The Hammer of God

by Tom Avitabile

  Sensing the impossible position he was in, the undersecretary took the chance of his career. “What if I show you proof?”

  That stopped Brodenchy. Now this bureaucrat was either pulling a prank or had misinterpreted something as “proof” of the outlandish claims he just made. His intellectual interest piqued, Brodenchy acceded.

  “May I ask you to wait here while I make the necessary preparations?” the undersecretary said.

  “Certainly,” Brodenchy said. He took a seat in the outer office. His mind raced with the implications to mankind if what he had just heard was true. Why had he never heard anything about this before? Furthermore, if it were a fact, why did they want him involved?

  “Doctor, the Secretary will see us now.”

  “The Secretary?” Brodenchy asked.

  “The Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant.”

  A chill went through Brodenchy. U Thant was a world-respected figure. If he was buying into this nonsense, maybe there was something…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Following Your Nose

  Peter had hit the mother lode. It was like taking candy from big babies. All he had to do was violate the sanctity of some computer room and within minutes he had them right in the palm of his hand. Peter was now firmly committed to his goal of actually building an older IBM 1401 computer from all the parts they threw at him. He’d have to talk his uncle Joe into giving him space in his garage. A 1401, even just the boards, was a big machine, too big for the three-room apartment in the two family house he, his parents, and brother now lived in.

  Peter remembered the pinch in his nose that the computer room caused. It became the basis of his plan of attack. He’d go into a midtown skyscraper, press all the buttons on the elevator and at every floor, sniff the air. The clue Peter was sniffing for was the smell of acetate. It was the base layer of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing’s magnetic tape that was unceasingly run at high speed past the heads on the big computer tape drives of the day. The odor was unmistakable, a little like vinegar, and a little like old galoshes. 3M used it because when they broke, acetate based tapes broke clean with no stretching, meaning they could be repaired by a simple splice of tape with no loss of data.

  In the Pan Am building, Peter sniffed his way to two IBM 360 — 40s in one room. He walked off with a power supply compliments of an enamored computer engineer. At Lever House (IBM 360 -30) he got manuals and two register motherboards. Even at just a plain white building on 51st and Park, he smelled out an IBM 360-30 at a brokerage house and got to make up punch cards with his name on them. He had the idea to type in the alphabet and numbers 0–9 and get the whole alphanumeric card code right there in his hands. The largess from his little forays into corporate America was filling up his room in the Bronx — he’d better talk to Uncle Joe soon!

  ?§?

  Brodenchy left the U.N. in a daze and checked in to a room at the Waldorf. He ordered room service and sat trying to figure out how to accomplish the outrageous mission he had just accepted. He had agreed to chair a committee that at this point had no one on it. The conundrum he faced was that someone had to be on the committee before he could tell that person what the committee was about. His fear was that once he told anyone, he would probably not want to be on it, or worse, suggest Brodenchy stop drinking. It didn’t take any part of his prodigious brain to figure out that this was not going to be easy. He needed some event or convincer to attract some of the greatest minds in the world onto his panel. That panel would then advise the world on something it would never believe. The more he thought about it, the more he doubted his own sanity.

  Before room service arrived, he reached out to three of the men who he had escaped Hungary with. They would at least give him a straight answer as to whether he was sane or not. Maybe even help him sign up committee members. After a quiet dinner and some very good port, compliments of the U.N., he settled down to a restful night’s sleep.

  ?§?

  Peter decided it was time to see what RCA could contribute to his cause. Although their computers weren’t as commonplace in 1968 as the big four, they still made them and they had parts. Peter walked towards the big tall letters RCA, seventy stories up from 6th Avenue in Manhattan. This was a huge building. People were taking guided tours of the lobby. It smelled of steam heat and plaster. As he approached the bank of elevators, Peter met his greatest challenge ever: elevator men. These weren’t automated elevators with push buttons; the elevator operators were people who could stop him cold. What to do?

  The building directory was a study in itself. Peter spent twenty minutes looking for the right listing. Then he found it.

  “Accounting on the 10th floor,” Peter said to the uniformed elevator operator. Other people were already on and others followed, each calling out their floor. Peter was tall for his age but he prayed no one took a real good look at him, at least not until he was on the computer floor. Then he’d have them, once again, mesmerized by the computer.

  This elevator only served the first ten floors of the building. At three, a few people got off, and one got on and said, “Five please.”

  At four, someone said, “Thank you, Charlie.”

  At five, the doors opened and there it was: the pinching in his nose. He made the instant decision to get off there. As the people left the elevator area, he stayed behind. He walked a little in each direction like a hound dog on a scent. He went left. He found himself walking down long corridors of offices. When the hallway made a sharp right, he followed it. The rug on the floor became a hard vinyl floor. The walls were now blue-ish. The hallways became shorter and made more turns as he kept going. Having turned a corner, he came across a huge glass window behind which was the biggest tape drive he’d ever seen in his life. The tape that it used was wider than the 1/2” tape IBM used, even wider than the 3/4” Honeywell used. He stood in awe with his face up against the glass. There were no vacuum columns, which acted like shock absorbers to fast jerky moves of the tape. That must mean this machine doesn’t have sequential address.

  Two things happened simultaneously. The first was that he noticed a black-and-white monitor on the drive. On it was Dean Martin. It was a surreal experience for Peter. Being in an Italian-American family there were two things you did without question — you went to church every Sunday at ten in the morning and you watched “The Dean Martin Show” every Thursday night at ten. Peter knew the show well enough to know that the guy standing next to Dino was Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler on “Batman.” It was then Peter knew he was looking into a time machine. Frank Gorshin was going to be the guest star on this Thursday night’s show and here he was watching them at 11:30 in the morning on Tuesday. Wow!

  Then the other thing happened. A hand came down on his shoulder. Accompanied by, “What are you doing here?” in a foreign accent.

  Peter did a slow pan and to his relief saw that the arm was in a white shirt and not a uniform. Doing the fastest thinking of his life he said, “I am here to sell you something.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes. You see, I built a computer and, in it, I use a sequential access tape drive. And I figured you could use it to put all your news stories on and then you can play them back in any order you want to… here at NBC.”

  For a moment, the man took in the kid holding the attache case. “We don’t need that.”

  “Oh.” Peter feigned disappointment and was ready to exit quickly with a line like, “Well, Sorry to bother you, bye,” when the man surprised him.

  “Come on; I’ll show you.”

  Brodenchy met his fellow political refugees at the Thames Coffee shop on 44th Street, just east of Madison Ave. Hellerman, who was always a sickly sort back in Europe, looked good and healthy. He was now a consultant for Fairchild Corporation working on missile guidance packages. To the degree that he could, Brodenchy explained the unexplainable to his compatriot. Hellerman agreed to lend his name, sight unseen, if Brodenchy thought it was legitimate enough
. Brodenchy thanked him for the proxy and they discussed the issue of security. It was Hellerman’s feeling that if the committee was going to be dealing with top-secret matters, it should have a core of security to protect not only its findings but also its members. Only one name came up, only one person they had both trusted and would trust again with their lives. Kasiko Halman. Like Brodenchy, Hellerman had heard he was working in New York. He had an idea where.

  There were three radio studios all behind glass. Peter and the man entered the one on the far end. He saw rows of tape recorders and racks of equipment. There was a huge console with big knobs and meters. Two huge record turntables and more tape machines book-ended a man working the controls, but that wasn’t what caught Peter’s attention and had him riveted. Behind two panes of tilted glass, wearing an open collared, white, short-sleeved shirt, looking down at a piece of paper in his hands through thick glasses, was Chet Huntley! The NBC microphone poised by the bridge of his nose wasn’t necessary for Peter to know that he was the anchorman for NBC. Well, half the anchorman. The other guy was David Brinkley. But here he was twenty feet away from Peter. The man operating the big console pointed his finger at Huntley as a light went on that read ON-AIR over the doorway and then Peter heard the famous voice.

  “This is NBC Monitor News on the Hour. I’m Chet Huntley reporting.”

  “Wow!” was all Peter could muster.

  His host, not phased one iota by all this, said, “So you see we put every story on these carts.” The man held up a grey plastic Fidel-a-Pac cartridge that looked just like an eight-track tape. Only this one had a clear top and you could see the tape spooling around in a loop inside.

  Peter caught on quickly. “Oh, so that’s actually Random Access. Much better than Sequential Access.”

  There was a pause and Peter figured “the tour” was over.

  “You hungry?” the man said.

  “Me? Sure!”

  “Okay, come back to my office for a second then we’ll go up to the commissary and grab a bite.”

  Peter tried hard to remain cool, but the Commissary was the place that Johnny Carson made jokes about almost every night. Now Peter was going to have lunch there. First, he saw Chet Huntley, now he was going to have lunch with Johnny Carson! This was turning into one incredible day. He stole one last peek at Chet behind the glass as they left.

  It was about to get even better.

  It was a short walk down the hall to the place where the man worked. Peter noticed the room number 523 and another big glass window. In this room, there was no radio equipment, though. Instead, the room had rows of Teletype machines all noisily clattering and ka-chunking away.

  The man who was taking him to lunch pointed at a chair next to the only desk at the front of the room. “Sit here for a minute; I’ll be right back.”

  One thing struck Peter right away — some of the people working in this room were his age or a little older. Odd, he thought.

  All of a sudden, red lights started flashing and the machines started ringing. A boy not much older than Peter went to one of the blue machines and tore off some paper. He then thrust it into Peter’s face and said, “Quick, take this to Hourlies.” Then he went off into the other room.

  Peter, keying off the urgency of the boy’s voice, ran out into the hall but immediately stopped because he had no idea where he was going. Then his brain kicked in. “This is NBC Monitor News on the Hour. I’m Chet Huntley reporting” played back in his head. Hourlies? He took a shot and went back the way they came. He went through the glass door to the studio where he saw Chet Huntley. A bald-headed man was sitting at the desk reading a script, following along as Chet was broadcasting. Peter handed him the piece of paper. The man scanned it quickly and said, “Great! Bring me the ‘first lead.’”

  Peter went back out into the hall, retraced his steps once again to 523, and found the blue machine that he thought he saw the kid tear the paper from. There before him, typing out at thirty-five characters per minute was: “1-s-t-L-D.” First lead.

  Peter started to read:

  UPI — Mexico City, Mexico. A Boeing 737 with 87 aboard crashed on takeoff from Mexico City Airport. All on board are presumed dead. The Aero Mexico airliner struggled…

  “What are you doing?” asked the man who was taking him to lunch.

  “I’m waiting for the first lead?”

  Just then, the desk assistant who handed him the paper realized that Peter wasn’t who he thought he was and that Peter didn’t work there. Panic registered. “Where did you bring that paper?”

  Peter answered to the man instead, “Glass doors, down the hall, bald-headed guy.”

  The man barked, “Sit!”

  So Peter sat, terrified that he did something awful. The commotion in the room started to wane in about five minutes. The last time Peter was this close to coming to tears was when he was eleven and his father got pissed off at him for blowing up the old Dumont TV. He was sure they were going to call his parents. Forget about whatever he just did wrong, he was also cutting class, so there was no way he wasn’t going to get in big trouble for this. His life passed before his eyes twice, because he as only 14! Then the man came back and sat down at the desk next to Peter.

  “First off, I’m docking him a day’s pay,” he said, pointing to the kid who started all this.

  “And I am paying you. Would you like to work here?”

  “Me? I’m…”

  “Look, you showed a good sense for news and you showed me you’re a pretty smart kid. Do you want to work here?”

  “Sure. If it’s okay.”

  “It’s okay; what’s your name, kid?”

  “Peter, Peter Remo, sir.”

  “Good. Welcome to the NBC News, Peter. I’m Kasiko Halman.”

  “Hold it! Wait, Peter…” The Washington Monument appeared gray under a cloud’s shadow, while the reflecting pool and the mall were in brilliant sunlight, but that wasn’t the reason for Bill’s squint, “So far this is a nice story and all, …WWII, Hungarians, Science Fair and what have you, but honestly, you expect me to believe that NBC hired you at fourteen!” Hiccock said to his old friend from the Bronx (who he hadn’t seen in twenty-five years) as they sat on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “I couldn’t get a paper route with the New York Post until I was sixteen and had working papers.”

  “Yeah well, kid, my folks didn’t believe me either. But you were only four then, and the world was a different place back in ’68. Nepotism was alive and well in those days. The entire cadre of desk assistants — in print they’d call ‘em copy boys — was a dumping ground for the kids of RCA and NBC Senior Executive VPs. From summer jobs to after school work, it was like day care or day camp.”

  “Your pop was a truck driver. You weren’t ‘anybody’s’ kid.”

  “And I got let go three times for not belonging to anybody. But I got hired back four times.”

  “How?”

  “I was good and I had a little secret I shared with the news managers.”

  “Job security?”

  “In our room was one of the first Xerox machines, a 3600. It was massive and had stuff we take for granted today: document feeder, 20-copy sorter, up to 999 copies. Had a Nixie tube readout.”

  “Ahhh, Nixie tubes… please stick to the story.” Bill checked his watch.

  “Anyway, do you know why it took so long to invent copy machines? Because they had to invent copier repairmen first. ‘Cause you couldn’t run one of those suckers for more than a few hours before they broke down. I only worked Saturday and Sunday nights cause of school, but I made seventy-five dollars for the weekend. I was paid through newsroom dinner vouchers. Every week I was somebody’s dinner.”

  “Wow. Seventy-five a week back in ‘68. That must-a been good!”

  “My dad broke his ass on the stone truck for one-seventy-five a week! So anyway, one Sunday night the news manager has a report to get out and the Xerox is down. He’s about to retype the whole fifteen pages on Rexo
graph masters when I say, ‘I think I can fix it.’

  “‘You think you can fix the Xerox machine?’ he says.

  “‘I might have to shut the lights in the newsroom for a while.’

  “So then he says, ‘Peter, I’ll give everybody flashlights to work with if you can fix it.’

  “I started by defeating all the cabinet door sensors with paper clips. The problem was the tray that you pulled out to free jammed paper came all the way off the runners and the ball bearings went everywhere. So I shimmed up the tray using shaved down pencils. I got that sucker right in line but had to run the machine wide open cause of all these sticks and tape and paper clips hanging out of it.”

  “I bet NBC news was never the same after this,” Hiccock said.

  “Billy, you had to see it. At one point this big arcing light was swooping across the entire newsroom with each page being copied. I had to shut the lights because it was an electro-photostatic process. The inside of the machine was like a dark room, so when it was open the room had to be dark, but I had it running and humming. At the last minute, the news manager came in and asked for the last page of the report back. I remember I used to have to print it on NBC stationary that had hundreds of little interlocking NBC logos on it. He gave me back the last page and I collated it into the thirty copies of the fifteen-page report. Then I went about my job distributing it to the inner-office list. I did that every Sunday as the last thing I did before I went home. This way the VPs had it on Monday first thing when they got in.”

  “So that’s how you stayed employed?”

  “No. It’s how I got fired. Actually, on that last page? He rewrote the end to say, ‘This entire report wouldn’t be possible without the ingenuity and determination of desk assistant Peter Remo.’”