The Thinktank That Leaked

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “Point Three: You, Roger, submitted to her because a completed circuit already existed, very much on the lines you told me earlier on. The computer at Bristol Radar already knew your plans because Nesta had given the identification of the aircraft for which you needed to know the new altimeter setting. Nesta had no reason to withhold it. The system had several options as a means of ensuring that you would make contact with her. It was necessary to involve you directly with the Orscombe depot of the New Organism for some reason we don’t yet know. You were therefore lured to Orscombe even though you thought you were doing it of your own free will.

  “Point Four: There is the matter of the United States Navy being involved by the Organism. If the Americans have been using the Manchester computer to assess the state of the art in military strike power in the USSR it isn’t hard to see how an isolated sector of the American forces — a fleet of warships mid-Pacific — might interpret and thereafter act upon a computerized assessment of Russia’s accelerating military prowess if the information were also laced with a source of hatred and therefore of warped and inaccurate emotional input.

  “Point Five: The circuit must have been completed somehow with that Fleet in order for the sub routines of hate to take effect at sea. In other words, crystals must be present — perhaps in the headquarter ship — whereby a link with Command Personnel might be forged so that the incoming information could affect their brains directly. This will have been foreseen by the System. We do not yet have an inkling of how this was done.

  “And Point Six, Roger: What made you come to me?”

  “A paper you wrote in New Scientist. I interpreted it as a set of hints aimed at anyone who might urgently need them at some future date.”

  “Bright boy.”

  There came a short, high-tension pause.

  Nesta said, “You’re not going to tell my father about this?”

  “May I speak frankly?”

  “Please do.”

  “In the first place he wouldn’t begin to understand it. If he did, he wouldn’t believe it. If he believed it he’d try and make money out of it. If he made money out of it he’d bring total disaster on his own head and everyone else’s. If he did that he’d do his best to conceal what he’d done and he’d look around for scapegoats rather than face up to his own opportunism, corruption, expediency and guilt. Is that frank enough for you, Nesta?”

  I watched her. I thought Richter had gone too far.

  I was wrong. Nesta said, “I’m relieved that you know the man.”

  “How did you survive?” asked Richter.

  She said, “When you see a man mutilating your mother in a way that probably only a child can observe, you reject him absolutely and find other people to fill the gap.”

  “You have a strong character.”

  “I had someone to go to.”

  Later I was to discover that Lee Crabtree’s ‘best friend’ — a man who later became a director of what was ultimately to become Standard Electric Computers — had been involved with Nesta’s mother when it mattered most. Lee had become suspicious and eventually fired him out of hand, throwing in a law-suit on a trumped-up patent infringement to make sure that the lover concerned was rendered virtually destitute.

  Richter summed up. “Certain details must be attended to immediately before I make contact with my Russian counter-parts.” To me: “One is to get this phoney authorization for your nocturnal flight in retrospect. You may well need to fly anywhere at any time. We cannot have you crippled by ridiculous disciplinary measures at a time like this. I think I can have that put straight.” To Nesta, “I shall have to concoct a story for your father. He got suspicious and phoned Security three times while we’ve been talking.” To both of us, “Most important, I must obtain all possible information regarding a serum or form of treatment to free the both of you, the nurse, very possibly Mike Crabtree and Dr. Spender from the grip of internal parasytic activity on the part of the Organism. Although it will probably choose to lie dormant while it uses your brain, it may change its mind now this conference has taken place — because it will be that much more aware that we are wise to it.

  “What we are faced with is nothing less than the potential conquest of the human mind by a species that we ourselves have created.” He got up. “Meanwhile, do nothing that will give the mosaics any further indication of what we intend doing about them. In other words you have literally got to prevent yourselves from reasoning.”

  *

  The unique and certainly unprecedented situation that applied both to Nesta and myself was now that we had to be extremely careful not to think. Inside us were growing lattices of millions of interlocked transistors and integrated circuits, capable of responding and adapting to even the germ of an idea that could form in our unconscious minds. This was bugging on a level that mere words cannot easily convey.

  We should, however, be quite clear what we’re talking about. This was not a brainforce from outerspace, an invader with an intention of its own. It was basically a hate-multiplier responding to human aberrations. Having initially acted as the swill for unhealthy ingredients of mental illness on Spender’s patients, it now knew how to hate, and how to express that hate. And since no newborn race can be expected to harbour any great affection for a progenitor that had only given it this one over-riding emotion, it must logically turn on Man himself.

  The next few days were, by any standards, intensely happy ones, even though at the back of my mind there was something that was trying desperately to get some attention. Ironically, through the very ground rules that Richter had laid down, I fought this still small voice doggedly, not realizing that there was an element of the narrative that Both Nesta and I had completely forgotten to mention to Richter himself.

  Nesta and I had been out dancing. It was Thursday night, or rather Friday morning, when we finally got back to my flat. Nesta had got quite high on Champagne, though not really drunk. We were being extravagant with money but — unable to kick a certain streak of Chauvinism which, to be truthful, I don’t altogether deplore — I’d insisted on signing the cheques. Nesta understood it and forgave it, though she’d hinted for some time that she wasn’t going to put up with it indefinitely. “I’m entitled,” she had said, “to pay for my fun. Why shouldn’t I?”

  I forget my reply to this now; but on the night in question she was doing a sort of gossamer cabaret in some fairly outrageous pyjamas to an album we’d bought at the disco and brought back to my flat. We were still on Champagne and I was somewhere up there at about 30,000 feet, rivetted as I sat on the sofa watching a ritual dance that had only one possible ending. Or so we thought.

  It was three o’clock in the morning and the phone rang. I shouted over the din of the record, “Ignore it!”, but Nesta, temporarily oblivious to the crisis that underscored everything, picked up the phone neatly as she danced by and whirled it around, pretending that she was the lead singer of a pop group and using the phone as a mike.

  She suddenly stopped dead and switched off the player. “Who?” she asked, instantly back to her normal voice. “I’ll get him.” She covered the receiver with her hand and stared at me in the sudden silence. “It’s a place called the Cleave Hospital, in Esher.”

  I took the phone and for a few seconds couldn’t make any sense of it.

  The reason was simple; both of us had completely forgotten Paula’s existence and it had been the melodrama with her that we’d omitted to pass on to Richter — though with hindsight I feel fairly stupefied that I hadn’t seen its significance.

  Into the phone I said numbly, “Could you kindly hold on for a few seconds?”

  Nesta saw my face and she seemed to freeze right where she was and we both felt the same shiver. “What is it?” she managed.

  “Paula. She’s dying in hospital. That was the night doctor.”

  Nesta said, “My God, we forgot to —”

  “ — I know. Apparently she’s suffering from an unknown illness and —”
r />   “ — Not unknown to us. I’ll get dressed.”

  “Nesta, you can’t possibly come. She’s my ex and she’s not even my business, let alone yours!”

  Nesta said, “Roger, please! How petty do you think I am? We both know what’s going on. We’ll take the MG — it’s faster.” We’d retrieved my own car from Elstree the previous day — Wednesday — as soon as Richter had, as promised — arranged for a telex to be sent to the tower controller there that subdued this prima donna almost beyond recognition. He was now permanently in awe of me, which — from him — I found acutely embarrassing. But the startling change in his attitude certainly proved that Richter not only meant business but knew how to go about it.

  Nesta went on, “We ought to tell Richter first.”

  I said, “Except we don’t know his personal number.”

  She said, “Try the book, while I sling some clothes on.”

  There was no Richter with the initials J. A. in the London directory and there was certainly no time to get onto enquiries and go through the suburbs one by one. The arrangement had been that when he was ready for action he would call us. Nobody had expected the crisis to break so fast and we’d been caught — quite literally — with our pants down.

  As we dressed rapidly Nesta asked, “Why Esher? Does she live in Esher?”

  “Nowhere near it.”

  Nothing further was said until we were on the road. I took the wheel as I was marginally the more sober. I drove very fast and thought very fast and the truth dawned. “Esher! It’s an isolation hospital!”

  Nesta didn’t have to pretend to any emotions she couldn’t feel. Here was the Mosaics’ second known victim. That was enough.

  She simply said, “Then will they allow you anywhere near her bedside?”

  I said, “These days they have glass partitions and you speak through a mike.”

  Nesta said, “I’d better be there when you talk to her.”

  “You don’t want to and I don’t advise it.”

  “In a way I owe it to her.”

  “There are limits, Nesta.”

  “Not in this war. She was used.” Nesta meant the episode at the flat.

  I shivered. “And not by Spender.”

  “Of course not.”

  I pulled up at Emergency with a squeal of brakes and told the porter we were expected. I gave the name of the doctor and the ward. The doctor on the case came to the entrance immediately. He seemed vaguely surprised at Nesta’s presence but didn’t question it except by asking her if she wanted to come up and asking me whether I had any objection. He added, “Your ex-wife is in intensive care. You’ll be fully isolated and completely safe.”

  That statement in itself had an ironic ring. Nesta and I both knew what we both knew. At this rate how soon would it be before we both wound up in isolation? But we made no comment and went up with him in the lift.

  “I’ve never met the illness before,” he said. “The symptoms are all wrong for anything we at this hospital have ever known.”

  I asked, “How long will she live?”

  He said, “She’s barely alive now — completely paralysed and under automatic respiration. She can just talk, though her lips hardly move. You’re only just in time.” Just before the lift stopped the doctor said, “She’s been hearing voices but it’s nothing to do with schizophrenia or any conventional terminal effects on the brain.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “We are quite certain. The voices were screaming at each other, not her.” He stood as the doors parted. “They’ve stopped now,” he said.

  I muttered quietly to Nesta, “because they’ve completed their assignment.”

  The doctor asked sharply, “What was that?”

  I didn’t repeat it, but Nesta got me out of range of the doctor and managed, “If they fulfilled their mission, Roger, why shout at each other?”

  “She may be deluded.”

  Nesta pointed out, “The doctor doesn’t think she is.”

  Our visit to intensive care must have been one of the shortest on record. Paula had saved herself up for us — that, and no more.

  By now, her lips wouldn’t move at all; but the specialists in Electronics had clamped a throat-mike on her and we just managed to hear the few sentences she had left in her lifetime. The voice sounded odd and strangulated.

  She said, “I’m sorry about what I did.”

  I said gently, “Except you didn’t do it.”

  Paula said, “Not one lot. Two. Understand that, Roger? Two.”

  “Don’t talk. Let yourself rest, Paula. The doctor says you’re responding to treatment well.”

  She said, with just the ghost of a smile. “Shan’t get bored any more, Roger.”

  “You go to sleep.”

  “You’re nice. So is your girl. I like her.”

  Nesta took the mike from me and managed, “We can be good friends, Paula. After all, we go to the same shop for our clothes.”

  Paula said, “Yes, how dare you go there?” She was trying to play it bitchy, Nesta had to turn away.

  She needn’t have bothered. Paula died seconds later.

  6

  “Nobody in the world should ever die that way.” — Nesta’s summary of that terrible event.

  I did not, of course, pretend that I wouldn’t have been affected by Paula dying so young, however it happened. Paula had been my wife; not a very good wife; not a remarkable person; not even a particularly close friend. Nonetheless, I would have mourned her passing.

  This was something very different. She had been strangled to death by an alien yet manmade System; an intelligent System with a set of aims in its repulsive mind. Collectively, millions upon millions of solid state circuits had swelled and reoriented themselves and become an evil saliva that not only killed but watched and waited and listened and felt.

  The atrocity marked a massive, upward surge in the level of catastrophe that bewildered and sickened us. There seemed — suddenly — no limit to it. The train of events following on from that obscene Thursday testified to that.

  Nesta managed to get an hour’s fitful sleep when we got back early in the morning to my flat. She didn’t undress, knowing that if she did she would be making too much of an issue of sleep for it to come. Instead, she droused off on the couch. During this, I forced myself to have a bath and change … I don’t know why it seemed so important. Perhaps it was simply that I desperately needed some sort of order in the place of chaos.

  When Nesta awoke she did so very suddenly and completely. One moment she had been breathing irregularly with her eyelids flickering in tiny convulsions — as with anyone in the middle of a nightmare — the next she was staring at me, totally awake, with one preponderant thought to express. She said, “It’s useless to pretend, Roger. This scheme of Richter’s … I mean, telling us to try and prevent ourselves thinking … it’s too late for that. How can there be a cure for what we saw during the night? All we can cling to is the hope that these Colonies take time to develop. It’s possible that they’re not able — at first — to pick up what’s going on in our minds. We can’t afford the questionable luxury of evading issues: we just have to think like hell.”

  The same thought had occurred to me; and though I hadn’t said so, Paula’s dying words had stuck in my throat. They meant something. She’d saved them up. She’d stayed alive against all odds in the hope that we’d arrive in time to hear them. This had to be so because the specialist in intensive care had said afterwards, “Your former wife was … I don’t know quite how to put this … She was technically dead by the time you arrived, Mr. Kepter.” He’d paused, standing there white and shaken, then added: “It was almost as if what she said to you was a recording.”

  So I’d gone over it again and again in my own mind: ‘Not one lot. Two. Understand, that, Roger? Two.’

  The senior doctor on the case had confirmed that there were two groups of voices screaming at each other, not her.

  Dissent within one
species? — And so soon?

  Nesta executed her toilet even more thoroughly than I had and for much the same reasons. We both felt we had been all too close to the revolting monster that the collective Frankenstein of technology had unwittingly created and we were as revulsed as we were terrorized. As she dressed and made-up, she talked. “Those doctors were scared out of their minds. They just didn’t know what was happening to them.”

  “They were out of their depth and so would anyone else be.”

  “And something else occurred to me, Roger. I don’t question for a split second that you kissed that nurse down in Orscombe as a result of some outside force … not that it would exactly be the end of the world if a pretty nurse cashed in on your high spirits in that way.”

  I said, “You know I wouldn’t have let anyone do that. How could I? — The way I feel?”

  She brushed her hair vigorously for a few strokes, then stopped and glanced in the mirror. “The link caused by me, in telling Bristol Radar the identification of your aircraft, was not enough to bring about personal contact between your lips and hers. There’s a gap.”

  I said, “That’s one of the things that’s been bothering me. Over and over again I’ve tried to reconstruct exactly what happened down there in the duty room. All I seem to remember noticing was a pair of lips that were asking for it. Without questioning anything I met demand with supply.”

  “Which means,” said Nesta, “that there must have been some additional linkage before you even took off from Elstree. Did you …” She broke off, then pointed. “Did you use that phone?”

  “No,” I said. “Paula did. I made her try and call you.”

  “But you must have touched her sometime during the evening, surely?”

  “I’m trying to think, Nesta. I’m trying to reconstruct every move … I honestly don’t think there was any direct contact at all. After I’d leapt out of your taxi I took one back to here. Of course, I touched the driver’s hand when I paid him.”