The Tightrope Men / The Enemy

by Desmond Bagley

  It took over an hour to get everything in the right place - checked and double checked. Harrington said, ‘Page eleven to page twenty-three are concerned with the console settings.’ He turned to me. ‘If there’s anything to your idea at all these Roms will have to be analysed to a fare-thee-well.’

  ‘What’s a Rom?’

  ‘A read-only module - this row of boxes plugged in here. Your man, Michaelis, calls them microprocessors. They are pre-programed electronic chips - we’ll have to analyse what they’re programed to do. All right; let’s get on with the setting.’

  He began to call out numbers and an acolyte pressed buttons and turned knobs. When he had finished he started again from the beginning and another acolyte checked what the first had done. He caught three errors. ‘See what I mean,’ said Harrington. ‘One bug is enough to make a program unworkable.’

  ‘Are you ready to go now?’

  ‘I think so - for the first stage.’ He put his hand on the ledger. ‘There are over two hundred pages here, so if this thing really is a computer and if this represents one program, then after a while everything should come to a stop and the console will have to be readjusted for the next part of the program. It’s going to take a long time.’

  ‘It will take even longer if we don’t start,’ I said tartly.

  Harrington grinned and leaned over to snap a single switch. Things began to happen. Trains whizzed about the system, twenty or thirty on the move at once. Some travelled faster than others, and once I thought there was going to be a collision as two trains headed simultaneously for a junction; but one slowed just enough to let the other through and then picked up speed again.

  Sidings and marshalling yards that had been empty began to fill up as engines pushed in rolling stock and then uncoupled to shoot off somewhere else. I watched one marshalling yard fill up and then begin to empty, the trains being broken up and reassembled into other patterns.

  Harrington grunted. ‘This is no good; it’s too damned busy. Too much happening at once. If this is a computer it isn’t working sequentially like an ordinary digital job; it’s working in parallel. It’s going to be hell to analyse.’

  The system worked busily for nearly two hours. Trains shot back and forth, trucks were pushed here and there, abandoned temporarily and then picked up again in what seemed an arbitrary manner. To me it was bloody monotonous but Michaelis was enthralled and even Harrington appeared to be mildly interested. Then everything came to a dead stop.

  Harrington said, ‘I’ll want a video-camera up there.’ He pointed to the ceiling. ‘I want to be able to focus on any marshalling yard and record it on tape. And I want it in colour because I have a feeling colour comes into this. And we can slow down a tape for study. Can you fix that?’

  ‘You’ll have it tomorrow morning,’ I promised. ‘But what do you think now?’

  ‘It’s an ingenious toy, but there may be something more to it,’ he said, noncommittally. ‘We have a long way to go yet.’

  I didn’t spend all my time in the warehouse but went back three days later because Harrington wanted to see me. I found him at a desk flanked by a video-recorder and a TV set. ‘We may have something,’ he said, and pointed to a collection of miniature rolling stock on the desk. ‘There is a number characterization.’

  I didn’t know what he meant by that, and said so. He smiled. ‘I’m saying you were right. This railway is a computer. I think that any of this rolling stock which has red trim on it represents a digit.’ He picked up a tank car which had ESSO lettered on the side in red. ‘This one, for instance, I think represents a zero.’

  He put down the tank car and I counted the trucks; there were nine, but one had no red on it. ‘Shouldn’t there be ten?’

  ‘Eight,’ he said. This gadget is working in octal instead of decimal. That’s no problem - many computers work in octal internally.’ He picked up a small black truck. ‘And I think this little chap is an octal point - the equivalent of a decimal point.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned! Can I tell Ogilvie?’

  Harrington sighed. ‘I’d rather you didn’t - not yet. We haven’t worked out to our satisfaction which number goes with which truck. Apart from that there is a total of sixty-three types of rolling stock; I rather think some of those represent letters of the alphabet to give the system alphanumeric capability. Identification may be difficult. It should be reasonably easy to work out the numbers; all that it takes is logic. But letters are different. I’ll show you what I mean.’

  He switched on the video-recorder and the TV set, then punched a button. An empty marshalling yard appeared on the screen, viewed from above. A train came into view and the engine stopped and uncoupled, then trundled off. Another train came in and the same thing happened; and yet again until the marshalling yard was nearly full. Harrington pressed a button and froze the picture.

  ‘This marshalling yard is typical of a dozen in the system, all built to the same specification - to hold a maximum of eighty trucks. You’ll notice there are no numbers in there - no red trucks.’ With his pen he pointed out something else. ‘And scattered at pretty regular intervals are these blue trucks.’

  ‘Which are?’

  Harrington leaned back. ‘If I were to talk in normal computer terms - which may be jargon to you - I’d say I was looking at an alphameric character string with a maximum capacity of eighty characters, and the blue trucks represent the spaces between words.’ He jabbed his finger at the screen. ‘That is saying something to us, but we don’t know what.’

  I bent down and counted the blue trucks; there were thirteen. ‘Thirteen words,’ I said.

  ‘Fourteen,’ said Harrington. ‘There’s no blue truck at the end. Now, there are twelve marshalling yards like this, so the system has a capacity of holding at any one time about a hundred and sixty words in plain, straightforward English - about half a typed quarto sheet. I know it’s not much, but it keeps changing all the time as the system runs; that’s the equivalent of putting a new page in the typewriter and doing some more.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t know who designed this contraption, but maybe it’s a new way of writing a novel.’

  ‘So all you have to do is to find out which truck equals which letter.’

  ‘All!’ said Harrington hollowly. He picked up a thick sheaf of colour photographs. ‘We’ve been recording the strings as they form and I have a chap on the computer doing a statistical analysis. So far he’s making heavy weather of it. But we’ll get it, it’s just another problem in cryptanalysis. Anyway, I just thought I’d let you know your harebrained idea turned out to be right, after all.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, glad not to be £31,000 out of pocket. Plus bank charges.

  Two days later Harrington rang me again. ‘We’ve licked the numbers,’ he said. ‘And we’re coming up with mathematical formulae now. But the alphabet is a dead loss. The statistical distribution of the letters is impossible for English, French, German, Spanish and Latin. That’s as far as we’ve gone. It’s a bit rum - there are too many letters.’

  I thought about that. ‘Try Russian; there are thirty-two letters in the Russian alphabet.’ And the man who had designed the railway was a Russian, although I didn’t say that to Harrington.

  ‘That’s a thought. I’ll ring you back.’

  Four hours later he rang again. ‘It’s Russian,’ he said. ‘But we’ll need a linguist; we don’t know enough about it here.’

  ‘Now is the time to tell Ogilvie. We’ll be down there in an hour.’

  So I told Ogilvie. He said incredulously, ‘You mean that bloody model railway speaks Russian?’

  I grinned. ‘Why not? It was built by a Russian.’

  ‘You come up with the weirdest things,’ he complained.

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said soberly. ‘Ashton did. Now you can make my bank manager happy by paying £35,000 into my account.’

  Ogilvie narrowed his eyes. ‘It cost you only £31,000.’

  ‘“Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that tre
adeth the corn”,’ I quoted. ‘It was a risky investment - I reckon I deserve a profit.’

  He nodded. ‘Very well. But it’s going to look damned funny in the books - for one model railway, paid to M. Jaggard, £35,000.’

  ‘Why don’t you call it by its real name? A computing system.’

  His brow cleared. ‘That’s it. Now let’s take a look at this incredible thing.’ We collected Larry Godwin as an interpreter and went to the warehouse.

  The first thing I noticed was that the system wasn’t running and I asked Harrington why. ‘No need,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Now we’ve got the character list sorted out we’ve duplicated the system in a computer - put it where it really belongs. We weren’t running the entire program, you know; just small bits of it. To run through it all would have been impossible.’

  I stared at him. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, not really impossible. But look.’ He opened the LNER schedule and flipped through. ‘Take these five pages here. They contain reiterative loops. I estimate that to run these five pages on the system would take six days, at twenty-four hours a day. To run through the whole program would take about a month and a half - and this is one of the smaller programs. To put all twelve of them through would take about two years.’

  He closed the schedule. ‘I think the original programs were written on, and for, a real computer, and then transferred on to this system. But don’t ask me why. Anyway, now we’ve put the system back into a computer we’re geared to work at the speed of electrons and not on how fast a model railway engine can turn its wheels.’

  Ogilvie said, ‘Which computer?’

  ‘One in the City; a time-sharing system.’

  Ogilvie looked at me. ‘Oh, we can’t have that. I want everything you’ve put into that computer cleared out. We’ll put it in our own computer.’

  I said quickly, ‘I wouldn’t do that. I don’t trust it. It lost Benson.’

  Although Harrington could not know what we were talking about he caught the general drift. ‘That’s no problem.’ He pointed to the railway. ‘As a model railway that thing is very elaborate and complex, but as a computer it’s relatively simple. There’s nothing there that can’t be duplicated in the Hewlett-Packard desk-top job I have in my own office. But I’ll need a printer to handle Russian characters and, perhaps, a modified keyboard.’

  Ogilvie said, ‘That’s a most satisfactory solution.’ He walked over to the railway and looked at it. ‘You’re right; it is complex. Now show me how it works.’

  Harrington smiled. ‘I thought you’d ask that. Can you read Russian?’

  Ogilvie indicated Larry. ‘We’ve brought an interpreter.’

  ‘I’m going to run through the program from the beginning; it’s set up ready. I want you to keep an eye on that marshalling yard there. When it’s full you can read it off because I’ve labelled each truck with the character it represents. I’ll stop the system at the right time.’

  He switched on and the trains began to scurry about, and the marshalling yard, which was empty, began to fill up. Harrington stopped the system. ‘There you are.’

  Ogilvie leaned forward and looked. ‘All right, Godwin, What does it say?’

  Harrington handed Larry a small pair of opera glasses. ‘You’ll find these useful.’

  Larry took them and focused on the trains. His lips moved silently but he said nothing, and Ogilvie demanded impatiently, ‘Well?’

  ‘As near as I can make out it says something like this: “First approximation using toroidal Legendre function of the first kind.”’

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ said Ogilvie.

  Later, back at the office, I said, ‘So they’re not going to use the railway.’

  ‘And better not,’ said Ogilvie. ‘We can’t wait two years to find out what this is all about.’

  ‘What will you do with it? According to Harrington it’s a pretty simple-minded computer. Without the schedules - the programs - it’s just an elaborate rich man’s toy.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ said Ogilvie. ‘I’ll have to think about that.’

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘Give it to Michaelis. It was he who figured those schedules were fakes. It’ll make his day.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  So Harrington put the programs on tape acceptable to his own computer and the Russian character printer began to spew out yards of Russian text and international figures. When Larry translated the Russian it proved to be oddly uninformative - brief notes on what the computer was doing at the time, but not why it was doing it. I mean, if you read a knitting pattern and find ‘knit 2, purl 1’, that doesn’t tell you if you’re knitting a body-belt for a midget or a sweater for your hulking Rugby-playing boy-friend. And that’s not really such a good analogy because if you’re knitting you know you’re knitting, while a computer program could be doing damned nearly anything from analysing the use of the subjunctive in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus to designing a trajectory for a space shot to Pluto. The field was wide open so a selection of assorted boffins was brought in.

  All this was beyond me so I left them to it. I had other things on my mind, the principal one being that Penny had cabled me, saying that she was returning and giving her flight number and time of arrival at Heathrow. I felt a lot better immediately because it meant she expected me to meet her, and she wouldn’t have done it if her decision had not been in my favour.

  When I met her she was tired. She had flown from Los Angeles to New York, stopped for a few hours only to see Gillian, and then flown the Atlantic. She was suffering from jet lag and her stomach and glands were about nine hours out of kilter. I took her to the hotel where I had booked her a room; she appreciated that, not wanting to move into an empty flat with nothing in the refrigerator.

  I joined her in a coffee before she retired to her room, and she told me that the operation on Gillian was going well and would I pass that message on to Michaelis. She smiled. ‘Gillian particularly wants him to know.’

  I grinned. ‘We mustn’t hinder the marriage of true minds.’

  She talked briefly about what she had been doing in California and of a visit to the Harvard School of Medical Studies. ‘They’re doing good work there with PV40,’ she said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A virus - harmless to human beings.’ She laughed. ‘I keep forgetting you’re not acquainted with the field.’

  I said nothing to her about the model railway, although she would have to be told eventually. We couldn’t just expropriate the knowledge to be found there - whatever it was - although the legal position would seem to be confused. The department had bought it, but whether the information it held came under the Copyright Act or not was something to keep the lawyers happy for years. In any case it was for Ogilvie to make the decision.

  But she had just said something that had jerked little man Hunch out of bed and he was yelling his head off. I said, ‘Did you talk over your work much with your father?’

  ‘All the time,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t seem a subject that would interest a man primarily versed in catalysts,’ I said casually. ‘Did he know much about it?’

  ‘Quite a lot,’ she said. ‘Daddy was a man with a wide range of interests. He made one or two suggestions which really surprised Lummy when they worked in the laboratory.’ She finished her coffee. ‘I’m for bed. I feel I could sleep the clock around.’

  I saw her to the lift, kissed her before she went up, then went back to the office at speed. Ogilvie wasn’t in, so I went to see Harrington and found him short-tempered and tending to be querulous. ‘The man who put these programs together was either quite mad or a genius. Either way we can’t make sense out of them.’

  Harrington knew nothing about Ashton and I didn’t enlighten him beyond saying, ‘I think you can discount insanity. What can you tell me about the programs - as a whole?’

  ‘As a whole?’ He frowned. ‘Well, they seem to fall into two groups - a group of five
and a group of seven. The group of seven is the later group.’

  ‘Later! How do you know?’

  ‘When we put them through the computer the last thing that comes out is a date. The first five seem to be totally unrelated to each other, but the group of seven appear to be linked in some way. They all use the same weird system of mathematics.’

  I thought hard for some minutes and made a few calculations. ‘Let me guess. The first of the group of seven begins about 1971, and the whole lot covers a period finishing, say, about six months ago.’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Harrington. ‘You must know something I don’t.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I rather think I do.’

  I sought Ogilvie again and found he had returned. He took one look at my face, and said, ‘You look like the cat that swallowed the canary. Why so smug?’

  I grinned and sat down. ‘Do you remember the time we had a late night session trying to figure what Ashton would have been working on? We agreed he would keep on theorizing, but we couldn’t see what he could theorize about.’

  ‘I remember,’ said Ogilvie. ‘And I still can’t. What’s more, neither can Harrington and he’s actually working on the material itself.’

  ‘You said he wouldn’t be working in atomics because he hadn’t kept up with the field.’

  ‘He didn’t keep up in any field with the exception of catalytic chemistry, and there he was mainly reworking his old ideas - nothing new.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ I said flatly.

  ‘I don’t see what he could have kept up in. We know the books he bought and read, and there was nothing.’

  I said softly, ‘What about the books Penny bought?’

  Ogilvie went quite still. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Penny said something just before she went to the States which slipped right past me. We were talking about some of the complications of her work and most of it was over my head. We were in her home at the time, and she said she was so used to talking with her father in that room she’d forgotten I was a layman.’