Dead Letter Drop

by James, Peter

  I drove down Mass Avenue, over the Harvard Bridge, and then turned right behind the main body of the Institute buildings. I parked the car in an open lot, and walked down to the stunningly graceful embankment, Memorial Drive.

  Bearded, tieless, greasy-faced from not having washed this morning, jacket and trousers crumpled, and with the white pallor of a sleepless night, I felt I should easily pass as a post-graduate student.

  I crossed over and walked along by the Charles River, and looked over the far side at Boston, with the gold dome of the State House and the John Hancock Tower rising from the snow-covered ground. A horde of 45-year-old joggers nearly mowed me down as I turned to start walking again.

  The air was cold and the tiny warmth of the sun felt good. My shoes rapidly turned to pulp in the slush, and I cursed myself for not having any boots.

  The Computer Science rooms would, I knew, be busy, but there was an IBM 370 in the Chemistry block that I remembered being told was rarely used, and I made my way to it. The whole place seemed to have shrunk since my first visit, the way places always seem to.

  I reached the building and went straight in; a security man was standing in the entrance, which was a new addition since I’d been there.

  ‘I’m going up to the 370.’

  ‘You with the seminar?’

  I nodded that I was.

  ‘Up the stairs, second on the right.’

  I thanked him, cursing to myself that there was a seminar, walked up and went in through the door. It was a familiar layout of two rooms adjoining, with a large amount of window space in between. Through the window was the operator in the temperature-controlled room where a plethora of shiny blue boxes with winking lights and clumps of wires concealed something considerably more intelligent than the old cash registers upon which Watson founded his International Business Machines.

  In the room I was in, the VDU room, were the visual display telescreens, the plotters, the card readers and the printers. There was also a large group of students, ranging from the younger ones in their cords or jeans, track-suit tops or faded jerseys, and mandatory Adidas shoes, to older ones in herringbone sports jackets and flannel trousers. Over half the entire group wore thick rimless glasses; the age group spanned 19 to 50. A tall thin man, with a sallow face and zipped up corduroy jacket, was expounding on some figures on a diagram on one of the visual display screens in the centre of the room. He stopped and looked at me almost apologetically when I walked in. ‘Oh – er – are you wanting to run a program?’

  ‘Well, I was – but I can wait.’

  ‘Not the Zee Beta Assignment is it?’

  ‘Er – no!’

  ‘Traffic control?’

  ‘No – it’s a new one I’m working out – part of my term paper.’

  He peered at me. ‘You don’t look familiar.’

  I wasn’t surprised. Fortunately I remembered some names from my previous visit. ‘Actually I’m up from Princeton. I’m on a special course under Dr Yass.’ I hoped to hell Dr Yass hadn’t been hit by a bus during the couple of months since he’d escorted me around Princeton for a morning. I was aware of nineteen of the other twenty faces in the room staring at me. The twentieth was busy plucking the hairs out of his head, one by one. Enlightenment glowed in the lecturer’s face; yet again the ancient art of name-dropping had worked.

  ‘Go right ahead, if it’s not going to take too long. I’ll be taking a while yet. It’ll be good for these students here to watch.’

  My already overstretched nerves began jangling badly; blind panic was only inches away. My previous experience of actually running computers was very minimal indeed. The knowledge that I had acquired was suitable only for talking, in a seemingly knowledgeable manner, about such machines – not for operating them. I knew just about enough, given time and a fair wind, to perform the most elementary of operations. Given the current climate of this room, even if I could escape the attention of the operator there was no way I was going to achieve anything by plugging my chip into this computer, except perhaps to provide a good few days’ employment for an IBM repair team. Furthermore, in the unlikely event of my succeeding in obtaining any satisfactory results, I wouldn’t have been over-anxious for the secrets of the chip to be revealed to twenty-one strangers; there were other people, not a million miles from this room, who, had they been aware of my predicament, I am pretty damn sure would have shared that sentiment.

  ‘Thank you, but I’ve several hours’ work to do. It can wait.’

  ‘We’ll be through here by 5.00. If there’s no name down, it’s all yours.’ He jerked his head over at a sheet of paper pinned near the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I walked over to the sheet, and the lecture resumed.

  ‘Now, the early analogue machines had . . .’

  I looked for today’s date. Beside the time of five o’clock there was a name, written in thick, untidy writing: E. Scrutch. I nodded my thanks to the lecturer and left the room. He didn’t notice; he was back in the days when computers were bigger than dinosaurs and a lot more ponderous; now they’re smaller than guns, and a damn sight more dangerous. The security man wasn’t there when I got downstairs; I ducked behind his desk and found a row of keys, all identical and tagged ‘Pass – must be signed for’. I pocketed one and left the building.

  The name E. Scrutch stuck in my mind. Who was E. Scrutch? Who could possibly christen anyone E. Scrutch? It was one of the most singularly unattractive-sounding names I could remember encountering; I imagined him to be short, thin, with a jutting face, and stubble on both his chin and the top of his head.

  I took my usual precaution of scanning the area as I walked away from the building; I didn’t feel there was much likelihood of my having a tail, but the scanning process had been so thoroughly drummed into me during my training six years ago, and during the yearly refresher courses, that it had become part of my normal movement. Within a second, and probably quite a bit less, and in one seemingly innocent action, I knew what was going on in the full 360 degrees of area around me, and to the casual observer would have appeared to have done no more than to have straightened some ruffled hairs on the back of my neck.

  I carried on across the campus, towards downtown Boston and the hope of dry boots.

  Half an hour later I was seated in sublime warmth in a cafe named Uncle Bunny’s Incredible Edibles, my feet having a good time inside a thick, dry pair of socks inside a thick, waterproof pair of boots. I had a mug of steaming coffee and a plate somewhere underneath one of Uncle Bunny’s smaller sandwiches. It wasn’t just the plate that had disappeared but most of the table as well, under a sprawling mountain of turkey, avocado, chips, wholemeal bread, bean sprouts and gherkins.

  It was a student hangout cafe – everything this end of town was a student hangout – with orange tables and hard plastic chairs, advertisements in the window and a student staff. The cafe was quiet at the moment, the lunchtime rush hadn’t yet begun, and the few young hopes of America that were there sat, in the traditional arched back poise of students, staring mournfully into black holes, which, when they came out of their reveries, they remembered to be mugs of coffee, and they sipped.

  In this great land of new awareness, of car-sharing, thought-sharing, experience-sharing, wife-sharing and God-knew-what-else-sharing, I sincerely hoped E. Scrutch would be into computer-sharing.

  11

  E. Scrutch came as a shock; the name which had haunted me through a long and slow day belonged to some 20 to 25 stone of very aggressive female. She was completely and utterly enormous, like something out of a comic cartoon book, except that she was real, standing there before my eyes in the computer room.

  Her presence in the room diminished it, distorted the perspective like a scene from Alice in Wonderland. She had short dark hair, which served only to accentuate the size of her head, and this, whilst considerably larger than is normal for such an object, looked like an afterthought that had been plucked from the wrong-sized box, before being pl
onked, like a pimple, on the top of her bull neck.

  She wore a badly cut full-length smock, which did nothing to disguise the total shapelessness of her body, and made it quite impossible to identify her breasts, stomach or even knees amid the enormous rolls of flesh that hung about her; were she horizontal, and a couple of hundred miles long, she would have been a geographer’s paradise. As she was, standing upright and about 64 inches tall, visions of paradise did not roll immediately into my mind.

  She was staring at me with a pair of eyes that could have been glass, except they were bloodshot. ‘You want something?’ It wasn’t a question, it was a military command, barked out with all the softness and femininity of a sergeant major addressing the first parade of a platoon of new recruits.

  ‘No, don’t let me bother you.’

  ‘You are bothering me. I’ve got a lotta work to do and you’re the fourth schmuck to bother me in the last ten minutes. I’ve booked this room, so why doesn’t everybody fucking leave me alone?’ She stuck a finger in her ear, and twiddled it furiously; she then removed it, and started scraping a lump of wax from under her finger nail. Gaining access to this computer wasn’t going to be easy.

  I tried the name-dropping trick once more. ‘Dr Yass is going to be upset – he’s asked me to get some work done for him by this evening.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about that creep; got the worst-run campus in the country and the only way to get a fucking degree out of him is to be 5 foot 7, with blonde hair.’ She glared at me. ‘Either sex,’ she added.

  Our heart-to-heart chat was interrupted by the emergence from the computer room of the operator. ‘I’ve fixed that tape drive – won’t give any more trouble now. I have to go home; my kid has to go to the hospital. I won’t be back for a couple of hours at least. Try not to break anything while I’m gone.’ He hurried off.

  I felt that a new line of attack was required, since conventional and logical attempts to reason were likely to end in my physical ejection from the room. I didn’t say anything for some moments, and she stood blinking at me, like a toad eyeing a fly. I shrugged my shoulders and attempted to put on my ‘I’m actually a very nice guy’ expression.

  ‘You look like you need a good crap,’ she said.

  They say that when a girl takes an interest in the condition of your clothes then she’s in the marriage stakes; I wondered if the same applied for an interest in the condition of one’s bowels. Her sheer size and physical ugliness weren’t my major worries; my eyelids were in good working order and in any emergency could be clamped shut. But I hadn’t learned how to shut my nostrils, and since I could smell her clearly from here, close up I reckoned she’d be pretty ghastly. But I steeled myself – somehow. ‘I like your dress,’ I said.

  For a moment she looked like she’d been hit by a nuclear bomb. The moment passed and then she looked like she’d been hit by a passing car. That moment passed too, and she then looked like she’d been hit by a pillow-load of feathers. That moment passed too, and she looked like the back door of a Tiffany delivery truck had just burst open in passing her and showered her with one whole load of diamonds. ‘My dress?’

  ‘It’s very pretty.’ If ever, in its entire history, the British Secret Service had expected an agent to make the supreme sacrifice of all time, that moment, I felt, with not a little trepidation, might be about to come.

  ‘You like it?’ She was actually reeling in shock. It was probably the first compliment she had received in her 24-odd years on this planet and she was finding it difficult to handle.

  ‘I do. You look lovely when you’re angry. Don’t start being nice now.’

  She just stood and looked at me. Then she put both her hands into her smock pocket and her eyes flooded with tears. I offered her a cigarette and she accepted; I lit it for her and put it in her mouth. Great crocodile tears came down. I waited until they’d subsided, and then laid it on further. ‘You look like you’ve had a rough time just recently.’

  ‘My boyfriend just ran off with someone.’

  Now it was my turn to recoil in shock; even girls that looked like this had boyfriends? She began talking: he was 26 years old and had never had a girlfriend before. He was acknowledged as one of the most brilliant pupils MIT had ever seen; he was working on a design that was going to revolutionise the computer world; it was a design so brilliant it would make the current silicon chip micro-processors look as outmoded as the abacus. They’d been having a truly deep and meaningful relationship, and she slaved for him while he worked away. Then suddenly, last Thursday, he had run off to Ohio with a gay truck driver who’d helped him fix a flat tyre on his car.

  Within ten minutes I had my arm around her; she did smell ghastly. Within fifteen minutes Einstein had vanished from her thoughts and we were kissing passionately. Her breath was gruesome, and the only way to avoid it was to clamp my lips so tightly to hers that we made an airlock between our mouths. I kept to the inside of her lips as best I could, since the outsides were covered with rough hair. The only mitigating fact about this poor creature was that the skin on her body was as soft and supple as any could be; I tried to imagine she was someone else, someone stunningly beautiful, but it was hard.

  Her smock slipped down, and her bra was soon eased up over her head and tossed out of sight. Her breasts were utterly gigantic, hanging and quivering like water-filled balloons and capped with nipples like ashtrays. She pulled me down onto her, and it was like tumbling into a half-full water bed; she groaned and moaned, clutched at me, clamping fingernails that felt like the jaws of bulldozers into my back. Every now and then she broke her mouth away to make little grunts and squeals that gave me the illusion I was lying in a muddy bog in the middle of a farmyard during an earthquake. Suddenly she started shaking like a road drill, the tempo accelerating by the second; great gulps of air shot out of her mouth with a high-pitched whistle, and she started at the same time to fart vehemently.

  To try and remove my mind from this hideous reality, I allowed myself to lapse into a dream that I was strapped to the engine casing of a diesel bus in a traffic jam. She emitted one huge final sigh, released the iron jaws from the small of my back, let out one final cannon volley of a fart, and sank back onto the floor, completely and utterly spent. I leaned forward; she gave me a huge soppy grin, and plunged into sleep.

  I got myself dressed, covered her up as best I could, then let myself into the computer room, which the operator had left unlocked. It took me some while to check through the machinery, and even then I wasn’t sure if what I was going to do would bring everything to a grinding halt or not. There was only one way to find out; I pulled out a printed circuit board: the computer didn’t die on me; I pulled a chip out of it, and replaced it with my own, then put the PCB back in. To my relief there was no perceptible difference in the running of the computer. I went back into the VDU room and settled down to work.

  My luck held good, and within a few minutes my little plastic friend was cheerfully telling me all it knew as fast as I could absorb it.

  Unfortunately it was less lucid than I had hoped, and at the end I had a vast array of numbers that were completely meaningless to me. Basically there were several sets of numbers, the first being 1 to 105, the second being 1 to 115, the third being 1 to 119. the fourth 1 to 130, and on up to the highest one, 1 to 442. Each number was divided into four, six or eights parts, but I could at first find no common denominator between them.

  I had no idea what they might refer to – whether it be the neutrons in particles of some mineral, or the numbers of families in Central Park on any given Sunday, or a new secret formula for reconstructing Noah’s Ark. I started to work methodically through each number; 1, A, B, C, D; 2, A . . . My first clue came at the first number 14 I came to: A appeared all right, as did C and D. but there was no B. I discovered the same to be the case with all the other 14Bs. They simply did not register.

  A couple of hours had passed, and I had eyeball disease coming on from looking at all the fig
ures. I was anxious to leave before the operator returned, and before Sleeping Beauty awoke; I was going to adopt the cowardly method of ending an affair – by disappearing. If I was going to do it I would have to do it fast, since she was showing signs of stirring. And yet I was loath to tear myself away from the computer; I wanted desperately to unravel the mystery. This little silicon chip that Dr Orchnev, whoever he might be, had seen fit to deliver to me as his last act on earth – it must have meant something to him. One hell of a lot. 14B. I wrote the number down and stared at it; it meant nothing; I used to see a 14B bus in London; or was it a 44? Went along Piccadilly then up Shaftesbury Avenue; or somewhere like that. I prodded and tapped at the plethora of keys. Maybe there was something I had to do to this computer that I had forgotten; maybe I should wake E. Scrutch and enlist her help. I thought about my salary; it wasn’t that great; the hell with it. I collected the chip and slipped out of the room, out of the building and into the bitterly cold night air.

  When the cold comes on the Northeastern seaboard it really comes and temperatures of 15 and even 20 below are not uncommon. The temperature must have been down in this region now; the air hurt my lungs and the dew on the ground had frozen hard; the roads were going to be treacherous and I had a long drive ahead.

  I reached the car park and found my car door frozen solid. I heated my key with my cigarette lighter; after a few moments’ reluctance it slipped into the lock and turned. The windows had half an inch of ice on them; rather than chisel away at them, I took the lazy way, of starting the engine and turning the de-mister on full. In my jacket and shirt it was too cold to sit in the car and wait for the air to warm; I reckoned it would take a good ten minutes. A smoke-shop was open across the road, so I went over to get some cigarettes and something to chew on the journey.

  Inside was harsh white lighting but there was a welcoming warmth from an oil heater; a fuzzy baseball game blared noisily from an elderly television in a corner above the counter, whilst the proprietor and a customer struggled to have a conversation above the racket. I stood there while they talked.