Dobie swallowed the remainder of his whisky very quickly. “Yes, I see. Or I think I do. I’ve made a fool of myself again, but I’m getting used to that. I’m very sorry.”
“That’s all right. It’s not really your fault. I should feel quite flattered, in a way.” Dobie, covertly re-examining her facial features, couldn’t detect the slightest resemblance to those of Alec; certainly the relationship wasn’t one that could have readily been guessed at. “I mean, Alec is still… Wouldn’t you say? I can see why poor old Mum should have got swept off her feet, as the saying goes, especially bearing in mind he’d have been thirty years younger or thereabouts. And so would she, of course. Now that I know him quite well, I’m sure he really was in love with her. It could be I remind him of her, though he’s never actually said so. Mum and I do look very much alike.”
“In that case his little peccadillo becomes much more easily understandable.”
“Now I am flattered. Anyone can make a mistake,” Mrs Strange said, “but a little old-world gallantry is always greatly refreshing.”
“In my distant youth I got involved in something rather similar myself. Though as far as I know without any such altogether admirable results.”
“Actually if you knew my other dad you’d think it even more easily understandable because while he has a gentle nature he’s unquestionably one of the world’s most excruciating bores. Guinness-Book-of-Records standards. But he doesn’t know about Alec, you see, and Mum thinks it important that he shouldn’t and so do I and that’s why all this hole-and-corner stuff. Apart from whatever Jane might… You do have to think about other people’s feelings, after all.”
“What about Wendy?”
“Oh Wendy, yes, I suppose Alec thought she ought to know about it. We’re half-sisters, after all. He brought her round here once but she didn’t come again. A bit awkward for her, I expect, divided loyalty sort of thing, though Alec says she didn’t get on with her mother particularly well. Of course all I know about Jane I know through Alec, so to speak. How did you see her? I mean really?”
“Well…” Dobie wasn’t very good at executing succinct verbal portraits of his acquaintances and knew it. “I always thought of them as being quite a well-matched couple. She was the sort of wife I imagine a very successful businessman would want to have. She could be very agreeable. To people she liked.”
“What about people she didn’t? Was she such a very jealous person?”
“I suppose she was.” Dobie thought about it for a spell. “… Possessive, anyway. I mean, she seemed to like Jenny very much and though I’d known her for years and years myself, in no time at all she was obviously thinking of me as Jenny’s husband and as such, a bit of a nuisance. But then I always thought most women were a bit that way.”
“Perhaps we do tend to be,” Mrs Strange said. “But then we have a lot to put up with where men are concerned. I love Max very dearly, as indeed I should, but that doesn’t prevent me from thinking of him on occasion as a royal pain in the ass, because that’s sometimes what he is.”
“But you don’t feel that way about him all the time.”
“Of course not. If I did I might get myself into trouble, as I suppose I have to say Mum did. Of course Alec wasn’t married at that time but she was. And I expect you know Alec has glorious visions of his name in the New Year Honours List?… It wouldn’t do his chances much good if his terrible guilty secret were to become common knowledge, especially with this other awful business and all that nonsense in the papers… I know these are enlightened times. But even so…”
“It is an awful business,” Dobie said. “That’s my only excuse.”
“For what?”
“For being so intrusive. Into private matters.”
“The worst of it is I can’t feel I’ve been of any help at all.”
“I rather think you have. I’m sure that you have. Though just for the moment,” Dobie said, “I can’t see exactly how.”
Half an hour later, he still couldn’t.
Something she’d said was important. That was all.
It would help, Dobie thought, if I knew why it was important. But all I really have is the sensation that there was something she’d said that fits. Or maybe doesn’t fit. In either case, alters the pattern. Something that goes into place not like a piece in a jigsaw but like a keystone in an arch. Syllogism. A form of discourse in which, certain things being posited, something else follows from them by necessity. If p then q. If q then r. Therefore, if p then r. Elementary first-year Aristotelian logic. No M is P. Some S is M. Therefore, some S is not P. Categorical, my dear Watson. The only trouble with mathematical logic is that sooner or later it drives you round the bend. Unless of course you happen to be a computer. O happy little IBM, he doesn’t give a damn. I wish I were an IBM. At least I’ve got the use of one. That’s the next best thing.
In Sammy’s room…
Preoccupied thus with his inner musings (thoughts you could scarcely call them), Dobie drove sedately back to 221B or rather to 12 Ludlow Road, where, as he made his way down the passage towards the staircase, various snuffling and sneezing sounds emanating from the inner sanctum on the right enabled him cogently to deduce that Watson’s morning consultancy session wasn’t yet concluded. Dobie entered his own sanctum – it was really his room now, not Sammy’s – and seated himself at the computer with a certain air of confident deliberation, rather as a fighter jock might seat himself at the controls of a Tomcat; there were many things that Dobie wasn’t very good at but the monitor screen was his element, just as the cirrus-streaked sky was the interceptor pilot’s. The problem, of course, was to get himself safely up there. He carried out an unhurried instrument check and then began to prepare the machine for take-off.
He was still sitting at the end of the runway when Kate came in.
“What are you doing?”
“Just fooling around,” Dobie said.
“No, you’re not. Should I leave you to it?”
“It’s all right.” Dobie SAVE’d the set of equations he’d run up, though they differed in no important respect from Sammy Cantwell’s, and pushed his chair back. “I’m just programming information, that’s all.”
“Good,” Kate said, yawning prodigiously and stretching herself out in the nearer armchair. “Or it is if it helps to take your mind off things. You went out, didn’t you?… Lucky sod. I hate having to run the clinic these summer mornings. I keep looking out the window and wishing I were somewhere outside.”
“Yes,” Dobie said. “I was just thinking about that.”
“About me? Highly gratifying, I’m sure.”
“About your looking out the window. And about something else that chap told me.”
“Oh.” Kate rubbed her face gently, as though her cheek muscles had suddenly tired. “… No. My telepathic receiver’s out of action. What chap?”
“The security bloke,” Dobie said. “He was on about a funny thing that happened the day before Sammy got the sack. Apparently Jane Corder spoke to Sammy and afterwards he denied it. Well, and then you said you’d once seen Jane standing outside this place. Waiting.”
“I’ll tell you about a funny thing, Dobie. When I saw you poking away at that machine, I thought you were giving all that side of things a rest. Because Jacko’s right, you know. You really ought to.”
“Supposing,” Dobie said, “Jane knew that Sammy was lending someone his room… and what for… I’m thinking that she might have told him to stop doing it. She was the boss’s wife, after all. He’d probably have reckoned he’d better do what he was told, and by the same token he could have been embarrassed enough about it not to want to admit to the conversation afterwards. And then remember the message he left for you. I won’t be able to help any more because of something else that happened at Corders – wasn’t that what he said?… It all fits…”
“But why should Jane care a damn what he did with his room? It wasn’t any of her—”
“She might have
cared if she’d known that Jenny was one of the people using the room. Jane was quite possessive about her friends. And don’t forget she wanted to see me about something, about something she said was private. You see what I’m getting at?”
“You think she meant to tell you what Jenny was getting up to.”
“It seems fairly likely.”
“But then she’d have known who she was meeting here.”
“You’re catching on.”
“And… that’s why she’s dead?”
“You’re catching on fast. She couldn’t be allowed to tell me. Or anyone else.”
“But it still doesn’t make sense. If people started killing people for knowing about things like that, nobody’d be safe. I mean, supposing I’d seen them going in or coming out… I didn’t, of course, but I might have…”
“Exactly,” Dobie said. “So there has to be more to it than that. And so there is. Because if you’d seen them, you wouldn’t just be tying them to each other. You’d be tying them to Sammy as well.”
“And so to…?”
“Exactly,” Dobie said again. “Adultery’s not such a very serious matter, except to the people concerned. But, as Inspector Jackson says, murder is.”
Kate got up and went for a little walk, to the far end of the room and back again.
“… Well, the one thing you haven’t been doing is giving it a rest. That’s obvious.”
“I’ve been programming information. Like I said.”
“You don’t mean…?”
“Here.” Dobie flicked at the keyboard and the monitor screen came to life, flashing blurred symbols at him with an eye-baffling velocity before settling down to show a bewildering jumble of intersecting triangles. Kate stared at it, waiting for the pattern to change. But it didn’t.
“That’s information?”
“That’s a syllogistic series,” Dobie said, “expressed in terms of Lorenzian equations. Of course I haven’t taken it very far as yet.”
“And that’s how you scrape a modest living? Setting up that kind of thing?”
“I and a few other like-minded citizens. Mostly in the States. Of course a computer is only as good as its programs and that’s where I’ve got a bit lucky, because I received some of the most advanced programming that’s ever been developed only last week. Would you like to see one?” Dobie took a mini-disc from the brown paper envelope on the desk and slid it into the machine. “… What we’re hoping eventually to get is a mathematical representation of the whole of physical reality. A set that includes all conceivable sets. In fact that’s theoretically unachievable because of the Lorenz effect, but by seeing where and why we fail we can maybe track down all those strange attractors a little more closely. So we start off here…”
Kate’s mouth came a little open as she stared at the screen. On the right-hand side, a jet-black ball bisected by the edge of the monitor extended a long curved jet-black tentacle rimmed with golden fire. The fire grew in intensity, reaching back to touch the dark sphere itself which also began to glow; it might have been a planet eclipsing a brilliant sun that now stood on the point of emergence. The arm of darkness began to curve back, starting to form a circle as the monitor tracked towards it.
“… Looks a bit like a Star Wars scenario, doesn’t it?” Dobie’s voice said comfortably. “That’s in fact what the Americans are using it for. Among other things.”
The dark ball was disappearing from view as the monitor rushed on towards the centre of that huge dark loop which had begun to glitter now with points and whorls of colour, red and blue and green and yellow; within the loop another loop was forming, and then another, the colours growing always brighter, clearer.
“… I suppose you could say we’re making a map of the furthest reaches of the human mind, though I don’t think George Campbell would put it quite that way. He’d say we were expressing a finite set series in terms of a unified field theory… but that’s only saying the same thing in a different way…”
His voice seemed to murmur into Kate’s ears from a great distance away as the circle of blazing light into which she was rushing exploded suddenly outwards in a shower of symmetrical particles and another long arm of light came round to envelop her, thrusting out other curving arms like the whorled shells of DNA spirals, failing to clutch her and detain her as she sped onwards towards the centre of another spinning spiral like that of a bursting nebula; she heard her own voice murmur in reply, “But it’s so beautiful…”
Still the hallucination held as the nebular pattern widened out into dense white clouds of primal matter through which strange never-before-seen shapes and colours danced like jewels, like snowflakes, forming millions of widening circles like those made by raindrops on water.
“I told you it was,” Dobie said. “But you didn’t believe me. Not that I blame you. People usually don’t.” He touched the keyboard and the screen went blank, went dead, and Kate went on staring at it, feeling a sadness, the sadness of a deprivation.
“You know, for the first time I feel a bit sorry for Jenny.”
“Why?”
“I don’t see how any woman could compete with that.”
“Oh well,” Dobie said. “I always thought that Jenny was beautiful, too.”
“But you didn’t make her. Like you made that, that… that.”
“I didn’t exactly make it, you know. It’s more like translating a language. And the computer does most of it, anyway, because once you’ve fed it the basic sets it’ll generate all the others that follow from the same premises and it’ll fit them all in the places where they should go. Of course, even so… it takes time.”
“How much time?”
“We’ve been working for about twelve years on that one.”
It takes a lot of time and a lot of patience. But by six o’clock that evening Dobie felt ready to engage the dialogue mode.
ACCEPT CONSTRUCTION
JOHN IS AN ORPHAN Q JOHNS PARENTS ARE DEAD
ACCEPT CONSTRUCTION
JOHNS PARENTS ARE DEAD BUT YOURS ARE ALIVE
NEGATE CONSTRUCTION
JOHN IS AN ORPHAN BUT YOURS ARE ALIVE
BY ESTABLISHING ANAPHORIC IRREGULARITY
The computer made a faint humming noise indicative of willing obedience and then answered:
OK
Dobie coded in and continued:
ACCEPT CONSTRUCTION
I AM A WIDOWER Q MY WIFE IS DEAD
ACCEPT CONSTRUCTION
MY WIFE IS DEAD BUT YOURS IS ALIVE
ANALYSE CONSTRUCTION
I AM A WIDOWER BUT YOURS IS ALIVE
The computer immediately decided
CONSTRUCTION UNACCEPTABLE BVO ANAPHORIC GAP
Dobie coded again and instructed it to
ELIMINATE GAP
The computer sighed audibly.
NO CAN DO
it said.
CONFIRM (Dobie politely suggested) ANAPHORIC GAP AS BVO PARADOX
This actually took the computer several seconds.
CONFIRMED GAP AS BVO OUX-EKON-EKON TYPE PARADOX OK OK OK
To be or not to be, Dobie thought. He sat back in his chair and took several deep breaths, this in order to oxygenate his brain. The computer’s brain required no oxygen and the computer therefore did nothing. Nothing at all. Dobie stared at it in silence for a few minutes before attacking the keyboard again.
YOURE PISSING ME OFF
he typed. To this the computer wittily replied
FUCKYOUTOO
and added several asterisks by way of emphasis. The programme was one that allowed Dobie to express his feelings on occasion and further permitted the computer, though it didn’t have any feelings, a purely nominal right of reply. This emotional safety-valve was Dobie’s own innovation; it was pleasant after six or eight hours of labour to be able to relieve in this wise his frustration and it made no difference to the computer either way.
Clearly it was back to the drawing-board. He didn’t need the computer to te
ll him there was a paradox somewhere in the programming, an anaphoric gap; he needed it to tell him where it was, so that he could eliminate it. There had to be a way in somewhere but he couldn’t see it and the computer couldn’t see it either. Well, it was early days yet. Far too early, really, to be losing your temper. It wasn’t the computer’s fault. The computer wasn’t losing its temper. Maybe that’s the whole trouble. That’s why NO CAN DO.
Dobie got up from his chair and began to walk to and fro, to and fro, to and fro. The key to the whole thing, he thought, is what somebody feels. That’s why I can’t solve the conundrum. I haven’t felt anything very much since Jenny got dead and I probably didn’t feel enough before. Not enough to understand anything. Not the computer’s fault and not Jenny’s; no, mostly mine. Now all that rather frightening yet welcome numbness is wearing off, I’m starting to hurt. I’m starting to get angry. Maybe I need to lose my temper if I’m ever to find the answer to this one. Because the answer has to have a human form and because that’s how that certain human form is always managing to stay ahead of me. Pushed ahead by anger. Or hatred. Or something like that. But anger at what? Hatred of whom? If I don’t feel those things, how can I tell?
He sat down again at the computer, went back to the graphic mode and started out again. Building on the screen a circle of fact, an ellipse of theory, moving the two shapes this way and that, trying to get them to coincide. Once he had found a point of coincidence, he’d move them round their common epicentre at an increasing speed until they began to fluctuate, to spin off course. Then he’d have pinned it down. The strange attractor. Or at least have established its location. But it would all take time. It would take a lot of time and a lot of patience.
The Strange Attractor Page 14
