Billion-Dollar Brain

by Len Deighton

  ‘He’ll hang out the laundry right across the valley,’ Harvey said. Almost as he said it a parachute inflated under the plane. ‘First the conduction officer,’ said Harvey. ‘That gives the other students confidence. Now they go.’ Six parachutes puffed like Indian smoke-signals across the sky. ‘They’re going nicely,’ he said. ‘They’ll be right on target. We do three daylight drops, two at night. The instructors are US Army Special Warfare Centre people from Fort Bragg. Really tough.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. We watched the men bundle up their parachutes and move off through the dense undergrowth, chopping at it with jungle machetes. Now and again there was a tiny puff of smoke and the smack of a hand-grenade or a burst of machine-gun fire. It didn’t seem my sort of thing at all and I gave Harvey a glance to indicate it.

  ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ Harvey said. He walked on. ‘Down in the valley they say they found dinosaur tracks…’

  ‘Freeze. Freeze,’ a shrill voice sang out. I froze and so did Harvey. It took me a full minute to recognize the soldier in the bush. He had a tough tanned face and clear eyes. He wore a mottled camouflage jacket and a lightweight stetson and carried an automatic rifle. He moved slowly and cautiously through the dead roots and broken timber.

  ‘Newbegin and student Dempsey of the new intake,’ Harvey said.

  The man with the rifle said, ‘Remove your index tag real slow. Put it on the ground and back up.’

  We removed the tags from our shirt fronts, put them on the ground and stepped backward. The sentry picked up the tags, stared at the photos and at our faces. ‘Colonel Newbegin, sing out your number backwards.’

  Harvey said, ‘308334003 AS/90.’

  I said, ‘I don’t have the slightest idea.’

  ‘He’s today’s intake,’ Harvey said. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘I suppose that’s OK then,’ said the guard grudgingly. ‘I’ve seen you around before, Colonel Newbegin sir.’

  The sentry brought the cards to us. I said, ‘What kind of gun do you call that?’

  ‘The AR 10,’ said Harvey. ‘Fairchild Aviation Armalite Division developed it, using aluminium and foamed plastics. Seven hundred rounds per, at two and three-quarter thousand f.p.s. Quite a baby, weighs nothing.’ He turned to the sentry. ‘Let him feel the weight of it.’ The sentry passed it to me. ‘Eight pounds. Fantastic?’

  ‘Fantastic.’

  ‘Twenty-round magazines using seven point six two NATO cartridge. See the new-type flash suppressor. It’s quite a baby the AR 10.’ Harvey took it and swung it round experimentally. His face tightened, his teeth bit into his lower lip. ‘Raise ’em,’ he yelled. We didn’t move fast enough. ‘Raise ’em I said. Get your goddamn pinkies grabbing cloud.’ He turned upon the sentry. ‘Hit dirt,’ he said. ‘Twenty press-ups. Twenty. Count ’em. Not you, stupid,’ he said to me. ‘You didn’t turn over your gun.’ The sentry looked mournful. He was a Mexican boy about eighteen years old. They were employed around the compound as permanent sentries. ‘Twenty press-ups,’ Harvey said again.

  ‘Harvey,’ I said. ‘Let it go. It’s too hot for playing at Belsen.’

  Harvey looked doubtful, but he let me take the gun from him. ‘Here, kid,’ I said and threw it to him. The sentry took advantage of the pause to slip away into the undergrowth.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Harvey said resentfully.

  ‘Come on, Harvey. You’re the pleasure-loving, all-laughing boy who is successful by accident. This pursuit of efficiency isn’t your speed at all.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ said Harvey. Then he raised his voice. ‘Now from here you can see the buildings more clearly. See how the three largest buildings surround the little flat windowless one. Kind of arrogant that little building looks, doesn’t it? That’s where we are going now. We call that the Brain. The other buildings are schoolrooms and a gymnasium for the spitballs and gut-men. Those walkways join the three buildings together because we sometimes have cosmics here. That is to say, students whose faces we don’t want the other students to see.’

  ‘Man in the iron mask,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ said Harvey. ‘Next stop the Bastille.’

  The only part of the Brain building above ground level was a reception hall. The outer doors were as heavy as those in a bank vault and inside the air was clean, dry and quite cold. To the left there was a long line of cubicles with coloured doors and large numeral on each. Two uniformed men sat inside an armour-glass fishbowl in the centre of the floor. Inside the turret there were twelve small TV screens by means of which the guards monitored the approaches to the building and knew when to open the electric door. I could see the tiny figures of Harvey and myself moving on two of the screens as we walked across the floor. It was white, and so gave optimum visibility on the screen.

  ‘Go ahead,’ the second guard said. Harvey took off his identity tag and inserted it into a machine like a railway station weighing machine upon which he stepped. Harvey explained: ‘The identity tags are changed every week. The metal strip at the side of the card holds an electrical charge—like a piece of recording tape; this machine reads that, to make sure it’s of the current pattern, while at the same time photographing me and my tag and weighing me. If one of those things doesn’t tally with the record of me on the machine, then the doors will lock—including the doors to the elevators—and alarms will sound in about twenty places on the compound as well as in New York.’

  The guard said, ‘Cubicles twenty-one and twenty.’

  ‘What now, Harvey?’ I said.

  ‘You go in the cubicle—it’s quite large—undress and step into the shower. The shower will stop automatically and warm air blowers will dry you off. You will then change into a set of white overalls which are made of paper. Leave all your belongings in the clothes you take off, the door will automatically lock behind you. Don’t keep your wristwatch on because the last doorway you step through will be a counter. The smallest item will trip it and start an uproar, so don’t forget anything. Your glasses and keys you put through a small slot. You’ll see the notice about it.’

  ‘In three languages?’ I asked.

  ‘Eight,’ said Harvey.

  Harvey and I came out the other side looking like a couple of spooks. ‘The whole building,’ Harvey explained, ‘is sealed and dust-free.’ We entered an elevator and went down. ‘Stand still,’ said a sign on the wall opposite the elevator exit.

  Harvey said, ‘That’s a TV monitor. The guard at the entrance can watch who is moving from floor to floor.’ We stood still. Harvey picked up a green phone and said, ‘Visit 382 on pink level.’ The sign flashed the word ‘Cleared’.

  We went down a long corridor to a door bearing a sign ‘Latvia pilot operation’. Inside there were long banks of computers making a low musical noise like a child’s spinning top. ‘These are operational,’ Harvey said. ‘Riga is the pilot operation, that’s why we are watching it so closely. These machines are programming our operation there. Each and every act of every agent comes out of this machine.’

  Harvey told me how each part of the computer was named after a section of the human brain: the Medulla, Pons and Midbrain. He showed me how the items of information called ‘neurons’ were filtered by the ‘synapses’. I said yes to everything, but to me machines tend to look alike. Harvey led me to a room which he unlocked with a key. It was a large room with a dozen or more men pushing switches and loading reels of tape into grey machines. Some of the men wore earphones with dangling plugs which they occasionally plugged into a machine, nodding professionally like doctors sounding a chest.

  ‘Nu think,’ said Harvey. He pointed at a row of eight doors along the far wall. ‘It’s an indoctrination laboratory.’

  ‘Go into number four,’ said one of the attendants. ‘We’re going to steam him in a couple of minutes.’

  Inside the door number four was a light-lock and beyond it a dark cubicle like a flight-deck of a large airliner. There was a curious smell of spic
e in the room. A man sat in a low leather bucket seat and watched a TV screen. Some pictures were in colour and some were black and white. Some of the pictures were stills, some were movie. There was a picture of a village street, the houses were battered clapboard and there were a lot of horses around. On another TV screen at the side there was an endless stream of associative words in Russian script and Latvian: horse, house, people, street. They were stream-of-consciousness words, Harvey explained later, a constant enrichment of the students’ vocabulary. Over a loudspeaker came a voice speaking Latvian, but Harvey handed me earphones that carried an English translation. ‘…until you were sixteen,’ the commentary was saying. ‘Then your uncle Manfred arrived. He was a soldier.’ A photo of Manfred came on the screen. ‘That’s how Uncle Manfred looked in 1939 when you were sixteen. You saw him again in 1946. He looked like this. You saw him for the last time in 1959. He looked like this. Now I’m going to stream Uncle Manfred’s life for you, but before I do here are some questions.’ The associative screen stopped its flow of words. ‘These two bottles on the screen, what do they contain?’

  ‘Green top is yoghurt, silver top is milk,’ said the student.

  ‘Good.’ The bottles disappeared and a street scene appeared. ‘What is the name of this cinema and what was showing there at Easter weekend?’

  ‘I never go to the cinema,’ said the student.

  ‘Very well,’ said the commentator, ‘but you must have noticed the posters. Isn’t this where you line up for the tram coming home from work?’

  There was a long pause. ‘I’m sorry,’ said the student.

  ‘We’ll have to do local geography again,’ said the commentator. ‘We’ll leave it for now and stream Uncle Manfred a few times.’

  Pictures of a man were flashed upon the screen in rapid succession. They were in chronological order and I saw him grow older before my eyes. The lines on his face and the slope of his eyes varied as the pictures changed. It was an uncanny thing to watch. I shivered. Harvey noticed me. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s how it makes me feel. Mind you, that’s just a short sequence they are streaming. Later they will stream longer and longer episodes, until a whole life whistles past in about three minutes. It goes right into the subconscious of course; no memorizing involved.’

  ‘Again,’ said the voice, and the screen showed the whole stream of pictures through again.

  ‘In five days,’ said Harvey when we were outside the cubicle, ‘we can indoctrinate a man so that he really believes his cover story better than he believes his own memory. By the time that man gets to Riga he will know his way around the town and every detail of his life from the day his father gave him a light-brown teddy-bear, to the movie show he watched last night. He doesn’t need to remember facts and figures, he actually sees the things and people of his cover-story life. We photograph special set-ups, his motor cycle, his dog, we use actors to make a movie of his relatives sitting in the rooms where he grew up. We show him photos and a movie of his home town when he was a kid. By the time they leave here no one could crack them, they believe their own cover story, they are schizophrenic. Did you notice the smell in there? It’s always the same temperature and humidity and has that scent so that the mind is conditioned by environment.’

  Harvey stepped up to a door marked ‘Recreation’. ‘What about a litte recreation?’ he asked. ‘This is where we keep the curvy blonde.’

  I said, ‘I knew this was science fiction.’

  ‘By the time those indoctrination students have done their training they deserve a break,’ said Harvey. ‘They just stay here twenty-four hours per day talking nothing but the language of their region from the minute they wake up, till the time they go to bed in those tiny cubicles over there. Even then they don’t get a break, because they are woken suddenly at night and asked questions in some language they are not supposed to speak. If they even look like they are going to answer they get an automatic extra twelve hours. They learn fast, believe me. They learn fast.’

  Inside the recreation room there was a bar-counter with coffee, doughnuts, iced milk, hot soup, Alka Seltzer, bread and a toaster. Harvey poured two glasses of milk and put two doughnuts on to paper plates. We sat in fibre-glass easy chairs. There were a dozen magazines, a TV set, four telephones—one red one marked ‘emergency’—and a small illuminated panel which gave a current weather report. ‘Low today 70º Downtown San Antonio 79º Humidity 92% Pressure 29.6 Partly cloudy, Wind from South-East at 12 m.p.h.’ There was no blonde except for a lady on the TV who was showing us Sani-flush in the new unbreakable plastic bottle.

  ‘It’s complicated, eh?’ Harvey asked between bites on the doughnut.

  ‘That’s the understatement of the year,’ I said.

  ‘Cost over a billion dollars,’ Harvey said. ‘Over a billion. The old man—General Midwinter—has got a private suite at seven floors below ground level. I’m not allowed to show you in there but that’s quite a terrific place too. He even has a swimming pool there. The pumps that change the water in that pool cost three thousand dollars each. It’s fantastic; the lighting is arranged so that you’d think it was daylight down there. He can see the surrounding country on colour TV if he wants to. Really fantastic; sixteen guest bedrooms, each with a bathroom as large as my sitting-room.’

  ‘It’s nice to know that when he survives World War Three he’ll have guests.’

  ‘I’d sooner be a crisp than survive. I had four months on permanent duty here. I went out of my mind.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to bore you,’ Harvey said, ‘but you should understand that these heaps of wire can practically think—linear programming—which means that instead of going through all the alternatives they have a hunch which is the right one. What’s more, almost none of them work by binary notation—the normal method for computers—because that’s just yes/no stuff. (If you can only store yeses and noes it takes seven punch holes to record the number ninety-nine.) These machines use tiny chips of ceramic which store electricity. They store any amount from one to nine. That’s why—for what it does—this whole set-up is so small.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  We finished our milk. ‘Back to the salt mines,’ said Harvey, standing up. ‘And if you want to do me a real favour, stop saying yes, for Christ’s sake.’

  Harvey went through two doors and down a moving staircase. ‘This is what we call the Corpus Callosum; it’s the most complex computer in existence today. The machines in this building cost over a hundred million dollars to develop and the machine equipment and construction set Midwinter back nearly as much again. These operators are all college graduates with postgraduate qualifications in either maths or a similar subject.’

  We walked through a small data room. Operators were using punch machines and then transferring the results on to tape. Two men were standing under a no-smoking notice trying to hide a burning cigarette, and one college graduate with a postgraduate qualification was sitting under a sign that said ‘Think Tall’ reading an illustrated journal called Voodoo monsters invade earth.

  ‘You saw the operational machines,’ said Harvey. ‘They are working on the Latvia project. If the Latvia project is successful, then the total resources of the Brain will come into use.’ He paused before a locked door marked ‘Main Project’. Two guards stood outside, khaki-clad and motionless like shop- window dummies. They exchanged code words with Harvey, then each of them opened his shirt and fished out a small key on a neck-chain. There were three key-holes marked, Alpha, Beta and Kappa. Harvey produced a key for the third and a red light came on over each lock. Harvey opened the door. This room was gigantic: like the hangar deck of an aircraft carrier. The banks of computer machines stretched away into the distance and there were only a few dim lights glowing. Our footsteps echoed as though there were other people walking to meet us from the far end. The machines were only ticking over. ‘Non operational’ the plastic ticket said. Over the banks of machines were signs
: ‘District 21 including Odessa’. ‘District 34 as far as environs of Kursk’, ‘Moscow Central and dispersed centres of Government whatever their location’, ‘Coastal Zone 40’.

  The machines hummed and snick-snicked as if they had been warned to keep their voices down. The thin oil that coated each vital component, the enamel and metal tapes were warm enough to aromatize the air as fast as the air-conditioning changed it. The smell was sobering and efficient like ether and antiseptic, as though this was the casualty ward of a vast hospital run by machines.

  ‘This operation in Latvia,’ I found myself speaking in a whisper, ‘what is it doing that these machines will do for the rest of Russia?’

  ‘Usual thing,’ said Harvey. ‘Sabotage of communications, cache of arms, instruction in guerilla warfare, preparation of landing fields and drop zones, clandestine radio, beach reconnaissance, underwater demolition, contact with ships and aircraft, then G-2 work for the military. Usual stuff.’

  ‘Usual stuff?’ I said. ‘If that’s usual stuff, for God’s sake don’t ever try to surprise me. This is total war looking for a place to wage!’

  ‘Stop worrying,’ said Harvey. ‘It’s solely for Midwinter. Three-dimensional chess, that’s how to look at it. Three-dimensional chess for a millionaire.’

  ‘Fool’s mate,’ I said.

  * * *

  *Gut course: easy course (US college slang).

  Chapter 18

  Harvey lived with his wife and two children a few miles outside town on the road to Laredo and the Mexican border. I drove through the city instead of round the loop. It’s not a typical American town, not one of those low modern places with chrome and neon and glass; the Alamo City is beat-up, chewed at the edges and in need of paint. I passed the second-hand clothes shops and the sign that said ‘Used books and guns’ on Commerce Street. The Texans share the town with Mexicans, and they share it with soldiers. It was seven P.M.; already military police were sniffing around the clubs and bars of what Texans call ‘occupied Mexico’. Out on the far side of the town signs were jammed down the highway: Liquors, Drugs, Breakfast all day, Speed radar control, Watch for deer roaming at night, Exit, fasten seat belt, Mexiteria; all you eat $.10, Hot Pizza to go, Gas, Regular 25.9, Tomatoes 35c. I watched for the gas station on Harvey’s map and turned off on to an unmade road that kicked up stones against the underside of the Rambler and laid a film of dust across the tinted windscreen. There were whole fields of dead tree-stumps here, like a World-War-One battlefield. In places the topsoil had broken, revealing bleached stones that were luminous in the fading light. A long way ahead of me, on a narrow farm road, were half a dozen cows. A man in a pick-up truck slammed his hand against the door and shouted ‘wow-wow’. The sound was louder than the buzz of cars along the highway I had left. My tyres rumbled across a cattle grating; I watched for a marker board of the Screw Worm Quarantine Line. I turned there and followed the twin scars that marked the track to the house.