The Thinktank That Leaked

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  “Still, I did it.”

  He handed us the text of the message he’d input to Pottersman’s mosaic. Possibly it was this that led to my own personal crisis that followed so quickly upon it. In any event, what he showed us must surely have been one of the weirdest telexes ever to be compiled.

  It purported to originate with an isolated n-p-n colony that claimed to have computed the intentions of all p-n-p integrated circuits. In some detail it sketched the strategy of those mosaics which were exclusively structured using p-n-p only and alleged that, from the very inception of mosaic technology, the electrically positive sub-species had been planning to wipe out its counterpart, n-p-n.

  Cleverly, Richter had entered this message not in ordinary English but in COBOL — an extended version of this manmade computer-language that Richter knew the mosaics had been using.

  The message ended by declaring that p-n-p planned to time the wipe-out to coincide with the ‘forthcoming action of the Sixth Fleet in the Pacific’. And, through using ingenious phrasing, Richter had managed to convey — without actually saying so — that the human attack on the Orscombe Mosaic, during which electrical cancellation had been used to immunize the humans against the Species for a short period, had given the p-n-p group confirmation that its strategem was technologically viable.

  The whole text was in stilted, dehumanized COBOL-prose and to me it looked convincing. I certainly couldn’t have managed to make such an outlandish transaction appear so authentic.

  Richter went on, “I tested the program initially by feeding it to a small sliver of unseparated mosaic that had been growing out of some intensive care equipment at the Barbican. I sliced it right off and made the experiment in isolation. The outcome was devastating though — somewhat to my surprise — not instantaneous. It was as if some kind of internal interrogation took place.

  “Then the sample simply blew out. Like a burst tyre.”

  He paused, as if having to nerve himself for the next statement. “I could not afford to regard this test as conclusive. The only certain method of knowing what the exact effect on the entire mosaic network would be was to get some voice output.” He gazed up at us as if appalled at himself. “Since the only voice-output available was a human one I … I had to act accordingly. I may say that the spoken word can — once in a lifetime — be almost too much for me to take. I got my proof, no doubt about that …

  “Ruthless though it may sound — and certainly was — I then shot a dose of this into another patient who, by then, had been admitted with the same illness.” His face was grey. “I won’t describe the outcome beyond saying that n-p-n is now quite certain that p-n-p is all set to destroy it. So far so good — if you consider that my mutilation of a sick man was good.”

  I said, with a parched throat, “He would have died anyway.”

  Richter snapped back, “I suppose all murderers can convince themselves that their victims will eventually die of old age. For God’s sake, any coffee in that thing?”

  Nesta poured him one and he gulped it.

  “I then went to Spender’s Flying Saucer and don’t let’s dwell on the agonies of that. You may take it as read that the prophesies of Geoffrey Sale come to something of an understatement.

  “I then unleashed some of the contents of my briefcase at the mosaic which now formed a kind of chrysalis around what remains of Spender. In so doing I started the chain of internal war and you’ll know very soon when it fully takes hold …” He indicated the telephone. “We get confirmation when that thing blows out.”

  He clinked his cup back into the saucer and lit a cigarette erratically. “Having committed myself irretrievably to knocking out the entire network I then noted two things which, when taken in combination, nearly made me slither into the mucus myself. One was a print out that was still on the machine in Spender’s den; the other was a video screen. This had been blank when I’d gone in there.

  “The print out stated what I half-suspected — I think you did too: the United States Sixth Fleet is programmed to start a world nuclear holocaust. The program is of the ‘Proceed Unless Cancelled’ type — the opposite, of course, of ‘fail-safe’.”

  Nesta said, “But … but that’s no surprise to us.”

  Richter said, “Granted. What I didn’t know was the nature of the message Captain Hitchcock recorded — and thereby entered into the system — just before he died at the London Clinic. For some reason — possibly through the action of Pottersman’s mosaic — the text abruptly appeared on the video screen … only a few seconds after I’d irreversibly ensured that with one notable exception every mosaic in existence is sentenced to electrocution.”

  I said, “But surely … That’s exactly what we want.”

  Richter ignored this and said, “The message on the screen was short but — in the circumstances — not very sweet. It said that Satellite Y.33 has malfunctioned. It’s not working. Do you get it?”

  I did get it. Right in the guts.

  Richter explained to Nesta, “It means that we are hoist by our own petard. We’ve knocked out the very system — the only system there is! — which could have found some alternative route for communicating with the Sixth Fleet. Failure of Satellite Y.33 means this: there is absolutely no means at our disposal of cancelling a ‘Proceed Unless Cancelled’ program to fire strategic nuclear missiles at world capitals including here. The mosaic controlling Admiral Hartford cannot know that every System other than its own is about to blow out. It will therefore proceed through a count down and fire its warheads. From Swiss sources I have a shrewd idea of the magnitude of this fleet. At the very least, it consists of a Command Aircraft Carrier, three battle-cruisers, five light cruisers, and God knows how many nuclear-firing subs. I would not care to compute the total fire-power, in megatons, of a strategic force of that weight.”

  Nesta was the calmest person in the room.

  She asked coolly, “How far away is the Sixth Fleet?”

  Richter said, “Over eight thousand miles. Well within strategic missile range to strike at virtually any capital. But slightly difficult to reach from here at short notice.”

  I said, stupefied, “Can’t we call the Rear-Admiral in Command by radio?”

  Richter said, “Sure, we can call the Rear-Admiral. Except that he’ll be infested by now with Electronic Cancer to a degree at least sufficient to place him totally under the control of the mosaic network. That’s one of the purposes of the flaked fallout. It descended from the satellite to ensure that the links were forged worldwide. It would be quite meaningless for us to have a quiet chat with anyone in that ocean war room. Its human occupants are redundant.”

  Nesta said, “So what we’ve done is to start the death-knell of the only species we could trick into saving ourselves and millions of other lives?”

  Richter threw up his hands. “What would you do, if you were the soul of that mosaic? Would you provide any opportunity for the human species to use it after homo sapiens has sentenced the whole enormous electron-mucus to a galloping race war? I’m not a great lover of irony; but what’s happened is that the mosaic, though it won’t survive to enjoy its retribution, has left a legacy that amounts to a posthumous victory that would swamp the history books — if only there were someone left to read them.”

  I said, “We’ve got to get there.”

  Richter said grimly, “To the fleet. Eight thousand miles away. Any idea of the deadline?”

  I admitted, “Can’t be long. We know that an American military mission abruptly vacated their sumptuous rooms across the way — in the Carlton Tower — earlier tonight. Others are getting the tip-off to get out of town.”

  Richter said, “We’re sitting ducks. So is everyone else.”

  Nesta said, “No duck remains sitting — for as long as it can fly’”

  I got up and yelled, “Concorde! It’s the only aircraft fast enough to give us a hope in hell! We have to acquire one, take a section of Pottersman’s mosaic, program it to cancel, an
d hook it up to the network that controls the Fleet.”

  Richter snapped, “And could you fly it? — even if we could get hold of one?”

  “Not a hope. But obviously there are people who can.”

  “People who can. All right. So on whose authority do they fly us there? Who do we go to for that? How do they land it on an aircraft carrier and how many bits of us will be left when its burning wreck sets fire to the carrier’s deck?”

  I said ludicrously, “We put an emergency call through to the British Navy.”

  “We do? I’m under surveillance from the Foreign Office; and the two of you will have been reported by the System as being hostile to NATO.”

  Nesta said, “We’re talking and we’re wasting time. Mega-death is staring us in the face and by now we could be on our way to Heathrow.”

  I said, “Where we don’t know whether there’s a Concorde anywhere near the place!”

  Nesta said, “We must try.”

  There was a five second pause. At the end of it the telephone blew out. It emitted a deafening squawk, then simply melted before our eyes.

  At the same time the hate-power went up and shot right off my own mental dial.

  I found myself with my hands round Nesta’s throat and I was murdering her. Her eyes were standing out on their sockets.

  Richter rushed across the room, yanked the telephone wire from the phone and held the bared ends of the wire against my head. Horrendously, I was conscious of the whole thing. I knew Nesta would be dead within another ten seconds, and I felt the more murderous for the thought.

  As the wires touched my head, I heard a series of terrible screams in my mind, followed by frightful crashes, as if my head was exploding.

  But in those few instants, one variant killed off the other inside me. For the war that now raged between the two was transmitted electronically to my own mosaic and a species instantly came to an end within my cranium.

  Nesta sagged, half-conscious, to the sofa.

  Almost the worst part was giving her the kiss of life when I was overcome with the guilt of having brought her so close to death.

  She breathed again more evenly and managed to croak some words. She had to say them three times over before I got their meaning. She said, “If you ever start to believe it was you that did that, Roger, I’ll cut you out of my will.”

  9

  “Guns? I’ll use no guns.”

  Even Richter seemed surprised. “Kepter, out there stands a Concorde loading up for take-off. Luck — for once — is with us. We need it all. It’s ours for the taking. How else will you manage?”

  I said, “Hijacking isn’t the way. It’s never once led to anything productive, whatever the motives of the hijackers. Don’t you think that some of those fanatics who’ve tried it have believed in their cause? We have to use persuasion. We have to get the crew on our side …”

  It interested me somewhat that Concorde was loading up with passengers at this time of night in any case. Noise Abatement rules normally preclude take-offs at such an hour. Yet there was no sign of panic; once again it seemed that perfectly ordinary people thought they were doing perfectly ordinary things.

  We were a huddled little group in the darkness near the Customs area beyond Terminal 3 at Heathrow. Because we didn’t know what to expect of ourselves, we had in fact come armed. I’d inherited an old service revolver and — more in haste than judgement — I’d grabbed it out of a drawer, together with some very ancient ammunition. My father’s old shot gun was the other weapon we’d brought; and it was in such bad condition I thought it unlikely we could fire it. Of course, none of us intended at any time to use weapons: and the probability is that the majority of ‘genuine’ hijackers — people who think they are solving something for some group or other never mean to use firearms either. But armed robbery of an aircraft is analagous to corporal punishment in schools — it’s an admission of defeat in advance.

  Nesta said, “Roger is right. We have to talk them into it. However hard it looks, we must use words.”

  Richter, incapable of sulking, flashed a quick little smile at us and said, “I’ve been in a few tough situations in my time. Today was the very first occasion when I’ve ever consciously harmed an innocent person in trying to get out of one. Don’t let’s repeat it. There just has to be another way” … a flick of a nervous smile; but the grin was really a comment on the frantic list of measures we needed to take before we could get what we wanted.

  He was saying, in effect, that without using threats we couldn’t win. “We have to explain to the Captain something so outside his experience that he’s liable to think we are insane. We then have to convince him that he must depart from his scheduled flight plan and instead of setting course for New York he must take the polar route to the Pacific. We have to talk him into turfing out the passengers and the cabin staff. He then has to face the almost certain prospect of ditching a supersonic aircraft in the ocean — It’s extremely unlikely we’ll find an island anywhere near the Sixth Fleet and even if we did what chance is there of discovering one with a conveniently-planted runway put there by magic in order to provide three desperate people with a safe means of arrival?”

  “Then the Captain has to work out where to refuel. Not only does he have to overfly Soviet Russia and Red China without being shot down or forced down and imprisoned if he’s that lucky; he has to get them to fill the tanks at breakneck speed and get us airborne when our destination doesn’t happen to include an airport but does happen to involve the United States Navy which is already lined up for nuclear attack. All that and more. How?”

  Nesta, silent all this time, said, “Let me go and talk to the crew.”

  I said, “How will you get through to the Customs Zone?”

  She was wearing the white jeans and couldn’t have been more conspicuous.

  She paused only to take a breath, then glanced down at Richter’s briefcase. “Let me borrow that.”

  He said, “For God’s sake don’t open it.” — He had more than one reason for that particular exhortation. One: it contained the only available unaffected crystal mosaic: he’d kept it isolated from the universal blow-out of the System and it still lived … The last time we’d inspected it in the car it was in fact still growing. It represented our only means of influencing the war room at sea. There, because of the satellite failure, those mosaic systems affecting the minds of the American top brass lurked in isolation — the only other known crystal network in existence. Now, Richter proposed to use our remaining supply of mosaic to neutralize it.

  Two: if Nesta were to release any mosaic on the flight deck of the Concorde now waiting on the apron she would be risking the contamination of all electronic equipment aboard as well as the minds and health of the crew. Though we had no means of knowing that they had not been affected already, we could at least be sure that any remnant of mosaic would have been knocked out in the widespread flashover.

  Nesta just nodded. She dashed up to the man on the gate and we could hear just odd words of a frantic interchange. “… Yes, I’m a doctor … Suspected case of smallpox … No, of course I haven’t had time to get a pass and I’m afraid I don’t carry credentials when I’ve just been called out of bed … By all means phone anyone you like, do that. But for God’s sake don’t keep me waiting while you do it. I trust you don’t want to be held responsible for the spread of an epidemic? …”

  *

  I should try and describe what had occurred between our departure from my flat and our arrival at the airport but I doubt whether my powers of narrative writing are up to it. I rather doubt whether anybody’s gift for words could begin to cover the ground. For one thing it happened so fast; and print lags the speed of the events it is there to describe. For another, the events themselves almost defy description because the act of describing something presupposes that some, at least, of the content is within the experience of the reader. Of course, it’s true to say that millions of you did experience it in a sens
e; but we were the people with the key to them and enjoyed the dubious privilege of being in the know. Ironically, since part of the action of the mosaics before being so abruptly wiped out was to numb people’s minds to what had really been going on ever since Spender poured neat hatred into an organism capable of amplifying it by a factor of millions, the abrupt demise of the silicon-virus tissue shot past the clock long before it could have any real meaning for those who had been numbed to it in the first place.

  So the only common ground I can use is the attempt I’ve already made to describe what went before. There are many loose ends; and these will only be accounted for when the research on Electronic Cancer has been completed. As things stand, most of the scientific effort has up to now gone into finding a safe means of extracting crystal lumps out of people’s brains without inflicting irreversible brain damage or — quite simply — death. In this, Melerick — the talented specialist we had so summarily dismissed as being steeped in established medical tradition and methodology had played a leading role, the moment he himself had recovered sufficiently he subsequently went to work on an entirely new method of surgery — part electrical, part chemical, and part psychosurgery. To begin with he would only allow experiments on himself, sometimes without the use of a general anaesthetic. There have been casualties and disappointments but progress has been made.

  But I am faced with having to anticipate the official report in trying to convey what happened in the Electronic War, which raged across world communications and lasted a total of about seven minutes. In its death-throes it made matters clear enough to those monitoring it just what kind of holocaust it proposed to leave behind for mankind in retribution. This act of revenge was stated on more than one teletype machine before the words became gibberish and the whole cancer died … the whole cancer, that is, except what remained for the final showdown in the Pacific. I won’t quote the teletyped message verbatim; it contains horrific obscenities and offers only total degradation of mankind’s own ability to carry on and replicate. It seems that the RNA/DNA actions of the virus used in symbiosis with the crystals somehow deviated so much from the normal transfer of genes and chromosomes across the reproductive helix that the mosaic community found organic substances such as semen utterly revolting. In this it is thought that the paranoia of the man Sale activated this revulsion to a degree I’d rather not place on record.