The Thinktank That Leaked

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Before we made a move, Nesta said one thing more. “You must promise me, Roger, not to try and help … not to try and help it. You understand? It knows. There are still recognizable human heads — some with the brains actually showing — and it knows! You must not try to do anything for it. Such suffering is beyond the means of mere mortals like us to succour. And it might pull you into itself. It might have such a crying need for human help that it can only take. You must not give. Remember, I saw what was protruding out of the sides of the that huge aircraft hoist. It had been lowered on top of them. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pity and love them, Roger. The hatred of the mosaics has transcended anything I imagined possible. The punishment inflicted here — through what they guessed we had done elsewhere — was to make men a travesty of the mosaics themselves, dissolve and bind them in the same way.” She suddenly vomited. It went on and on, the retching. Now, I could hold her. Her body was freezing cold. The shivers appalled me. Yet after a few seconds she spoke through the puke. “There’s not time to comfort me … We don’t know the settings on those clocks, down there. For all we know, it’s a world holocaust, all lined up and waiting …”

  I said uselessly, “Promise you’re all right? You won’t move from here? We must know where to find you, whatever we decide to do.”

  She nodded. “I won’t … I won’t add more to your worries, Roger. I’ll stay in here. And wait.”

  *

  There was only one possible thing to do when Richter and I found what the settings were on those terrifying dials in the War Room.

  Richter’s concentration was total. Had this not been so, my eyes would have strayed to the composite human tragedy that was the expression of the New Apocalypse. It was calling out for help. We could neither help it nor kill it. And as it squirmed in self-disgust at the atrocities committed against each soul that formed an integrated part of the whole, we could only convey to its writhing heads that shortly it would drown.

  Gently, Richter said to me, “About all this I want you to remember one thing only … even if you only live ten seconds longer than that agonized thing, and it is this: you must not hate yourself because your body and soul is intact when theirs are not. Misdirected guilt destroys not only the one who indulges it, but all those who live in its shadow. Whatever happens tonight, keep hold of that …”

  But there was work to do. It was Richter who put our commitment into words.

  “Kepter,” he said, “did you ever think in your blackest nightmares that one day you might have to sink an entire fleet? We cannot stop those warheads going off; but if they are deep enough under the ocean they will go off in all the wrong places.”

  “And just how the hell do we manage that?”

  “The mosaic inside my briefcase has grown. I took a very careful look at it a short while ago. It’s certainly big enough — and therefore intelligent enough — for me to program in exactly what is needed. We need a stand-alone computer — an uninfected one — and it’s got to be lashed up to the mosaic we’ve brought. Basically we have to do two things. The first we know we can do, because that’s what we did before: we polarize. The mosaic aboard this ship which controls the rest of the fleet has got to meet the same death as the main network based on land.”

  “And the second?”

  “We have to arrange for the contents of my briefcase to ensure that the scorpion stings itself to death in the other sense. Using conventional weapons — torpedoes — this Carrier has got to sink the rest of the convoy, then fire all the remaining fish — three at least — into its own carcass.”

  “And how do we get away?”

  Richter said expressionlessly, “We can’t.”

  I thought a bit. “There are boats. Some of them were actually used. Some of these men got away, we know that.”

  We knew this because our means of boarding had been via derricks that had already been lowered over the side.

  Richter shook his head. “Find me a boat that’s fast enough to escape one of the biggest undersea nuclear explosions in history and I’ll paddle it all the way.”

  “But we must try,” I said. “There is Nesta.”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “I know we shouldn’t have let her come, but we did.”

  “In this, Kepter, she is as much a soldier as we are. Many times she has been the one to guide us. Even now, just a few minutes ago, it was she who guessed we’d got outdated plans of the ship. Don’t reproach yourself. She’ll hate you for it.”

  I didn’t say anything to this. I couldn’t deny it, anyway. Nesta had almost fought physically to come on the Concorde and it was not for me to question her absolute autonomy.

  “How do we get hold of a computer that isn’t already infected?”

  He did manage a grim smile at this. “I wish all our problems were so easy to solve as that one. What we do is to cut any one of these processors free — isolate it but completely — then use a very small sliver of this …” he rapped his briefcase — “… to cause a flashover, as before. That cleans out the computer and makes it programmable. The rest is up to the contents of that program — plus the remaining crystal mosaic I’ve got here.”

  “Suppose,” I said, “that the species we brought with us somehow manages to find out what we’re actually using it for?”

  “I think it would only get suspicious if we tried to use it for neutralizing the warheads.”

  I said, “But there’s no way we can do that anyway.” — Without knowing how every single stage was clocked we would have almost certainly fired the weapons inadvertently onto the targets set if we’d attempted any such thing.

  Richter said, “The mosaic does not know that we realize what we cannot do.”

  “A subtle point, surely?”

  Richter replied, “But a crucial one. It doesn’t know what to expect, does it? Don’t forget, this mosaic came out of Pottersman. At the time I extracted it it knew all that we’d figured out up to that point — via the telephones, via the ‘Kissing Machine’ as you call her, via Spender, and via all the processors on the network — and most of all via the wretched creature — Geoffrey Sale — we visited at Orscombe.”

  “We blew out the system at Orscombe before we spoke to him.”

  “It would have recovered within minutes of our departure. We know that because otherwise it wouldn’t have retaliated so fast by effectively closing the London Clinic. In a few microseconds the mosaic inside Sale’s head would have reported the full conversation and the computers and mosaics concerned would have sifted, absorbed, sorted and assessed what it would mean in terms of our own actions. In other words, the mosaic inside my case already knows all there is to know bar the one thing nothing could know: the state of the floating hell we’re in now. And we didn’t know it either. Check so far?”

  “Check.”

  “Right. That’s a lot of sums for it to do in the few microseconds it survives during the internal genocide we bring about when we divide the two variants of the species. No computer in existence could swallow the amount of fresh data that our own mosaic could discover if it had the time, except for one simplex computation: if it learned, in — say — a nanosecond, that we were trying to disarm warheads it could easily do the sum in time because it knew all the time that they are there. It could react and fire them prematurely before we’d got through with our own plans. The whole thing is a matter of timing …

  “Finally, your comments on a getaway for the two of us and Nesta. That we have to leave, simply because we cannot leak a single fact to the mosaic that’s running this ship. If we got onto the radio and demanded an American or an Australian helicopter to pick us up the cat is out of the bag. This species cannot — unless directly connected to us — see or hear or sense. Use so much as one dot of the morse code and it goes straight to red alert. Am I right?”

  He was right. And I could have kicked him hard in the balls for it.

  *

  If I was left
scratching my head in perplexity at Richter’s plan of action I hope it wasn’t because I didn’t want to go too closely into it. It’s so easy to whitewash oneself after the event and state that ‘in context’ my actions were justified and ‘it’s all very well for people to use hindsight later and question my true assessment of the situation.’ The stark fact is that an action is that same action whenever you take it and any assessment of that action holds just as true at the time as it does fifty years later. As you will have seen, from the extracts I have printed from the draft White Paper, it is the habit of most politicians to somehow extract themselves from the realities of the events they were supposed to control by a wide range of lies, deceit, rationalizing, buck-passing and protests that, after all, they were only obeying orders. I’d rather live with the guilt, personally, of knowing that I had more than a sneaking suspicion that Richter was about to take terrible risks with his own brain and his own life; and that in telling me he’d ‘rather get on with it alone’ and sending me back to the Rear-Admiral’s day cabin where Nesta was resting he was aware — albeit with his usual humanitarian leniency and charitableness — that, somewhere at the back of my mind, I had decided he was an old man and therefore more expendable than I was. A terrible thing to say about oneself — some might think — until one considers the alternative, which is to spoof oneself, forever after, that one acted out of faith hope and charity and had not a moment’s doubt. It’s not true. My doubts began when he started talking about programming a ‘stand alone computer’ — that is, a computer used for calculations on its own and not one connected to any other equipment. Anyone who had witnessed— as I did — the sprawling mass of intergrowing human tissue, hideously rearranged in a way that in any other situation only a schizophrenic could even imagine, would realize at once that the multiple lattice of crystal and mucus which tied every one circuit to every other circuit was quite impossible to cut away … it was a surgical impossibility.

  ‘… Misdirected guilt destroys not only the one who indulges it, but all those who live in its shadow. Whatever happens tonight, keep hold of that …’

  Open to interpretation, for sure. ‘Whatever happens tonight …’ — There was the key.

  Very well. For the sake of others, for the sake of Nesta. I would interpret it.

  I chose to believe him because I wanted to. I wanted Nesta to get away alive and I valued my own skin above Richter’s. Condemn me if you will, O God of the Perfect; but at least I choose to face my remorse and somehow live with it. As Nesta has said since, “At least nobody else can possibly know how they would have behaved in a similar situation.” — Nice and practical, that. She doesn’t think she’s a Goddess who has the prerogative of letting me off my own hook.

  When I got back to the day cabin she looked better. She had regained some of her colour and, finding the drink cupboard, had allowed herself a stiff brandy. The one I poured myself was even stiffer. She glanced at me curiously and said, “Unusual for you, surely?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  So even then, she suspected. It wasn’t unusual for a man in that situation to knock back alcohol; it was her way of expressing the feeling that I had something on my mind I didn’t want to know too much about.

  We waited in there, and I remember we talked a lot about the species we’d been fighting all along. She said some memorable things:

  “If God created Man in his own image, all I can say is Man has run amok a bit since then. The mosaic species was created in Man’s image, and it’s not very nice. Don’t let’s pick out one individual — that fatty-degenerate slob at Orscombe. He’s just one of us; he couldn’t possibly have done all this. The mosaic reflects one facet of what we really are, Roger; and don’t you find it interesting to compare how we defeated the land-based mosaics with the all too similar fact of racial hatred? All we did was to divide one species by picking on one factor that was not quite the same — one was basically positive and the other was negative. What’s the difference between that and pitting black against white? We just found one feature that was different; equally there might have been others. It doesn’t matter which one you choose; when Hate predominates, you can usually find an excuse. Skin pigmentation and the exact electrical functioning of a semi-conductor … the difference between p-n-p and n-p-n … these are parables of what we humans do to each other.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, tell me: is there any difference whatsoever in the way the two sorts of transistor work, or what they can do for electronics?”

  “Absolutely none. In drawing the circuit diagrams you simply reverse the signs.”

  “And are the two types incompatible in any one piece of electronic equipment?”

  “On the contrary, the fact that they are different in one way only makes circuit design extremely efficient and easy — much more so than it would be if you were stuck with only one type, without the contrast provided by the other. All we had to do was to give p-n-p an excuse to hit back at n-p-n — it seldom matters what the excuse is and it seldom matters on what basis you decide to discriminate between two slightly different versions of the same creature … exactly as you say.”

  Nesta said, “I can think of a race war which makes as much sense as any other: why don’t we start one between people who are left-handed and people who are right-handed? It makes just as much sense as any other sort.” Without any change in her tone she asked, “Are we going to get away from here in time?”

  “It doesn’t seem very likely,” I said.

  “Funny,” said Nesta. “Traditionally, people are supposed either to go into a frightful panic, or to copulate wildly until the big bang. I don’t feel like either. I just want to talk, over a brandy, and — perhaps — pray a little? Are you standing there with a king-size erection?”

  “No. I’m listening to you, and praying like you.”

  She said, “I feel contented, Roger. Does that sound extraordinary? Does it sound mad?”

  “No. It sounds like the words of someone who isn’t conditioned into copybook reactions. There are better times for going through the procreating bit than when you are probably going to die. I don’t believe the fables, anyway. I think they’re sham.”

  *

  “Nesta! Christ Almighty!”

  “I was nearly asleep.”

  “You mean you were preparing to die. Like I was. We’d given up. No sex, no panic, just doom. So we stood there sipping brandies and saying we were different from everyone else. And yes, I have got a kingsize stand — but I’m not going to express all it means just yet. Don’t you realize where we are, Nesta? We’re on an aircraft carrier! There are planes … You know, things with wings. They fly, Nesta. What the hell are we doing preparing our tombs?”

  She sprang to her feet. “Where are they?”

  “Obviously, down below. Where the hoist goes.”

  “You realize —”

  “— I realize what I can’t avoid seeing. But whoever … whatever is crushed under that hoist, they’re dead.”

  “It won’t be pleasant.”

  “It will be quite nice not to go down with the ship.”

  “Will it be possible to raise the hoist?”

  “Richter will know that.” Double-think had conveniently entered my conscience even at that stage. “First, let’s see if there’s something down there I can fly.”

  We ran all the way — and it was a hell of a long ship. Our footsteps sounded like multiple gunshots echoed by all that steel.

  The personnel elevator was out of action so we had to descend via a long, winding companionway.

  And on F Deck there was such a profusion of aircraft that I was dazed by the spectacle.

  Nesta shouted, “But why didn’t more people get away by air?”

  “Probably programmed by the mosaic into thinking they couldn’t fly.”

  “Well, you can.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “These are fast, he
avy aircraft which are normally launched from a steam catapult. I don’t know how to work one; there are no men to help us manhandle one of these things onto it; I’ve never done a deck take-off in my life and there’s no instruction book issued with these toys.”

  “Isn’t that a helicopter over there?”

  “Never flown one.”

  “Well, surely for God’s sake we aren’t going to be cheated out of getting out of here now. Why didn’t we think of it?”

  “We weren’t meant to.”

  “But Richter says the mosaics inside us are dead.”

  “We also worked out that the brain did not operate one hundred per cent without them, once they have taken hold.”

  “Then,” she said, “our brains are beginning to recover.”

  “I’m not so sure. If I tried to get you and Richter off in one of these things I should have my head examined.”

  “None of them any good?”

  “They’re for specialist pilots who are trained until they practically bust. We’d simply end up in the drink. You can’t use these things off the short run you’d get just through rolling along the deck. And I couldn’t begin to fly one. These are for real pilots.”

  “So are 747s.”

  I said dryly, “You’d have a job getting a 747 into the air off the deck up top. And as far as I know they don’t make a catapult quite big enough.”

  She said, “What about trying the next deck up? I saw some more aircraft there when we came down.”

  We dashed up the companionway to E Deck.

  And there, before us, was a perfectly beautiful observation aeroplane. Probably built for aerial photography, it was a single-engined, propeller-driven job. It was easy to see it was not rigged for catapult launching; and since what comes down must go up — at least in aerodynamics — it should be possible, I thought, to do a normal take-off along the deck.

  Nesta called, “How many seats?”

  I looked. “Only two. But we can squeeze three in, somehow.”

  — Again, that horrible, oppressive sensation of deceit. Did I know? Had I allowed Richter to calmly set about sacrificing himself when I might have thought of a way of helping him solve all those problems some other way?