Fuchi goes one step further. The fifth gen- balance of ics and Computer Technology Corporation is just a portion ot the total fifth-generation eration, he says, will (orge a new (MCC). Directed by Admiral Bobby Ray In- effort now going on in Japan. U.S. research- power in technological societies around the that In the age of the computer, he ex- man (ret.), MCC hopes to get a lead on ICOT. ers visiting Japanese companies report world. plains, is power. Today that in- The key is collecting a critical mass of talent. for every five representatives sent to Fuchi, information Says Inman, "We've pooled resources there are 30 to 50, and sometimes hun- formation is available only to the very few. against the challenge. One of the benetits of dreds, ot researchers hard at work on simi- But when the masses have access to intel- ligent machines and databases chronicling the Japanese alert is that it has gotten U.S. lar projects in company labs. businesses to think about planning for long- While the Japanese have stressed the de- virtually all of human knowledge, "they will to abide by whatever range research." sire for world cooperation from the start, it no longer be forced generation will ul- The response in Europe has been almost seems clear that this is a race in earnest. officials decide." The fifth redistribute- wondiy wealth in the form as emphatic. Spurred by Japanese re- Where will it all end? "One view," says Man- timately search, the British have begun an ICOT-like ning, "is that this is just another Pearl Harbor of human knowledge, he says. And that will ot forging an artificial-intelligence thrust called the Alvey and that all they've succeeded in doing is usher in the rebirth democracy, Programme. And the West Germans, now twisting the tiger's tail and making him mad age more expansive and human than the envisioned. pouring billions of dollars into artificial intel- as hell; and now the tiger, in the form of MCC Greeks could' have ever DO WHERE IS PLANET X?

By Joel Davis

Uranus and Neptune misbehave month lifetime, IRAS spotted dozens of seen," he explains. "But IRAS was capable constantly. The orbits they follow new comets, asteroids, superfaint red dwarf of spotting planets the size of Jupiter or around the sun are irregular, and siars, and distant galaxies. And unlike Tom- larger." Theoretically, such planets would many astronomers think they know why. baugh's search, it covered the entire sky. be detectable as far as 90 billion miles

They believe an unknown body is present Did it find Planet X? "We don't know- from the sun. in the solar system and that its gravity yet," says Russ Walker. Walker is a member One day, while sorting through IRAS disturbs the movement of the two planets. of Jamieson Science and Engineering, a images, Gautier thought he had something.

They call this body Planet X. Now all ihey firm engaged by the Jet Propulsion It was an unidentified point of infrared have to do is find it. Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, to radiation. It was in just the right place and Astronomers have been looking for search through the accumulated IRAS data appeared to have just the right temperature Planet X for more than half a century. So far for evidence of Planet X. to be the elusive tenth planet. For a few this mysterious object has eluded them. "We have been looking at thousands of moments Gautier had visions of joining

The first person to mount a methodical candidates," Walker explains. "What we Tombaugh as one of the only living humans search was a skilled amateur named Clyde are searching for is the motion of a cool to have discovered a planet. Tombaugh. In 1930 he found a Planet X object against the background of the sky." Closer inspection showed it was a false candidate, but it turned out to be much too (By cool, Walker means that the objects alarm— a faint red star. So Gautier and small to disturb the orbits of Uranus and should have temperatures no higher than the others on the IRAS team continued to Neptune. Tombaugh's discovery was named 150°K.) He and his colleagues have done sort' through the hundreds of other likely Pluto, the ninth planet of the solar system. preliminary blinking ot IRAS images and candidates. This month, at the annual Tombaugh spent 14 years patiently expect to make their findings known meeting of the Astronomical Society of the continuing the search for a transplutonian sometime this year. Pacific, members of the IRAS team will planet, using the same technique that IRAS is limited in what it can find. It report on what they did see. helped him find Pluto: comparing photo- couldn't spot an Earth-size planet at dis- Tombaugh is not optimistic that IRAS will graphic plates of the night sky taken months tances beyond Pluto, says JPL researcher find Planet X. "The sky is loaded with or even years apart. By "blinking" the Nick Gautier. also working on the IRAS infrared objects," he says. But he thinks plates in a device called a comparator, which data. 'Anything that distant would be too IRAS could make another interesting gave him a quick look first at one plate small and would radiate too little heat to be discovery: a substar collapsed by gravity and then at the same view taken at a later before it ever made it to the big time of date, he hoped to spot a moving object full stardom. Gautier agrees and suspects that might be a new planet. that Planet X may not be a planet at all

"I searched more than seventy percent but may actually be a brown dwarf, as such of the sky," Tombaugh, now in his eighties, tailed stars are called. recalls. "I blinked plates to the extreme Working on this hypothesis, astronomer limit, looking at objects four to five times John Anderson, of the Jet Propulsion is far-traveling fainter than Pluto was when I found it." Laboratory, using two space Tombaugh's quest turned up nothing. probes to look for Planet X. The probes Astronomical technology in the Thirties he's using are Pioneer 10 and 11, now and Forties was primitive compared with moving out of our solar system. Anderson today's hybrids of computers and believes that if there is a large astronomical telescopes. Already the new equipment body in a distant orbit around the sun, its has helped astronomers find objects gravitational pull should bend the orbits of Tombaugh and his contemporaries could the two spacecraft. By comparing their have missed. For example, no one calculated paths with their actual paths, suspected the existence ot Pluto's moon Anderson says he can use the two Pioneers Charon, discovered a few years ago with a as gravitational detectors and might even telescope equipped with computerized be able to determine the area of the sky image-enhancement technology. where the unseen body is locaied. Today's search for Planet X employs the Of course, it's possible that there is no latest in astronomical high tech, including Planet X at all. But Uranus and Neptune the orbiting telescope IRAS (infrared astro- continue to wobble in their paths around nomical satellite). IRAS was able fo see the sun. Something must be disturbing infrared, or heat, radiation and could spot them, If it's not an undiscovered planet or a objects cooler than stars. During its 11- Neptune: Does Planet X make it wobble? brown dwarf, what then?OQ

126 OMNI —

one, when do you become bald-headed? was for the good of mankind— to cure can- irUTERV/IEUU There is really a chasm between curing cer, AIDS, and infectious diseases—all right. abolition of it it isn't true! The American Cancer Soci- CONTINUED FROM P; sickness and the death. And But will be the rich who will live longer because ety would be broke if cancer were cured. A sign these things are very expensive. more just distribution of money to less-pop- Yet I am siill asked to applaud and man- think. ifestos (or more money to do research faster; Omni: Science has brought us television. Isn't ular fields might be more useful than we that boon? Maybe work on the pigments in butterfly and I refuse. a Omni: Aren't you for the new technology to Chargaff: You are talking to a man who has wings would find something that has to do in with cancer. extend life—the artificial heart, for example? never had a TV. Prisoners used to.be put Chargaff: It's horrible! That poor fellow solitary cells as punishment. Now the whole We should realize that the great triumphs Schroeder who hangs on the machine and of humanity has put itself into solitary cells of science, as almost everything else, are for pur- is paralyzed, and everyone is happy at sci- and sits before a box. I don't wan! to know, really serendipitous and not made a

if there are intelligent pose. Serendipity is a silly word because in entific progress! I see the abolition of death even from Mr. Sagan, is mixture of knowing this is really behind the whole affair. If you worlds in the universe. I was interviewed my- science there always a is question of expe- I really to look, which a prolong life, why not one hundred, one hun- self, and I objected to the makeup. where Fleming dred fifty, two hundred years? Cure all dis- don't want anything to be brought to me that rience, and actually looking. When

I his lab a dish of culture eases, make all normal safety valves of na- I have not found myself. Only when travel came into and saw

fill with halo penicillin, no one ture ineffective. Death is a safety valve. do I switch on the TV to up my batteries a and discovered Nature does not like to see the same people with hatred and disgust. had dreamed that such cells existed. This is don't usually the type of discovery that brings re- around all the time! I believe in equilibria, Omni: Surely great men. even today, and I'm convinced that there will be some- watch much TV or hang on the telephone? suits, It's the old joke about King Frederick his men and thing much worse to pay for it. There is Chargaff: There are no such men today. We of Prussia appearing before the something philosophically, morally, and even have created a mechanism that makes it saying, "We are going into Seven Years sociologically objectionable in the attempt practically impossible for a real genius to War!" He couldn't have said that in the be- In field biochemist Fritz ginning, and you can't yet say we are even- to abolish death. I am really astonished that appear. my own the in this ostensibly Christian country, with so Lipmann or the much maligned Linus Paul- tually going to cure cancer. many evangelists and born-again Chris- ing were very talented people. But gener- Too much research today is systematic research in which pre- tians, no one stands up and questions it from ally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died discovery, analogy these perspectives. Of course, we have out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities dictable things are found. Real discoveries professional ethicists on committees, but blown up by the winds of the time. are unpredictable. My own discovery of the they are paid only from nine to five. The commercialization of research is the complementarity relationships was certainly

I unpredictable. Omni: Bui isn't it desirable to cure disease? worst development. When was a professor completely sitting in office, it occurred Chargaff: Certainly it is a defensible function at medical school, you weren't allowed to One day, my calculation. of medicine to cure sick people. But where take out patents. Now you have companies to me to do a different kind of

it got in the electric calcula- I just new is the line? If you tear out your hairs one by buying into Harvard and Yale. If believed We had

i tors, and I could average hundreds of anal-

yses that I couldn't have done by hand. And out they came, as flawless as Botticelli's Ve- nus on the half shell! But you had to know

what to think about. It is very rare that a New- ton is hit by an apple and comes up with the gravitation theory. Usually he gets just a bump on the head. Omni: What about your previous major dis- covery, proving that DNA was capable of carrying Ihe information of heredity? Chargaff: That was not quite so unpredict- able. Anyone who did a little thinking about

it and knew the specilicity of proteins should have concluded there must be some spec- ificity [the means by which genes carry a coding sequence providing all of the infor- mation essential tor creating a specific life form] in DNA. Otherwise Avery could not have found that the DNA from pneumococ- cus could transform a nonvirulent strain of bacteria into a virulent one, whereas the DNA from calf thymus did not have the same ef- These solidly built JUKI^ fect on bacteria. Avery had discovered the s pack a lot of muscle. Plug ( existence of specific nucleic acids. It's quite p.c. and get letter-quality printing; including graphics, at a price himself that made JUKI a legend. For home use, the JUKI 6000 offers 10 cpsfor under clear if you read his paperthat Avery ^300. For the small office, the JUKI 6100 gives 18 cps performance on a wide range of couldn't understand it, and he was very eas- s word -processing functions— for less than 600.. For business use, the JUKI 6300 gives all ily brought out of balance by people at

that, and more, at a 40 cps speed— and , ... Rockefeller University. They asked, "How can

it's wide enough for your spreadsheets, :-' M^"' BB BB^^B® you be sure that there is not an impurity in 3 too. . .under 995. Excellent mainte- . ^Qlxisrr BJBJ|B%.B the DNA that is really the transforming prin- .««.« t|»,i.»- 3^ Since he had little chemical knowl- . ciple?" and powered te Theworkers JUKI.OFFICE MACHINE CORP, edge and no chemical means of analyzing,

I provided it. We were the first to do the com-

15-6315 (Calf,) plete analysis of the nucleic acids. Omni: Is James Watson, then —who worked mostly in his head and who ignored the threat a

beautiful stunt that his grant would be cut off—the kind of the structure of DNA yourself? ize that. The double helix is a

all. It science that's researcher you'd approve of? Chargaff; I was not in the running at that has given rise lo a new

successful. It is not really Chargaff: Yes, the discovery of the double was not of interest to me. I was a chemist been extremely

" best expla- helix was one of the last examples of excel- working on methods oi quantitative analysis what I'd have aimed at—just the all nation of the available chemical facts. lent science. It didn't cost any money; it was of nucleic acids. Do you realize that the done between teatime and dinner, more or people who now work on nucleic acid have Omni: What then would DNA look like under of infinite less. They were driven a little more than oth- never seen it? They see only a shadow. They a microscope power? double helix. ers— especially Watson, who went around have never isolaied the stuff, never had it in Chargaff: Only occasionally a riverbank of and listened right and left. But British sci- their hands. They don't know what it looks DNA in a cell is a landscape, a with geography, a hill ence was very good then—the last sunset, like. DNA is a peculiar fibrous material. When tremendous length, a the other side, you might say, of small science. Watson now wet it forms a sort of continuous glue— on one side, a sandbank on things. directs a fairly big institute, but it's still old- white, odorless jeliy so gelatinous you can't a dam—all kinds of The more we

it. it flufflike learn, fhe clearer it becomes. The chromo- fashioned, recognizable science, I guess. pour When dry forms a dust on Omni: When you met them, though, you a phonograph needle, a fibrous mass of very some is such a huge complex in chemical helix is didn'i see Crick and Watson as historical fig- thin needles. No, I never lasted it. But it's terms. To say this is a double wrong. ures, did you? probably salty because if's usually isolated It isn't the whole story, but you can read it as Chargaff: They impressed me more as a as a sodium salt. such for a number of chemical experiments comedy team. I'm a chemist, and they were Omni: But you were very interested in the and be more right than wrong. anfichemist, you might say. They didn't know structure of DNA, weren't you? Don't forget science has always had tre- its history. phlo- any chemistry, whether out of disgust, hatred, Chargaff: Yes, but I would have gone much mendous revolutions in The

in four or five years. If I giston theory of combustion looked com- or negligence, 1 don't know. I reviewed The slower. Maybe had Double Helix, in Science. Not a bad book, had the collaboration of someone like Ros- pletely impregnable for one hundred years. build models, we'd also have [Phlogiston was a mythical chemical that was as far as it goes. Amusingly written. I was alind Franklin to thought to be released during burning. The astonished it was so well done. Didn't give come up with something. You see, the joke much evidence of a deep-seated nature, but is that the double helix is, again, an idealized discovery of oxygen relegated phlogiston to ash heap.] Suddenly, a few maybe Watson was overdoing the chase of structure. There is no evidence that it exists the chemical the cell in this way. In ihe isolated form, in kicks and it's gone. The double helix will nof the Cambridge popsies. I prefer to let these in

the idealized form, it is true, yes. But it is not disappear in this sense, but it will be very things go to sleep. I don't want to spend the

I siill there is a lot rest of my life giving hell io Crick and Wat- a picture of what goes on when the cell di- much modified. believe we

I always son. This farce has been playing for too many vides. It's like the model ot benzene: You don't know about the whole thing. lor creating the don't the hexagons in fhe bottle, but it's say it's the several proteins in the nucleus years. I don't blame them see reactivity not just the nucleic acids [DNA and RNA] revolution. It made ihem, far more than they an easy way of representing its and

it It's one-dimen- that affect theoperations of the genes—that made it. when you write down. a Omni: You had already made a key contri- sional static simplification of a polydimen- there's more to it ihan the nucleic acids. Now bution to what they did. Why didn't you seek sional dynamic situation. People don't real- I see inklings in the literature, adumbrations

of someihing coming. It is not impossible that

in twenty years if will turn out that I was right.

Omni: Instinctively, you like the idea of it being more complex?

Chargaff: Yes, I have always called myself a great complicator. Omni: Perhaps this tendency threw you off the fact that your ratios suggested some- thing about the structure ot the molecule?

I Chargaff: I slighted my own discovery! was

very diffident about it and held it back and

did it over and over, because if looked too

simple. I was extremely reluctant to believe

it because it was really the first time in bio- chemisiry that such a simple relationship was

discovered. It was so peculiar, I hesitated to

believe it. Then, too, this was all before Crick and Watson. One didn'i rush into the news- papers immediately with everything. These

were quieter times, and I am a very quiet left man. So I decided to be sure and even

it out of the first draff of my paper, I added it to the proofs. Omni: Why didn't these one-to-one ratios suggest to you a molecule thai divided down the middle to replicate?

Chargaff: In retrospeci it seems obvious, but there are hundreds of other ways that pair- " ing could take place. It sounds funny, but I

am still not sure that the model is completely correct. That the DNA gene is the double

helix as you see it now in cartoons, I'd re- there /# serve judgment. I honestly do believe

are great surprises coming. When if came out a few years ago that the genes were not

really in one piece but distributed over the

chain in various segments, I thought this was 9 People wait for ihe a big change, a break. It's been plastered people I could mention might have discov- one wrote that today

, ; it preliminary comrr .L.n cai'.ons then rush over at the moment, but I am not sure that in ered and never would have been cele- and thirty years you will really get the same an- brated. This was a publicity phenomenon, lo the phone to ask their graduate students swers as you do now. We now believe that partly through the book, partly through their to try it immediately in order to beat the au- telegenic usefulness. thor to publication or to the patent. genes direct heredity, but I can visualize a charmingly They were — time when an entirely different belief gov- the best replacemenl for Einstein. There were Omni: Doesn't competition spur people to erns, that something else has to do with he- perhaps grealor ohysicists than Einstein, but perform excellently?

redity—or maybe there is no heredity. By he looked like everycocy's :eddy bear. He Chargaff: I am not aware that Shelley and scien- definition, it is impossible to foresee. I tried was so lovely, the old German professor Keats were ever competing! To me a in my last years at the laboratory to show playing the violin, all kinds of cute features tist is an artist. Science is an art where it that- base pairing had other biological ef- that have nothing to do with relativity. The really counts, and it would never have got-

if it If it fects, such as regulating enzyme reactions, public doesn't know what relativity is. I am a ten anywhere hadn't been. had been all would which have nothing to do with heredity. I member ot the National Academy of Sci- technology from the beginning, you better Ar- showed these ir several papers that no one ences, and I don't understand it. I take it for ever have had would have been

has really read. granted it's probably true, since I have no chimedeses, building better levers. You Omni: Aren't you doctoring history by say- way of checking. Why millions get excited wouldn't have had Newton, or the great in chemis- ing, long after the fact, that you found the about it, I don't know. mathematicians, or Emil Fischer "pairing" of important elements in DNA, The same with ihe double nelix. The funny try [German Nobel prize-winner who first

it this lost rather than just that they "approached one- thing is, I have never considered such an synthesized sugars]. Now has been to-one ratios"? important thing, the centerpiece of our sci- completely. Not one in a hundred young- entific thinking, of times for sters going into science will be of this type. Chargaff: I used the word complementarity a symbol our their originally, the base complementarity. Pairing twenty-five years. I honor Avery much more Omni: Do you envy Watson and Crick

than I Crick clscovcry ihe.r celebrity? I used later, translating my word into what honor and Watson.

it for silly question! Do I envy had become a slogan. I did not say they were Omni: Was very disappointing you to Chargaff: That's a

in a double structure, no. That is Crick and be so knowledgeable and so close lo it and the Austrian who won the ski race yester-

Watson. The helix is a gimcrack. The fact have them come in and. scoop you? day? People ask me why I didn't get the No-

1 it, is that it is double is important because it is an Chargaff: No. Not at all, but it was the first bel prize. say I never ran for which

really the truth. I don't automatic way of reproduction. I never appearance in science of this kind of grab- honest-to-goodness

I could it. I'm not the pasting. Originally think I get claimed it was my idea, and I don't wish to. bing and science was an ever thought international of 'airly na- type, there are two ways of getting When I first heard about it, I wrote the first undensk'ng a meek because

first, I not appreciation, that it was the best explana- ture. You could find hundreds of papers with anything in the world. For the am tion of the regularities discovered. very exciting results, where a footnote at the bright enough. And I'm not smeary enough,

Omni: Was the celebrity Watson and Crick end would say, "We ask colleagues' to re- for the second. I know several scientists who achieved for its solution inevitable? serve this field for us for a few years." Can didn't get it but deserved it. It's not a ques-

laughter if tion of it. I'd like to say all the peo- Chargaff: No! ltwasvery"evitable." I bet ten you imagine the Homeric some- deserving

ple who have got :on .i arc reasonably good

scientists, but it's not so. And there are so many that they are almost indistinguishable.

It has become a lottery With someone un- usual like Barbara McClintock or Peyton

Rous at eighty-five, it's a correction of an in-

justice. Tolstoy didn't get it! Then, too, you have to make yourself no-

ticeable. I know many people of whom I said. "He's going to get the Nobel," not because

I read his paper but because he was so ea-

ger to get it. In this world, if you want some-

thing very much you very often get it, I once thought of writing an art c e called "The Little

Technology of the Nobel Prize," but I never

did because people would say it was sour

grapes. Honest to goodness it's not: I am more an observer than a sufferer. Omni: At seventy-nine you are very sharp- minded, and according to your book, you didn't retire from Columbia willingly. Are re- tired scientists a wasted resource? Chargaff: Bertoft Brecht wrote about the president of a large corporation coming back from the dead and being unable to get the job of a doorman. Our age is characterized by extreme hypocrisy: We say that scientists are irreplaceable, yet we keep replacing them with younger people. Of course, the tensile strength of an expert or specialist is

bound to let up with time. One doesn't re-

main as agile or flexible. I have always pitied my colleagues trying convulsively to hang

on when they had very little reason to any- more. But Avery was sixty-six when he dis- covered the genetic function of DNA.

I don't know of any scientist of sixty or sev- enty in the middle of the current rumpus. being best adapted to the future. They've :

They all are too eccentric for it. They do some done away with privacy, for instance. I greatly their papers. value privacy myself. But there will be no pri- GMrMES decent work and read own ANSWERS TO GAMES {PAGE 152) Young people won't go to them, so they usu- vacy in the future because there will be ally work with second-rate help. Young standing room only, If you have four billion FRAME THE QUEEN. To get the frame Ph.D.'s sell themselves to a gang for the rest people now, and that doubles every twenty- around the queen's face, you must first turn calculate there the square frame inside out." Do this by of their lives. I worked on everything under five years, you can how many the sun — nucleic acids, carbohydrates, en- will be in a hundred years. Everywhere there feeding each of the four corners of the square through the central hole. this is zymes, lipids, you name it —five or ten pa- will be tremendous crowds of ill-educated down When pers on each. I'm really eighteenth cen- people unable tc express themselves in their completed and laid Hat, the result will look tury—pre-French Revolution. own language. Sign language will lake over. like the photo on page 152. For your first tries, Omni: You talk of providence, and the front Already there are almost no articulate, liter- you will want to cut the frame thinner than as page of your book quotes a religious sonnet ate people except in small circles at univer- shown. Use cards of high-quality paper; by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Do you sities or in the theater. cheaper cards tend to tear accidentally. believe in a god? Omni: Are you bitter, as some have said? Flatten the final product with a warm iron. All the writers before Chargaft: I make it a rule never to tell anyone Chargaff: best modern .of my beliefs. I'm not making confessions: times have been labeled bitter; Dickens in Times, Swift in Gulliver's Travels. But By providence, I mean the legislative arm of Hard

bitter is ;ust ; hackneyed attribute God. I do go to church, yes, but to look at a s:arda c intercnangeablc jour- the pictures. I am the least colorful of sci- used as an module by entists. To jazz me up will produce only a nalists. Maybe the truth is always bitter. I very sorry spectacle. would call myself desperate. But I don't like

Omni: Heracleiius was known as the weep- to dramatize myself or play a role. I may have ing philosopher, and your views seem equally an aura of inapproachability. I was late get- pessimistic. Do you see any bright spots in ting into the Academy of Sciences, which the American picture? showed a certain lack of popularity. But I

if I not interested in offi- Chargaft: Well, yes, I do. Someone said bear no grudge. am there are saints in America, you find them in cial positions. It would have only been a GET IT OFF What could be simpler? Just the Middle West. People outside the larger bother. push the inner strip through the hole, and cities are honest, open, and kind. America Omni: With all due respect, how can you be voila! This is one of the few mechanical puz- is multifaceted. You can't say America stinks. sure you're not just an old fuddy-duddy who zles with an answer so simple it can be pre- Amazingly, after my lectures a few young can't adjust? sented in a single drawing. people come forward who are worth talking Chargaff: I ask myself that very often. Is to. There are always individuals. America is grumbling the prerogative of old age? I con- peculiarly rich in them because mass cul- clude it is not. Anyway, statistically if you pre- there will time ture has driven so many beyond the pale. I dict the fall of the world, be a

this is it! I not speak to those. I don't consider myself a when you are right. Maybe am the scientific truth, scientists prophet, though I have a certain readership. speaking but in aseptic world interpretation world. I live where I don't want to improve the have a an very small part. many phi- great dislike of do-gooders, I doubt their sin- plays a But how cerity. They are reacting off some hidden losophers have we had since the world be- faults or crevices. The world can be im- gan, each with his own truth? If you asked proved only from the bottom, by grass-roots Plato whether he spoke the truth, he would effort, by small steps like practicing greater probably throw you out! I am too polite! What small "Forty below" is the only temperature care with words and language. When I read gives me strength is that I'm in such a COLD. that President Nixon said, "We've got to nuke minority. Dean Swift wrote that it all the at which both the Fahrenheit and Celsius something, one be scales read the same. (Incidentally, as Mi- them," I vomited. Anyone who is on such fa- dunces acclaim can miliar terms with the nuclear bomb can go happy to be the one who disagrees. chael Stueben pointed out in Capital M, the In Washington, DC, Mensa newsletter, this is to hell as far as I am concerned. [Chargaff Omni: regard to DMA. would you now is referring to a report of a White House aide agree that we have succeeded in solving also the freezing point of mercury.) listening in on an alleged conversation be- the mystery of life? KIN. Mother. tween Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who was Chargaff: No. A living cell is still a great mys- then secretary of state. Later Kissinger de- tery, and nothing that molecular biology or CREDITS

',:, ; : .-:. ,r,i, - : :!:>!., nied the assertion that Nixon, referring to any of us has done has contributed a milli- !'s.::s \B. i-i:--. .;:. ii ',— .O'r '-.lilt- -j-U- -'.'..ir-.iii;,'-. !' ,(,:; iiriijj ,-. J: I. ii life. «. .u.k <:;.!( North Vietnam, told him, "Henry, we've- got meter to our understanding of We just ::„a« ! [»-ii?2i iMise pi™ 34 short- don't know what is really meant by entele- to nuke them."] But Americans are iiv ;)ii^v:il! :.',,.: !':/:. paqi?4i!.

i i i page 44 top, J P changed on- their education. The little old lady chy, the word used by Aristotle to describe - il '-.<) Dt-'.V" !. ...:rii';:: I ii a: page 44 Ootlom. LLNI. organic whole. take mixture of '. ::..- in the red schoolhouse is not only underpaid the You a S!ss« 4iJ lou. i f>s

Oilifci-iS pSQO-ii; i.'i;. :':.?!, I page 46 bottom, bacteria put in little alcohol or you but held in contempt. It's inexplicable. Half- and you a !;&:.,' .'.( " a i'i .ii p E ge 47 top. t-M.i! Qav s: pig? 47 bot- ;: ', Djrllinoc. 48 r-,Vr-,.« 'I Turks have an .al- heat it, and nothing obvious has happened, tom, -E '9B5 !!s'h page top, civilized people like the -,; -,-. :-;.!<: it' hosioin. '. page 49 top, Hoi a Chemically most holy regard for teachers because they yet now the bacteria are dead. .!. I, page 49 bottom, A ain No-

know their national memory is transmitted they are .identical if you do it properly, and through them. still something is gone, You can't weigh it,

' Omni: What nation do you approve of? and you call it organization, but you can't Chargaff; My philosophy is almost the op- even show that the organization has been

it is- still page as bottom, Courtesy of posite of the American one. I think everyone interfered with. So a great mystery ObLisl-.a pages 86, 87. Lilian R Wolff page wi, •:-

I solve. ':: :: ii i . else. In way, that don't want to i.i.. i . i... .'!'. has an obligation to everyone a i '' the ideal society, is the Chinese, which has Omni: James Watson told Omni that it is sim- tested now for five thousand or six- ply a matter of physics and chemistry, and been .... !...;.:, thousand years, longer than any other peo- the mystery has been solved. Chargaff; the reductionist, I it's There ple in history. wouldn't want to live there; you have ilQbgnsha. very unpleasant. It's, ideal in the sense of and here you have the non reductionist, DO 134 OMNI telephone line, you may want to snap Data IOJTELLIBERJCE properly, in the operating room. Though the UCLA work will have its most' Guard into your existing line. While con- CONTINUED FROM PAGE40 imme'diaie application in the education of nected! if knocks out the extensions, on the giving you, in effect, a dedicated Kabo had to write a program that smoothly physicians and nurses, it could ultimately same line, Removing Data Guard linked the contours of ihe first cross section have a substantia! impact on the nascent field line for your modem. restores extensions, ($39.95 from Control all the way through to the- last slice. He also of robotics. "The better understanding we assigned contrasting colors and shades to ha.ve of the actual movement capabilities of Industries, Box 6292, Bend, OR 97708.) the skin, fat, nerves, and muscles. the arm and the best ways to lever it," says insight we'll have in design- Business or pleasure? If you have a PC It was a prodigious accomplishment. The Kabo, "the more : largely lor business, may need to prove storage capacity for- the data alone is ten ing better in.-ji,'pL a:o's for robots." you

it. PCLOG can help by Keeo ng track of your megabyles," says Kabo. "That's just the'raw NEW WARES: HARD AND SOFT activities—when files you worked on and for data." Now stored in an IBM 4341 minicom- long. ;hf: Imornal Revenue Ser- puter, the digitized limb will have to be trans- Say it again, Mac. Whether it's dialogue how Shou.d income-tax deductions and ferred info a much larger machine before from the movie Casablanca or- your bank vice guestion the your you'll have Kabo can make further refinements. balance, a computer program called tax credits claimed for PC, detailed logsto substantiate your computer- The final result will be a videodisk with SmoothTalker can teach your Macintosh Programs arc available for .20,000 individual frames. In effect, the stu- computer to read machine-readable copy. related expenses. 41 the PC6300, IBM PC, PCjr, and many dent will have an arm and hand that he can The program breaks English words into ATST ($19,95 from Oak Tree slice at any point and view from any angle. separate phonemes, or sounds, and allows other machines. Road, Sol- He can dissect the specimen with a com- you to feed back some of your own excep- Technologies, 2619 Quail Valley

! ware-' scheme of pronunci- vang.CA 93463.) puterized scalpel or build it up one layer at tions to the so! s low, a time: bones, nerves, muscles, and blood ation. It can talk fast or slow, high or with Isaac Asimov. His novel Ro- vessels. And Meals and Kabo are already a man's voice or a woman's. It also reads Match wits with into a com- thinking about creating dynamic images of fractions and such titles as Dr. and Ms. bots of Dawn has been encoded puter-software adventure that changes each the arm and hand in motion. (Available for £149.95 from retail outlets or Taking the role of One colleague told Meals that he thought "directly from First Byte, 2845 Temple Ave- time you play the game. "Lije" Baley, get to ply the technology could someday be valuable nue, Long Beach, CA 90806.) detective Elijah you your investigative trade in remote galaxies, in educating surgeons who operate on her- interrogating in your quest to de- I suspects nias. Because the computer provides inside This is dedicated to the one log. Have and outside views, surgeons would be able you ever been downloading and had some- termine who murdered Dr. Han Fastolfe, the creator of humaniform robots. (Priced from to see from the inside where the strength of one pick up an extension phone? Not only depending on type of computer, the hernia repair must be concentrated. At can you lose the file, you may have to redial $29 to $35, -irne at retail outlets and Irom Epvx, Inc., 1043 Kiel the same time, they would also be able to and log on aga'i i. thai costs and money. bucks for a separate Court, Sunnyvale. CA 94089. )DQ observe how the repair would look, if done If you don't have the

" "Up until now it was just a theory. c Imw to reacktkefloldstatularf.

cR&dmfilm. (Because timegoes m>. —

nia's utilities were shifting their focus from Shortly afterward -G&E came up with a nuclear to coal. By the beginning of 1980. similar proposal for financing solar collec- had EARTH the two California giants. PG&E and South- tors as well. By djnt of its size, PG&E :';: CONTINUED I HOM r*o I: ern California Edison, had roughly similar became, overnight, the country's leading for And building ten new coal and nuclear plants, a ambitions: one pair of 800-megawatt coal utility in programs alternative energy. later, new greenie and eighi specific plan making full use of the alterna- plants apiece within the state and one shared one year with a intense litigation, finally forced tives looked better from every financial an- 2,500-megawatt project out of state. months of EDF cancelation of the enormous 2.500-mega- gle. The bottom line was that a scenario of Into this incipient California coal rush, the conservation and alternatives could replace PUC dropped a bombshell— the unprece- watt coal plant that PG&E (and its sister. Edi- planning. nine out of the ten big plants on this com- dented rate penalty that EDF had been son) had been By March 1983, when the PUC's fourth pany's drawing board. It would get the same pushing for. Ruling that PG&E had inexcus- issues con- energy results at lower post. ably dragged its feet on cogeneration, the annual conference on energy commission subtracted $14.4 million from vened at Stanford, California, there was hardly anything left to talk about. With tradi- .In 1979 the dark side of Zach's analysis PG&E's rates. million dollars tional dynamo planning stalled, PG&E even- what would happen if PG&E did not shift to Money talked. Fourteen was comparison alternatives — began to emerge. Interest trivial in itself, a mere fraction of a percenl in tually completed a greenie-like prospects released a com- .rates were breaking records every month, the utility's profit rate, but the precedent was of its supply and their plan: For the coming decade of and oil prices were being driven up by the terrifying. The commissioners had mensurate power. supply investment, PG&E would realize fall of the Shah and by the war between Iran hands on the fundamental lever of new 9 Sensitive 5.000 megawatis from conservation. and Iraq. Most public utilities had redoubled What if they decided not to let go some management, geothermal, cogenera- their commitment to power-plant construc- to what the public might think, PG&E's top load tion, wind; zero megawatts from new tion in response to the first oil crisis, in 1973, executives also found no pleasure in being and look like oxen plodders who re- nuclear and coal. The financial side of the but now they were discovering that they made to : exactly the eco- couldn't afford to keep borrowing the capital fused to change direction unless they were analysis dwelt at length on nomic indicators that Zach had first pointed that their projects demanded. The illusion of whipped. If for nothing more than image, they later of company plans reached order in utility-supply planning was begin- needed to demonstrate a little leadership to. A version conclusions even more firmly. In ning to fray. The number of power-plant proj- and creativity on their own. the same coffee-break conversation at the confer- ects that were canceled were equal to a Within three months, PG&E came forward executives were blandly quarter of the country's total existing electri- with the country's largest program to pro- ence, PG&E's top

it all for granted. cal capacity, and of those plants still under mote conservation measures. Called ZIP for taking DO construction, more than four owners of 100 Zero Interest Program, it proposed to lend all the fhey needed for Excerpted from half-finished dynamos were beginning to find consumers money Copyright® 1984 . by David Roe themselves twisting slowly in the wind. things like attic insulation and storm win- Dynamos and Virgins, by David Roe. Reprinted permission oi Random House, Inc. Meanwhile, for political reasons, Califor- dows, at no interest. by )HOPPING BY ROBOT BREAHTHRDUEH5 By Henry Wouk

Buiding us past the cold cuts and Following a premapped path, it rolls to the logs of cold cuts are on display inside a meticulously stacked displays pickup point, slips the two prongs of its stainless-steel and glass booth. In a process

of fresh fruit, Fumio Takayama, a lift under the cart, carries il to the proper reminiscent of selecting music on a tall, lanky man with a relaxed stride, showed shopping aisle, and sets it down. Humans jukebox, customers push buttons to select us a sight not usually the high point of a unload the carl and restock the shelves. the amount of meat they want, even how tourist's visit to Japan: the supermarket Even unloading supply trucks has been thick the slices will be. After an order is manager's office. The large, glass-walled automated. On delivery days specially punched in, the machine picks up one of cubicle looked like a miniature of the control equipped trucks and .drones do most of the meat logs, rotates it into position against the slicing slices and room at Three Mile Island. II was crammed the work. A videotape of the process shows machine, weighs with electronic equipment; video monitors, a woman hopping out of the cab of the the meat, drops it into a plastic box, seals computer terminals, and an intimidating truck, connecting a cable from the truck to it, affixes a price sticker, and shoots it out a bank of switches, buttons, and gauges. Off a special plug by the loading-dock door, delivery slot, untouched by human hands. store to the right, nine television screens flashed and Ihen pressing a few buttons on a control There is hardly a corner of the a continuing display of what looked like panel on the side of the truck. ("Unloading where technology isn't being tested. A food commercials. has become an easy job even lor a woman," shopper reaching for an item in a display oi Takayama is not your average greengro- the male voice on the videotape notes exotic or unusual foods breaks the beam cer. He is a systems engineer with Seiyu, cheerily.) A pneumatic ramp lowers. One of small infrared sensors hidden under later, Ltd.. the third largest supermarket chain in by one the wheeled carts loaded with the lip of each shelf. A second a Japan and the company that owns the presorted groceries are pushed out by a prerecorded woman's voice emanating store. He has the unique distinction of mechanism built into the truck. The loading from a nearby loudspeaker describes the running what has to be the most automated drone uses a pair of extender arms to item chosen: what it tastes like and how

it in various dishes. supermarket in the world. If the Hal grab each cart, bringing them to the door can be used Are customers impressed by the store? computer from 2001 took over the A&R it of the warehouse. There the robot crane no doubt would look something like this. reads the label on the cart and hauls it into Takayama says they barely notice the Located in the busy port city of Yokohama, the dark interior of the warehouse. difference— as most of the automation lakes the "super" is a walk-in experiment using For the customer, the star of the store is place out of sight—and that's what the some of the same technology that has what Takayama calls the Ham Slicer. Three Seiyu engineers had hoped. Another made Japanese factories so efficient. Seiyu company's experiment with a store that solicited ideas for the store from 28 was almost totally automated—from the Japanese-firms, including Sanyo, Sharp, stockroom lo the checkout counter— failed Fujitsu. Pioneer, Mitsubishi, and Matsushita miserably because :he customers did (the Japanese equivalent of the Fortune not like dealing only with machines. They 500). The result is a store crammed with as missed the human touch. much hew technology as possible. Seiyu, explains Takayama, eventually Robots are everywhere. A small robotic plans to adapt some of the technology of cart, signaling its approach with electronic this $34 million experimental store for use in chimes, cruises the aisle with the day's its other branches, among I hem one under specials displayed on its back. In the construction in Tsukuba City, an experi- evening, when the store is closed, the main mental community in the Tokyo suburbs. computer takes inventory and sends Interested retailers from ten countries, orders to an automated warehouse in the including the United States, have made the back of the store. The warehouse is a pilgrimage to Yokohama to get a good tall, narrow structure where large-wheeled look at what may turn out to be the super- carts of goods are stacked in a vertical market of the twenty-first century, and array like books on giant shelves. On Seibu, a Tokyo department store, even offers command an automatic crane equipped daily guided tours there. with an optical scanner searches out carts At the end of our tour, we asked to see laden, with specific groceries, brings them the ham sheer in action. When we reached back down to the ground floor, and guides the cold-cut aisle, we found nothing but them lo a pickup point in the back room... a bare spot on ]he floor. We asked a woman Then, a small but powerful robotic forklitt mopping the floor where the ham slicer is roused in its recharging station in the was. "On a tour of other supermarkets," she front of the store and sent to retrieve the cart. Robot-run market in Japan: High-tech h- answered. DO 140 OMNI —

We would have postponed this report, but we never got around to it conriPETiToru By Scot Morris

at least I'll I schizophrenic, but Our September 1984 announcement of may be always have each other. Competition #34 asked readers to send in —Randy Harrison, Indianapolis original oxymorons—those statements besl of you. that are self-contradictory, self-referential, Don't let your willpower get the

I used to be an agnostic, but now I'm not paradoxical, or otherwise off center, A — Christopher Morrison, Scottsdate, AZ huge response brought many a double and so sure. forget :h s senience are —John N. Kock, Madison, Wl triple lake. Those who Many familiar lines could be traced back condemned to reread il. —Bill Yochum, Rochester, NY Teacher's critique oi a term paper: "This to Sam Goldwyn, Groucho Marx, Yogi report is filled with omissions." Berra, and George Carlin. Others were just unitel Indy 500 Proverb: The only bad engine is a repeated too often to be original. Eschew Solipsists of the world, Atianta dead engine. obfuscation. Military intelligence. Jumbo —Freya £. Harris, —John Henrick, Seattle shrimp. Business ethics. Scienlific creation- illusion. It just looks like ism. Science fiction. Moral majority. It's It's not an optical Procrastination means never having to say bad luck to be superstitious. Thank God I'm one. —Phil White, Ventura, CA you're sorry. an atheist. Cliches are a dime a dozen —Ton! Epstein, New York avoid Ihem like the plague. If you fall and your break your legs, don't come running to me. I caught you at own game: Omni Publications International Ltd. Do you call Athletic scholarship A little pain never hurt anyone. I told you yourselves Omni Limited? —Tim Moore. Providence a million limes— don't exaggerate. I can Denman, Ottawa, Ont. resist everything bul temptation (Twain). —Mark I'm so meticulous when I do crossword I not belong Hello, I must be going; would HONORABLE MENTION puzzles thai I do the horizontal words in to a club that would have me as a member blue and the vertical words in red. (Marx). A verbal contract isn'tworth the n not going to say "I told you so." —Elaine Fincannon, Montgomery, AL — R. Martinson, St. Paul paper it's written on; Include me out (Goldwyn). No one goes to that restaurant

. . that . (Berra). Jesus was born in 4 B.C. II goes without saying anymore— it's always too crowded —Dennis M. Ragan, Lee, IL All in all, this/proved to be a fun contest to judge. We can't remember having a Manners are the noises you don't make more memorable time when eating soup. GRAND PRIZE-WINNER: $100 —R. E. Atkinson. Avalon, PA

astrology. But, then, I'm an alienee will come to he who wails lor it. I don't believe in —Richard Lauterback, Referee's report on a scientific article: 'This Aquarius, and Aquarians don't believe in Naval Air Station, paper fills a much-needed gap in the astrology. Moffett CA theory." —James R. F. Quirk, Portland, ME or that mirage? —Ridgway Scott, Ann Arbor, Ml Am I seeing things, is a RUNNERS-UP: $25 EACH —Christopher Bean, North Brunswick, NJ

May I ask a question? it If ignorance isn't bliss, I don't know what —Michael Smuckler, Jackson Heights, NY are two things l dislike in a person— is. There

—Craig Ewing, Seattle- absentmindedness and ... I can't remem- ber the other one. Who can count the cost of innumeracy? Peie Yazzolino. Portland, OR —Gavin Bolus, Edinburgh, Scotland Book Title: Suggestibility Cured Through — Hypnosis furtherance of the status quo. lost-and-found when I advocate —Patricia J. Veber, Mount Pleasant, SC You can never find a you need one. —John Mannarine, Franklin Square, NY The Schizophrenic; An Unauthorized —Greg Clifford, Santa Ana, CA ol one of Canada's three major Autobiography Name political parties: Progressive Conservative —Mark K. Hogue, Columbus, NB Port Alberni, B.C. -John Lappe, Florissant, MO . —Rosemarie Buchanan,

Bumper Sticker: honk if you are against NOISE POLLUTION! Dyslexics of the world, untie! —Jed Martinez, Elmont, NY —Andrew D. Jamner, Los Angeles 142 OMNI . —

French has a Je ne sals quoi, which in an- other language would be merely a— I don't LIFE know what. —David J. Daulton, Columbus, OH pharmacology at the Medical Academy, in thai Nepotism is okay as long as you keep it in Szczecin, Poland, reported Padma 28 the family. produces signifies™ bene-ris inpatients suf- —Richard Hutson, Los Alamos, NM fering from the severe chest pain of angina pectoris. In a double-blind study involving Plastic silverware 29 patients. Wojcizki found that Padma re- —John Vickers, Fort Washington, MD duced the number of angina attacks by 63 percent, from 35 to 13 in a two-week period. You simply must stop taking advice from Padma's eflectiveness may come from an other people. ability to keep blood from clotting in re- —Melissa Timberman, Monroeville, NJ sponse to irregularities in arterial walls. This clotting, or "aggregation mechanism." is the He speaks Esperanto like a native. same process the body relies on to heal —Martha H. Freedman, Sarasota, FL wounds, but when it takes place inside the

arteries, it becomes dangerous and can lead A User's Handbook o! Hard-to-Remember to stroke or heart attack. Mnemonics Other researchers, including Vladmir —R. W. Ellis, Glen Mills, PA Badmajew, Jr., are exploring Padma's effect FORBES on the immunological system. Experiments al War&aw Medical School have MAGAZINE Without scapegoats, humanity is bland. 1 conducted blame the scapegoats for this. shown that Padma 28 increases the activity — Gabriel, of lymphocytes (white blood cells) in the OFFERS YOU A Joe Batarse, San CA blood samples of patients with immunolog- ical disorders. Padma appears to improve MILLIONAIRE'S Do I strike you as a violent person? —Brian Hammer, Seattle the performance of T-suppressor lympho- PARADISE cytes. These T cells play highly sophisti- regulatory roles in the immune sys- Detroit implores: Buy American I The Seville, cated infection Monte Carlo . . tem, stopping antibodies once an LOCATED IN THE EXOTIC Fiji the Capri, the Granada, the San Francisco has been overcome and before excessive t Islands, Laucala is a 4.7 square- —Margaret Tse, immune-system activity can be turned mile island that offers a few discerning people the vacation I'm going to commit suicide or die trying. against the body itself. prostaglandins, known to be opportunity of a lifetime. —Michael Burgess, Thousand Oaks, CA Interestingly, cardiovascular sys- From Laucala's well-equipped deep important agents in the is tem, recently been shown to play a I have sea boats, fish for the big ones—Black The kindest thing can say abou! my wife role in regulating the responses of the Pacific Sailfish, Black Marlin, Shark that her in-laws are a lot nicer than mine. major system. The understanding that the and feisty Barracuda! —Stephen Maxwell, Encino, CA immune cardiovascular and immune systems are re- Or just come and relax. With its lated in such ways supports the Tibetan be- privacy and modern facilities, exclusive The doctor tells me to take something for my lief in primary cause. It also begins to ex- Laucala combines all the natural kleptomania. plain such apparently unrelated attributes of a tropical paradise without —Roberta Marks, Morton Grove, IL why disorders as angina pectoris and bronchial the intrusion of the normal tourist with if I did, asthma might be treated successfully routine. A real "Bali Hai" for those who I'm glad I don't like spinach because

I the stuff. the same formula. want, and can afford, the best in sport I'd eat it, and God knows hate Furthermore, has found that fishing and vacationing. —Ken Patterson, Port Angeles, WA Badmajew two of Padma 28's components Poly- There is a basic charge of $1650 per (knotgrass) and Liquiritiae person. This charge covers up to 7 nights By definition, one divided by zero is unde- gonum aviculare radicus (licorice root) have effects on the im- and 8 days with all meals. Included in fined. Knotgrass contains flavor- this package are the round trip flight to —Scott James Prouty. San Diego mune system. immunological and from Nadi International, and use noids— key components in inhibits inflamma- I still have most regulation. Licorice root of a fishing boat (captain, crew, bait and 1 started out with nothing, and tion and helps combat viral infections. "De- all normal gear) for 4 days. of it left. remaining components," says Other amenities available are: —R. E. Atkinson, Pittsburgh mystifying the waterskiing, snorkeling, scuba and Badmajew, "could easily take a lifetime." analysis work on swimming pool. Sign: haircuts while you wait Standard kinds of chemical ingredients in Laucala's clear azure seas provide —Sandy Forrest, New York isolated, "active" a com- interaction of Padma's a magnificent environment for under- pound. Because the water exploration and photography. ingredients is responsible for its effects, The waters surrounding the island Badmajew explains, .soialng Ms constituent necessarily explain its abound with rare tropical fish and components will not effectiveness. "Understanding Padma's in- flowered coral reefs. World-famous 60- No coffee for me, thanks. Coffee just gets in gredients," he says, "will mean creating a mile-long Heemskerck Reef is a great my mouth. paradigm of biological action." attraction for divers. —Michael Weber, Los Angeles new The task is lurther complicated in that each For information, please write: Everybody generalizes. of Padma's 28 components has thousands Noel Douglas, Forbes Magazine "Trying to the bo- . —Chris Rogers, Los Angeles of ingredients. understand 10011 " 60 Fifth Ave., New York, NY tanical, chemical, and pharmaceutical or call 212/620-2461. like Each class of men is created equal. mechanisms," says Badmajew, "can be —David M. Garens, Medina, OH DO swimming in a sea oi madness." DO —

Trapped within the stony walls of a r hurled to Earth from some unkr ' source is this cluster n crystals, brilliant bands of metal

ed by a photographer's special filters. While entering E " ' meteor's surface tenor, however, s unattected. Approximately 500

i fall from the 00 land in ttk.^ Lynn Bodner, of Vancou 1 this fragment m ce art—an art form that nature has '" J " says photographer Ken Cooper,

a Nikon camera, a 55mm n -al filters, and Kodachrome film.DO INSIGHT... The most important nniruD The Unspoken Words science book you CONTINUED FROM PAGE 34 Of Inner Vision Services Corporation, a firm that specializes will read this year is: in interpreting Japanese for U.S. business- men, described a common situation. "You should see a negotiating session be- tween Americans and Japanese. First, tea

is served to all the executives seated around a table. The Japanese almost never speak Machines in Man's Image first, even if it means minutes of embarrass- ing silence. They will sit there sipping si- by ISAAC ASIMOV lently, while the Americans anxiously won- and KAREN A. FRENKEL der when they're going to get to the point." By waiting for the Americans to make the

first move, the Japanese force Ihem to re- veal something of their bargaining position, a definite negotiating advantage. How does this relate to the Japanese high-

tech life-style? It highlights the differing ways in which the two cultures react to their envi- ronment. Hideo Kojima. an educator at Na- goya University, points out that the Western- er's sense of self is always distinct from and independent of his environment. "For the self is always in an interdepen- iOU have heard it. Japanese, Nei- r You have seen it—that dent relationship with the environment. "sudden flash into con- ther self nor environment can be defined sciousness of a word or a without the other," he says. ^mental image. Its clarityis un- American psychologist Ftothman agrees, mistakable. Call it hunch, or intui- r citing the word harmony as the best de- tion, it can and does solve problems. scriptor of the Japanese attitude toward the It suggests ways to accomplishment world. "Individual ego is just part of a sense where all previous thought may have failed. Japanese Whence comes such light of the mind? In an essay called "Why Are the What mental processes generate such Receptive to Technology?" Shichihei Yama- practical useful thoughts? Why wait for moto tried to explain the origins of this atti- these occasional and mysterious flows of tude. (For another perspective on these the inner recesses creative thought from origins, see First Word, page 6.) One clue, to provide the value of mind? Leam how Yamamoto suggested, was in basic philo- insight of iAvoH sophical and religious attitudes held by the Let the Rosicrucians, a worldwide or- Japanese. During a period in Japanese his- ganization, prove to you, as they have to FREE Meijii era. in the late nine- thousands of other men and women, that tory known as the HEATHKIT CATALOG twentieth centuries, the there is more to life than you would ordi- teenth and early narily suspect. Not theories, but a prac- Build your own dominant philosophy was a form of Confu- tical application of cosmic laws for every- • 16-bit Computer cianism. Even back then, such new tech- day use. Color TV nologies as the telegraph were making sud- System FREE BOOKLET Stereo den appearances and just as quickly being > Test Instruments absorbed into the Japanese way of life. The Rosicrucians (not a religion) • Robot What helped ease this transition, he says, extend to you an invitation to write for Our Guarantee was the Neo-Confucian attitude of "biologi- a free copy of the Mastery of Life. This "We won't let particularly important you fail." cal materialism." In a booklet is not for the idly curious, but piece of Confucian thought, a twelfth-cen- for those who wish for attainment and tury classic called Kinshi roku, everything peace profound in life. Use the coupon that exists proceeds from something called below. ultimate— all the energy and all the interested in the latest in high tech. the great "five ase send me a FREE Heathkit Catalog. matter in the universe. It held that the 039-302 elements" (water, fire, wood, metal, and The Rosicrucians i6 to: Heath Company, Dept. San Jose, California 95191, U.S.A. Benton Harbor, Ml 49022 earth) owe their heritage to the great utti- r mate. In other words, everything that exists is related to everything else as part of a larger 3CFTHK 1 | KDB i.'r-.i the dominant view of the !;„s:;-.:i-^! |i ;r.-',M''JK<: world. This became 1 educational elite and, over time, of the entire SanJose, California 9:i!91 U IfaF Japanese nation. "That being the case, there « -,.fsr:.-- 1 naturally rejection of new technology," is no 1 Yamamoto says. "Our sense of machinery and technology

; " .i is different from Europeans' or Americans',"

don't if says NTT's Shirane. "Now, I know that's good or bad." he says with a shrug, that's how we feel." DO 1 "but Impossible card and a new photo contest

By Scot Morris

Last month our pictorial presentation of the results of Omnfs Museum of the Impossi- ble contest left out one runner-up entry. It is the Framed Queen, shown at right, a playing card sent to us by Martin Gardner.

The problem is to figure out how it was made. It appears that part of the card has magically dematerialized and passed through itself. A square piece of the card has been cut away, and a portion of the back of the card has somehow been brought around to the front to form a frame around the queen's face. Yet the paper isn't glued, taped, or otherwise separated and rejoined. What you see is all one solid piece of paper— missing only the square inside-frame piece. How could the frame from the back appear at the front, without breaking the card into two pieces? The simple topological principle involved was discovered just 15 years ago when

Gustavus J. Simmons, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote to Gardner about a curious problem. Simmons was working in a factory owned by Rolamite, Inc., a company that makes complex banded rolling systems. A flexible band like the one shown in the upper portion of the illustration at right had to be looped into the configuration shown

below it without disturbing end A, which was permanently attached to a large machine. The problem has a solution, a Rolamite worker found, and we invite readers to

rediscover it by cutting a strip of paper to resemble the shape shown, and trying

it out. The full solution may be found in Gardner's 1983 book Wheels, Life and Other

(published v,

152 OMNI COMPETITION #37: PHOTO FACES

In connection with this issue's Japanese theme, we looked at some back issues of the Japanese edition of Omni and were

charmed by a collection of photographs, all samples of 'found art." These are ordinary objects that look like faces, profiles, monsters, or cartoon characters because of a peculiarly human sort of vision that

animates the inanimate world, finds life in the lifeless, and reorganizes happenstance

shapes into more familiar visions. In the four samples shown a! left, photographers have found human form in an alarm clock, -OuP%Z-:B a beer can, a leather briefcase, and a pair of can openers. Based on these Japanese examples of "found faces," here's a new Omni competi- tion. Can American photographers and other readers of the English-language Omni improve on the Japanese collection? We think so, and we invite you to send in

your best examples to prove it. Look around and see what faces and figures you can find in coffeepots, doorknobs, fenceposts, shop tools, and kitchen utensils;

We won't be able to return entries; so if you can't bear to part with an original, send a copy. If we decide to use your entry, we'll contact you to make arrangements for obtaining an original. Color transparencies (slides) are preferred over color prints. Print your name, and address on the border of each slide (or the back of each print), and in an accompanying letter include any explanatory remarks and telephone numbers where you can be reached. Can you imagine how to gei the string off? At Mission Control in Houston, the radio To give you extra time to have copies If you give up too quickly and turn to operator "I said, heard them say. Tempera- made, we extend by two weeks our usual the answers, you may .' be embarrassed to ture is forty . below . but then the recep- contest deadline date. The grand prize- find that the solution is so.simple that it. tion can broke up and I tell couldn't whether winner will receive an Olympus OM-PC be explained in a single drawing. A typical they said Fahrenheit or Celsius." Program camera with ESP metering reaction is, "Is thai all?" To fully appreciate "Put down Fahrenheit." said the flight (suggested list price: $370). In addition, this classic challenge, we urge you to director "I'm it's correct." sure four runners-up will each receive $100 construct facsimile a and to try your best to How did the flight director know? in cash, and ail five top winners will get a solve il before turning to the answer page. one-year subscription to Omni and a copy KIN. In writing up Omni's Complete Book of the QUICKIES . book Omni Games. All entries of Future Genealogy, our researcher came become the property of Omni. You may COLD. Explorers were searching the East ' across this question: What is the English send up to three entries, and they must be Pole of Cygnus XI, the snowball planet. designation for the only sister-in-law of the received by August 1, 1985. Address They took a reading of the temperature and sister of one's father? them to Omni Competition #37. 1965 radioed the information back to Earth. Answers appear on page 134. Broadway, New York, NY 10023-5965.DO ! r " ' =

with accompanying my son on All my adult life. I ve been obsessed my tdwnhouse,

three things. Icod. sex. and gadgets: I'm on his rounds, mien it made a break for 1 left lorn oodii '. i hallway md a die! no* and married, sc I an witn stairs before crash- gadgets. But even though I. iKs mosl tumbling down a few people, have found myself getting increas- landing on an antique fable.

srill of computer ingly entangled in the ckcui'ry of the i am pretty much a rny e'.ectron'c ego, rny existence does -not iltite'ate For a lorig lime I used compute! seem to have become simpler, smoother. terminal- display as a.nighi-ligh;. Betas 1

car; safer. Quits get conversant ;n :he compute'- arts, I . or- the ieasi we expect— the contrary, "he age of electronics has 'Utersarethe jliimafe In with the a silicon chip on its. shoulder. individual gadgets. Even computers

1 rncr "n. . :.(.!'.!'.!:: w . I began collecting my thoughts aboul gadgets soi sre Take.fcr example, the chess episode. just aboufevsry great- train of (nought This particular chess adversary is a terribly has -no doudf or.G>nc;ed —the ;Ohn. And. likable machine, an intelligent chessboard. ask the this '.-/as not just any -toilet: not for At Using a small keyboard, you can

Goldstein.. gadgeteer This was a snappy omouter toplay amou : i i" iplete with solve chess problems, or even play itself,

ripte nozzles of hci and ccid.water, a hot- it sets up and moves individual chess air dryer and a warmed seat,. This -gadget pieces by an ingenious se; of magnets was io toilets what ;ho New York oiiyscape beneath the'-playing surface. If is delightful

13 to. sKy lines.. : to watch a rook and king castle all by

' 5liding-.0venf.he if by Anyway. was sitting- on the ultradreuxe . themselves. board as '' eiectronic'toiler—squatting, -on.it, actually;:-: .telekinesis.' Again my -son- was the victim. We thought LMST since the' Japanese navea different approach io elimination than' we do.—and a to give -Jordan a chance to the beeoes. noughts emerged, oh. yes. they did, when l learn cness with machine: from: the .humiliating '{- UUDRD began to no! ice vast plumes of oily smoked Is could save his parents issuing from between my loiirs; My obituary, experience c. / an efeven-

'". By A! Goldstein ; headline- flashed before my eyes; cadge- Vi 1. He TEEmSWS'i.fOOWN' ....-'..'. was to give hints to its human opponent something of a l-ium:l;a' : on J you 'ee 7 : HtBefore the Sonere I was, a peaceful, iaw-abiding. (also

just the type ail thmk about it). Push the 1 urm button ana flaming-toilet episode, :. empty-headed ma'!-,., : governments wish the!- Citizenry would be- the computer would magnefica- v .'.egcye •:'; gadgets, had\ now knocked ou! of my complacency by the — :'; At that the one for you to move -. never seemed at ail a short-circuiting, Asian outhouse..

Jordan tried this function a lev,- 1 meE moment t was raocsdzed and began ".evil to me. : '-;: to rev ; ew the multifarious ways gadgets always with the result ha' ho was -en I! anything, they were have betrayed me. being checkmated with a few moves. It Before the fciming-iclte: episode, gadgets went something litre hint. Move. BLAMI • ; SO Witch. : had never Checkmate. To add insolence to injury, the fun, so disarming* anything, they were so much fun, so machine had this feature that made it iaugh

it the disarming, it is hard to carp about them j maniacally when won. But have the habit en sitting in my gimc rack- experience did have one comforting feature: fallibility of The crammed office gazing benignly, upon my :lt proved the computers faulty. gadgets as if upon my brooo. The thru hint feature was

is paternal or a: teas: avuncular. There Is in What ready worries me s how peepe

f my office: a clock ;ha: runs on bear; an could gadgeteer us al electronic game designed to be- played with iroupe gaogete: w ! . corvjic:eo , ; .i;- love "he cats: anc ; can listen to music by olacing -- a tiny Volkswagen van on. a record., turning And the oeop ; e who are developing r--.:

1.. ii- !."'' :.'. io line van on. and welching as it drives 1

around the- record and plays music. . aren't playing with beer clocks arc cat games Then gadgets are deadly And Leaning back in my chair, ! can whisper on. a conic heated Just one example " urdow.r-yr-' telephone nea- my left elbow, ana -.hat oeen a patent taken out on an

gadget will dial the number of my son. 1 aircraft earner Each plane S suppose-: 'dm could have done if myself of course, but to be earned to tne surface by eocs having the machine dc :he simple ice pop open when they d! tne air " :i ' ». for me gives me something to marvel at. And nere r wi - ; m 1 ! . ,r >: 1 ; i..,i But -more are those times when it dials the iha" began wen .1 -;- cry cieaneremsfead of Jordan or when m has taken me: The world ol gadgets I

: !'".. refuses to dial anyone because have :i, offif. :: osmr, ' e. large. clever great, silly, w^m a cole Then ii becomes something to eurse. Everything

r-.sti :.. ' ii,i:. Ana ihe-e was tne -one! Jauntily assum- 1 siuj id, ial

A'tuie : ng ing- that the age of tne Jettons was upon slops ever into gatigetry as we^i ::

foi i had seen the futuie. and : us I ordered a household robot Jordan, on tne John in due time a squat, serenely inhuman didn't wash OQ cylinder of metar. plastic, and microproces- sors arrived ai my door Olmui: .•nan electronic parody of an electronic fgszi'/re, !V3S r&j'eriedto using ;-\an>a, the machine clunked through entionff! indoor pkun&ng.