The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

moment onwards, two things started to happen. Relations between the Army and the scientists grew steadily worse; and Dr Milquetoast, for the first time, began to give serious thought to the wider implications of his work. He had always been too busy, too engaged upon the immediate problems of his task, to consider his social responsibilities. He was still too busy now, but that didn’t stop him pausing for reflection. “Here am I,” he told himself, ‘one of the best pure mathematicians in the world—and what am I doing? What’s happened to my thesis on Diophantine equations? When am I going to have another smack at the prime-number theorem? In short, when am I going to do some real work again?”
    ‘He could have resigned, but that didn’t occur to him. In any case, far down beneath that mild and diffident exterior was a stubborn streak. Dr Milquetoast continued to work, even more energetically than before. The construction of Karl proceeded slowly but steadily: the final connections in his myriad-celled brain was soldered; the thousands of circuits were checked and tested by the mechanics.
    ‘And one circuit, indistinguishably interwoven among its multitude of companions and leading to a set of memory cells apparently identical with all the others, was tested by Dr Milquetoast alone, for no one else knew that it existed.
    ‘The great day came. To Kentucky, by devious routes, came very important personages. A whole constellation of multi-starred generals arrived from the Pentagon. Even the Navy had been invited.
    ‘Proudly, General Smith led the visitors from cavern to cavern, from memory banks to selector networks to matrix analysers to input tables—and finally to the rows of electric typewriters on which Karl would print the results of his deliberations. The General knew his way around quite well: at least, he got most of the names right. He even managed to give the impression, to those who knew no better, that he was largely responsible for Karl.
    ‘“Now,” said the General cheerfully. “Let’s give him some work to do. Anyone like to set him a few sums?”
    ‘At the word “sums” the mathematicians winced, but the General was unaware of his faux pas . The assembled brass thought for a while: then someone said daringly, “What’s nine multiplied by itself twenty times?”
    ‘One of the technicians, with an audible sniff, punched a few keys. There was a rattle of gunfire from an electric typewriter, and before anyone could blink twice the answer had appeared—all twenty digits of it.’
    (I’ve looked it up since: for anyone who wants to know, it’s:
    12157665459056928801
    But let’s get back to Harry and his tale.)
    ‘For the next fifteen minutes Karl was bombarded with similar trivialities. The visitors were impressed, though there was no reason to suppose that they’d have spotted it if all the answers had been completely wrong.
    ‘The General gave a modest cough. Simple arithmetic was as far as he could go, and Karl had barely begun to warm up. “I’ll now hand you over,” he said, “to Captain Winkler.”
    ‘Captain Winkler was an intense young Harvard graduate whom the General distrusted, rightly suspecting him to be more a scientist than a military man. But he was the only officer who really understood what Karl was supposed to do, or could explain exactly how he set about doing it. He looked, the General thought grumpily, like a damned schoolmaster as he started to lecture the visitors.
    ‘The tactical problem that had been set up was a complicated one, but the answer was already known to everybody except Karl. It was a battle that had been fought and finished almost a century before, and when Captain Winkler concluded his introduction, a general from Boston whispered to his aide, “I’ll bet some damn Southerner has fixed it so that Lee wins this time.” Everyone had to admit, however, that the problem was an excellent way of testing Karl’s capabilities.
    ‘The punched