Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel

by Rucker, Rudy

  “Epic views of the ancient cliff-dwellings,” added Peter, driving along. “Very spiritual. People say you can feel the ghosts.” He glanced back at Alan and Susan in the back seat, sitting with their red can of gas on the floor between them. “How much further is your car?”

  “Take the next left,” improvised Alan. “We’re on that side-street.”

  “Okay...” said Peter, pulling slowly into the snowy lane. “But I don’t see any car? Or tire-tracks?”

  “Now,” said Alan.

  Alan and Susan grew out their forefingers and sank them into the backs of Peter and Polly Pfaff’s downy necks, with Alan linked to Peter and Susan to Polly. At Alan’s direction, the car pulled over to side of the lane and stopped. They weren’t in the direct view of any houses.

  Rather than fully skugging the pair, they used their bio-hookup to soak up the two ski-bums’ memories. A whole life in a minute.

  “Give us your wallets,” said Alan.

  Moving sluggishly, with blank eyes, they handed back their wallets.

  “Watch this,” Alan told Susan. Using his left hand, he opened his leather coat and khaki shirt and laid the Pfaffs’ Colorado driver’s licenses on his belly-skin. The patterns transferred over to Alan’s flesh, as if stamped on. The skin thickened up in two rectangles. Alan peeled them off like scabs. Both sides of the documents had been copied.

  He handed Susan her new ID. If not exactly paper, the cunningly textured skin felt close enough to it. Alan copied the skiers’ Social Security cards as well. And now he put the originals back into the wallets and passed them forward.

  “We release them now?” said Susan. She and Alan still had their fingers in the backs of their hostages’ necks.

  “Yes,” said Alan. “But before we unplug, we tell them to sleep for half an hour, and to wake with no memory of meeting us. They pulled into this side street for a nap. We’ll let them think they bought the can of gas as a backup supply. A prudent precaution.”

  It was an easy walk to the entrance to the Los Alamos National Labs, whose main entrance was about a half mile further along the main road. On the way, Alan and Susan made themselves blonde and blue-eyed—to match what it said on the new driver’s licenses. At least the licenses didn’t have pictures, so they wouldn’t have to change their features again. Alan still looked like his unforgettable first heartthrob Christopher Morcom; Susan still looked like her fellow electronic composer Bebe Barron. But blonde.

  “Remember that we’re a married couple now,” said Susan. “Mr. and Mrs. Pfaff.”

  “I don’t care to be married,” said Alan. “Brother and sister! Cousins!”

  “No, we’re married,” said Susan, teasing him a little. “That’s what our records say, if anyone looks them up. And its what the memories we’ll be showing off say, too. I’m such a Polly Pfaff. Ski, ski, ski.”

  “Right-o,” said Alan, taking a breath. “We’ll slip into our borrowed personas, giving off the wholesome scent of ski wax and fresh rye bread.” One of the Los Alamos National Lab’s buildings was visible up ahead, a brick structure with a glass and steel walkway along one side.

  The LANL gate guard directed them towards a different building, a faceless concrete auditorium. For now, Alan was no longer thinking his own thoughts; he was fully absorbed in being Peter. It was a life-or-death imitation game.

  He had a rough moment when he saw a tall man in an asinine hat leaning against an ambulance outside the auditorium entrance. Although Alan wouldn’t consciously formulate the recognition till later, at a subliminal level he knew this to be a man who’d tried to kill him, and that the creature inside the ambulance was—

  Alan threw his whole soul into the Peter Pfaff persona. “Nice slope over there,” he said to Susan, pointing a mountain peak in the middle distance. “We’ll earn some bucks here, and go ski-camping for a week.”

  “I’d love to meet some of the local Indians while we’re on the mesa,” said Susan in a her sappiest tone. “Maybe join a kiva ceremony? Why’s there an ambulance?”

  “Not for us!” said Alan, squeezing Susan’s hand. “We’re tiptop. Let’s go in and see about a gig.” In his role as Peter, he was speaking the American idiom.

  They entered an echoing lobby with a few tables. It was by no means a mob scene. Less than a dozen applicants had appeared. They looked like housewives and mechanics.

  “The job you want is tape puncher,” a rangy, talkative woman told Susan. “That’s what I do. It’s like being a typist. You look like you’d be fun to work with. What we do is poke holes in paper tapes that tell MANIAC how to act. The test is over there.” She pointed to a machine with a small keyboard. “I’m Tilda. Come on. I’m recruiting you.”

  “Okay,” said Susan. “I’m Polly Pfaff.”

  In his less than scholarly Peter Pfaff persona, Alan felt no confidence about being able to punch the tape reliably. “What are the other jobs?” he asked the chatty Tilda. “I’m Polly’s husband.”

  “You might go for tube tech,” said Tilda. “It means you run around the back of the MANIAC changing radio tubes when they burn out. The test for that one’s inside the auditorium.”

  “Okay,” said Alan. “See you later, Polly.”

  It was interesting inside the auditorium. Rather than exposing the delicate and highly classified MANIAC’s machinery to every ham-handed job applicant, the engineers had decorated the stage with a rickety array of colored lights. The flickering bulbs were red, yellow, green and blue. The assemblage gave the concrete auditorium a festive, holiday air.

  As Alan watched the blinking lights, he noticed an interesting flow of forms, as if on an illuminated nightclub sign—although the patterns were more like twirling paisleys than like, say, leg-kicking showgirls or flying champagne corks.

  “Tube tech test?” inquired an engineer with a clipboard, walking up the aisle to greet him. A second engineer was down on the stage, a silhouette against the flowing patterns.

  “Yeah,” said Alan.

  The man handed Alan a shoebox holding some small colored lightbulbs. “The idea is to keep the network on. It’s a complex circuit. When one of the bulbs fails, some of the others go black. And we’ll be timing how quickly you can figure out which bulb is dead. We’ll do three runs.”

  “I used to fix my Oma’s Christmas lights in Denver,” said Alan, running his Peter Pfaff routine.

  “Good for you,” said the engineer, setting down his clipboard. “No peeking now.” He cupped his two hands over Alan’s eyes. His fingers were pleasantly warm. “Zap it, Joe!” he called.

  When the engineer uncovered Alan’s eyes a moment later, he saw a wobbly, irregular blotch of darkness in the flowing patterns of lights. He hurried down to the stage and got started, reasoning as well as he could while maintaining his protective mental simulation of Peter Pfaff. Joe, the junior engineer whose job it was to screw up the circuit before each run, was sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling.

  Seen close up, the network was more complicated than Alan had realized. Each bulb was in a small fixture holding four bulbs in all. A rat’s nest of cables tied the fixtures together, and each of the fixtures was about six inches from its closest neighbors.

  The fixtures were continually turning on and off, sometimes red, sometimes blue and so on. Waves of color jittered across the network like nested scrolls, with the elusive zone of outage a dark cloud against a spinning sky.

  By the time Alan found the dead bulb, he had flop-sweat rolling down his ribs. He went back up into the auditorium and let the man with the clipboard cover his eyes again, while skinny Joe put another dead bulb into the system. The second run went faster than the first.

  At the end of his superb third run, Alan paused on stage, staring contemplatively at the melding patterns, letting a little corner of his Alan Turing mind begin working on the question of what algorithm was being used. It seemed very like an activator-inhibitor rule.

  Right about then he noticed a third LANL eng
ineer—a man in a suit sitting in the shadows at the back of the stage, twiddling a little console board of controllers, perhaps exploring the possibilities of the network’s behavior. The shadowed man looked familiar. But—still aware of the skugsniffer outside—Alan didn’t allow himself to think too deeply about it. He turned away from the secret master of the network and gazed up at the engineer with the clipboard.

  “How’d I do?” Alan called.

  “You’re in,” said the man, beckoning. “Just let me copy the info off your ID, and we’ll get you a gate pass. Your first shift can be tomorrow, 1 pm to 9 pm. We’re running around the clock, three shifts a day.”

  Out in the lobby, Alan found that Susan, too, had done well. She was a tape puncher, with the same work hours as him.

  The pressure of imitating Peter and Polly Pfaff was so strong that they didn’t talk much until they were back downtown in Los Alamos, at the Big Bow Wow, out of the skugsniffer’s range. Tina had brought them coffee, cheeseburgers, and apple pie.

  “I assume you realize who those people at the gate were?” said Alan.

  “The asshole in the cowboy hat was Dick Hosty,” said Susan. “Right? And he killed my husband with a flamethrower. We’re going to get him, Alan. We’ll pay him back. He’s going to die.”

  “Of course,” said Alan in a soothing tone. “No worries.”

  “Who was the skugsniffer?” asked Susan. “I couldn’t get a read, and I was scared to be too obvious.”

  “Roland Gill,” said Alan. “That was the FBI agent who I skugged in Holly Beach. He was almost a friend of mine. Poor Gill.”

  “Why are we screwing around inside LANL anyway?” demanded Susan. “Why don’t you get a gun a shoot Hosty right now? Or sic Burroughs and Naranjo on him. Those guys don’t care.”

  “Think bigger picture,” said Alan. “I need to worm so far into LANL that I meet with their top brain. And that’s probably Stan Ulam. Have I ever mentioned him to you? No? Anyway, LANL is cobbling up a nuclear weapons project against the skugs. It’s our role as skuggers to prevent that.”

  “I’m amazed I got hired there at all,” said Susan, her mood shifting as she ate her pie. “I don’t know anything that they care about.”

  “Stan Ulam,” repeated Alan, his mind running on its own track. “That’s who was sitting in the shadows at the back of the stage! I was so busy imitating Peter Pfaff that I didn’t realize it. Yes, yes, of course. It’s as I said. Ulam is the chief designer. You have to help me meet him, Susan. It’ll be natural. I’m keeping his machine in trim, and you’re turning his code into holes punched in tape.”

  “I just wonder where Vassar went,” said Susan, staring out the window at the rolling, sunny fields of snow.

  Chapter 15: Nonlinear Feedback

  It took Susan less than an hour to learn her job—which was converting the head designer’s handwritten instructions into punched tape. She used a nice little tape puncher with about a dozen keys. Her new friend Tilda worked next to her, showing her the ropes.

  Their overseer was a bland, doughy woman named Dora. Dora wore colorless Army-issue spectacles and a hair bun. Three hard-featured younger women filled out the roster. Susan was the only new hire on this shift.

  After Susan had converted her first page of written code into rows of holes on a small spool of paper tape, Tilda smiled and told her to feed the tape into a reader beside her desk. The reader scanned through the tape, one row of holes at a time, then initiated a frantic burst of activity among some other machines—well-worn metal devices that created subsidiary rolls of punched tape on their own, spooling the tapes to and fro according to some hidden logic.

  “Dora says the feds used machines like this for the last census,” Tilda told Susan. “I always think of falling dominos. One thing leads to another.”

  “I like it a lot in here,” said Susan, savoring the aural filigree of clicks and clacks, the tapping of the solenoids, the hum of the rollers. She felt proud for having initiated this cascade. “I wish I’d brought my audio recorder.”

  “You’re a musician?” exclaimed Tilda. “Sister! I play fiddle in a western band—Diamonds And Spades. We do weddings, funerals, and shitkicker BBQs.”

  “I’m more a composer than a performer,” said Susan. “Not that I write out notes and clefs and all that razzamatazz. I do—acousmatics? Means I tape tasty noises and paste them up.”

  “This isn’t a coffee klatch, girls,” said Dora, suddenly looming over them. “Punch more tape.”

  “Sure thing, boss,” said Tilda. “But tell Polly here what’s going on. Polly punched her first spool of tape, and fed it into the reader, and the whole room went batshit. Why for? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

  Dora solemnly scanned over Susan’s tape. “This tape told the tabulators and the unit record machines to create a tape that’s a ten-thousand-line model of a hollow ball,” she said. “A spherical shell.” And now she widened her bulging eyes, as if to look more commanding. “Back to work! No lollygagging.”

  “I’m, ah, also wondering if the MANIAC can make music,” ventured Susan.

  “I’m sure Dr. Ulam can answer that,” said Dora. “When he has time to talk to you. For now please don’t bother him. Dr. Ulam is brilliant, but he’s very distractible.”

  “Not that he ever talks to us anyway,” put in Tilda. “He liked to go into the machine room. Warms his hands at the holy vacuum tubes.”

  Dora strode across the room to ride herd on the other three. “Pick up the pace, girls. Mankind’s future is in your hands!” The young women met this with jeers and giggles. One of them made a jacking-off gesture. Quietly Susan folded and pocketed the hand-written sheet of instructions that she’d just encoded.

  Over in the MANIAC’s room, Alan’s job was slow-paced—until it wasn’t. He was to sit on a stool behind the MANIAC cabinets not doing much of anything until one of the two engineers running the machine would yell something like “Failure in sector Yankee-Foxtrot.”

  And then Alan would have to find and replace the bad tube. The MANIAC wasn’t more than ten feet long—and the rear panels on the cabinets were open. He had easy access to the innards. But the thing had over two thousand tubes, and even with the sector advice, Alan would have to decide among at least four or five possible culprits.

  The guys running the machine were engineers whom Turing might ordinarily have befriended—one of them was Joe, who’d been helping with the job test yesterday. But they weren’t interested in talking to Alan. He was a pawn, a tool, an inferior. Alan remembered his own inability to properly see the low-ranking techs when he’d been in power at Manchester.

  Time dragged as the late afternoon shift wore into night. Alan would have liked to be scheming about how he might meet Ulam and find out the details of the big anti-skug project being set into motion here. But, more so than Susan, Alan was cautious, even paranoid, about thinking his natural thoughts. He kept worrying that Hosty’s skugsniffer might direct his attention inward to the occupants of the lab—and ferret Alan out. Not that there were any signs of that.

  Staring blankly at the gently glowing thermionic tubes, awaiting the next circuit failure, Alan drifted into the trance of an invisible man. And that’s when he saw Vassar again.

  In the snowstorm on the mesa, Vassar had been a fluttering rhombus, vague at the edges of Alan’s field of perception. But now the ghost was center stage. He resembled a meter-wide manta ray, with lambent wings of the same brightness and tint as the filaments of the vacuum tubes. The long cord of the ray’s tail led deep into the guts of the MANIAC.

  “Wake up, spaceman,” teeped Vassar. “I’m back. Can you get me in touch with Susan?”

  “Failure in Sector Romeo-Zulu!” called one of the engineers just then, and Alan sprang to work. When he had a moment to think again, Vassar was gone. Perhaps Vassar had by now found Susan on his own.

  Alan’s and Susan’s shifts were over at 9 pm. The LANL security was quick to herd them and the other workers out the gates. The two c
aught a ride to the sketchy, meager core of Los Alamos.

  Once they were alone, Alan told Susan about seeing Vassar. Susan hadn’t seen Vassar herself, but she told Alan what she’d heard about Ulam. They grabbed some sopaipillas and chili verde at the Big Bow Wow. Alan was very interested in the instruction sheet that Susan had bagged—he claimed he could reconstruct the system’s whole programming language from these few lines.

  “I’ve a knack for these things,” he told Susan. “Like a paleontologist modeling a brontosaurus from a tail bone.”

  After their meal, they headed back to the granny cottage, bringing some take-out food for Bill Burroughs, in case he was awake.

  Bill was more than awake—he was fully wired, snapping his limbs like a marionette, going full bore on his memoir. He’d set up a typewriter on the kitchen table. His output pages were scattered across the table and the floor.

  “I’m a soft machine,” exulted Bill. “A meat teletype from Atlantis.”

  Alan found it sexy to see his boyfriend writing. He went over and gave Bill a reckless kiss on the mouth. Delicious. “How far along are you, dear?”

  “Jumping around,” said Bill, teeping his pleasure at Alan’s attentions. “One hard pop per page. Right now we’re skugging hicks at nowhere airstrips.”

  “And—are you finding your inner skug of use?” asked Alan. He was still trying to decide whether his parasites actually provided a true creative boost.

  “The inner light,” said Bill in a sardonic tone. He stretched his hands upward as if towards a blazing sun, then ran trembling fingers across his face. “Wearing the Happy Cloak!” Now he paused and shook his head. “Why do amateurs always think that artists depend on drugs, or demonic possession, or biocomputational implants? It’s all me, Alan, straight or high. But I will grant that my skugs are quite encouraging. It views my chronicle as a gospel. Exodus perhaps, or the Book of Revelation.”