The Strange Attractor

by Cory, Desmond

  At nine o’clock Kate brought him in his dinner on a tray and he left the computer in order to eat it. She sat down again in the armchair to watch him eat it; he seemed to be pretty hungry but there was that in his appearance which precluded the asking of silly questions, such as How’s it going? She waited instead for him to speak first, which he didn’t do until he’d finished eating. Then he went at once back to the computer, carrying his coffee-mug, and lit a cigarette. She’d already noticed the twelve or fifteen crumpled stubs in the ashtray and that had surprised her a little; Dobie wasn’t usually a heavy smoker. He looked all right, though, on the whole. Not even particularly tired. Just a little crumpled up, like the cigarette stubs.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “No progress to report?”

  “It isn’t like that. Either you’re through or you’re not through. You’re inside or you’re outside. It’s like hacking, in a way.”

  “Hacking?”

  “Getting into someone else’s computer. Only this is getting into someone else’s brain. Seeing the patterns the way another person sees them. Tricky.”

  It wasn’t the kind of mental activity that Kate could even begin to imagine. She got up and looked over Dobie’s shoulder at the monitor screen, to see if that helped. It didn’t. The inside of your brain apparently looked like thousands and thousands of intersecting parallelograms, all shifting restlessly about. It wasn’t, surely, a picture that any neuro-surgeon would recognise. “It reminds me of a Chinese box,” she said. In so far as it reminded her of anything.

  “We’d have a Chinese box turned inside out in a matter of milliseconds.” He didn’t sound contemptuous. Just flatly dismissive. “It’s a lot more complex than that.”

  “I suppose it would be.”

  “Maybe you could say the symbols I’m using are something like characters in a drama. They don’t stay put, you see. They move from place to place. Until,” Dobie said as flatly as before, “they’re terminated. And even then they go on affecting the pattern, although they’re not there.”

  “The butterfly effect?”

  “On a magnified scale.”

  “Extraordinary.” But Kate wasn’t contemptuous, either. She was fascinated. “Which one is me?”

  “It doesn’t work like that, either. The characters aren’t really characters, they’re only arrangements of syllogistic series, actual and potential. From one point of view, all right, that’s what we are, or that’s how we are as a computer sees us. But it’s still only a metaphor. Even when you’ve picked out a significant pattern, it still has to be interpreted. That’s normally a job for the physicists. I’m not a physicist.”

  “No. In fact I can’t quite make out what you are. There’s one thing,” Kate said, “you’ve never asked me. Perhaps you should.”

  Dobie didn’t raise his head. “About you and Sammy?”

  Kate sighed. “The answer is no. We didn’t.”

  “We see that situation in terms of unrealised potential. So I’ll check that out as confirmed.”

  Kate didn’t hit him. Instead, she sighed again. “Unrealised potential. That’s me, folks.”

  “That’s everybody,” Dobie said. “The way a computer sees us. Computers can attain their potential. People can’t. That’s why I can’t foretell the future with this thing. All I can do is analyse. I can’t predict.”

  “… What’s our potential, Dobie?”

  “I have a feeling,” Dobie said, “that it might be quite considerable.”

  “Uh-huh. But that’s a feeling? Not a prediction?”

  “It’s an intuition.”

  “Dobie, there’s hope for you yet.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Dobie said. “For both of us.”

  “Is there anything else I can get you?”

  “Not right now,” Dobie said. His head was lowered over the keyboard again. He heard the door close behind her as she left the room. If it is possible for a door to close light-heartedly, that one did.

  Of course light-heartedness is a part of it. Euphoria, even. There have to be moments when everything seems to be going good, the patterns falling into place, the fingers moving on the keyboard as though guided by predestiny. But euphoria won’t sustain you for long. It comes and it goes. You need something else to push you through the long dark hours when the mind is numbed and the fingers move as though clogged in a morass of self-doubt; you need anger, you need hatred. Things like that. When his fingers came to a temporary halt Dobie got up from his chair and walked round the room, his hands behind his back, with the tape on the cassette-player once again turning and Oscar Petersen’s turmoiled arpeggios once again accompanying the confusion of his thoughts, Oscar Petersen’s agile fingers replacing his on that other keyboard, the walls of his brain echoing to those elaborately devised chord progressions. As he walked slowly up and down, letting his anger grow…

  Because he knew this wasn’t the usual enemy. This time he wasn’t up against some elusive mathematical abstraction, some concept lurking behind a thicket of Dirac equations; much less up against George Campbell’s battery of square-eyed whiz-kids in downtown Boston, all intent on flushing the bird from the thicket and shooting it dead before the goddam Limeys had loaded their shotguns. This was a bird of a different feather, another kind of enemy. This was N. An enemy who had stolen Dobie’s wife and had later killed her and who was thus no longer an enemy but the enemy, Pluto to Dobie’s ineffectual Orpheus. And this room, Sammy’s room, was the dark-shaded Hades to which Jenny had been rapt; she too had lain on the bed with another head beside hers on the pillow, listening idly to this same cunning music, and through that recollected music had sent her husband some kind of a message, perhaps of joy, perhaps of despair, who could tell? Now here he was in the underworld, feeling oddly at home here as probably she had also, marching soundlessly up and down, letting his anger build and build before sitting at the computer desk to send out messages of his own, tapping out the codes and symbol strings, trying to shape the outline of a face, the face of the head on the pillow.

  Oh yes, this bird had a face. N had a face. A face that Dobie hated, though he couldn’t see it. He had to hate it in order to get to see it. He wanted to see it because he hated it. Not that seeing it would be enough. There was a key on the computer board that he hadn’t yet used. A key marked CANCEL. That would do the trick…

  But he wasn’t just a transmitter of messages. Very far from it. He was a receiver as well. Behind the insistent interchange of the piano and the guitar he could hear no less insistent voices, other people’s voices and sometimes his own, voices creating other random patterns in his mind as his feet moved back and forth across the carpet, the voices and the rhythmic tread of his feet combining at times with the insidious water-trickle of the music,

  It was great fun

  But it was just one of those things…

  and at other times overcoming it, erasing it briefly from the tape until with the cessation of the voices it could return…

  It’s like going over the top of a hill. All of a sudden, there’s nothing to stop you…

  He kept the pistol in the chest of drawers, under his shirts…

  He’s hardly been to see me at all this past month…

  When you’re that age, it’s quite easy to mistake the nature of a relationship. I suppose at any age, for that matter…

  Now that I know him quite well, I’m sure he really was in love with her…

  I always thought that Jenny was beautiful, too…

  His own voice was one of the voices but sounding different, hollow, as though echoed from the dark water at the bottom of a deep, deep well, and other echoes seemed to be mingled with it, the distant murmur of a string quartet, the vibrating rumble of an approaching aircraft. While behind those background reverberations the voices kept on speaking.

  She kept it hidden away…

  But he lied about it, just the way he lied about everything else…

  Somethin
g like characters in a drama. They don’t stay put. They move from place to place…

  One voice, though, that he couldn’t hear clearly, couldn’t recall distinctly enough. A very important voice. It was lucky that he’d run off a copy of the tape. He went to the cassette-player and exchanged Oscar Petersen for Sammy Cantwell, the slow dark piano chords for the stumbling monotonous voice, there was an unpleasantness, y’know?… playing and rewinding the tape five or six times until the memory of that voice was part of the other memories and the voice part of those other voices that spoke together, interrupting one another confusedly:

  … Something else had happened at bloody Corders…

  … The clinic’s been broken into on three separate occasions lately…

  … keys… keys… I have to know about the keys…

  … because the keys, he thought, are the key to the case. The key to this room and the key to my flat and the key to the tune of the Cole Porter lyric. The black and white keys of the piano and the keys of Jane’s red-ribboned typewriter. And the flat blank door of the monitor screen, still waiting to be opened…

  Four o’clock in the morning. Time to reopen the dialogue. Dobie flexed his fingers over the keyboard and tried again.

  If at first you don’t succeed . . .

  ACCEPT AGENT N Q TERMINATING SERIES

  SEQUENCE F

  CONFIRM AGENT N Q TERMINATING SERIES

  SEQUENCE G

  Can do, the computer decided. It sent

  CONFIRMED

  Dobie sent

  CONFIRM AGENT N Q TERMINATING SEQUENCE H

  The computer gave the matter some serious thought and then decided,

  CONFIRMED

  Dobie was beginning to feel tired. He ran the routine check on the programme’s logical structures and syntactical role and found both to be impeccably intact. So there it was. A three-way terminator took you way beyond the bounds of possible coincidence, though of course never quite. For anyone but a computer, though, you could call it a certainty. No longer an assumption. The same person each time. N had killed all three. Four o’clock in the morning, though, and the face was still hidden behind the thicket. It had moved no closer. Dobie moved the monitor arrow to the panel marked

  KILL

  and pressed the button. The letters flickered into nothingness and the graphic mode returned. The pattern of the Chinese box had shifted. It looked very like a fluctuation. Dobie stared at the screen, not liking what he saw.

  Seven fifteen a.m.

  Kate came in, wearing a bright red flannel dressing-gown and carrying a teapot on a tray. This she almost dropped when she saw Dobie hunched up in his chair, still navigating the computer. “My God, Dobie, haven’t you been to bed at all?”

  “Bed at all?” Dobie said dozily. “No, I haven’t been to bed at all, I’ve been… Don’t worry about it. I’m used to staying up all night.”

  “You’d better tickle your tastebuds with this lot,” Kate said crossly, plonking the tray down beside him on the work-table. “And then come and have some breakfast. And then get some sleep. This is bloody ridiculous.”

  “Don’t want breakfast.” Dobie levered his eyes away from the monitor screen and peered vaguely round about him. “Can’t stop now we’re on a roll.”

  “On a roll? That thing’s going to curl up and die on you if you work it like that. I’ll report you to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Computers.”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “There ought to be.” In fact he looked pretty much the same as when she’d left him last night. Somewhat distrait, but not noticeably the worse for wear. The room was full of tobacco smoke, though; he had to have got through a whole packet. She went to draw the curtains and open the window; another clear bright morning, with a few early starters scurrying earnestly along the pavements. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

  “You get tired around the twelve-to-fourteen hour mark.” Dobie was prepared to be factual about this. “You keep on working and then it’s all right. It’s a bit like the pain barrier for a distance runner. But I’m going to run into another one about two hours from now. Do you have anything that’d help to get me through it?”

  “Breakfast would help,” Kate said firmly.

  “I’ll need something with a bit more kick to it than eggs and bacon.”

  “I suppose you could shoot some Bennies if you wanted to. But why do you want to? What’s the hurry?”

  “I don’t want to,” Dobie said. “I have to.”

  There are some patients it’s no good arguing with. It does more harm than good. Kate went to fetch the Benzedrine tablets from the refrigerated medicine cabinet at the back of her pantry and on her way through the kitchen clicked the switch to boil up another kettleful of water. When she got back Dobie was talking to the computer again, his lips moving as he fed it more mouthfuls of delicious information. The computer was getting breakfast all right. “You’d better take them now if you’re going to take them at all. Let me feel your pulse first.”

  Nothing wrong there. Slow and steady.

  Dobie said, “What would have the opposite effect to these?”

  “Depressant, you mean?”

  “Narcotic. Something that’d send me off to sleep.”

  “Valium. Or one of the derivatives. But I’m not giving you anything like that on top of the other. Let me know when you’re on a down and I’ll come and hit you on the head with a hammer.” No. Not funny. “… What is it, Dobie?”

  “I don’t like some of the results that I’ve been getting” Dobie said, popping a couple of the little blue pills with effortless ease. “One of the sequences I’ve been running… I don’t like it at all.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t like it?”

  “It looks as though another termination situation is going to arise. It looks as though that situation is imminent.”

  “If you mean what I think you mean—”

  “Then somebody’s in danger,” Dobie said. “Somebody else is due to go and there’s not an awful lot I can do about it.”

  “Because you don’t know who it is?”

  “Exactly. I can’t tell who it is.”

  “And when you say go…?”

  “Yes,” Dobie said.

  Kate turned her attention towards the screen, where a small green circle was spinning on its axis. Spinning very slowly. But spinning. “Bloody hell,” Kate said. “You can’t know that. You said yourself it couldn’t predict.”

  “It’s not a prediction. It’s a probability estimate. But ranking very high on the scale.”

  “How high?”

  “Almost as high as it’ll go. It’s the time factor that’s, well… crucial.”

  “So what can you do?”

  “Go on working,” Dobie said. “Trying to clear up a little point here, a little point there. Like what happened to Jane Corder’s clothes.”

  “Jane Corder’s clothes? She was wearing them.”

  “Not when I saw her she wasn’t.”

  Kate gave it up. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “You can help the cause of suffering humanity down there in the clinic. While I go on fighting this many-headed hydra here.”

  “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

  “Yup,” Dobie said.

  Of course it wasn’t really a fight. Or even a race, because once inside the computer time had no meaning. The computer didn’t understand about death, the enemy with no face at all; it had no sense of urgency. But Dobie did, and when around half-past nine the fatigue hit him it was that alone which kept him going; the Benzedrine helped only a little and the taped music no longer helped him at all, was lost in the thrumming roar of the traffic going by outside which impacted upon Dobie’s eardrums with the thundering force of Pacific breakers. When he got up to close the window he found himself barely able to stand upright; when he went back to his chair his hands were trembling so wildly he could no longer control the computer keys. Luckily h
e’d been through all this before and had the computer self-programmed against this eventuality; it went on working busily as he sat there in a semi-blinded haze, waiting for the cloudiness that affected his vision and the jerkiness that affected his movements to go away, to yield to the inexorable pressure of his will-power and once again recede. While in the computer’s unbefuddled brain the patterns kept forming and re-forming.

  Until in the end the noisy traffic’s boom was quietened and the ache at the base of his skull was eased and Dobie’s fingers moved to the keyboard again; day and night, night and day were all the same to him now. His mind was at last free of all thought, of all speculation, of hatred and of anger; he was back inside the computer again, part of its millionfold function, and there was no longer any hurry, and cause for alarm or need for regret…

  He was through.

  4

  Pontin was engaged the while in one of his favourite pursuits. Reading the morning papers. As a concession to the varied pressures exerted upon him in consequence of the recent stirring events in his manor he had spent little more than five minutes on the sports pages and various other third-page allurements before turning briskly to what quite a number of the tabloid editors clearly considered to be the meat of the day’s matter. Headlines that seemed, however vaguely, to relate to the affair of the Cardiff Multiple Murderer were at any rate prominent; their tone varied from the mildly speculative (as with the Spook’s wistful inquiry, IS JACK BACK?) to the altogether more boisterous (MANIAC SEX KILLER STILL ON THE PROWL, according to the Daily Strip). Pontin was most displeased to observe that despite the lengthy interview he had afforded yesterday to the gentlemen of the press his photograph did not appear in any of these influential organs of opinion; an unflattering likeness, however, of That Man Dobie (as Pontin thought of him) had been reproduced in several (COLLEGE PUNDIT MYSTERY WITNESS TO BRUTAL SLAYINGS). Well, Pontin was well accustomed to this sort of thing. He was after all the Strategist, the Seasoned Hand, the Man behind the Scenes. Not for him the nerve-tautening tension of the scraped matchflame illuminating the face of the pockmarked gentleman in the slouch hat, the shots ringing out in the night as the Bugatti spins out of control, whizzing off the topmost bend of the Grande Corniche. No. For him, the telephone buzzer, the piled folders of the office desk. And, of course, page three of the Daily Strip. Immersed in awestruck contemplation, he came to himself abruptly as someone rapped sharply on the office door. “Come in,” he said. “Oh, it’s you, Jackson.”