The Thinktank That Leaked

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “No, it was mine. Why couldn’t Admiral Hartford get IBM or somebody to execute his calculations in the States?”

  “I’ll ask the questions. What is your political interest in the Sixth Fleet?”

  “You’ve been reading the wrong comics,” I said. “From what I’ve heard, it’s the fleet — not me — that is causing all the riddles.”

  He said nothing about my comics. “Naturally, the activities of that Fleet are an enigma to you, Mr. Kepter, since it is the business of the United States Navy to keep its orders secret.”

  “Who gives the orders? — I am aware that they’re not being issued from Washington.”

  He said sharply, “Certainly not via a medium which you can intercept.”

  “Then he is acting on sealed orders?”

  “He is acting as he thinks best. You may be aware that Rear Admiral Hartford is the son of a very famous naval man —”

  “ — The son of Admiral Kyle Hartford,” I said, “Who was renowned during his lifetime for assisting General MacArthur in forming a near-dictatorship in the Far East.”

  “That’s a Soviet propaganda and it reeks.”

  “Read a few books written on the subject by eminent and highly patriotic fellow-countrymen of your own.”

  The Chief leaned forward slightly and spread his hands before him on the desk. “Kepter, the Laws concerning Treason can be implemented, at any time, within any sector of the NATO Alliance. To date, your own activities leave you wide open to arrest and possible conviction under the British Official Secrets Act and I have already been in touch with the Home Office on that and other matters. However … if you will explain to me precisely what occurred in the Boeing 747 you flew earlier today I might have second thoughts.”

  So this was it. A deal. The Chief of Staff had absolutely no idea either what was really happening to the Sixth Fleet or what had happened concerning the crazy cocktail of messages that must have been relayed via the big dish on Exmoor. And, just for a second, his eyes flicked across to the partition wall of his office. Instinctively I realized why. The two armed men standing guard out in the corridor had not the faintest idea of what they were guarding.

  So I asked, “Does that room next door give out a very unpleasant odour?”

  “Just tell me what happened in that Jumbo, Mr. Kepter.”

  I don’t know to this day what I would have said. There was no opportunity in any case.

  From the corridor came a series of confused shouts. The door burst open. The officer who had been my escort had stopped worrying about the crease in his trousers. “It’s grown out of there, sir! Under the crack in the door! It’s giving off that stink again!”

  Before he could gag himself in my presence, the Chief of Staff rapped, “What does it want this time?”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean, the hell … In which direction is it growing?”

  The phone rang on the Chief s desk. The Chief picked it up as if it were the hot line to the White House. He listened for a few seconds, showed no change of expression, growled acknowledgement, and hung up. He said, “We know. It went down through the flooring and is now linked to the gear in the Communications Centre … Get this man Kepter back to his hotel. I can’t waste time on him now.”

  *

  Nesta’s nervous system was like a network of high-tension wires by the time I got back to the Eastways Hotel. I found her crouched motionless by the window. I remember she looked very lithe, supercharged. Her lips, perfect of line, aerodynamic almost, were slightly parted. In this mood she was a wild animal tamed, not by me in any sense, but by her love of organized life, of society in its true sense … a culture well on the way toward being utterly dismembered. And that thought tortured her.

  Without turning as I entered she said, “Drunks. Out there in the corridor.” She gestured beyond me to the door. “I wasn’t going to stay locked up in here. I went out to … to try and understand why people fresh up from the luxury flight from Hawaii go berserk like slum children.”

  “How berserk?”

  “Tearing lights out of their fittings … peeing on the carpet of the corridor. One of them, when he saw me, exposed his futile-looking prick.” Nesta looked neither shocked nor disgusted. “And that’s how I guess they felt: futile.”

  “Superceded, you mean?”

  She turned sharply. “Yes. And they can’t even know.”

  “So they feel it —”

  “— and express it. Roger, I think that’s almost more frightening than anything else. I suppose, before long, you and I … we’ll be numbed to it. Won’t know.”

  “You say ‘Hawaii’ …”

  “They had garlands. Then they cut them and joined them together and had a ludicrous tug of war. It took the staff ages to Hoover up all the mess … Roger, is this really the end of us? What happened at the Embassy, or wherever it was?”

  “Let’s save that for Richter. He should be here soon. Nesta, those mosaics have been working on you during my absence. Making you depressed.”

  “It’ll pass. I always did despise parasites.”

  Richter arrived a few minutes later. I told him immediately about the mosaic growth at the Naval Attaché, and the lunacy about Treason.

  Richter said, “They deal in only what they know. They’ll keep up this treason thing until they bust … or congeal.” He spoke this last word meaningfully. I wondered why. And I felt I could almost hear Nesta’s racing heart from across the room. She had no desire whatever to be phased out. But one look at Richter diminished the zest in her face in one brushstroke.

  He looked shaken and somehow a lot older — sagging at the shoulders, body limp. Although he conveyed the same air of gentleness there was no sign of the tranquillity that had gone with it. Gone were the fleeting smiles; his manner of speech was slower, the face drawn. That his brain was working flat out, however, could not be open to question. He had thought a lot and done even more since our brief phonecall earlier. He refused my offer of a drink. Instead, Nesta ordered up some coffee. Joseph Richter tried to relax for a while in an armchair, talking strained politenesses until the coffee had arrived and the waitress had shut the door behind her.

  “Late tonight,” he began, “we have an appointment to see Captain Hitchcock of London International Airlines. He is extremely ill and is now a patient at the London Clinic. I have been in touch with the specialist on the case and it has been arranged that we should see him.

  “Before we get onto that, though, I should say I have seen Dr. Spender.” He said this in a very expressive way and my eyes flicked across to engage Nesta’s. She had picked up the same thing as I had in his tone of voice. Richter continued in the same, strained mode of speech. “I won’t try and ease the shock; we are all getting used to shocks, though nothing quite like this has come up before now.”

  He added some milk to his coffee and I could hear the percussive rattle of china as his hand trembled. “I went to his lab … I think you call it ‘The Flying Saucer’. Spender was there.”

  Nesta tensely gripped her hands together, wrestling with herself. “For God’s sake, what’s coming?”

  “I knocked,” said Richter, “and though there was no reply, the door was slightly open. The floor itself was slimy and I nearly fell on the ground. I’m glad I didn’t. The lights were on and so was the computer equipment. Spender — what was left of him — was lying in one corner of the lab.” Richter had difficulty in getting his words out. “Spender was only just recognizable as a human being because he is being systematically broken down physically. I found him immersed in a sort of hybrid sewer which partly consisted of active groups of the crystals and partly …” he had difficulty in expressing this — “… partly the ooze of mucus resulting from the chemical breakdown of Spender’s membrane, tissue and organs, a hideous creeping aspic — part human and part a colloidal solution of a newly forming sludge of mosaic. I can’t call it ‘solid state’ because the vast sluice of potential LSIs — Large Scale Integration
circuits — was still moving and arranging itself as a treacly substance in which the crystals themselves were suspended. I am sorry to say that I was more revolted than overcome by grief at so repulsive a fate of such a man … You see, he is not dead. It was like seeing a new sort of organic cell, enormously enlarged as if seen through an electron microscope.” He fixed his eyes on me. “Spender is now part of a jelloid, crawling froth of living tissue and integrated circuitry and I can only think of the whole as a … as a monster. This monster is electronically connected to the existing ‘ring main’ computer network based on Manchester — and you know all about Manchester. Present was the characteristic smell, and the Hate Output was so intense that I would say — even as a scientist — that it would be measurable on some existing scale, perhaps megawatts … a tangible form of radiation that I would have sworn, not long ago, to be totally alien to science.” He clenched his huge fists. “And now we have a chain of it, linked by solid state technology that has gone through a definite evolutionary phase. The terrible irony is that it was Spender himself who forged the chain.”

  Nesta said, “And now the chain has no end.”

  Richter could hardly hear her. He was trying to hold his concentration. “Meanwhile I was following up on the two ideas you’ve already expressed — one of them yours, Nesta, and the other Roger’s … I know you have done some more thinking since and we’ll come to that later. But let’s deal with things in sequence, starting with your virus thing, Roger.

  “I did contact associates of mine in the Soviet Union and you were basically right in assuming that a virus is used to disseminate and form the crystal mosaic. As I told you, no virus is active in its crystalline form; but each organism is activated when required by the incubating effect of the organic chemicals within the total compound.

  “To come to your suggestion, Nesta, I had some assistants take samples of the dust particles and other matter on the outer skin of the 747 itself. Early reports from the laboratory I am using confirm that something very like semi-conductors — that means transistors or circuit chips — exist in the atmosphere in a kind of embryonic form … capable of growth, I have no doubt, at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature. The samples are being studied and we shall receive further reports later. It is unnecessary to add that such flakes would cause widespread contamination though we do not yet know how.”

  I got up and fixed Nesta a drink. She was a very unhealthy colour and I did not fail to notice that this state of her complexion was similar to how she’d looked in the Heathrow ante-room when she’d verbally attacked me. It did seem that whenever we were adversely affected by the horror that managed to lurk in every nook and cranny of our activities, the mosaic lodged — and presumably growing — inside her cranium regained ‘confidence’ and became more active, though this time there was no indication that her emotions or reasoning powers were impaired.

  No one interrupted Richter and he went on in a hushed voice: “You intimated to me, Kepter, that you thought it might be necessary for us to go down to Orscombe. I’d like to ask you what your reasoning was over this.”

  I said, “There was a missing item of information all the time. It never made any sense to me that in off-loading emotions to a computer network Spender had somehow created a new kind of species.

  “Nesta’s idea — taking wing-scrapings — fills in the vital gap. Those flakes must be falling from a satellite and that satellite was sent up there by somebody. Since Spender had the use of the mosaics first it must mean that some individual connected with the space program came into contact with Spender — in other words, a patient. Such a patient may well be down at Orscombe and we need to interview him very badly.” I paused awkwardly. The next thing was extremely difficult to express even to a man of Richter’s intellect. “This idea goes hand in hand with another one. And as things stand I cannot communicate it to you —”

  He got it straight away. “ — because you don’t want any possible mosaics in my brain to overhear it! Have you explained this idea of yours to Nesta?”

  “Yes …” I was referring, of course, to the idea of the two competing groups — p-n-p and n-p-n. I had no proof of such a phenomenon but was becoming increasingly sure that the idea had substance. Aloud, I explained, “The mosaics seem to regard Nesta and me as a composite organism —”

  “ — Yes.” His crisp tone had partially returned. “You have kissed each other.”

  I thought it nice of him to limit his comment to this. I went on, “So anything we say to each other is in any case confirmed by physical contact —”

  “ — at which time the mosaics produce a contagious mucus by means of activating the virus,” Richter said. “Let us now go back to my own day’s activities. As I had planned, I visited the hospital annexe at the Barbican and talked with this man Pottersman. It was very difficult indeed to conduct a coherent conversation … the man is in an hallucinary state. All the same, it does seem that your guess was right on both counts: Yes, someone in aerospace did become Spender’s patient; yes, he is a patient at Orscombe. We must not delay in getting there; and, for a number of reasons that leap to mind, we mustn’t fly. We go by car — my car: it’s a saloon and I can get some sleep in the back. One of you two can drive it. On the way I’ll tell you what we’re liable to expect.” He got up with some difficulty. “I’d be grateful if we could leave the moment you’re both ready.”

  I said, “What about this interview at the London Clinic with Captain Hitchcock?”

  Richter looked at his watch. “We’ll delay it. I was trying to take on too much and we certainly can’t do everything tonight. We’ll put a call through to the Clinic and try and arrange to see the man when we return from Somerset.”

  In making that decision Richter had inadvertently turned yet another key in the firing chain. But he had no means of knowing it … As we prepared to leave he said, “Your theory about an aerospace man checks out, okay. But I wish I knew how you knew.”

  *

  Although, on the way down, I tried to listen to Richter I was really more concerned with the formalizing of those ideas that had suddenly shot into existence after Nesta had got through her Hate Spasm (the thing was beginning to assume capital letters by now). Suppose there were two variants of the organism? — even something as simple as the difference between p-n-p and n-p-n? The prospects — for us — were thereby prodigious; for if one could somehow implant in one type of colony the idea that the other type were plotting its extinction, it was conceivable that something not far off a global war between the two variants would break out until both were annihilated.

  Before Richter sank into a troubled sleep, slumped in the back of the car, I said, “Dr. Richter: an honest answer, please, to a question that you’ll find it very hard to be outspoken about if it should go against Nesta and myself.”

  Nesta was at this time driving. I was next to her in the front seat. We were travelling very fast on the motorway and her body was erect and still. But in the back-glow from the headlights I think I caught her intensified expression, I think she’d guessed what my question was going to be, I think she instinctively felt the horror that might be encapsuled in the answer.

  Richter didn’t stir his body either. “And your question is? …”

  “Do your associates in the Soviet Union think there is the slightest prospect of developing a cure for Electronic Cancer, once it has taken hold inside a human being?”

  He said, “One cannot be dogmatic on such a point.”

  Nesta said, without turning her head, “Yes, one can.”

  Richter said, “The answer is No. The reasons are various: One is that the virus used by the composite organism both for contamination purposes and for re-arranging the crystal structure for growth and development is based on an extremely complex molecule which makes the virus virtually impregnable to pharmaceutical attack. The Russians suspect that this super-virus has developed largely through the wide use of various serums and a whole assortment of drugs —
dating right back to M&B 693 — and the consequent response in microorganisms so as to protect themselves. We only dimly know the RNA, DNA process whereby the virus replicates but it is certainly an improvement on anything that went before … faster and more efficient. We do not understand what it is that enables the virus to be converted instantaneously into its crystalline form and out again. Though this process is a known characteristic of virus organisms its use as a switch is new. So of course we are driven to purely empirical experiments — fighting an unknown micro-organism in the dark and trying things one by one to see if they work. So far, they don’t.”

  … This was the first and only time I remember taking Richter’s age into account when evaluating what he had to say. However unkind it may look in print, he had less to lose than we had. Nesta — a gentle person in my estimation if ever there was one — had the same feeling I know. She allowed her eyes to flit into their corners for a second and glanced at me as a truck heading toward us lighted the inside of the car.

  They were young, creaseless eyes; humane, most certainly. But they conveyed hope. You couldn’t possibly miss it. She was remembering what I’d said to her in the ante-room at Heathrow and she was banking on my optimism. I couldn’t impart any detail to Richter for the reasons I’d already given.

  But the phenomenally inspired design of Nesta’s face could not, I was convinced, be erased and replaced by anything so crude as the conglomerate personality of the species Man had unwittingly brought about. Indeed, mankind had, in tampering with test tubes, in no way created life. The living element in the mosaics was a virus, and comprised only a small percentage of the total matter that had led to Electronic Cancer. The idea that the two components could never be separated by some unforeseen scientific process was not to be entertained. For as long as men and women could inspire each other — as the Curies had — then progress must continue. My special view, just then as the truck s headlights ripped past, of the loveliness of our own species reinforced my confidence; and Nesta’s discreet little gesture — just with those pristine eyes — went clear down to my gonads so that I responded as a man. I knew we were not defeated; we could love; the mosaics could not. And never had I been so in love with Nesta than at that precious moment.