Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel

by Rucker, Rudy

  “Have you seen Vassar here?” interrupted Susan. “Alan saw him at LANL.”

  “I was writing about his ghost today,” said Bill, pointing at some pages that had ended up in the far corner of the kitchen. “In my deathless prose, your man burns more brightly than ever before. Be a dear and put my pages into some kind of order.”

  “Kiss my ass,” said Susan amiably.

  “We’re ready to bunk down,” said Alan. “And, Bill, if you’d care to join me for a tussle, I’d be more than—”

  “No time!” cried Burroughs, leaning over his typewriter like a race-car driver at the wheel. “Further communications incoming.”

  “I envy you,” said Alan. “I’m feeling dull as dog meat.” He set the bag of food from the Big Bow Wow beside Bill’s typewriter. “Burnt offerings for the high scribe.”

  “You’re kind,” said Bill, looking up, his eyes frank and mild. “I like that.”

  Alan felt a pulse of teep harmony. “I’ll sit with you for a bit before bed.”

  “But not too long,” cautioned Bill. “I don’t want any sense that you’re silently petitioning for preferential treatment in my Akashic records.”

  Alan laughed and got himself a glass of juice.

  Alone in her bed, Susan was lulled by the nested rhythms of the typewriter keys, the ding of the bell, the thunk of the carriage return, and the ratcheting swoop when Bill scrolled in a fresh sheet of paper.

  All the while, she stayed focused on the idea of Vassar—summoning him, on the verge of of sleep. And then he was before her: a large, translucent manta ray. His tail led to the socket in the wall. His voice in her head was clearer than before, more energetic.

  “Hey, babe.”

  “Why did you leave me?” teeped Susan. “I thought maybe you’d gone up to heaven. Or that you’d—fallen apart.”

  “I’ve been hanging with one of those local cliff dwellers. The ghost of an ancient Tewa Indian. I call him Xurt. He looks like a raven, but with some feathers falling out. He’s been dead for five centuries in those caves. He’s hungry and he’s pissed off. We’re helping each other. I want to get even with Dick Hosty. And he wants to stop those war-pigs from building a monster bomb in his canyon.”

  “Bomb?”

  “The army calls it a V-bomb. Project Utopia. Xurt and I found a way to follow the war-pigs’ info trails into their sty.”

  “You mean the Los Alamos Labs? Where Alan and I are working?”

  “Xurt and I made a nest in their giant computer. I’m like Aladdin in his cave. I’m branching out from there, drawing energy from the circuits of all Los Alamos. The computer, the phone systems, even the power lines. Xurt digs the hook-ups. He wants to haunt the whole lab.” Vassar flexed the winged delta of his body. “Me, I’m setting the stage for the takedown.”

  “Of Hosty?”

  “If Alan has the guts to help me, Dick Hosty is going to die.” Vassar flickered and was gone. And the weary Susan was asleep.

  Bill wrote all night, alone in the kitchen. At dawn he gathered up his pages to shuffle and reshuffle them. Gradually a stable configuration emerged. On a whim he wrote The Apocalypse According to Willy Lee across the top of the first page.

  Bill felt drained and shaky, as if seeing the world through a layer of plate glass. Finishing any project was horrible—like driving off a cliff at a hundred miles per hour. First came the abrupt come-down, and then the immediate worry that the work wasn’t as good as it had seemed while he was in medias res.

  This come-down was particularly harsh. Bill was was seeing blurs in his perception, like trails and smears when he turned his head. Even the modest sounds of Alan waking up and showering had an unpleasant boom and drag. Should he load up on those soothing endorphins from the Man within? No—that was starting to feel like being given brainwash meds in a psych ward.

  Alan strode into the kitchen, chipper in his boyish body and, truth be told, too British to bear. “You look all in, Bill,” he fluted. “Is the masterpiece done?”

  “You sound like a magnetic tape that’s being dragged at irregular speeds past the read-head,” said Bill irritably. “Horrible.”

  “I suspect you’ve overdosed on your endogenous neurotransmitters,” said Alan, his kind face filled with concern. “You need a nice lie-down, Bill.”

  “Don’t try to nurse me!” Bill felt a sudden and deep revulsion with his current status. He’d been mutated by a slug and he’d fallen into a sexual relationship with the parasite’s designer. He’d followed the stooge back to small-town America, and now this new lover was playing footsie with the government pigs.

  “Perhaps you’d feel better if you phoned your family in Florida?” said the maddening Turing. “You mother and little Billy would love to hear from you.”

  “Fuck that sound,” spat Bill. And then he felt ashamed of his coldness. His voice cracked. “Why can’t writing be enough? Why are you physically coming on to me?”

  Now Susan was awake too, standing in the door of her room. Susan, Alan and Bill. Three zombies.

  “I want out of here!” yelled Bill. He snatched up the phone and dialed Allen Ginsberg’s number in San Francisco. Thanks god he knew it by heart. The phone rang for quite some time, and finally Ginsberg answered, sleepy but alert. It was maybe 4 am out there.

  “Make this good,” intoned Ginsberg, right there in the moment. “I’m having a drunken night in my house with a boy.”

  “It’s Bill. You have to rescue me.” While saying this, Burroughs shot a hostile look at Turing and Susan. Teaching them a lesson. He felt spiteful as a toad. “I’m in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Imprisoned by religious fanatics.”

  “Cultists?” asked Ginsberg, mildly interested. “Any Peyote?”

  “No, man, these are mutants. They implanted a new organ in me.”

  “Are you high?”

  “I’ve been up all night writing a memoir, Allen. Get me out of here today. I’m behind enemy lines.”

  “Long road, Bill. Los Alamos where they build the bombs?”

  “New bomb on the way. The V-bomb.”

  “I’d dig seeing a test,” said Ginsberg. “Intolerable light and radiance, and afterwards the grey world is a ghost, with the juice sizzled away. Maybe I can ask Neal to drive me out. He’s on a tear. Entangled with a madwoman. He needs a break.”

  “Cassady? That motor-mouth Okie? Don’t drive, Allen, take a plane. I’ll pay. I’m fat with kale. Gangland deals in Mexico.”

  “Neal’s not an Okie, Bill. That’s just an accent he finds amusing. You’re so jealous of Neal. Open your heart.”

  “All right, I’ll pay Neal’s ticket too, Mother Superior. Anyway, I’m young now. Irresistible. You lowlifes rent a car in Santa Fe. I’m in Los Alamos in the granny cottage behind the house of Sue Stook the vet’s. She has a statue of horse out front. If you pass the Big Bow Wow, you’ve gone too far.”

  “Smallville,” said Ginsberg. “The town where Hiroshima was born! Strange ancient America.”

  “I want out of here, Allen. Before they inculcate me into the Higher Mysteries. They’ll trepan my skull, shave my balls, play the thigh-bone trumpets and drag me up the ziggurat. Maybe you bring me a dime bag of junk?”

  “We’ll chant, Bill. It’ll fry your hot dog for fair. I’ve learned to overlap the short and the long breaths.” A boy’s voice interrupted Ginsberg, and he ended the call in laughter. “We’re riding to the rescue, Captain Burroughs.”

  With Bill as agitated as he was, Susan and Turing left the house early. They stopped by the Big Bow Wow.

  “I saw Vassar last night,” Susan announced. “You and I didn’t really get a chance to talk or teep yet today. Thanks to that wacko Burroughs.”

  “He’s gone spare,” said Alan. “I fear I’m not enough for him. I’m a boring wonk. Not a writer.” Alan sighed and shook his head, crestfallen. “So what did Vassar tell you?”

  “You’re not boring, Alan. You’re the archenemy. Give yourself some credit.”

  “
Archenemy?” said Alan, slightly puzzled. “Oh, you mean my skugs. I’ve started taking them for granted, rather.”

  “World leaders definitely view you as the archenemy,” insisted Susan. “Anyway. The main thing Vassar told me is that LANL is building a bomb against the skugs in that canyon between here and the mesa where Ricky Red Dog lives. The V-bomb. Project Utopia.”

  “Those lights we saw when we where lost in the storm,” mused Alan. “That was the bomb site. Why V-bomb? And how would Burroughs know?”

  “Not sure about that,” said Susan. “At first I thought Burroughs had teeped the name from me. But there’s that vision he had when he was dead in Mexico. He saw something in heaven?”

  “God knows all,” intoned Turing. “Very strange if any of that religious bosh proves out to be true.” As so many times before, he thought of his lost love Christopher Morcom. Safe in heaven dead? Waiting for him? For now, Alan himself was wearing Chris’s face.

  “You better make your move on Ulam today,” said Susan, showing him the designer’s handwritten instructions again. “Make a plan, Alan. We can’t just be reacting to events. We have to get Hosty.”

  “Dora said this was the code for a spherical shell?” asked Alan, looking at the instructions.

  “Her very words,” said Susan, mopping up syrup with her last bit of French toast. She signaled the waitress for seconds.

  “Presumably the shell is the shape of the charge they’re going to use in this new bomb,” said Alan. “This V-bomb. They’re simulating the explosion on the MANIAC. Trying to predict how it’ll behave. And if these particular handwritten instructions do all that…” His voice trailed off and he was quiet for a few minutes.

  The clattering, humdrum diner faded away. Alan was where he most liked to be, in the land of pure abstractions. And now the answers came into his head. He understood how the computational patterns were tethered to the little knobs of the symbols. With wry amusement, he saw a simple way to throw a monkey-wrench into the MANIAC.

  With his pen moving as rapidly and evenly as a mechanical plotter, Alan inscribed twelve lines of code on the back-side of Susan’s sheet of instructions. He read them over one, twice, three times. No margin for error.

  “So you want me to punch these onto a tape?” asked Susan, in tight teep synch with him now.

  “Right. And this first line ensures that when you feed the code into the reader, the signals go directly over to the MANIAC. Without printing out any intermediary tapes.”

  “And then what?” asked Susan.

  “I meet Ulam,” said Alan.

  Sure enough, around three in the afternoon, the MANIAC went into a frenzy. Its lights flashed with rising intensity; its tape spools whined at a frenetic speed. So viciously crafted was Alan’s logic knot that Joe the engineer had to cut off the computer’s main power switch.

  Five minutes later, Stan Ulam appeared. Like the other men, he wore a jacket and tie. He was nearly bald, with thoughtful wrinkles, a large nose, and a slight smile.

  “What’s up, Joe? Why has the shit hit the fan?” Although Ulam had a noticeable Polish accent, he made the most of the American idioms he knew.

  “A problem with the program, Stan,” said the skinny engineer at the controls. “I can’t quite nail it down. I fetched a copy of the program tape.”

  Alan piped up from his stool beside the tube cabinets. “An endless loop, I’ll wager. A jump to a previous program point. An infinitely nested recursion.”

  “Advice from the peanut gallery?” said Ulam, mildly amused. “Who do you think you are, Mr. Tube Tech?”

  “I’m, ah, Peter Pfaff. I don’t have any formal degrees, but mathematics and computer science are hobbies of mine.”

  “Computer science,” said Ulam, as if the phrase left a bad taste in his mouth. “A discipline that explicitly calls itself a science is a pretender. Social science. Political science. Military science. And car science for the grease monkeys in the garage.”

  “Ah, but remember Turing’s use of the Halting Problem to solve Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem,” said Alan smoothly. “That’s science about computers, Dr. Ulam.”

  “Your tube tech is speaking always this way?” said Ulam, turning to the two engineers at the controls. He held his hands stretched out to his sides like a comedian delivering a punch line.

  “He only started here yesterday, Dr. Ulam,” said Joe, who was rapidly flipping through the MANIAC’s program tapes. “He never said anything at all so far.”

  “There’s the glitch!” cried in the other engineer, who was looking at the paper tape over Joe’s shoulder “A bad jump and an endless loop.” He scowled at Alan. “Suspicious.”

  “I made a simple deduction,” said Alan shrugging his shoulders. “I can’t help being clever.”

  “Fix the program tape and restart the run,” Ulam told the engineers after a moment’s deliberation. “And call in a replacement for this tube tech. He’s off the job. And tell Dora to fire whoever it was who punched the bad tape. We are not needing practical jokers.” Ulam turned his intent gaze full upon Alan. His eyes were gray-green. “I want to talk to you in private. Come.”

  Alan followed Ulam down a hall, not sure what was in store. The two of them took a seat on a couch at a bend of the passage, and Ulam asked Alan an escalating series of questions about maps in operator space, nonlinear wave equations, and the practical implementation of cellular automata upon computing machines. He seemed greatly to enjoy Alan’s answers, and when he was done, he beamed and patted Alan on the knee.

  “I am hoping you’re not so intractable a spy that we have to execute you,” said Ulam. “I’m deeply in need of an intelligent person to talk with. No such individuals are working at LANL just now. Come, we’ll let the security men pick your bones.”

  Alan had been through the security office for his clearance to be a tube tech. This time, however, he had to offer up his fingerprints, pose for two photos, and submit a blood test. Once more the agents scrutinized the Peter Pfaff ID that he’d grown from his stomach skin. So far as Alan knew, the real Peter and Polly Pfaff had finished their Bandelier day-trip and had moved on to gnarlier slopes by now. Good to have them out of the way. As before, Alan told the security he and Polly were lodging in the Cowboy Motel—and nobody checked. The security office wasn’t very well organized.

  Meanwhile the FBI and the CIA sent background information on Peter Pfaff over the teletype—fortunately with no photos attached. Alan was still wearing Christopher Morcom’s face. Above all, Alan was grateful that they didn’t wheel in the skugsniffer. Apparently the security staff didn’t want the skugsniffer inside the secure zones of the lab.

  “Can you rush the approval?” Ulam asked the security agent. “I would need Pfaff today and tomorrow.”

  “Says here he’s been a folk singer,” said the fat agent, tapping his finger on one of the print-outs. “Questionable.”

  “As you know, I’m chief scientist on Project Utopia,” said Ulam. “Crash priority. This colorful character’s input could be a key for keeping the project on time. I am taking my inspiration where I find it.”

  “We’ll give him a temporary clearance,” said the security chief, unimpressed. “He’ll have to apply for an extension in three days.” With a flurry of paper-stamping, the man put together a new identity card.

  “You are passing now to the inner sanctum,” said Ulam, hurrying Alan along. “We have a better cafeteria. Classified food. And now for my office. You can be yourself in here and talk freely. They are sweeping the place for bugs every week. Even the skugsniffer isn’t nosing in here.”

  In Ulam’s lair, shelves of math and physics books filled one wall, with scores of journal reprints mixed in. A massively boxed cathode ray tube sat in a corner above a bank of switches and dials. A heavy wooden table held a fascinating collection of mechanical devices that Ulam must have cobbled together himself, very rough and handmade. A blackboard was bedecked with arcane formulae and odd diagrams. Alan’s idea
of paradise.

  Ulam picked up a gimmick the size of a shoebox, with a piston on one side and a pair of wooden mousetrap-style levers linked to eccentrically mounted gears.

  “Can you make a wild guess what this is?” asked Ulam puckishly.

  “A mockup for the initiator cascade of the hydrogen bomb,” said Alan after a moment’s hesitation. Ulam waggled his expressive eyebrows, impressed by Alan’s acumen.

  And this was the moment when Alan’s inner skug could wait no more. A tendril shot out from his finger and into Ulam’s belly as if to skug him.

  But the finger could find no purchase in Ulam’s flesh. The long extension shriveled to a wisp and dropped away, leaving as a stub—Alan’s original finger.

  “I am vaccinated,” said Ulam. “Naturally. Like all of the higher-ups. I was of course suspecting you to be a skugger. Smelling a rat, no?”

  Alan looked frantically around the windowless office. The only way out was through the door. Ulam would sound an alarm and the guards would be firing at him. As a skugger he was relatively immune to bullets—but if they had a flame-thrower, he was done for. If only he could make it outdoors, he’d change his form and find a way to slip away, perhaps as a snake beneath the snow. But—how odd—Ulam was simply standing there smiling at him.

  “Aren’t you going to do anything?” Alan had to ask.

  “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” said Ulam. “Machiavelli. Who better to advise me on project Utopia than a skugger? If you can play along with me, Mr. Pfaff, there may be an opportunity to tell your fellows the details of our plan to exterminate all skuggers.”

  “Why would you help us?” asked Alan, bewildered. “Why would you create a security leak?”

  “I know the situation from both sides,” said Ulam moving his hanFds up and down like the pans of a scale. “Approximately my entire family was dying in the Holocaust. Exterminated for being Jews. Safe in America, I fight our enemies by working on the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. I helped create the instant holocaust of Hiroshima—and the potential for much worse. I am the exterminated and the exterminator. Both sides.” He dropped his hands.