The Thinktank That Leaked

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “Roger, that’s no camera. It senses things.”

  “That’s what a camera does.”

  “But cameras just sense pictures. Now Spender is talking about a Thought Sink. Do you recall his disposition when he was telling you about that? You did say it was odd.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Well couldn’t it be that the crystal apparatus does more than he thinks it does?”

  “What you’re saying is that it’s somehow capable of passing information on some level he can’t detect.”

  She burst out, “Roger, don’t be so damn cautious! You’re not at the university now. Come out with it!”

  “All right, I will. That crystal mosaic is a control.”

  “Thank you. At last!”

  “It’s also saturated with Hate. It’s where the ‘hate goes’.” My mind had shot back to what Nesta herself had said the day before, at Elstree. The brief exchange had gone as follows:

  *

  NESTA: What’s Spender’s garbage disposal unit?

  ME: A computer network. He pours his patient’s unwanted emotions — hate, for instance — into a computer.

  NESTA: By his reckoning, it must therefore stay there …

  *

  … and therefore influence everyone concerned? On its own this simply didn’t make sense.

  Aloud, I said, “Crystals grow, Nesta. Not in the same way as living matter does. But if these crystals are acting — as he seems to claim — in the same way as semi-conductors, I’m talking about transistors, then what happens to the way his crystal mosaic operates if in fact it gets larger all the time?”

  “Has it got larger?”

  “I’m trying to think. I hadn’t been taking much notice, not at first. But now you’ve drawn attention to it I think the crystal layer was a good bit thicker than it was a week ago.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Possibly Large Scale Integration — to stretch a point.”

  “Isn’t it time we stretched a few points? What is Large Scale Integration?”

  “In a phrase, more intelligence. LSIs — in ‘known technology’ are used in most computers. A chip the size of your fingernail can do the work, these days, of a thing which thirty years ago would be about the size of the Albert Hall … I think we should anticipate Spender a bit.”

  “How?”

  “By paying an unannounced visit to this place in Orscombe. That’s where he claims the mutual corruption of the two programs took place. We’ll fly down there tonight.”

  She said, “I think we should talk to Pottersman first.”

  “Where is he? You know where he is, don’t you?”

  She just said, “The Barbican. In the Annexe of University College Hospital.”

  “And just what can he tell us if he’s gone crazy?”

  “We have to see him.”

  “You know this?”

  She looked at me oddly. “Yes.”

  I didn’t question it. I felt it was high time I climbed out of my computer science straight-jacket and allowed myself to be guided by what I still chose to think of — then — as feminine instinct. It seemed that Nesta had plenty. “Let’s go.”

  Nesta started the engine of the MG, revved up, and headed East. This trip I had to shut my eyes sometimes over some of the manoeuvres she executed. If I’m going to be squeezed between two articulated lorries I prefer not to see.

  On the way we discussed plans. “You’ve been to Spender’s clinic in Orscombe?”

  “I visited Mike several times when he was Spender’s patient down there.”

  “Is there a decent field?”

  “Why do we have to fly? Can’t we drive?”

  “I want to get the hang of the total geography — including the siting of the tracking station on Exmoor. You see a lot more from the air that would take a lot longer by car.”

  She said, “Then there’d better be decent visibility or Exmoor by moonlight will be rather a let down … And yes, there is a reasonable field — in fact there are two, I think the one directly behind the clinic is probably best. It’s flat and it’s accessible. You have landing lights?”

  “Beauties … Nesta, who have you been talking to that you haven’t told me about?”

  “No one recently.”

  “Not so recently, then? … How about when Mike was a patient? Did you talk to anyone then?”

  “What makes you think I did?”

  “Because for someone not trained in computer science you seem to grasp a hell of a lot of things and some of them have eluded me.”

  “I’ve had more time to think things out. But I did take opinions in two different subjects — Psychiatry —”

  “— and computer science?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What was the psychiatric opinion?”

  She cut-up a huge articulated truck and the driver hooted furiously. I clutched the side of the car. “I got some funny answers.”

  “Which didn’t make you laugh.”

  “Too true. One answer — given me, of course, in confidence on account of my father being an influential millionaire — was that Spender is a schizophrenic.”

  “Capable,” I said, “of doing things by mistake on purpose?”

  “Yes … I also talked with another specialist — in rather a different field.”

  “Artificial Intelligence.”

  “How did you guess that?”

  “From the way you reacted when I told you what Spender’s garbage disposal unit was.”

  “You don’t miss much. I love you. Shut up. I’m going to overtake that lorry.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  4

  The Barbican, like the rather bad joke of the Festival of Britain, has always struck me as the outcome of a furious argument. Some expert in the construction of maximum security prisons had a chance meeting, no doubt, with a specialist in beehives; and after a succession of architectural tantrums there emerged the stark result — the pre-1939 outpourings of a Concrete Mixers’ Convention into the mould of an eight year old boy’s idea of Space City. In fact it was built in the 1960s, amidst a tumult of industrial dispute (and small wonder) which rendered it even more archaic than even the original blueprint implied by the time it actually took shape. Rather as a musician who has never once heard a symphony orchestra might catastrophically miscalculate the result of giving all the melodies to the double-bassoons and an alien squad of banjoes, so the dismayed building contractors found themselves accessories after the fact of a grim surprise: the monster, I am certain, looked not remotely like the euphoric (if conflicting) dreams of those who were at cross-purposes with themselves and each other for all the time it took to plan a vision that couldn’t be expressed.

  For those who can actually find it — and this is far from easy — The Barbican comes at you, very suddenly, if you lose your way somewhere north of St. Paul’s Cathedral; and if my reference to the superb work of Wren seems a bit like rubbing it in (Wren is not thought to have had access to computers) I can only point out that at least the Cathedral is recognizable as an architectural fact of life — it is there, it is One, and can be discovered on purpose, rather than through some cartographical miscalculation. Nesta, who had visited the Barbican before, steered her way through its inexplicable labyrinth of service roads with a combination of bravado and shrieking brakes, as if she were trying not to look at the surrounding superstructure apparently put there by the scriptwriters of The Flintstones. Squealing around a final corner she said, “This is nothing. Try coming here at night. The entire place is built upside down. To get into someone’s flat you have to go to the very top of this pile of children’s bricks and sort of enter via the funnel of an ocean liner up top.”

  “What are the cabins like?”

  “If you don’t mind living in an egg-box they’re fine. Everything except the beds is built into the wall. They found that was the only way it made things possible for someone to swing a cat.”

&n
bsp; She parked in the dungeon and took the Barbican by surprise — by shooting up into it inside a lift. It felt like an indecent assault on the Pyramids of Giza.

  We found the hospital annexe and were met by a friendly Sister and a pot of tea. Nesta employed her natural, friendly disposition (not applicable in Flying Saucers) to get her own way about seeing a very sick man.

  Sister said, “The trouble is, I doubt if you’ll get much out of Mr. Pottersman. He’s in a very depressed state. Most of the time he sits mutely watching television in the patients’ lounge. He’s asleep in his room, at present. I’ll try to get him in the mood to accept visitors.”

  I got permission to use the phone, and called the airfield. I had to use a ploy to get a pukka flight plan as it would have raised more than one eyebrow had I revealed my intention to land at night on an unregistered, untried field, with no flare path, no ground-based landing aids, no local met report and no controller. So I asked the arrogant young Buddha in Elstree Tower to file a clearance down to Bristol.

  He said, “Have you an instrument rating?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t want to use Airways?”

  “No. Cross country. I’ve got VOR and ILS.”

  “In that thing? — Big deal.”

  I said, “In place of the cocktail bar and the Royal Suite.”

  “How disappointing,” he said, “for your passenger — as if I don’t know who she is.”

  “But then, you do,” I said, refusing to lose my temper. “Can you save me a call and ask Richardson to get the mechanics to fuel-up for me?” Richardson was a good friend of mine at the flying school. By agreement, the London School of Flying supervized maintenance and service for the five of us who co-owned Bravo-Delta.

  Buddha agreed to this and all was set.

  Next, I spoke to Mike, saying that Nesta and I might want to visit him in the evening. I didn’t say we were going anywhere — something stopped me giving details like this on the phone.

  He sounded cheerful but asked, “Could I come to your flat instead? I’ve lent this one to some friends for a party … didn’t think Nesta would be needing it!”

  “She won’t.”

  “She okay? … I hear you’ve had a further ride in the Flying Saucer.”

  “And how.”

  “Like that, is it? … Roger, I’ve had an idea. Don’t quite know what made me think of it; but do you know of a chap called Richter? — Joseph Richter? He’s a physicist who works — for his sins — at my father’s computer company.”

  I said, yes. In fact I had read some articles of Richter’s in New Scientist and for some reason I couldn’t fathom the recollection of some of the things he’d written was ringing distant bells in my mind.

  Mike said, “Do you want me to forewarn Dr. Richter that you might want to see him?”

  “Better not.”

  “I know what you mean. If the great Lee gets to hear of it he might start putting spokes in all sorts of wheels.” Lee Crabtree was Mike and Nesta’s father and Chairman of Standard Electric Computers. Mike went on, “Lee is in a flap.”

  “What about?”

  “Don’t know yet. Saw him at The Anchors — that’s the esteemed family seat in Stockbrokers-Ville. Authentic tudor and built in 1936. Caught him pacing the floor and looking deep and penetrating in a Very Important Panic. I went there by royal command and was ordered by court prerogative to give the lowdown on you.”

  “I hope it shocked him.”

  “I didn’t say much. But he was clearly annoyed that you’d made me a lot better rather quickly.”

  “Surely he doesn’t root for Spender?”

  “Absolutely loathes Spender. But Lee thinks his own loving kindness should do the trick, so he’s jealous. The trouble is he’s so exquisitely unlovable that he can’t stand himself — let alone his family … By the way, Roger, ever heard of ‘Apocalypse’?” “You mean The Four Horses Of?”

  “Never mind. You obviously haven’t. Nesta’s crazy about you. Did you know?”

  I said, smiling, “Nice to hear nice things.”

  Nesta, who had gone into the surgery with Sister, joined me at the teapot. She said, “Apparently Pottersman is in a hell of a state. We won’t get much out of him.”

  “But we can try,” I said. I couldn’t keep my hands off her, even in there; and Nesta, who knew my intensive need for physical contact, allowed me to follow the contours of her body in a way not usually practiced in hospital waiting rooms. Sister, who evidently had a realistic grip on the facts of life, cleared her throat tactfully on entering and didn’t snarl, as so many lesser nurses would. “I’ve persuaded Pottersman to see you both,” she said. “If you’ll come this way?”

  *

  “ … He made me do things … things I don’t think he even understood himself. He’s so astoundingly ignorant, Mr. Kepter; the sort of person who would set out to irrigate Death Valley with a garden spray. He would never realize, until it was too late, that Death Valley would take over him; that in wasting what water he had would leave him and his helpers dying of thirst; skeletons in the sun, just feeding a few vultures …”

  Pottersman, tall, ultra-slim, small-headed, was — in his way — being surprisingly lucid He’d got out of bed, in old-fashioned pyjamas with broad, vulgar stripes. The jacket of it came down ridiculously low, tall though he was. He drank a great deal of plain water from his tooth-glass, and kept staring at Nesta as if she were some kind of apparition, a symbol of something in his mind rather than a real human being.

  But Pottersman was not dealing with flesh and blood anyway. The way he talked of Spender was abstract; my few attempts at tying him down failed. Like:

  “Pottersman, what does Spender mean by a crystal mosaic?”

  — A crystal mosaic can mean almost anything from an ordinary molecule-structure to a man-made transistor.

  Pottersman’s reply was surrealistic. “An expanding universe of solid state,” he replied, “can be a threat to the human mind. You don’t notice it at first, Kepter, any more than you’d notice a shop-lifter in a big store … until the goods became so depleted you’d start looking for the answer, if people weren’t paying for things at the cash register.”

  Nesta asked him, “Is Dr. Spender evil?”

  “Evil?! That’s a funny word. When something goes wrong in the universe; when a star explodes and becomes a supernova and the next thing you see, centuries later, is the Crab Nebula — is that evil? It’s an event; and either the event speeds things up or slows things down. Death of a body or death of a mind can come soon or it can come late. What’s the difference? Only time, you see.” He turned to me again. “Crystal mosaics seem very beautiful under the microscope. But some of them reform themselves.”

  “Viruses?”

  “A virus could be an agent, perhaps. A kind of living catalyst in the process of self-organization. Like the human brain, Kepter. By organic means it can construct new paths and therefore make a brain think new thoughts … But do you stop at every shrimp you see, by the shore, and bother to work out how it got there? If so, you won’t learn much about the ocean. Oceans come first; then the shrimps. See? Constellations form, and maybe they explode and maybe they don’t. But the shrimps aren’t very significant compared with the billions of light-years which provide the settings for real events.”

  “I asked him, “Am I real?”

  “You’d come out,” he said, “on a photographic plate or a tape recorder. But to make you significant on the mosaic I’m talking about, your face would have to be projected onto every star and every planet there is; and your voice would have to be heard on the most distant quasar accessible to a radio telescope. That would take so many millions of years that not even your fossil would exist by the time you had been fully propagated. That’s how real you are …”

  We left him. Sister said, “He’s very ill, I’m afraid.”

  I said, rather tensely, “Yes. Who’s treating him besides Dr. Spender?”

 
She looked faintly shocked. “No doctor here,” she said, “would dream of interfering with Dr. Spender’s patients,”

  “Why not?”

  She said, “I must shoo you both away, now. It’s their teatime. Perhaps when you come next Mr. Pottersman’s condition will have improved.”

  In the car, Nesta said, “That’s double-dutch gift-wrapped.”

  I said, “But there is a message on the card.”

  “What’s it say?”

  I said, “Nesta, if we could read it properly I think we’d take to the panic stations in something faster than this MG or my little aircraft.”

  “I could see you were frightened.”

  “I’m all of that.”

  “You don’t know what of?”

  “Not tangibly enough to put into words. Perhaps we’ll know a bit more when we get to Orscombe.”

  She steered smoothly through a gap in the traffic that only left an inch either side of the car. “Let’s see what Mike has to say about it,” she said.

  *

  To my consternation, it wasn’t Mike who arrived at my flat. No premonition saved me. Nesta and I were sitting up there waiting for him when there came a click at the door and Paula calmly let herself in.

  I suppose ordinary human loathing between two women should have struck me as a refreshing change from the intangible trail of bewildering clues littered in every direction we tried to probe I should have known better. Nesta Crabtree was a fireball at white heat and she achieved flashpoint without outwardly losing her cool.

  Paula was, most unfortunately, drunk. She didn’t often get like this and I could have killed her for her disastrous timing. Anyway, she lurched across the room, glanced momentarily at Nesta, and made straight for the drinks. When she’d fixed herself up with an outsize scotch she sat down next to me on the sofa. Nesta was on the window seat. Arrogantly and with precision, Nesta selected her most arresting posture — which was quite something to see — and watched the proceedings with the apparent detachment of a distinguished theatre critic getting primed for the purpose of closing the theatre with the next day’s notice in the New York Times.