I, Robot - Isaac Asimov [91]
To Ngoma, Stephen Byerley seemed like one of these immigrants, a pale searcher for the creative work of carving a harsh environment into the softness necessary for man, and he felt some of that automatic contempt of the strong man born to the strong Tropics for the unfortunate pallards of the colder suns.
The Tropics had the newest capital city on Earth, and it was called simply that: “Capital City,” in the sublime confidence of youth. It spread brightly over the fertile uplands of Nigeria and outside Ngoma’s windows, far below, was life and color; the bright, bright sun and the quick, drenching showers. Even the squawking of the rainbowed birds was brisk and the stars were hard pinpoints in the sharp night.
Ngoma laughed. He was a big, dark man, strong faced and handsome.
“Sure,” he said, and his English was colloquial and mouthfilling, “the Mexican Canal is overdue. What the hell? It will get finished just the same, old boy.”
“It was doing well up to the last half year.”
Ngoma looked at Byerley and slowly crunched his teeth over the end of a big cigar, spitting out one end and lighting the other, “Is this an official investigation, Byerley? What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s just my function as Co-ordinator to be curious.”
“Well, if it’s just that you are filling in a dull moment, the truth is that we’re always short on labor. There’s lots going on in the Tropics. The Canal is only one of them—”
“But doesn’t your Machine predict the amount of labor available for the Canal,—allowing for all the competing projects?”
Ngoma placed one hand behind his neck and blew smoke rings at the ceiling, “It was a little off.”
“Is it often a little off?”
“Not oftener than you would expect. —We don’t expect too much of it, Byerley. We feed it data. We take its results. We do what it says. —But it’s just a convenience; just a labor-saving device. We could do without it, if we had to. Maybe not as well. Maybe not as quickly. But we’d get there.
“We’ve got confidence out here, Byerley, and that’s the secret. Confidence! We’ve got new land that’s been waiting for us for thousands of years, while the rest of the world was being ripped apart in the lousy fumblings of pre-atomic time. We don’t have to eat yeast like the Eastern boys, and we don’t have to worry about the stale dregs of the last century like you Northerners.
“We’ve wiped out the tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito, and people find they can live in the sun and like it, now. We’ve thinned down the jungles and found soil; we’ve watered the deserts and found gardens. We’ve got coal and oil in untouched fields, and minerals out of count.
“Just step back. That’s all we ask the rest of the world to do. —Step back, and let us work.”
Byerley said, prosaically, “But the Canal,—it was on schedule six months ago. What happened?”
Ngoma spread his hands, “Labor troubles.” He felt through a pile of papers skeltered about his desk and gave it up.
“Had something on the matter here,” he muttered, “but never mind. There was a work shortage somewhere in Mexico once on the question of women. There weren’t enough women in the neighborhood. It seemed no one had thought of feeding sexual data to the Machine.”
He stopped to laugh, delightedly, then sobered, “Wait awhile. I think I’ve got it. —Villafranca!”
“Villafranca?”
“Francisco Villafranca. —He was the engineer in charge. Now let me straighten it out. Something happened and there was a cave-in. Right. Right. That was it. Nobody died, as I remember, but it made a hell of a mess. —Quite a scandal.”
“Oh?”
“There was some mistake in his calculations. —Or at least, the Machine said so. They fed through Villafranca’s data, assumptions, and so on. The stuff he had started with. The answers came out differently. It seems the answers Villafranca had used didn’t take account of the effect of a heavy rainfall on the contours of the cut. —Or something like that. I’m not an engineer, you understand.
“Anyway, Villafranca