The Thinktank That Leaked

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

“So did I.”

  I made a snap decision. “Let’s go and talk to the nurse.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Of course not. Nothing is wise. We needn’t say who we are.”

  “Suppose,” said Nesta, “she goes and tells Spender?”

  “I can think of one reason why she might not.”

  She took that as read, and that was so right. She knew I had to work out my thoughts just as she had to work out hers. We were having a conversation but nobody was speaking.

  We went back to the house and felt the same thing as before. Nesta showed more sang-froid than I did. Now that the name of the game had been spelled out, she seemed less afraid. I wasn’t, and I gripped her hand till it must have hurt, I held it so tightly.

  There was a side door with a sign saying, ‘Staff Only’. I found a button and pressed it. I heard the faint sound of a buzzer; and almost immediately the door opened and a nurse appeared.

  I suppose, before meeting Nesta, I would have thought the nurse irresistible, she was certainly attractive in rather a kinky way, and friendly to us both. But — with honourable exceptions — nurses are nurses; a universal streak runs through most of them, they are on the look-out for a mate. Once they’ve found one they get bored and go back to what they’re used to doing; attending the dependent infants — men and women temporarily or permanently deprived of self-will and autonomy — who need them more. For some reason this often makes them promiscuous.

  The nurse didn’t ask who we were, or why we’d come; but led the way into the duty room, where a stale pot of tea stood on the table. The nurse added some hot water, and Fixed us up with her idea of a beverage. Overhead were some quite elaborate call-bells; and a group of intensive-care television screens which showed one or two of the patients in bed. A heart blipper was flashing below one of them, the beat regular — as far as I could tell — at this time. While the nurse started opening a fresh tin of biscuits which she’d taken off the provisions shelf, she remarked, without looking up: “This is a quiet valley. Usually all you can hear is the stream. Occasionally you can even hear the sea, beyond the hill — ” she pointed through the square window — “Grabbist. And once in a while the pack of hounds kept up near the sawmills start each other off baying in the middle of the night — an eerie sound, I must say.” She transferred some biscuits to a plate and offered them. Only then did she look at us. “Tonight,” she said, “is the first time I’ve ever heard an aeroplane land in that field. There were moments when I honestly didn’t think you were going to make it.”

  Her face was wide-eyed and innocent, the lips neat and well-formed, the uniform trim and impeccable. A very ordinary girl — but she’d break a few hearts yet.

  Nesta didn’t seem to dislike her. Though no doubt she could recognize the signs of a perfidious nature, it was no concern of another woman’s. And Nesta plunged in the deep end. “And what do they say,” she said, “to explain away the less cosy aspects of this house? — the ones that feel so … nasty?”

  The nurse said, “Well, the villagers do say it’s haunted.”

  “And don’t the patients mind?”

  “Dr. Spender comes down once a week and soothes them,” she said. She had a matter-of-fact way of discussing this and merely answered the questions face-value, not taking matters any further than the raw requirements of the questions but not blocking the questions either.

  Nesta said, “Do you believe it’s haunted?”

  “I don’t dig very deep. That isn’t what I’m here for.”

  “So it doesn’t frighten you?”

  The nurse smiled. I guessed that she only had one sort of smile and used it for all smiling purposes. “Do I look frightened?”

  Nesta suddenly asked her, “Nurse, do you mind if I take another look around outside?”

  “No. Don’t fall in the stream.”

  I gave Nesta the torch. I exchanged a look with her. It meant, ‘Don’t touch those crystals’. Nesta nodded slightly and left the room.

  The nurse asked me, “Why did she do that?”

  I knew why. Nurses are often better at talking to men on their own.

  Yet paradoxically I felt another Presence. It’s hard to convey. I certainly don’t believe in ghosts. But I felt manipulated … not so much by the girl herself. It was in the atmosphere. I couldn’t predict myself. I usually can.

  In answer to her question I said, “Nesta wants time to think.”

  “What about? — You?”

  “No. Not me.”

  “She’s your girlfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “How odd.”

  “Why is it odd?”

  “You might resent what I have to say.”

  “I don’t resent things very easily.”

  “She’s not the kind of girl I would have thought someone like you could handle.”

  I said, “Do women need handling?”

  “I do.”

  “And do they succeed?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She wanted me to make a pass and I did so. Inexplicably I assumed Nesta had intended this. I can’t explain. I liked the girl’s lips, knew they would open wider after being kissed.

  I was right. For now I was to be interrogated. “What,” she asked, “do you think of Dr. Spender?”

  “How do you know I know him?”

  “People don’t fly secretly into other people’s fields without a very good reason.” She had her arm round my waist. I knew that next evening it would be around someone else’s, and that she would lie. I still liked it.

  I said, “Dr. Spender is a very skilled psychiatrist.”

  “With odd methods.”

  “How odd is odd?”

  “People used to use leeches to drain off a patient’s blood. Dr. Spender uses crystal things to drain off their mental sickness.”

  “Does it work?” I broke away very clumsily. “There’s no curtain on that window.” — So I couldn’t have believed I had consent.

  She sat down, smiling her only smile. “I understand … You’re onto a good thing.”

  “The question is,” I asked, “Are you? — By staying here?”

  She left this one midair. “You asked me if Dr. Spender’s treatment works. The answer is that whenever a patient gets better, the house gets worse; and whenever a patient gets worse, the house gets better.”

  “You’re giving me the creeps.”

  “It’s true.”

  I said, “I don’t understand why you aren’t more alarmed by that than you are.”

  “Quite simple. I’m not ill. There is no … what would you call it …?”

  “Interplay? Feedback?”

  “Feedback, yes. There is no feedback between the house and me. It’s neutral.”

  “But doesn’t it bother you that the patients are in some way interlocked with whatever it is in this house that can transact with them?”

  She said, “When you’re dealing with mental illness there are bigger issues than that.”

  “How can you know?”

  “Because I’ve worked in other hospitals. Nothing worse happens here than happens in the average psychiatric ward.”

  “So far.”

  “Except,” she said, “I get very bored.”

  I evaded the invitation. “Tell me, nurse, when the thing goes the other way round — I mean, when the patient gets better and the house — as you put it — gets worse, what happens to the other patients in the house?”

  “I honestly don’t understand your question.”

  “That’s because you’re not concentrating.”

  “Which is connected with the fact that I usually find this job boring and at the moment I’m not bored.”

  “I’m in love with that girl, nurse.”

  “It didn’t stop you kissing me.”

  “The window will certainly stop anything else.” I was now actively disliking her, and she was too insensitive to see it. I can’t stand women who only find you attractive because t
hey can see that somebody else does.

  I said crisply, “What happens to the other patients if one gets better?”

  She said, “It doesn’t affect them … or at least, it didn’t until very recently.”

  I made a shot in the dark. “By recently you mean when there was some kind of a hoo-ha about information leaking from the computer at this place to computers at other places?”

  “I think we’ve talked enough,” said the nurse.

  “And I think we’ve only just begun.” I pointed at the complex indicators overhead. “Do those lights and things work the same as they used to work?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. I mean, do they now get muddled up?”

  — There followed one of the strangest — and somehow the most evil — five seconds I have ever experienced. I cannot explain precisely how it transduced itself into my mind, this sickening impression of an alien force surrounding me.

  But it was there, as the nurse paused in the perfectly normal act of putting the used cups on the drainer.

  Certain things were clear. I realized, for instance, that my assumption that Nesta had intended me to flirt with the nurse had been illusionary. Not only was the idea entirely alien to Nesta’s whole make-up, it was — in an odd sort of way — obscene. I had never in my life kissed a total stranger by consent. Somehow, I had been manipulated into an embrace which I not only regretted and felt guilty about, but which, in its aftermath, revolted me. That again didn’t make any sense: the girl was pretty, if rather vacant; and I’m not so bent as to convert a sense of guilt regarding my own actions into repugnance about the other party.

  The nurse turned, smiling, and instead of answering my question she said, in a low sort of a voice, “Do you want me to fix … a digression?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I cut back my natural reactions which were now working again. At the same time I fully realized then that they hadn’t been. Even the biggest walking-talking shit on earth doesn’t two-time a girl in quite that way. Nesta was just outside, in the garden. And it wasn’t just that I adored her. Even if I’d merely been her escort for the night, even on a one-night stand, neither I nor anyone else I knew of would risk her utter humiliation in the preposterous circumstances that were being proposed. So I said, “We’d both better forget you said that.”

  “Why? You obviously find me attractive.”

  If I had before, I certainly didn’t then. It was more like I imagine it would be if I’d been playing opposite the same actress for four hundred performances in some stupid bedroom farce. Indeed, I sensed the presence, somewhere, of the author of the play. The nurse’s expression was as incomplete as that of a female in a movie cartoon; it wasn’t real. And I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  The nurse said, “I’m going on my rounds but I won’t be long.” She brushed against me as she passed and I felt revulsed. “I do hope,” she whispered, “you change your mind.”

  She left the room but the acute sense of malevolence did not, proving beyond doubt that neither the tastelessly phrased proposition nor the unsavoury atmosphere in the duty room itself had been due only to some fleeting relationship between us both.

  I was still standing there in a daze, virtually transfixed as I stood on the same spot, when Nesta came back. I could see that she was very frightened; but I couldn’t move; I couldn’t speak.

  Nesta said, “This place … Roger, we’ve got to get away from this place!”

  I said, “You’ve got to know what happened, Nesta. Please! You’ve got to know! It … it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t me.”

  She said, “Yes. I can see the lipstick.” Her voice didn’t sound hurt, or angry, or even untrusting. Just puzzled and afraid. “But why?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something revolting about it but I don’t know exactly what.”

  Nesta said, “There’s nothing revolting about kissing an attractive nurse.”

  “No? What was I really kissing, Nesta? And was it me doing it? — Or something living inside me? … If so, how did it get in?”

  Nesta said, “The same way as it got inside the nurse.”

  I said, “What did you find outside the house?”

  “That mosaic has … has changed.”

  “Changed? How? You didn’t touch it, for God’s sake?”

  “No. I shone the torch on it. But part of it has contracted and apparently … started to go back into the computer room through the cracks in the brickwork. And, Roger! Don’t you see why it came out? It knows! It knows we’re here! It came out to make sure and then when it found out it went back in again.”

  I said, “Nesta, how much do you know about systems? — I mean in the information processing sense?”

  “Very little.”

  “But you did talk to someone in A.I. — Artificial Intelligence. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve never learned about computers? — Perhaps from your Dad?”

  “Not from him! — But when Mike was sure he was going to fail his degree I did try and help him by ‘hearing’ him on his subject. I suppose I picked up a bit of computer science in that way but I wouldn’t understand if you went into technicalities with me — especially now. I feel almost numb with fear, I can’t explain it.”

  “I don’t have to be technical to explain what’s on my mind.”

  — Only I couldn’t explain in there. Not in that room. Not only because it felt so malignant. There was a far more practical reason. Information systems can listen. Or they can sense.

  I led the way out of the duty room, then through the staff door out into the open. We were in a small rose garden. You could smell the roses. But the garden was far from pretty in the moonlight. There was a foulness about it, as if it had grotesque memories. Then, I could appreciate what some superstitious people meant about hostile ghosts. Only I knew for certain we weren’t dealing with ghosts.

  I led Nesta past the rose garden and out onto the drive but I turned left, away from the house front, toward some gates leading to what was evidently the road. I tried to visualize the charts and maps we’d used for locating the house. Tithings and its surrounding group of cottages — the hamlet of Orscombe — lay between Timberscombe and Dunster. The road, I figured, must therefore be the A.396 — the old road through from Minehead down to Exeter.

  There was a pair of wide wooden gates. They creaked as I opened them. Then we were standing out there on the road. Without speaking we crossed to the far side, up the slight incline of the grass bank. There was dew in the long grass and it smelled sweet. Here, the impression of hate was entirely absent; but we turned and looked back and down on the house. From here, half-hidden by its own surround of foliage, it gave nothing away.

  Nesta murmured, “It looks so pretty, so innocent.”

  I said, “It probably was. Whatever funny old ghosts there may have been, haunting such an old farmhouse, they’d be as scared as we are now.”

  She kissed me, very lightly and very sensitively, on the lips. I understood. It was her way of saying that she knew it hadn’t been anything in me that had wanted to kiss that girl. Coming as it did from Nesta of all people, who had reacted so impetuously to Paula’s intrusion at the flat, it meant volumes. She said, “What in God’s name are we up against?”

  I said, “Nothing more or less than a System. An intelligent, man-made system that is somehow self-regenerating, or at least self-organizing. In other words, it thinks … Translating what Pottersman said at the Barbican, he was really muttering about a kind of amorphous chunk of solid state that could devise its own circuits, as required. Now, if it’s poured full of hate and fear and misery, then it cannot be benign. But is that its own fault? — Spender wanted somewhere for people’s uglier, self-destructive — perhaps mutually destructive — instincts to go. He had this maniacal idea that emotions — unwanted emotions — had to be put somewhere. This is one of the p
laces he put them.”

  “It’s crazy.”

  “It’s crazy, Nesta, but somehow he’s done it. And it doesn’t stop here, at this horrible nightmare of an emotion-dump, because we know from Spender himself that two programs — apparently incompatible programs — got corrupted and joined up and went out by radio satellite to the Pacific. And I don’t doubt him any longer.”

  “But how? Surely, if two programs are in two different languages and don’t have anything in common”

  “— An artificial intelligence could provide the linking material, could interface them: provide an intermediate code — like an interpreter, if you like … so that software designed to operate on either one could operate on both.”

  She said, “You’re talking about a Monster. You may not realize it, because you have an analytical approach; but that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I’m saying it comes to the same thing. And possibly something organic is actually used to organize those mosaics so that they do add up to what, in your language, really is a Monster. It takes us back to Pottersman again —”

  Nesta interrupted. “ — You mentioned something about viruses to him.”

  “Yes I did. Because viruses can assume a crystalline form and remain in that state until they become active. What no one has considered is that they could still be active — in crystalline form — if what they were acting on were —”

  “ — were other crystals.”

  “Yes. Germanium, Silicon … together with the impurities that are added to these rare-earth substances to make them into semi-conductors.”

  “What’s a semi-conductor?”

  “Come on, Nesta. You took Mike through his curriculum. You must know already. And remember what we discussed in town.”

  “I feel … so panicked I can’t seem to think.”

  “We’re away from the ‘Monster’ at the moment. I’m not giving you lectures in the middle of the countryside. We have to work this out together.”

  “Transistors?”

  “Of course. We’re talking about ‘solid state’ — but we’re also discussing LSI … Large Scale Integration. LSI technology so advanced that it can actually alter its configuration — its geometry and circuitry — to suit what’s been put into it.”