The benzedrine wears off five hours later and Comstock finds himself sprawled across a table in a room filled with haggard, exhausted men. Waterhouse and the privates are pasty with chalk dust, giving them a ghoulish appearance. The stenographers are surrounded with used pads, and frequently stop writing to flap their limp hands in the air like white flags. The wire recorders are spinning uselessly, one reel full and one empty. Only the photographer is still going strong, hitting that strobe every time Waterhouse manages to fill the chalkboard.
Everything smells like underarm sweat. Comstock realizes that Waterhouse is looking at him expectantly. “See?” Waterhouse asks.
Comstock sits up and glances furtively at his own legal pad, where he hoped to draw up an agenda. He sees Waterhouse’s four assertions, which he copied down during the first five minutes of the meeting, and then nothing except a tangled field of spiky doodles surrounding the words BURY and DISINTER.
It behooves Comstock to say something.
“This thing, the, uh, the burying procedure, that’s the, uh—”
“The key feature!” Waterhouse says brightly. “See, these ETC card machines are great for input and output. We’ve got that covered. The logic elements are straightforward enough. What was needed was a way to give the machine memory, so that it could, to use Turing’s terminology, bury data quickly, and just as quickly disinter it. So I made one of those. It is an electrical device, but its underlying principles would be familiar to any organ maker.”
“Could I, uh, see it?” Comstock asks.
“Sure! It’s down in my lab.”
Going to see it is more complicated. First everyone has to use the toilet, then the cameras and strobes have to be moved down to the lab and set up. When they’ve all filed in, Waterhouse is standing next to a giant rack of pipes with thousands of wires hanging out of it.
“That’s it?” Comstock says, when the group is finally assembled.
Pea-sized drops of mercury are scattered around the floor like ball bearings. The flat soles of Comstock’s shoes explode them into bursts rolling in all directions.
“That’s it.”
“What did you call it again?”
“The RAM,” Waterhouse says. “Random Access Memory. I was going to put a picture of a ram on it. Y’know, one of those sheeps with the big huge curly horns?”
“Yes.”
“But I didn’t have time, and I’m not that good at drawing pictures.”
Each pipe is four inches in diameter and thirty-two feet long. There must be a hundred of them, at least—Comstock is trying to remember that requisition that he signed, months ago—Waterhouse had ordered enough drain pipe to plumb a whole goddamn military base.
The pipes are laid out horizontally, like a rank of organ pipes that has been knocked flat. Stuck into one end of each pipe is a little paper speaker ripped from an old radio.
“The speaker plays a signal—a note—that resonates in the pipe, and creates a standing wave,” Waterhouse says. “That means that in some parts of the pipe, the air pressure is low, and in other parts it is high.” He is backing down the length of one of the pipes, making chopping motions with his hand. “These U-tubes are full of mercury.” He points to one of several U-shaped glass tubes that are plumbed into the bottom of the long pipe.
“I can see that very plainly, Waterhouse,” Comstock says. “Could you keep backing up to the next one?” he requests, peering over the photographers’ shoulder through the viewfinder. “You’re blocking my view—that’s better—farther—farther—” because he can still see Waterhouse’s shadow. “That’s good. Hit it!”
The photographer pulls the trigger, the strobe flares.
“If the air pressure in the organ pipe is high, it pushes the mercury down a little bit. If it’s low, it sucks the mercury up. I put an electrical contact into each U-tube—just a couple of wires separated by an air gap. If those wires are high and dry (like because high air pressure in the organ pipe is shoving the mercury down away from them), no current flows. But if they are immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ pipe is sucking the mercury up to cover them), then current flows between them, because mercury conducts electricity! So the U-tubes produce a set of binary digits that is like a picture of the standing wave—a graph of the harmonics that make up the musical note that is being played on the speaker. We feed that vector back to the oscillator circuit that is driving the speaker, so that the vector of bits keeps refreshing itself forever, unless the machine decides to write a new pattern of bits into it.”
“Oh, so the ETC machinery actually can control this thing?” Comstock asks.
Again with the laugh. “That’s the whole point! This is where the logic boards bury and disinter the data!” Waterhouse says. “I’ll show you!” And before Comstock can order him not to, Waterhouse has nodded to a corporal standing at the other end of the room, wearing the protective earmuffs that are generally issued to the men who fire the very largest artillery. That corporal nods and hits a switch. Waterhouse slams his hands over his ears and grins, showing a little too much gum for Comstock’s taste, and then time stops, or something, as all of those pipes come alive playing variations on the same low C.
It’s all Comstock can do not to drop to his knees; he has his hands over his ears, of course, but the sound’s not really coming in through his ears, it is entering his torso directly, like X-rays. Hot sonic tongs are rummaging through his viscera, beads of sweat being vibrated loose from his scalp, his nuts are hopping around like Mexican jumping beans. The crescents of mercury in all those U-tubes are shifting up and down, opening and closing the contacts, but systematically: it is not turbulent sloshing around, but a coherent progression of discrete controlled shiftings, informed by some program.
Comstock would draw his sidearm and put a bullet through Waterhouse’s head, but he’d have to take one hand off one ear. Finally it stops.
“The machine just calculated the first hundred numbers in the Fibonacci sequence,” Waterhouse says.
“As I understand it, this RAM is just the part where you bury and disinter the data,” Comstock says, trying to master the higher harmonics in his own voice, trying to sound and act as if he saw this kind of thing daily. “If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you call it?”
“Hmmm,” Waterhouse says. “Well, its basic job is to perform mathematical calculations—like a computer.”
Comstock snorts. “A computer is a human being.”
“Well… this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I suppose you could call it a digital computer.”
Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL COMPUTER.
“Is this going to go into your report?” Waterhouse asks brightly.
Comstock almost blurts report? This is my report! Then a foggy memory comes back to him. Something about Azure. Something about gold mines. “Oh, yeah,” he murmurs. Oh, yeah, there’s a war on. He considers it. “Nah. Now that you mention it, this isn’t even a footnote.” He looks significantly at his pair of hand-picked math whizzes, who are gazing at the RAM like a couple of provincial Judean sheep-shearers getting their first look at the Ark of the Covenant. “We’ll probably just keep these photos for the archives. You know how the military is with its archives.”
Waterhouse goes into that dreadful laugh again.
“Do you have anything else to report before we adjourn?” Comstock says, desperate to silence him.
“Well, this work has given me some new ideas on information theory which you might find interesting—”
“Write them down. Send them to me.”
“There’s one other thing. I don’t know if it is really germane here, but—”
“What is it, Waterhouse?”
“Uh, well… it seems that I’m engaged to be married!”
CARAVAN
* * *
RANDY HAS LOST ALL HE OWNED, BUT GAINED AN ENtourage. Amy has decided that she might as w
ell come north with him, as long as she happens to be on this side of the Pacific Ocean. This makes him happy. The Shaftoe boys, Robin and Marcus Aurelius, consider themselves invited along—like much else that in other families would be the subject of extended debate, this goes without saying, apparently.
This makes it imperative that they drive the thousand or so miles to Whitman, Washington, because the Shaftoe boys are not really the sort who are in a position to simply drop the hot-rod off at the Park ‘n’ Ride, run into the airport, and demand tickets on the next flight to Spokane. Marcus Aurelius is a college sophomore on an ROTC scholarship and Robin’s attending some kind of military prep school. But even if they did have that kind of money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend their native frugality. Or so Randy assumes, for the first couple of days. It’s the obvious assumption to make, given that the Cash Flow Issue seems always to be on their mind. For example the boys made Herculean efforts to consume every spoonful of the gut-busting vat of oatmeal cooked by Amy the morning after the quake, and finding it beyond their endurance they carefully decanted the remainder into a Ziploc bag while fretting at length about the high cost of Ziploc bags and didn’t Randy have any old glass jelly jars or something, somewhere in the basement, that might be unbroken and usable for this purpose.
Randy has had plenty of time to disabuse himself of this fallacy (namely that their airplane-avoidance is dictated by financial constraints) and to draw the real reason out of them after they have dropped Amy’s U-Haul off near SFO and begun to caravan northwards in the Acura and the jacked-up, thundering Impala. People are rotated from car to car whenever they stop, according to some system that no one is divulging to Randy, but that always situates him alone in a car with either Robin or Marcus Aurelius. Both of them are too dignified to spill their guts on light pretexts, and too polite to assume that Randy gives a shit about anything they think, and perhaps too basically suspicious of Randy to share a whole lot with him. Some kind of bonding is required first. The ice doesn’t start to break up until Day 2 of the drive, after they have all slept in an Interstate 5 rest area near Redding in the reclined seats of the vehicles (each of the Shaftoe boys solemnly and separately informs him that the chain of lodgings known as Motel 6 is one giant con game, that if those rooms ever did cost six dollars a night, which is doubtful, they certainly don’t now, and many are the innocent young travelers who have been drawn in by the siren calls of those fraudulent signs rising above interstate cloverleaves; they try to sound impartial and wise about it, but the way their faces flush and their eyes glance aside and their voices rise makes Randy suspect he is actually listening to some thinly veiled personal and recent history). Again without anyone saying anything, it is taken to be obvious that Amy, as the female, will require her own car to sleep in, which puts Randy in the hot-rod with Robin and Marcus Aurelius. As the guest, Randy gets the reclining passenger seat, the best bed in the house, and M.A. curls up on the back seat while Robin, the youngest, sleeps behind the steering wheel. For about the first thirty seconds after the dome light has gone off and the Shaftoes have finished saying their prayers out loud, Randy lies there feeling the Impala rock on its suspension from the wake-blasts of passing long-haul semis and feels considerably more alienated than he did while trying to sleep in the jeepney in the jungle town in northern Luzon. Then he opens his eyes and it’s morning, and Robin’s out there doing one-handed pushups in the dust.
“When we get there,” Robin pants, after he’s finished, “do you s’pose you could show me that video-on-the-Internet thing you were telling me about?” He asks it with all due boyishness. Then suddenly he looks abashed and adds, “Unless it’s like real expensive or something.”
“It’s free. I’ll show it to you,” Randy says. “Let’s get some breakfast.”
It goes without saying that McDonald’s and their ilk charge scandalously more for, e.g., a dish of hash browns than one would pay for the equivalent mass of potatoes in raw form at (if you think money grows on trees) Safeway or (if you have any kind of decent regard for the value of a buck) farmer’s markets situated at lonely interchanges in the boondocks. So for breakfast they must drive to a small town (grocery stores in big places like Redding being a ripoff) and find an actual grocery store (convenience stores being etc., etc., etc.) and purchase breakfast in the most elemental form conceivable (deeply discounted well-past-their prime bananas that are not even in a bunch but swept up from the floor, or something, and gathered together in a gaily printed paper sack, and generic Cheerio-knockoffs in a tubular bag, and a box of generic powdered milk) and eat it from tin military-surplus messkits that the Shaftoes produce with admirable coolness from the hot rod’s trunk, a ferrous, oily chasm all a-bang with tire chains, battered ammo boxes, and, unless Randy’s eyes are playing tricks on him, a pair of samurai swords.
Anyway, this is all done pretty nonchalantly, and not like they are trying to test Randy’s mettle or anything, and so he doesn’t imagine that it qualifies as a true bonding experience. If, hypothetically, the Impala throws a rod in the desert and they have to fix it with parts stolen from a nearby junkyard guarded by rabid dogs and shotgun-packing gypsies, that would be a bonding experience. But Randy’s wrong. On Day 2 the Shaftoes (the male ones anyway) open up to him a bit.
It seems (and this is abstracted from many hours of conversation) that when you are an able-bodied young male Shaftoe and you are a stranger in a strange land with a car that you have, with plenty of advice and elbow grease from your extended family, fixed up pretty nicely, the idea of parking it in favor of some other mode of conveyance is, in addition to obvious financial folly, some kind of moral failure, pure and simple. That’s why they are driving to Whitman, Washington. But why (one of them finally summons the boldness to inquire) why are they taking two cars? There is plenty of room in the Impala for four. Randy has gotten the sense all along that the Shaftoes are dismayed by Randy’s insistence on taking the redundant and repulsively scarred Acura, and that only their formidable politeness has prevented them from pointing out the sheer madness of it. “I do not imagine that we will stay together beyond Whitman,” Randy says (after being around these guys for a couple of days he has begun to fall out of the habit of using contractions—those tawdry shortcuts of the verbally lazy and pathologically rushed). “If we have two cars, we can split up at that point.”
“The drive is not that far, Randall,” says Robin, slapping the Impala’s gas pedal against the floor to rip the transmission into passing gear, and careening around a gasoline tanker. From the initial “Sir” and “Mr. Waterhouse,” Randy has been able to talk them down into addressing him by his first name, but they have agreed to it only on the condition (apparently) that they use the full “Randall” instead of “Randy.” Early attempts to use “Randall Lawrence” as a compromise were vigorously denounced by Randy, and so “Randall” it is for now. “M.A. and I would be happy to drop you back off at the San Francisco Airport—or, uh, wherever you elected to park your Acura.”
“Where else would I park it?” Randy says, not getting this last bit.
“Well, I mean that you could probably find a place where you could park it free of charge for a few days, if you did some looking around. Assuming you wanted to keep it.” He adds encouragingly, “That Acura probably would have some decent resale value even considering all the body work it needs.”
Only at this point does Randy figure out that the Shaftoes believe him to be utterly destitute, helpless, and adrift in the wide world. A total charity case. He recalls, now, seeing them discard a whole sack of McDonald’s wrappers when they arrived at his house. This whole austerity binge has been concocted to avoid putting financial pressure on Randy.
Robin and M.A. have been observing him carefully, talking about him, thinking about him. They happen to have made some faulty assumptions, and come to some wrong conclusions, but all the same, they have shown more sophistication than Randy was giving them credit for. This causes Rand
y to go back and review the conversations he has had with them the last couple of days, just to get some idea of what other interesting and complicated things might have been going on in their heads. M.A. is a pretty straightforward by-the-book type, the kind who’ll get good grades and fit well into any kind of hierarchical organization. Robin, on the other hand, is more of a wild card. He has the makings of either a total loser or a successful entrepreneur, or maybe one of those guys who will oscillate between those two poles. Randy realizes now, in retrospect, that he has spilled a hell of a lot of information to Robin, in just a couple of days, about the Internet and electronic money and digital currency and the new global economy. Randy’s mental state is such that he is prone to babbling aimlessly for hours at a time. Robin has hoovered it all up.
To Randy it’s just been aimless ventilating. He hasn’t even considered, until now, what effect it has been exerting on the trajectory of Robin Shaftoe’s life. Randall Lawrence Waterhouse hates Star Trek and avoids people who don’t hate it, but even so he has seen just about every episode of the damn thing, and he feels, at this moment, like the Federation scientist who beams down to a primitive planet and thoughtlessly teaches an opportunistic pre-Enlightenment yahoo how to construct a phaser cannon from commonly available materials.
Randy still has some money. He cannot begin to guess how he can convey this fact to these guys without committing some grievous protocol error, so the next time they stop for gas, he asks Amy to convey it to them. He thinks (based on his hazy understanding of the rotation system) that it’s his turn to be alone in a car with Amy, but if Amy is going to convey this data about the money to one of the boys, she’ll need to spend the next leg with him, because it must be conveyed indirectly, which will take a while, and because of that indirectness, time will then need to be allotted for it to sink in. But three hours later, then, at the gas stop after that, it naturally follows that M.A. and Robin must be placed together in the same car, so that Robin (who now knows and understands, and who gets out of the Impala with a big grin on his face and punches Randy affably on the shoulder) can pass the message on to M.A., whose recent conversational gambits vis-à-vis Randy made no sense at all until Randy figured out that they thought of him as a beggar and that M.A. was trying in a really oblique way to find out if Randy needed to share any of M.A.’s personal toiletry items. At any rate, Randy and Amy get into the Acura and they head north into Oregon, trying to keep up with the hot rod.
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